Staff Spotlight

With farming backgrounds on both sides of his family, J. Arbuckle knew early in life about agriculture and the land grant university system. His paternal and maternal grandparents all had farm backgrounds, and were all educated at Land Grants.

Arbuckle’s paternal grandfather was a dairy scientist known for his research on ice cream, and his maternal grandfather was a veterinary pathologist. Both had two degrees from land grant universities (Purdue and Missouri and Auburn and Georgia, respectively) and both met Arbuckle’s eventual grandmothers at land grants.

Born and raised in Washington, D.C., Arbuckle experienced both rural and urban life. He spent time during summers working on his grandparents’ cow-calf operation, and got out of the city as much as he could to spend time in the Appalachians or on the Chesapeake Bay. After college, He worked on conservation projects in rural Guatemala from 1992-1994, after which he returned to Washington to work several years for an international development firm.

His international development experiences and subsequent work with extension during his graduate degrees at the University of Missouri gave him a strong appreciation for extension and the role it plays in the land grant system.

“My favorite thing about extension is we’re all about bringing science to bear on thorny problems that markets aren’t addressing,” said Arbuckle, professor and extension sociologist at Iowa State University.

A critical part of his job, he said, is trying to understand people’s attitudes and beliefs, and what motivates them to do certain things.

“Education and outreach is most effective when you can meet your audience where they are,” he said, “As a rural sociologist I try to understand where farmers and other agricultural stakeholders are at on whatever issue is of interest, so we can meet them there with appropriate information and programming.”

Arbuckle is particularly interested in research and extension related to soil and water quality, and farmer adaptation to climate change.