I am a Research Agronomist at the USDA-ARS Coastal Plains Soil, Water, and Plant Conservation Research Center in Florence, SC. My life and research studies have taken me all across the eastern United States, from my upbringing on my family's dairy farm in Ohio, to Kentucky and Mississippi during graduate school. This has given me a diverse background of different forage production systems from the Midwest to the Deep South. I've worked on development of heat and drought tolerant forages for use in the Southeast, as well as assessing forage mixtures and the complex interaction of multiple species. Currently, my research is focused on incorporating perennial forage and cover crops into cotton production systems of South Carolina, which will potentially allow for both grazing and row cropping operations to exist in tandem.