By J. Scott Angle
@IFAS_VP
Madeline Mellinger has worked for more than half a century to help Florida farmers, walking fields to detect pests and other threats.
And she has inspired many others to help you – walking corridors and entering board rooms to visit with commodity group leaders, research farm directors, government agency officials, professional association colleagues, and members of Congress.
Your land-grant university simply would not be able to do as much as UF/IFAS is doing for you today if it were not for decades of service by Mellinger championing our cause.
That’s why my colleague Rob Gilbert and I nominated her for the Florida Agricultural Hall of Fame – and why we’ll be proud to attend her induction ceremony in Hillsborough in February.
It’s not the first big agricultural party where she’s the headliner. In 2023 she was honored as the Florida Commissioner of Agriculture’s Woman of the Year in Agriculture at a luncheon at the state fairgrounds. Again, I was proud to have nominated her.
Though she lives on the east coast, she still comes regularly to Polk and Hillsborough counties.
Mellinger is likely the only person who serves on three UF/IFAS research and education center advisory committees, including that of the Gulf Coast Research and Education Center (GCREC). She has helped advocate for funding for the planned Center for Applied Artificial Intelligence in Agriculture in Balm.
She is currently working with Hendry County Extension commercial vegetable agent Craig Frey across the region to combat whitefly transmitted virus diseases in watermelons.
Mellinger has not only been a mentor in the field for Frey, but she had a hand in his academic preparation for the job.
Mellinger and her husband, Dr. Charlie Mellinger, are regularly called the godparents of our Doctor of Plant Medicine (DPM) program, which trains students for careers in plant health diagnosis and management. The Mellingers were among the chief advocates to start the program 25 years ago. Frey is among DPM alumni now helping you.
Mellinger is a pioneer who helped change the way we farm in Florida. As an entomologist in her early 20s, she worked seven days and drove 1,200 miles a week to monitor weather stations and aphid traps as she built the Glades Crop Care. She drew upon this field intelligence as well as the cooperation of UF/IFAS scientists to guide her as a key contributor to what we know today as integrated pest management.
I am the sixth senior vice president to call upon her to represent the land-grant system in Washington, D.C. Since 1997, Mellinger has served as a UF delegate to the Council for Agriculture Research, Extension, and Teaching (CARET) of the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities, including service as the liaison to the Extension Committee on Policy.
This service as a CARET delegate represents dozens of trips to Washington, D.C., countless visits to public policy officials and an untold number of hours of advocacy on behalf of the University of Florida and the land-grant university system.
It’s time we served her. I hope some of you will join me at the Florida Agricultural Hall of Fame induction banquet and ceremony in February in Tampa to celebrate all she’s done for us as an industry.
J. Scott Angle is the University of Florida’s Senior Vice President for Agriculture and Natural Resources and leader of the UF Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences (UF/IFAS).
