The University of Kentucky Research and Education Center in Princeton is celebrating its centennial this year. As UKREC marks its milestone anniversary, the center is also continuing its years-long recovery from the December 2021 tornado outbreak that damaged or destroyed most of the buildings on the research station’s campus.
The center, which held its dedication ceremony on Sept. 7, 1925 in Caldwell County, serves the region’s farmers through crop and cattle research, outreach programs and educational training sessions. The property, which originally consisted of just 100 acres, has grown to more than six times that over the center’s century of service.
“It's not only gotten larger in acreage, but the staffing level has gotten quite a bit larger,” said Managing Director Dr. Carrie Knott. “It started off with a pretty small staff of like a farm superintendent that oversaw all the farm crew. So at that time, it was mostly farm crew that just completed research that faculty members in Lexington wanted completed. And, over time, it has morphed into – depending on the year – about 65 full-time employees here at the station.”
Now, several hundred acres are dedicated to beef cattle and row crops like corn, soybean, wheat, canola, cereal, rye and other grain crops as well as tobacco.
The UKREC also provides opportunities for students in the region, allowing them to participate in research, where they aid in plot maintenance, harvesting and data collection.
Knott is also a researcher and agronomist at the UKREC, where she conducts research on mostly wheat and soybeans, looking for diseases.
The research station aims to help the region’s farmers identify and solve issues that impact their farms’ production–and ultimately, their wallets.
“We have state specialists, which are like faculty members here, that kind of look and talk to farmers and figure out what is a big problem, and we conduct research to figure out how to solve that problem or make the problem less impactful to the farmers,” Knott said.
The December 10, 2021 tornado outbreak left a trail of destruction after it swept through the region, impacting most of the structures on the campus – leaving just ten untouched – and destroying more than six miles of fencing that helped corral cattle at UKREC.
“We had about almost 80% of our facilities wiped out, including the brand new building that was renovated where we house our research laboratories and our office space for the researchers,” Knott said. “It took almost an entire year for all of us to get back on-site.”
In total square footage, almost five and a half acres of buildings were lost. Since the storm, UKREC staff, like Knott, have been working out of temporary facilities.
Knott said the research station has close ties to the surrounding community, and that those connections were deepened in the wake of the storm when many pitched in a hand to help clear debris or fill the gaps to get needed resources to the campus.
For several months after the storm, the UKREC had no running water, but members of the local community and the fire department supplied water to the station’s cattle.
“We've been here a long time and it's really great to be in a small community,” Knott said. “I think all of us – me as managing director, and also me as a faculty member, and other faculty members – we just want to see this place go another 100 years.”
Knott said she expects the final construction projects and repairs to wrap up next year, before the 5th anniversary of the disaster.
