Ohio Agricultural Research and Development Center

Ohio Agricultural Research and Development Center (OARDC) is the research institution of the Ohio State University College of Food, Agricultural, and Environmental Sciences. The center is home to research projects ranging from plant and animal sciences to human ecology and medicine, and includes branches across the state covering a total of over 7,000 acres (28 km²). The OARDC's main campus is located in Wooster, Ohio, next to the Ohio State University Agricultural Technical Institute.

History

The Ohio Agricultural Experiment Station was founded in 1882 in Columbus and moved to Wooster ten years later. The station grew at Wooster, focusing on crops commonly raised in Ohio, such as corn, wheat, livestock husbandry and nutrition, and expanding into other departments such as entomology. It was renamed the Ohio Agricultural Research and Development Center in 1965 and entered a period in which it thrived with increased funding and new breakthroughs, such as Lowell "Skip" Nault's immensely important discovery of a teosinte in Mexico that could be crossed with corn to make it more resistant to disease in 1979.