Photo courtesy of Texas Tech Plant and Soil Science
Katie Lewis, Ph.D., has made a career in getting her hands dirty – quite literally. Her job, which she does not take lightly, is to research soil health and fertility. Covered in dirt, Lewis pursues her passion by using personal and professional motivators to find answers to some of the soil’s deepest mysteries.
Lewis is an assistant professor of soil fertility in the Department of Plant and Soil Science at Texas Tech University with a joint appointment at Texas A&M AgriLife Research. Her research focuses on improving overall production practices to meet both environmental and economic sustainability. This includes researching differing cropping systems such as cover crops and rotations, soil health and practices, stress from weather patterns, and nutrition management within the soil based on water and temperature fluctuations.
“I think some people might forget at times if we didn’t have a soil or the microorganisms in the soil, then we wouldn’t be able to grow our crops,” Lewis said. “The soil formation process is such a long one that in a sense it is nonrenewable.”
This interest in soil did not start early in her life. Lewis has always been interested in agriculture having grown up on a family farm, but she was not exactly sure how that would look as a career. What she did know was that she had a passion for chemistry after a high school chemistry teacher sparked her interest in the subject. It was not until she took her first soils class while majoring in chemistry at Sam Houston State University that she realized what she could study in agriculture.
“When I took that first soils class I was like, ‘Hey! This is really an applied chemistry if I look at it from a chemistry side of things,’” Lewis said.
Researching soil science and sustainability did not truly become personal until Lewis moved to Terry County in 2014 with her husband, Clay Lewis, when he took over the family farm. That was a particularly rough year for cotton farmers due to unusually low market prices. Lewis remembers her husband saying, “I don’t know if I can do this.”
Dr. Katie Lewis and her husband Clay Lewis
“His, our, livelihood is dependent on how those crops perform,” Lewis said emotionally. “In my mind, the research I’m doing is cool and exciting from a research standpoint, but what really drives me every day is the fact that I could possibly make a difference in farmers’ lives and improve their livelihood.”
Lewis said everything she does from a research standpoint has a practical component to it – whether it is from an environmental or overall economic standpoint. Everything she does is for the farmers in the area because she knows how hard her husband and father work.
“So often you see things like ‘Oh farmers don’t care about the land,’ but really farmers are the stewards of land,” Lewis said. “The land is how they make a check every year, so it is way more than a piece of land for many farmers.”
Lewis continued speaking about the risks farmers take every day.
“(I)f we can do something as researchers to stay out in front of that and help mitigate some of those things,” she said, “then I think we’re doing our job as scientists.”
She said she enjoys working in extremely dynamic fields as there is always a new question to ask and to address through research.
“Without the research, we wouldn’t be where we are today, and we couldn’t continue making improvements to farming practices,” Lewis said. “It’s not just work for me, it’s very personal.”
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