Jerry J. Johnson, PhD.

Extension Specialist and Professor

Soil and Crop Sciences


Fields of Expertise

Agriculture, Soil Science

Areas of Interest

Improving crop variety selection procedures, Agronomic methods to improve wheat quality, Interpreting crop genotype by environment interaction, Theory and practice of on-farm testing of crop varieties


Biography

Jerry Johnson is a Professor and Extension Specialist for crop production and since 1995, has been the leader of the Crops Testing Program at Colorado State University in the Department of Soil and Crop Sciences. He obtained his B.S. from U.C. Davis and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Washington State University where he studied crop variety testing. The Crops Testing Program currently conducts on-farm and small-plot variety trials on sorghum, winter wheat, dry beans, sunflower, proso millet, as well as irrigated and dryland corn. He worked for over 12 years in West Africa first as a Peace Corps Volunteer introducing animal traction in Benin and then as a contractor doing food crop research and extension in Mali and Cameroon. In his last international assignment, he developed famine early warning systems in Chad.