A conversation with HudsonAlpha’s Kaitlyn Williams
By Sarah Sharman, PhD
Illustrated by Cathleen Shaw
Agriculture is big business in Alabama, with commodities like cotton, peanuts, broilers, and livestock contributing billions to the economy. The number of thriving crops and genetic diversity of plants available for Alabama growers is limited, largely due to the state’s warm, humid climate.
A state-funded project is working hard to bring a new commodity crop to farmers across the state: barley. In 2021, HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology, along with collaborators at Alabama A&M University and Auburn University, received a grant from the Alabama Research and Development Advancement Fund to build a pipeline to help Alabama farmers grow barley and help create an industry for the commercial use of barley.
To learn more about the ADECA barley project, I spoke with Kaitlyn Williams-Thacker, the barley project coordinator at HudsonAlpha.
Sarah Sharman: Thanks for taking the time to chat with me. Tell me a little bit about yourself.
Kaitlyn Williams-Thacker: I’m a fifth-generation farmer from Boaz, Alabama. My family has been commercially farming since 1905. My parents and I own and operate Double W Farms. Growing up on the farm really shaped me as a person. There was always work to be done. But at the same time, we were always having fun.
Sarah: How did you go from growing up on a cattle farm to working on the crop side of farming and agriculture?
Kaitlyn: We run a small cow-calf operation, and as long as I can remember, I have always helped with what I could with the cattle and our poultry houses. I loved it, and I still do. My mom has a degree in animal science from Auburn University, and my dad has a poultry science degree from Mississippi State University. Growing up, I thought I would be an avian vet. In school, I quickly learned that chemistry was not my thing, and vet school seemed further and further away from me. Once I got into Snead State, I started to see how big of an impact our local greenhouse industry was having on our food supply and food chain, and I really liked the management of how you did that.
Right after community college, I entered the Disney Horticulture Program at Disney World. I stayed there for about nine months and learned about plant propagation and greenhouse management. While there, I fell in love with working with the plants. I really enjoyed the working environment. It was such a fun experience. We taught kids how to garden. We were growing food for the restaurants. It was a really relaxed learning environment, but we got a lot done. And I definitely learned a lot from that. After Disney, I went to Auburn University and studied horticulture and agronomy, mainly plant production and crop production as a whole. I also worked for the Alabama Extension System as a Research Assistant during that time. Our lab was focused on entomology research for row crop production.
Sarah: Can you tell me a little about the barley project and describe your roles?
Kaitlyn: The goal of the barley project is to help establish winter barley as a rotational cash crop in Alabama. Historically, barley has not been grown in Alabama because of our warmer climate. Barley is a cool-season crop that thrives in temperate climates with cool, moist springs and relatively dry summers. We are growing barley throughout the winter months when farmers would normally not have a commercial crop planted aside from winter wheat.
A large part of my job is helping design, coordinate, and monitor field trials with local farms we’ve partnered with. Our field trials have done really well so far. We harvested 30,000 pounds of barley from an eight-acre field trial in north Alabama. The barley had low disease and insect pressure and met the protein levels and toxicity levels required by the industry.
I also help build relationships with stakeholders across the pipeline, from the field to commercial use. We have a great relationship with our malting partner, Riverbend Malt House, in Asheville, North Carolina. We sent the big harvest to them last August. They confirmed it met the malting standard and had a great color and germination rate. Then they malted the barley for us, and we’ve had many Alabama breweries use the malt to make craft beers.
Working with schools is a newer part of the project that I am especially passionate about. The students collect agronomic data for those barley trials themselves, and we help them analyze and learn from the data.
Sarah: What is the benefit for Alabama farmers being able to grow barley?
Kaitlyn: We’re providing farmers with an additional row crop to diversify their operation. With barley, if they have the equipment and fungicides/herbicides for wheat, they already have what is labeled for barley. It doesn’t add extra costs to the farmer’s operation. Barley yields are really good, and from what we’ve seen, it can tolerate our cold winter months. We haven’t seen much issue with disease pressure.
Another thing we’re doing is helping connect farmers with end users to buy the barley. We have great relationships with local brew houses who are eager to use a local crop in their beers. We also have malting partners set up. So, farmers can take comfort in knowing there is a growing market seeking out the local barley.
Sarah: How important is this project to the Alabama economy as a whole?
Kaitlyn: This project is extremely remarkable in the fact that when you look at the groups of people that we’re helping through this barley project, you’re talking about farmers, you’re talking about brew houses, you’re talking about several different entities that you’re bringing together, that they’re all able to profit from different aspects of this one crop. And not only that, at the end of the day, you’re bringing people together that just enjoy getting together and drinking a nice beer, you know. That’s just so cool, bringing all those big groups and getting them together for that.
We’re also impacting students. It’s awesome to think that now these high school students are getting hands-on experience in what we do as an industry. That’s critical to keep the next generation of agriculturalists and crop genetics going. They’re getting to learn how to take the data, and they’re learning how to process it. They’re also developing communication skills that will help them in the workforce, whether or not they study crop production or stay in the ag industry. If they’re in a different field, they can apply this skill set they’ve learned to nearly anything.
Sarah: What has been your favorite part of working on this project?
Kaitlyn: Probably witnessing the first successful barley harvest in Alabama at Martin Farms. This eight-acre field trial wasn’t large in the grand scheme, but it meant we were on the right track with this research. It was surreal to be part of the harvest process and later enjoy the high-quality barley used in beer at Yellowhammer Brewery. This experience solidified my passion for this work and motivated me to keep moving forward.
Sarah: What are some of your long-term dreams for the ag industry?
Kaitlyn: I would like to see our industry reach a point where we quickly embrace new ideas, leading to rapid profitability for farms. That’s what is really neat about this project, we’re building this pipeline for farmers to enter a new market that wasn’t widely accessible to them years ago. We would like to see any company, private organization, or university take the model we built and replicate it to help farms diversify their operations and push into new markets. So that’s my long-term vision for our local ag industry to take this model and then use it for anything else and become an industry standard of how we experiment with doing new things to help our farms.
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