Q&A with Ozzie Abaye

Office of General Education: You received your PhD in agronomy from Virginia Tech and have taught here for more than 25 years. Tell us more about your background and what started you on this career path.

Abaye: I always loved agriculture, there’s no question about it. When I came to the U.S. from Ethiopia as a teenager, I was adopted by a family that had a dairy farm in Pennsylvania and I really liked the work. That’s what got me started in agriculture.  

Originally, I had wanted to be a veterinarian. We had a vet that would help us on the farm and I was assisting him with a cow that was giving birth and when I saw the calf actually coming out, I fainted. He told me I might need to rethink my plans, that I could work in agriculture without being a vet. He was right, I couldn’t stand the sight of blood.  

So, I continued to help on the farm, milking cows, and went to a small college and majored in biology, and eventually got a master’s degree in dairy science from Penn State and my doctorate from Virginia Tech. After that I’ve stayed here, it was my first job and I’m lucky to be finishing my career at the institution where I started. It usually doesn’t happen that way.  

OGE: Part of your appointment at CALS is for international outreach linked to cooperative extension. How does that work influence your teaching?  

Abaye: My first passion is teaching. I always wanted to expand into outreach and research that would support my teaching programs, so I try to bring the field to the classroom whether it's global or local issues. Outreach, research, study-abroad programs, and teaching are all interconnected.

My international work for the last 11 years has been in Senegal. For the first five years, it was funded by a grant from the USAID (United States Agency for International Development). Everything I’ve done looks back to teaching and what I can bring to the classroom.  

OGE: Tell us more about your work in Senegal. What was the focus of that project?

Abaye: Our first project, between 2011 and 2018, was funded by the USAID’s Global Hunger and Food Security ‘Feed the Future’ Initiative with the overall goal to revitalize the agricultural sector through education, research and discovery, and outreach. The second project, beginning in 2019, was funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s McGovern-Dole Food For Education Program with the objective of helping farmers provide high quality, nutritious commodities for school meal programs. Central to both projects is the mung bean, which we introduced with the goal of improving soil fertility and diversifying the local diet, which is mostly based on cereal crops like rice, sorghum, and millet.  

We found it was really difficult for the farmers to invest additional resources for the introduction of a new crop, so we sought buy-in from the community regarding ‘room for mung beans’ in their existing production system.   

As we held meetings in the villages, all these issues came up. The major crop production constraint for these farmers is water. One of the mung bean’s attributes is its ability to grow and produce under moderate rainfall. Additionally, mung beans have a short cycle, a maximum of 65 days from planting to harvest.  This short cycle would reduce the hunger season that is often experienced by resource-poor farmers between the end of the dry season to the next rainy season when crops are harvested.

We also started seeing a lot of women coming into these meetings, wanting to know more about the mung bean. How to grow it, process it, and prepare it for school meals as well as household consumption. So, my colleagues from Virginia Cooperative Extension,  Dr. Erika Bonnett and several other extension agents and specialists, trained the women on food safety, sanitation, food conservation, and preparation. We introduced a community-based curriculum that brought kids, teachers, and the community together around the introduction, production, and consumption of this single crop.  

I started the project as an agronomist but my role morphed into education. Once the community saw the value and advantages of the newly introduced crop, we were able to train over 1,000 farmers. The system we worked out gave farmers the mung bean seeds, and they would give 25 percent of the yield to the schools for meal programs.  Between 2019 and 2021, the project provided more than 5,000 school meals for children.   

Due to the successful implementation of the mung bean program in the northern part of Senegal, we have been asked to extend the program to other parts of the country for the next 5 years.  

OGE: Is that a common situation for international development projects? You start with a single objective in mind and then find there are other issues that need to be solved, using a range of skills, to make the program successful?

Abaye: Yes. That approach comes from our mission as a land-grant institution; you already have the mindset that research, education, and outreach are all interconnected.  

OGE: Tell us about Cooking with Ozzie, which is part of a Pathways course you teach. You were able to make the best out of a difficult situation during the initial phase of the pandemic.

Abaye: Things happen by accident. The course is called World Crops and Cropping Systems, which includes three food labs that highlight what we’ve discussed in class. In our food labs, we connect students with the cultures of those crops, how it’s used today in different countries. For example, when we talk about wheat in class, we’ll celebrate Chinese New Year in the food lab by making dumplings.  

The food lab is really a joyous place. I always tell students you can’t be sad in the kitchen. But after COVID, that was gone. I went to Senegal during spring break in March 2020, when I came home, I had a weekend to transition the course to remote learning on Zoom.  

During the initial phase of the pandemic, I gave the students several options, like writing a page or two on food culture or being part of the online, video cooking sessions with me from home. When the students cooked at home, their whole family got involved. The college of agriculture asked if they could link the cooking sessions to their Facebook page. It was amazing, former students and their families participated, and we had more than 30,000 views. The Roanoke Times also came to my house and did a story.  

It really came out of desperation but what choice did I have? I needed to stay engaged with my students.  

OGE: What’s next for your teaching?  

Abaye: Beginning this semester, this course is now a Pathways course and it covers the Core Concepts of Reasoning in the Social Sciences and Critical Analysis of Identity and Equity in the United States.  We will talk about food migration and the contribution of migrants to the food system and culture in the U.S. Also, I really want to include students and their own personal histories in the discussion. Food is identity.  

Because it’s a Pathways course, we’ll have students from a lot of different backgrounds and I'm really looking forward to learning from them.  

Dr. Abaye is a professor in the School of Plant and Environmental Sciences at the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences and the Recipient of the 2021 Jerry G. Gaff Faculty Award for Outstanding Teaching  for the Association for General and Liberal Studies.