José A. Hernández, Ph.D., CPAg.

I am an Extension Educator and Assistant Professor of Extension in the Extension Center for Food, Agricultural, and Natural Resources Sciences (EFANS) at the University of Minnesota - Extension. My interests lie in the fields of nutrient management, manure management, precision crop management, and agricultural applications of spatial statistics. My research focuses on using traditional small-plot as well as on-farm large-scale trials to address questions related with nutrient management and water quality.

I received my Ph.D. in Soil Science with a minor in Statistics from the Department of Soil, Water, and Climate at the University of Minnesota in 2007. My degree work focused on the analysis of on-farm experiments for optimal Nitrogen management in corn production. An interesting consequence of the challenging data analysis from this project was the development of two original research papers. The first paper showed a methodology that allows researchers to take into account the effect of heterogeneous soils in the analysis of landscape-scale on-farm experiments. The second paper shows an innovative approach to determine confidence intervals of economically optimum Nitrogen rates.

I am currently the principal educator/researcher on the 319 project "Maximizing the economic benefits of manure to reduce nutrient loading." The project combines small-group education on calculating the value of manure for individual operations with on-farm trials on corn response to the timing of manure applications.