Dean Wehri of Mott, North Dakota, is the newest member of North Dakota's State Board of Agricultural Research and Education. 

The board helps the NDSU Extension Service and North Dakota Agricultural Experiment Station identify needs and set funding priorities.

To accomplish that, the board gathers input on agricultural research and Extension needs from producers, commodity and other interest groups, NDSU's Research Extension Centers, the Extension Service and departments in NDSU's College of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Natural Resources. The board then organizes the needs into initiatives and ranks them for the state Legislature to consider for funding each biennium.

Wehri, an agricultural lender with Commercial Bank of Mott and a cattle producer, will serve a four-year term that ends in June 2019. He replaces Rodney Howe of Hettinger, North Dakota.

He is the NDSU Extension Service representative on the board for an area of south-central North Dakota consisting of Adams, Billings, Bowman, Dunn, Golden Valley, Grant, Hettinger, McLean, Mercer, Morton, Oliver, Sioux, Slope and Stark counties.

Mark Birdsall and Lance Gulleson also are relative newcomers to the board. Their terms end in June 2018.

Birdsall is a Berthold-area farmer and a partner in Birdsall Grain and Seed, a seed sales and processing company. Gulleson is a partner in Gulleson Farm and Ranch and a principal agent for Farmers Union Insurance in Lisbon. They replaced Paul Langseth of Barney and Doyle Lentz of Rolla on the State Board of Agricultural Research and Education.

Gulleson represents Extension's Multicounty Program Units 5 and 6 on the board. Those units are in southeastern North Dakota. Birdsall is the North Dakota Ag Coalition's representative on the board.

As a student-focused, land-grant, research university, we serve our citizens.