Choosing the Right Road: Jim Hairston Waded into Water Quality from Winding Path
By: Liegh Stribling, Ag Illustrated Associate Editor
In her 1997 album Higher Ground, Barbara Streisand sang, "We each choose roads to call our own/ but none of us is traveling through/ this universe alone."
Most of us could name a handful of people who helped us choose a road to call our own. Jim Hairston, professor of agronomy and soils and leader of the Alabama Water Quality team, is no exception.
From a childhood spent as part of a tenant farming family in north Alabama to leader of an Auburn University team that has created one of the nation's most comprehensive sources of water quality information, Hairston's career has been shaped by a number of individuals.
Hairston was born and grew up in Section, a rural community in northeast Alabama. His family worked as tenant farmers until he was in the eighth grade when they bought their first acre of land. Then they bought another small farm and another, ending up with 200 acres. On this land they grew cotton and some produce, which they sold at the Chattanooga, Tenn., farmer's market.
While his parents encouraged all of their children to graduate from high school–Hairston was the first in many generations of his family to do so–they were less encouraging about college. As the oldest of 10 children (Hairston's older brother drowned in a local creek at age 14), Hairston was expected to stay on the family farm, where he played a major role in the family workforce.
The young Hairston was determined to make a better life, so with the help of his high school principal and the principal's wife, Hairston ran away from home to go to college in Rome, Ga.
"The principal and his wife were kind of like an extra set of parents to me. I still owe them a lot," says Hairston. "They carried me to take the college entrance exam, and they actually took me to Berry College against my parents' wishes. I graduated from high school in May and a week later I was on the Berry College campus working."
Hairston initially thought he wanted to major in art. Naturally talented, he drew portraits throughout his high school years. But he changed his mind when he took the initial courses in algebra and chemistry.
"I had this old chemistry professor who said, 'Son, you're good in chemistry. You need to major in chemistry.' Since chemistry was easy for me," admits Hairston, "I changed my major."
Although his parents were initially against his going to college, they eventually were supportive. Hairston graduated from Berry College in 1968 with a bachelor's degree in chemistry.
Later that year, he started graduate school at the University of Georgia, studying organic chemistry, but these were the years of the Vietnam War. Hairston was drafted into the military service, where he spent two years, three months of that in hazardous combat duty.
After military service, Hairston returned to graduate school in organic chemistry. Once again, his career path was influenced by his professors–although this time the influence was inadvertent.
"I was in three graduate-level chemistry courses, and each of the professors harassed me because I was a Vietnam veteran. They were critical of me as a person for serving in Vietnam. That was hard for me to understand," muses Hairston.
One day, irritated by the criticism, Hairston walked out of the chemistry building and went into the building across the street, which happened to be the agriculture building, Conner Hall. There he talked with a soil microbiologist.
"We started talking about the kind of background I had in chemistry. He said that agronomy involved a lot of chemistry and that I would probably do well in agronomy and soils," says Hairston.
Hairston was unsure about changing from chemistry to agronomy and soils, but he decided to help the soil microbiologist set up a greenhouse experiment and make nutrient solutions. Meanwhile he audited several agronomy courses.
At about the same time, the owners of the apartment complex where Hairston lived offered him a job as manager. So he dropped out of chemistry, managed the apartment complex for the next few years and continued to help professors in the agronomy department with their research.
Hairston met another influential person at this time–his future wife, Ruth, who lived in the apartment complex he managed. In June of 1974 they were married, and the following fall Hairston went back to school.
Still not committed to agronomy, Hairston enrolled as an unclassified post-graduate and soon had several agronomy professors asking him to conduct doctoral research with them.
In his research, Hairston studied the effects of applying nitrogen to corn through high-frequency irrigation systems. By injecting nitrogen through the irrigation system, the amount of nitrogen could be applied precisely and efficiently, reducing nutrient runoff into surface waters–a growing environmental concern. It would turn out that Hairston's doctoral research was the beginning of a career-long interest in water quality issues.
Before he could finish writing his dissertation, however, Hairston was asked by two of his agronomy professors to take on a new project.
Georgia had been selected as the model state for studying the environmental impacts of land-use conversions that occurred between 1972 and 1976, when U.S. markets were opened to the former Soviet Union and many acres of land were converted to agricultural fields to grow soybeans to sell to the Soviets.
Hairston's role in the project was to collect information about how land was being used in 1976 and compare it to how the land had been used in 1972, using satellite images from both 1972 and 1976. In preparation, he trained with the U.S. Geological Survey and worked with NASA on remote sensing technology.
"I bought a little red pickup truck and put more than 20,000 miles on it in three months, driving all over Georgia gathering ground truth information for testing," relates Hairston.
Hairston determined the acreage and crop conditions on the ground and worked with a researcher at Georgia Tech, who used the unique spectral signatures of agricultural crops to develop a software program that could estimate land cover and land use from satellite data. These data and other information were used to estimate economic output and effects on the environment.
Hairston's work on this project stimulated another of his long-term research interests–the use of spatial technology to help manage natural resources.
Hairston did complete his dissertation and received his Ph.D. from the University of Georgia in 1978 in agronomy and soils. He immediately began work for the Georgia Soil and Water Commission in a newly created job studying stormwater runoff from urban and agricultural lands. In this position, he was responsible for developing Georgia's program for agricultural nonpoint-source pollution.
Throughout these years, Hairston remained interested in returning to the academic life where he could teach and conduct research, so when a job opened up at Mississippi State University, he applied. He spent more than nine years at MSU, developing a water quality research program.
In 1988, there was national interest in enhancing extension water quality programs at land-grant universities. A colleague sent Hairston an announcement about a job with the Alabama Cooperative Extension System as Water Quality Program Coordinator.
"I applied out of curiosity; then I forgot about it," admits Hairston. "A few months later, I got a call from someone at Auburn telling me that I'd been selected as the leading candidate for the job."
Hairston soon accepted the position at Auburn where he has remained since.
One of his most recent projects as Water Quality Program Coordinator has been developing the Alabama Water Quality Program Web site, which covers all aspects of water quality.
The site, www.aces.edu/waterquality, carries information about drinking water and human health, environmental restoration, volunteer citizen water-quality monitoring and animal waste management. It also has the nation's largest online glossary of water quality-related terms–everything from abandoned-well rights to zebra mussels. The section of the Alabama site dealing with drinking water and health comprises a key component of the USDA's Cooperative State Research, Education and Extension Service's Water Quality Program Web site.
Freelance writers have used information gleaned from the site to prepare articles for Consumer Digest and several other national publications. Scholars from several countries also have used information from the site to prepare water quality-related information for presentations at international conferences.
When asked why the Alabama Water Quality Program Web site is so successful, Hairston, who is widely recognized as one of the land-grant university system's leading experts in drinking water as it relates to human health, replies, "I've been lucky to get good people."