Farmers and others caught up in the trials and tribulations of modern-day agriculture sometimes forget just how magical the process of putting seed in the ground and producing bushels or pounds of a crop can be.

Dawn Mellion remembers her first experience with growing plants when she enrolled in a crop production class after discovering her first choice for a college major – pre-med chemistry – wasn’t working out.

“The ag building was the next building over. I didn’t know anything about agriculture, but I knew it should be science, right?” she said. “I walked in, saw some people I knew and had an opportunity to talk to one of the professors. I signed up for a class in crop production, and it was really a good experience.”

In the class, she grew green beans. After the first harvest, she weighed the beans and, not realizing they were the same thing as string beans, threw them out. She had only seen canned vegetables up to that point.

“My professor asked what I did with the beans, and, after I told him I threw them away, he told me I should cook them. I said ‘OK.’ I brought the next batch of beans home, and, after my roommate, an engineering major, left, I cooked them. Then we had them for dinner,” she said.

“I got all these noble feelings,” she said. “If I could feed my roommate and my family with one row, if I had 10 rows, I could feed my neighborhood. If I had a hundred rows, I could feed the community. Thus, my lifelong infatuation with agriculture began.”

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NBGC executive director

Mellion, who recently was named executive director of the National Black Growers Council, received her undergraduate degree in plant and soil sciences and her master’s degree in ag education at Southern University in Baton Rouge, La. She earned her Ph.D. in ag and Extension education at Iowa State University.

She returned to Baton Rouge and became assistant director of the Section 2501 program at Southern University. The 1990 farm bill created the 2501 Program to help underserved farmers, ranchers and foresters who have historically experienced limited access to USDA programs and services. The 2014 farm bill expanded it to include veterans.

The NBGC hosts several Model Farm Field Days throughout the late spring and summer to educate member. (National Black Growers Council)

She eventually became director of the 2501 program before moving into the Cooperative Extension Service at Southern. She started as an assistant specialist in the Agricultural and Natural Resources area. Then she became an associate specialist, and a full specialist before becoming vice chancellor for Extension and Outreach at Southern.

“The beauty of the Extension program at Southern or of Louisiana was that when I first started at Southern in 1995, the audience was primarily Black,” she said, “By the time I retired we had quite a few white farmers who relied on our programming.

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“And what I realized was that farmers wanted relevant, timely information that could benefit them, and they didn’t care where it came from. They just needed good solid information that was tailored to their needs, to help them stay in farming and get better at it.”

After her retirement, she became a catalyst for the Extension Foundation, which was formed in 2006 by Extension service directors and administrators.

“As a catalyst, I supported small teams at land-grant universities who had these novel ideas they wanted to pilot,” she said. “The Extension Foundation gave them small amounts of money to do a pilot program for their ideas.”

Nextgen Program

In 2022, USDA launched its From Learning to Leading: Cultivating the Next Generation of Diverse Food and Agriculture Professionals or NextGen Program. NextGen is aimed at “enabling institutions of higher education to engage, train and support students to build the next generation of diverse food, agriculture, natural resources and human sciences professional, including the future USDA workforce.”

“When the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture released the program, they contracted with the Extension Foundation to provide technical assistance to the minority-serving institutions so they could write competitive proposals for the grants that became available,” she said. “I became the project director for the NextGen technical service provider opportunity.”

Mellion is planning to use her experience in helping minority and majority farmers in her role as executive director of the National Black Growers Council, which was organized in 2010 to advocate for the interests of Black farmers across the United States.

One of her first tasks was helping organize the NBGC’s annual meeting, which was held Dec. 10-13 in Charleston, S.C. Last year's meeting in Memphis, Tenn., featured an address by Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack and was attended by several hundred Black farmers, industry representatives and state Department of Agriculture and USDA officials.

“The majority of our meetings have been held in the Delta region in the past,” she said. “By meeting in Charleston, it gives people on the East Coast better access to the location and our members in other regions a chance to experience the Carolina low country. We have two tours of the area scheduled, including one of a tea farm.

“When I was an Extension specialist at Southern, I put together a leadership class for small farmers from the states with 1890s Historically Black College and Universities Land Grant institutions, and we would travel across the Southeast,” she said. “I believe one of those stops was at the Bigelow Tea Farm, which is quite unique in the U.S.”

She also has some 90-day and longer goals. “I think NBGC is a wonderful organization. In the book ‘Good to Great,’ Jim Collins discusses why some companies make the leap from good to great and others don’t. My vision for my tenure here is to leave NBGC stronger than I found it, to make it better than it was before my tenure.”