Impact. > 2020 top ten > Kathryn “Katie” Doonan

Kathryn “Katie” Doonan

Community Service

  • College of Agricultural, Human, and Natural Resource Sciences, College of Arts and Sciences
  • Biology, Organic and Sustainable Agriculture
  • Bishop, California

Involvement

Representative for CAHNRS Student Senate; vice-facilitator for CAHNRS Ambassador program; CAHNRS research assistant for the Department of Crops and Soil Sciences; CAHNRS IGNITE researcher; Organic Agriculture Club president; Eggert Family Organic Farm volunteer; Palouse Conservation District intern; Cougar Award recipient; participant in a study abroad program in Ireland; emergency room technician; volunteer firefighter and EMT

Favorite WSU experience

Coordinating the Fall Harvest Festival and pumpkin patch at the Eggert Family Organic Farm. I was so happy to be able to help bridge the gap between the WSU community and the Pullman community. Seeing people so excited to be there made me feel like all of my hard work for the three months beforehand really made a difference. It’s the farm’s biggest event, and it’s the Organic Agriculture Club’s biggest event—and it was my project. My research senior year, too, was a big aspect in my WSU experience. I was researching Rhizoctonia’s impact on wheat, and I was able to run my own experiments and go out and meet with local farmers who had this problem. Rhizoctonia is a soil pathogen, a fungus that grows through the soil but will attack wheat roots, and it causes a lot of yield loss in the Palouse area. It helped me see where I want to go in the future. I really like being able to experiment, to troubleshoot.

Future plans

I want to help keep people healthy through sound agricultural practices. Right now, I’m working on a business plan with my family so I can try to start my own sustainable farm. From there, I’d like to go to graduate school to study interactions between agriculture and human health—and potentially use my farm as a study site for that research. I would start out with hay production but eventually transition to more vegetables and grain crops. Right now, my family mainly grows alfalfa and a grass hay mix and also raises cattle. We want to bring the principles of the sustainable farm into current production and use (my farm) as a trial site, but that’s definitely years down the line. We’re trying to diversify the crop base.