Honoring Carl Hunt

University of Idaho Extension beef specialist John Hall has a prestigious new title and additional tools to serve his students and the state’s livestock industry thanks to a gift from the family of his former boss and mentor, the late Carl Hunt.

Hall has recently been named as the inaugural recipient of the Hunt Family Beef Education and Research Endowed Professorship. It honors Hunt, who died in September 2021 and was head of the former Department of Animal and Veterinary Sciences when Hall was hired in the spring of 2008.

Hall will hold the professorship for three years before it is awarded to another faculty member. The endowment supports nutrition-based livestock research, as well as educational activities and a graduate assistantship.

“It’s a great honor and I’m very humbled to be selected for the professorship, especially because it’s named after Dr. Carl Hunt,” Hall said. “Dr. Hunt was a tremendous person for CALS. He really showed a strong interest in you as an individual faculty member and was also really dedicated to building teams and building good working groups within the department.”

Carl and Martha Hunt originally established the endowment in 2013 with the goal of ensuring continued commitment to beef cattle education and research at U of I. For several years, the endowment supported graduate students in animal sciences focused on beef nutrition, but the Hunts’ ultimate goal was to build the endowment to $1 million, sufficient for an endowed professorship. The family met the goal last year. Additional contributors to the endowment included the Idaho Cattle Foundation, industry partners and friends.

According to Carl and Martha’s children, Daniel and Katherine, the family is tremendously grateful to the donors, friends, and generously committed organizations that contributed to the endowment.

“Dad’s decades-long vision remains our mission: to put U of I on the map as a national destination for beef science research and learning,” Katherine said. “Funding Dr. Hall’s research is a great start for making his vision reality — we are confident the training he provides and the data his work generates will provide a significant boost to the Idaho cattle industry.”

Hall’s research has focused on reproductive management of beef herds and the effects of nutrition on cattle reproduction. Hall will use endowment funds to buy time-saving equipment, including technology to remotely monitor cow behavior to determine which animals are in heat. He will also use the endowment to fund a multi-year graduate assistantship. The student will start work in the spring of 2023, studying how the timing and quantity of polyunsaturated fatty acids delivered in a form that can’t be altered within the rumen may increase cow pregnancy rates.

Furthermore, Hall will use the endowment to cover student educational opportunities, such as sending the graduate student to livestock industry and scientific meetings and the establishment of a multi-day undergraduate tour of the state’s beef industry.

“The neat thing about Idaho is we do have the breadth of the industry contained within the state’s borders,” Hall said. “This gives our students a really good chance of having a better understanding of the total beef industry in Idaho and ideas of what they might be able to do for a career in the industry.”

Hunt left a lasting mark on the department. For example, he was a longtime steward for the Steer-A-Year program, through which ranchers donate cattle to the university. Students raise the cattle in a university feedlot, gaining livestock management experience, with proceeds benefiting student scholarships for the Department of Animal, Veterinary and Food Sciences and Vandal athletics.

Hall is stationed at the Nancy M. Cummings Research, Extension and Education Center near Salmon. The ranch, made possible by a generous donation from the Auen Foundation of Palm Desert, California in 2005, serves today as the primary cow-calf and forage research station for U of I. The Idaho Cattle Association provided strong support for the center’s mission by helping the university acquire its research herd.

Published in Catching Up with CALS