Bruce Erickson is the agronomy education distance and outreach director, working to help deliver Purdue Agronomy’s wealth of expertise to audiences in Indiana and around the world using a variety of learning platforms. Bruce’s areas of capability include corn and soybean production, precision farming, instructional design, and competency-based education and assessment. He has experience in building technical, product-related sales and marketing programs to fulfill individual proficiency needs and to meet business goals, and then delivering through classroom, field, teleconference, CD, and Web-based platforms. Bruce is the primary instructor for Agronomy 105, an introductory course in crop production, and also teaches Fundamentals in Applied Agronomy, an online course offered by the American Society of Agronomy.
Bruce grew up on an Iowa farm, completed his undergraduate work at Iowa State University in agronomy, then began his professional career as an agronomist with DuPont Pioneer. After completing his master’s at Iowa State University in crop production and physiology and his PhD in agronomy at Purdue, Bruce joined the staff of the Purdue Department of Agronomy where he taught the introductory agronomy course and played a leading role in developing and maintaining the performance objective documents and the minimum proficiency exams for the International Certified Crop Adviser Program (CCA) and the Tri-State (Ill., Ind., Ohio) regional CCA program.
For three years, Bruce served as senior technical designer at Agri Business Group in Indianapolis (now Adayana), an agricultural consulting company. Bruce was director of cropping systems management and associate director of the Purdue Center for Commercial Agriculture, where he coordinated the Top Farmer Crop Workshop, and worked extensively with precision farming and crop production economics research and Extension. Most recently, he was the agronomic education manager for the American Society of Agronomy, responsible for and the primary instructor for Fundamentals in Applied Agronomy, the 4R Approach to Soil and Water Management, Precision Agriculture for Practitioners and a number of other educational programs. Working with subject matter experts, he was also responsible for the International CCA performance objectives and in annually developing the International CCA Exam, the India CCA Exam and the Mexico CCA Exam.