New center aims to create new jobs to revive region's ag industry

Tour the Dan River Plant Propagation Center
By Tara Bozick
Published: January 06, 2011

Local research aims to give local farmers a way to take profitable plants from the laboratory to market.

The new Dan River Plant Propagation Center at the Institute for Advanced Learning and Research would create 30 to 50 new jobs and would rejuvenate the region’s agriculture with new products like azaleas, daylilies, bioenergy crops and roses.

That’s why Danville Regional Foundation invested $1.2 million over the next three years in the center, said DRF CEO and President Karl Stauber. It not only creates direct jobs, but gives local farmers a competitive advantage, he added.

“Our farmers will be at the front end of the development of a new piece of the American agricultural economy, and hopefully, that will be a basis on which we’ll produce rural prosperity for years to come,” Stauber said.

This way of applying research from the lab to the ground is a fulfillment of the Institute’s promise, Stauber said.

“This lab is the next major step of the original vision, which we all embraced,” said Jerzy Nowak, the professor and former horticulture department head at Virginia Tech who came up with the idea for the center.

This is how it works: Plant scientists at the Institute for Sustainable and Renewable Resources at the Institute develop improved plants. For high volume production, these plants start as tissue cultures grown in the new propagation center. Then, growers take this tissue culture and grow the plants to a size desired for sale.

The center hopes to ship out 4,000 to 5,000 azaleas to the Virginia Nursery and Landscape Association in March and April, said ISRR Director Barry Flinn. The center is also negotiating contracts for daylilies and hellebores.

A couple months ago, scientists began researching the unofficially named “Lady Astor Rose” when the Langhorne House gave a 1922 rose bush to the Institute for study.

Scientists cloned the roses Lady Astor gave away and plan to propagate them for sale with the name “Lady Astor Rose,” Maurakis said. A portion of the profits would go to Langhorne House.

Flinn hopes to have these roses leaving the center for growth within a year.

“This is a wonderful opportunity for the area,” Maurakis said. “With this particular rose, they are preserving history and also expanding the local economy.”

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