Madalyn Shires puts on a lot of miles in the summer. As an assistant professor and SDSU Extension Plant Pathology Specialist, Shires traverses the state visiting research plots and educating crop producers on that research.

“With a lot of these monitoring projects, we’re able to take that information and immediately provide it back out to producers,” Shires said. “My goal from the start has been to put together a research-based extension program that is driven to help producers.”

One of the major projects is a statewide wheat disease monitoring system, funded by a grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture National Institute of Food and Agriculture. Now in its fifth year, the project collects spores on spring and winter wheat crops from across the state and tests those spores weekly,

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