Dwayne Beck Protegée, Mazarine Foustel, Visits CASI's NRI Project field in Five Points!

August 8, 2019

Right off an intensive two-month internship with South Dakota Hall of Famer, Dwayne Beck, University of Bordeaux agricultural engineering student, Mazarine Foustel, took part in a whirlwind tour of a number of California agricultural sites and met with a number of CASI Workgroup members on August 8^th before heading off to the Grand Canyon and her return to France later this month (Figure 1).  Foustel is from Brittany in western France where her family has a dairy farm.  She searched out the internship with Dwayne Beck through his worldwide reputation in conservation and regenerative agriculture and because of the huge impact he has had on improving food production systems around the world.  While at the Dakota Lakes Research Farm these past two months with Beck and his team, Foustel conducted a wide range of duties including helping with the daily moving of cattle that have been integrated into Beck's cropping system research and also learning about how Beck and farmers in his area have been working to implement soil care practices now for several decades. 

While in California, she stayed initially with a family in Sacramento that had first hosted her back when she was in high school.  Then, she took part in an ambitious tour with CASI's Jeff Mitchell that included visits to the UC Davis campus and the field laboratory site that is being prepared for this fall's PLS111 agronomy students (Figure 2), the Century Experiment at the site of the Long-term Research on Agricultural Sustainability just west of campus (Figure 3), a very nice visit with CASI farmer, Rich Collins at his farm southwest of Davis (Figure 4), and then Mitchell hosted her a few days later down at the NRI Project field in Five Points, CA.  While in Five Points, she also visited the local West Side San Joaquin Valley farms of CASI Workgroup members, John and Justin Diener and Scott Schmidt, and saw broadacre farm processing tomato and garlic harvests underway.  We thank Mazarine Foustel for spending time with us a we wish her all the very best as she now returns to France to complete her studies!