In the drylands north of Nairobi, Kenya, an invasive cactus is rewriting the ecology of the historical rangelands of the Maasai people. The prickly pear cactus has spread across overgrazed lands, crowding out vital grasses and evading eradication.
But where others see a scourge, UF agronomist Jose Dubeux finds life-sustaining solutions.
Instead of working to eradicate the plant, Dubeux uses it to solve problems and improve lives. In his circular system, crushed cactus becomes animal feed. Biodigesters turn the animals’ manure into methane for cooking food. Vertical vegetable gardens thrive on fertilizer from the digesters and stored rainwater. Solar lights are a game-changer for children’s education.
The Kenya project is among many overseen by UF’s Global Food Systems Institute, which connects faculty from an array of disciplines including animal science, public health, epidemiology and horticulture. Together, they take on some of the world’s toughest challenges in regions of dire need: Helping Parkinson’s disease patients grow the medicine they can’t afford to buy. Reducing children’s stunted growth with high-protein foods. Boosting farmers’ yields and optimizing planting strategies.
The GFSI is one of the few U.S. university institutes that unifies research, teaching and agricultural extension programs into a single global food systems hub.
“I don’t know any group that does that the way we do it. We catalyze collaboration across departments, colleges and countries,” says Adegbola Adesogan, the institute’s director and the E.T. and V.C. York Professor of International Agriculture.
For Adesogan, the institute’s work is both urgent and deeply personal. Some 25 years ago, a church newsletter recounted his early years in Nigeria.
“A giant of a man, Adegbola was a loner with a reputation for being able to sink a pint of lager faster than any other student on his university campus. If anyone crossed him, he would write their name in his little black book, plotting the revenge he would take,” it says.
As a young man, Adesogan eventually turned fully to God. He began channeling his energy into sustainable livestock nutrition. Today, Adesogan speaks eloquently and ambitiously about bettering the world. That means addressing the tragedy of stunted growth, leveraging animal-source foods and taking on the stark reality of malnutrition.
“When children are deficient in micronutrients, the brain doesn’t form well and it’s almost irreversible,” he says.
A Cactus-Powered Future
Dubeux gained cactus forage expertise in his native Brazil, but it was a chance encounter with a European philanthropist that led to funding for the Kenya project through the Sicily-based dryGrow Foundation. For about 30 residents of Laikipia County, a central region north of Mount Kenya, the project has been life-changing, Dubeux says. Residents struggle with the invasive cactus, limited animal feed and little firewood, which is risky to gather because of wild animals. There’s no electricity and indoor smoke causes respiratory illnesses.
While the cactus-feed effort has brought remarkable changes for families, the raw plant is no panacea. It has to be ground up, fortified with fiber and protein, and pelletized. In a 2025 trial, Dubeux found that goats in Kenya gained almost 20 pounds in 85 days with cactus pellets while needing less water — significantly better than grazing goats. Two years earlier, he showed that supplemental cactus feed could spike milk production in camels. It’s prized as a superfood in Kenya, often selling for twice as much as cow’s milk.
“By feeding this cactus to the camels, they doubled milk production,” says Dubeux, a professor of agronomy at the Institute of Food and Agricultural Science’s North Florida Research and Education Center in Marianna.
That, he adds, is just the start. Cactus and animal manure are loaded into a biodigester, producing methane that’s cleaner burning and more abundant than wood.
“It’s like a large, artificial intestine,” Dubeux says. “You feed materials in one end and gas for cooking comes out.”
As a doctoral student working with Dubeux on the goat trial, Kenneth Oduor saw the project’s profound effects on families. Goats that were fed cactus pellets gained nearly twice as much weight compared with other feed. The cactus pellets also help animals survive droughts, reducing the need for distress slaughter. Biogas eliminates the need for long, dangerous firewood trips and improves air quality in homes.
“Going into the bush to look for firewood is a dangerous expedition. They sometimes face lions and leopards,” says Oduor, now a postdoctoral associate at Florida A&M University.
For Dubeux, no detail was too small. The methane-producing system was designed using only local materials. He insisted on hearing from Maasai women, who emphasized the need for reliable cooking fuel. Next, he wants to expand the system to more families, though funding is limited. Equipping a household costs about $5,000 including a biogas-powered cactus crusher. For about $100,000, Dubeux can scale up production of cactus pellets to make them a salable commodity.
“Our approach is a little different,” he says. “It’s to add value to the cactus for the local population as we are combating the infestation.”
In the central Kenya countryside, a UF-led project turns invasive prickly pear cactus into animal feed and gas for cooking. Women in south Madagascar sell cactus fruit (lower-left image). The plant is an important part of their livelihoods because it provides fruit, fodder and energy. UF researcher Jose Dubeux and his collaborators established that the invasive red cactus found there can be used as livestock feed.
One Egg, Big Impact
Sarah McKune aspires to change the trajectory of poor children’s lives — one egg at a time.
Her work addresses some of the world’s most persistent and devastating global health challenges: child stunting, malnutrition and impaired cognitive development in low-income countries. A professor of environmental and global health in the College of Public Health and Health Professions, McKune’s research is driven by a central question.
“How can we optimize the relationship between people, their animals, and the environment to yield more positive health outcomes?” she says. The humble egg is a perfect tool for that, McKune says.
Her work has consistently s hown that eggs are a clean, practical and affordable path to improving child development — sometimes dramatically. A 2020 study by McKune and her collaborators found that boosting egg consumption among 260 mother-child pairs in 18 rural villages in the West African country of Burkina Faso significantly reduced the number of children who were underweight or dangerously thin for their height. Subsequent findings, including a 2024 analysis, revealed that just one additional egg per week resulted in a 1.9% increase in children’s problem-solving scores. Children who ate eggs regularly throughout the trial were much less likely to have delays in important skills like talking, moving and interacting with others.
For McKune and the children’s mothers, the effects were no less impactful.
“I almost didn’t believe the data as it was coming in. We were asking people to report children’s eating behaviors, so I wondered: Was someone cooking my books? Then, you measure the kids again and see they’re actually growing in a completely different way,” McKune says.
Mothers who participated in the study later told government officials they were skeptical at first. Before long, their children were clamoring for eggs.
“The kids started acting differently and looking differently. They weren’t getting sick as often. As a mother myself, I know the power of that built-in, positive reinforcement and it’s amazing,” she says.
But boosting egg consumption in Burkina Faso required more than just new eating habits. It meant changing minds and addressing social norms. McKune’s “One Egg” project introduced culturally tailored messaging to overcome beliefs that children who ate eggs were destined to become thieves.
During the study, some children were given four chickens in addition to the behavior-change package. Egg consumption nearly tripled in those children. Just as importantly, mothers were empowered to manage their egg supply. Some eggs were used to feed their children, while others could be sold to buy chicken feed or other essentials. Fathers also became allies in the effort, asking if children had gotten their eggs.
“Women control chickens all over the world,” McKune says. “When women are making decisions in a household, children’s health outcomes improve.”
McKune put much focus on nutrition in the first 1,000 days of life, when crucial brain development activity happens through myelination. Like insulation on an electrical cable, myelin helps develop faster, more coordinated thinking, moving and learning in children. Eggs are a safe, scalable and affordable way to supercharge that process, she says. With 149 million children affected worldwide by stunted growth, McKune sees the urgency of her work. Next, she wants to bring the egg program to the Philippines, Guatemala and Honduras, where growth stunting is particularly common.
During a project in Niger, a researcher collaborating with McKune measures a child’s middle upper arm circumference.The information is used to rapidly assess child nutritional status in the field, a crucial step before referring undernourished children for care.
McKune’s expertise in egg nutrition and animal-source foods also helped catalyze UF’s Brain Food Initiative, which was devised by Adesogan. The project was part of the Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Livestock Systems, a collaboration involving McKune, Adesogan and several faculty from UF and other institutions.
Since late 2025, the effort has brought McKune, Adesogan and UF scientists in medicine, public health, agriculture and other disciplines together to study food systems that support brain development and reduce growth stunting. The BFI is one of the few programs in the U.S. to study the biology of brain-development nutrition alongside the food systems and cultural realities that determine what people actually eat. It has already produced papers on food taboos and plant- and animal-source brain foods.
“The Brain Food Initiative is a unique opportunity to examine and build on the evidence that consumption of animal-source foods, fruits, vegetables, and nuts contributes to reduced infant and childhood stunting and improved cognition and health,” Adesogan says.
The initiative, McKune says, is an opportunity to amplify what she does best — finding nutrition solutions that improve child development — from what she calls “the 20,000-foot level.” But ask McKune what she’ll never forget and it’s an intensely personal, close-up scene. It was 2007, and she was in Niger to collect data on outpatient malnutrition centers after a food crisis. A weary mother arrived with triplets, 27 days old but each weighing no more than about 2 pounds. The journey was 22 days with babies too weak to nurse. The mother and another woman willed the babies to survive, extracting breast milk onto a cloth and dripping it into the infants’ mouths. Even a seasoned nun at the feeding center was stunned by the mother’s resolve, McKune says.
That moment echoes what McKune’s mentor, the late Emory University smallpox eradication pioneer William Foege, once told her: “Don’t ever forget that every number you count is a person, a person’s child, a person’s mother.” Those memories and those words, McKune says, are what propel her.
“These extraordinary things happen in the world all the time. The will to live, the will to survive, the desire to protect a child, and the belief that you can do it, that you can get there,” she says. “It was years before I could tell that story without crying.”
During the One Oeuf (“One Egg”) study in Burkina Faso, Sarah McKune’s research team held monthly training and information sessions with participating women to reinforce a “One Health” approach to child growth. The topics included the preparation and feeding of eggs to infants, chicken husbandry and other information.
A Plant for Parkinson’s
For Dr. Michael Okun, a nondescript, tropical bean is a lifeline for patients struggling with the effects of Parkinson’s disease.
Okun, a UF Health neurologist, hails the velvet bean as a potent, affordable and accessible source of L-DOPA. The brain processes L-DOPA into dopamine, quieting tremors and easing muscle stiffness in Parkinson’s patients. More than 10 million people worldwide are estimated to be living with Parkinson’s — a figure that’s expected to explode to 25.2 million with aging populations.
Getting levodopa — the essential dopamine-replacement therapy for Parkinson’s — is cheap and easy in first-world countries. In developing nations, it’s often unaffordable. Okun bristles at that. His goal is simple but sweeping: ensure 100% access to the drug.
“It’s an absolute travesty that we have this treatment that’s so effective for Parkinson’s, and yet the majority of people can’t get access to it,” he says.
He also knows how well patients in the initial stages of Parkinson’s respond to small amounts of dopamine.
While the velvet bean is potentially powerful, it’s also deeply flawed: The plant is invasive and unpredictable. Its raw beans can be toxic and deliver inconsistent L-DOPA levels. None of that deterred Okun. A few years ago, he approached then-Provost J. Scott Angle with an audacious goal to breed a reliable, plant-based dopamine source.
“I’d like to build this,” Okun told Angle. “I’d like to figure out how we can engineer this thing.”
Angle asked Adesogan, who had graduated three doctoral students working on the plant, to build a team. Adesogan worked with the Chris Gunter, chair of the Horticultural Sciences department, on the task.
Before long, UF had a multidisciplinary team of scientists on the case. Kelly Balmant, an assistant professor of horticultural sciences, is sequencing the plant’s genome. Guodong “David” Liu is the field scientist, testing dozens of velvet bean varieties in different soils and climates. Okun will provide clinical direction and dosing expertise. Jeongim Kim, a plant geneticist, is studying how the plant produces L-DOPA. Adesogan networks with global researchers to gather velvet bean varieties from around the world for testing at UF, while also exploring the best methods for storing and preparing the plant. Funding for the study is being provided by UF’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences and the Norman Fixel Institute for Neurological Diseases, part of UF Health.
Without Balmant’s expertise, a better velvet bean never happens. Her work is essential to identifying the genes that cause toxicity and produce L-DOPA. It’s also crucial for building a stable, chemically consistent plant strain. A group in China previously sequenced the velvet bean genome, but the data isn’t available. So UF is doing it from scratch. That means decoding the DNA of 56 velvet bean varieties from around the world.
Balmant’s efforts are the project’s genetic road map, identifying the traits for toxicity to enable future gene editing. She’s also working with a UF biomedical engineer to test whether a food-based inhibitor could help reduce the velvet bean’s nausea side effect.
“For any kind of follow-up work and plant development, we need the genome,” she says.
When UF scientists in various disciplines collaborate, the results can be life-changing for people around the world, Balmant says. Parkinson’s patients who can’t afford medication could one day grow their own beans. Taking the velvet bean from an unreliable supplement to a natural, predictable therapy is the holy grail.
“If I get one spoon of the right cultivar, I know exactly how much L-DOPA I’m getting,” she says.
To get there, Balmant needs Liu to sort out the plant’s many botanical wild cards. L-DOPA levels can vary from 3% to 10%. Temperature, weather and soil conditions play big roles in that, says Liu, an associate professor of horticultural sciences.
Liu’s job is to find an elite variety of velvet bean with weather resiliency and potent, stable L-DOPA. He grows the velvet beans, identifies the best candidates, and will hand them off for pharmaceutical evaluation and refinements to reduce toxicity and improve L-DOPA consistency. His field trials are essential — and sometimes exceptionally difficult. Recently, only 18 of his 24 samples sprouted. Then, an early frost killed their leaves before maturity. The roots survived, allowing Liu to recover some seeds.
Liu recently replanted about 60 varieties of velvet bean gathered by Adesogan from 15 countries, drawing on global germplasm — essentially the seeds and plant lines that hold a crop’s genetic traits. Collecting velvet beans from various environments across the world, one of Adesogan’s tasks, is crucial for identifying the varieties with the best L-DOPA levels, Liu says. Adesogan provides expertise in translational agricultural research and plant-derived bioactive compounds, helping to better understand the best cooking methods for preserving L-DOPA and reducing toxicity.
Ultimately, the final solution may not even be the velvet bean. The L-DOPA pathway could be transferred to another bean, such as fava or cowpea. That effort, led by UF Professor and bean genetics expert Eduardo Vallejos, could allow researchers to sidestep some of the velvet bean’s undesirable traits.
As the research unfolds, Okun continues to feel the tug of a moral imperative. People around the world shouldn’t have to choose between feeding their families and treating Parkinson’s, he says. That’s part of Okun’s larger goal of achieving 100% access to dopamine therapy.
“If you could get a plant that grows in your garden, people around the world will be able to treat their Parkinson’s,” he says.
Modeling Agriculture’s Future
In a dim, tidy office near the center of campus, Gerrit Hoogenboom quietly shapes global food security and agricultural decision-making across continents.
As one of the world’s most influential crop modelers, he’s the lead architect and longtime steward of a team that runs DSSAT, the Decision Support System for Agrotechnology Transfer. The system helps researchers, governments and multinational agribusinesses better understand crop growth, weather’s effects on yields and how to optimize production while reducing environmental impacts.
On Hoogenboom’s watch, the system has grown from modeling six crops to about 50, including soybeans, wheat, rice, peanuts and vegetables such as onions and radishes. He’s also overseen major expansions including greenhouse gas modeling and long-term crop rotation.
The system takes in data about weather, soil, crop genetics and planting practices. Scientific equations then simulate growth, crop yields, water use and other outcomes. That, Hoogenboom says, delivers myriad benefits that can take much of the uncertainty and guesswork out of agriculture. His models help answer challenging long- and short-term agricultural questions: What’s the optimal amount of fertilizer to maintain yields without polluting the water supply? Which varieties of citrus will thrive in 2050? When should farmers plant to avoid a drought?
“We bring knowledge from many different disciplines together. We are running these models for the entire planet,” he says.
For Hoogenboom, an early exposure to plants shaped a lifelong interest in crop production. His parents owned two acres of vegetable greenhouses in the Netherlands. In college, he blended that with a love of math and interest in global agriculture.
Today, DSSAT is the gold standard for crop modeling worldwide. Since its 1986 release by UF’s James Jones — who’s now a distinguished professor emeritus of agricultural systems modeling — DSSAT has been deployed in more than 190 countries. Hoogenboom eventually made the system open-source, meaning its capabilities are available to anyone. All of that has been done on a shoestring budget: UF pays Hoogenboom’s salary but DSSAT receives no dedicated funding. Money sometimes trickles in to help model a specific crop. He channels those dollars into maintaining the system’s software and upgrading its modeling components.
“We have zero money to run the program. It’s all done on a volunteer basis,” he says.
Despite running a globally essential agriculture tool with a small team, Hoogenboom is never finished tinkering. He’s working with the International Food Policy Research Institute to merge mechanistic models with generative AI to give farmers real-time, location-specific advice. There’s also work to be done on crop-quality prediction, which helps farmers raise plants with optimal protein, starch, or oil content.
And then there’s Hoogenboom’s retirement pledge — a vow to model fruit tree crops starting with citrus. It’s especially challenging because perennial fruit trees have different biological and structural behaviors than annual crops. To compound the issue, there’s a dearth of fruit-tree data that DSSAT needs.
“One of the promises I’ve made before I retire is to have a model for fruit tree crops,” he says.
DSSAT remains wildly popular among agriculture experts. Its output is downloaded daily around the world and has been accessed about 30,000 times in the last 10 years. Hoogenboom is especially proud of the system’s impact: Food security depends on understanding changing weather, pest and disease patterns. Developing countries need tools like DSSAT, not just aid. Farmers need better information to cope with weather variability.
“If no one’s asking for a copy of the software, I would quit tomorrow,” he says.
Sources
Adegbola Adesogan, Ph.D.
Associate Vice President and Director, Global Food Systems Institute
adesogan@ufl.edu
Kelly Balmant, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Horticultural Sciences
balmant@ufl.edu
Jose Dubeux, Ph.D
Professor of Agronomy
dubeux@ufl.edu
Gerrit Hoogenboom, Ph.D.
Professor and Preeminent Scholar, Agricultural and Biological Engineering
gerrit@ufl.edu
Guodong “David” Liu, Ph.D
Associate Professor of Horticultural Sciences
guodong@ufl.edu
Sarah L. McKune, Ph.D
Professor of Environmental & Global Health
smckune@ufl.edu
Michael S. Okun, M.D.
Director, Norman Fixel Institute for Neurological Diseases
okun@neurology.ufl.edu