UW College of Agriculture and Natural Resources Recognizes Award Recipients Sept. 20

A go-to person for public lands management and a sheep rancher who helped create a lamb cooperative will receive outstanding alumni awards from the University of Wyoming College of Agriculture and Natural Resources.

The outstanding alumni and other award recipients will be recognized during Ag Appreciation Day Saturday, Sept. 20, at UW. The annual Ag Day Barbecue that raises money for agricultural student organizations is from 11 a.m.-1:30 p.m. in the southwest corner of Fan Fest inside the Indoor Practice Facility.

Joel Bousman of Boulder and Brad Boner of Glenrock were selected outstanding alumni. The Wyoming Stock Growers Association (WSGA) is the outstanding research-outreach partner, and Molecular Biology Professor Don Jarvis is receiving the Andrew Vanvig Lifetime Distinguished Faculty Achievement Award. Bill Baker of Saratoga is the Legacy Award recipient.

Recipients will be recognized during the University of Wyoming-Florida Atlantic University football game. Links to full stories are at http://bit.ly/2014agday.

Bousman graduated from the college in 1970 with a degree in agricultural economics. A fourth-generation cattle rancher, he helped develop a permittee monitoring system for public lands grazing.

Boner received his agricultural business degree in 1982. Boner, along with his brothers and father, raise sheep and cattle. He was instrumental in creating the Mountain States Lamb Cooperative, which markets more than 250,000 lambs annually from 13 Rocky Mountain states.

The WSGA supported UW as a land-grant institution and recognized the crucial role the college of agriculture would play in the development of the livestock industry.

“I think that continues today,” said WSGA Executive Vice President Jim Magagna. “Through research, through educating the majority of young people who end up back in our industry, and certainly through the interactions that take place on a daily basis with the extension personnel across the state. Our association places a high priority on our relationship with the College of Agriculture and Natural Resources and the university.”

Jarvis joined UW in 1998. He received the Wyoming Agricultural Experiment Station Researcher of the Year Award in 2012 and was selected to give the UW 2012 President’s Speaker Series Talk. In 2011, he formed GlycoBac with former UW student Christoph Geisler. The company works to produce glycoprotein drugs using insect cells. He has written 79 peer-reviewed journal articles, received 40-plus grants, recorded 12 patents and mentored 10 graduate students.

Legacy Award recipient Bill Baker, with his wife, Jeannette, who died last year, created the Bill and Jeannette Baker Agriculture Scholarship. An Air Force veteran, his fondness for agriculture began as a high school news reporter, developed further as he recruited engineers for Halliburton from land-grant universities and further deepened when he married his wife, a graduate of UW.