Anna Morrow, a Purdue Extension educator, has joined the Midwest Cover Crops Council (MCCC) as program manager. In her new role, that began on July 1, 2016 as as staff member in Purdue University’s Department of Agronomy, Morrow will assist MCCC in meeting its goals of facilitating widespread adoption of cover crops across the Midwest for purposes of soil health, water quality and crop productivity. She will be working out of Extenson’s Shelby County office and work from the University’s West Lafayette campus as needed.

“We are excited to have an experienced county Extension educator join our team as our first program manager,” said Eileen Kladivko, professor of agronomy and a founding member of the MCCC. “Anna brings experience in working with producers on a variety of challenges in Midwestern row crop and animal agriculture, and we look forward to working with her to move cover crop adoption and the MCCC into the future.”

Kladivko said the council has continued to grow since its beginning in 2006, as has the interest and use of cover crops across the Midwest.

“We needed a full-time program manager to help improve our current outreach tools and develop new ones, provide timely information on cover crops to our website, be a point of contact for the council, and generally improve our capacity to be the go-to source of information about cover crops in the Midwest,” Kladivko added.

Morrow grew up on a small Indiana farm of livestock and crops in Shelby County near Saint Paul, and she still helps on it. She earned a B.S. in biochemistry and an M.S. in agronomy at Purdue, through which she researched soil and pasture management on a Costa Rican dairy farm. She had been Franklin County’s agriculture and natural resources educator for Purdue Extension since 2012.