Over an 18-year career at NMSU, Robert Heyduck has worked in various roles within the Agricultural Experiment Station. Heyduck currently serves as an associate research scientist at the Sustainable Agriculture Science Center at Alcalde, a position he’s held since 2014. Before that, he was a senior research assistant at the John T. Harrington Forestry Research Center at Mora and a research specialist at the Agricultural Science Center at Farmington.
In his current role, Heyduck assists Extension Fruit Specialist Shengrui Yao with jujube and apple trials and conducts research on vegetable production, medicinal and culinary herbs, native plants, alternative crops, and cover crops and organic methods, among other duties.
“I maintain organic certification on six acres of the farm where we have grown amaranth and apple, blackberry, cherry, cowpeas, currant, cucumber, gooseberry, kale, lettuce, peach pear, plum, tomato, spinach, sweet corn, blue corn, common and tepary beans,” he said. “I spend most of my time in the field maintaining our trials and gathering data. I am especially excited to work on increasing seeds of native plants for pollinator habitat and revegetation applications.”
In 2004, Heyduck joined the Farmington science center and worked with hybrid poplar, drip irrigation, native plants, restoration and phytoremediation until moving to the Mora research center in 2010. There, he worked in the native tree nursery and on several forest restoration projects.
“There are lots of things to enjoy about my job, but the top few are spending most days out under the New Mexico sun, meeting new folks and learning new things on a regular basis, striving to be helpful to the people of New Mexico, and working toward the improvement of our stewardship of this beautiful land,” he said.