Scott Wicht

UC Davis Hopland Research and Extension Center
Hopland, California
Encore Fellow 2016

 

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Scott is leveraging his 36 years in R&D and his keen interest in wildlife management issues to create an innovative technical solution to a persistent challenge: tracking grazing sheep. He will work for the UC Davis Hopland Research and Extension Center which seeks through science to find better ways to manage natural resources and conduct sustainable agricultural practices, for the benefit of California’s citizens.

“Encore Fellowships are a marvelous community contribution with long-lasting benefits. The contributions Scott made are significant and long-term… the result is truly transformational for our operations at HREC.” — Kimberly Rodrigues, UC Hopland Research and Extension Center Executive Director

After 36 years of R&D work in several high-tech companies, my employer, Keysight, offered the opportunity to look at an encore career through Encore Fellowships. My kids were away from home, in college or working. I felt it was time to give back. I was surprised at the vast amount of organizations looking for volunteers. But I didn’t know if I could do nonprofit work, as I had never done it before.

I was an engineering manager all my career. I always said, I drove a desk for work. Now, I wanted to do something very different, very physical. Here I was retiring – it was a watershed moment for me, a new life and a new lifestyle. The last thing I wanted to do was go back behind a desk.

After a long search, I decided my keen interest in wildlife management issues was a good fit with the UC Davis Hopland Research and Extension Center, which seeks better ways to manage natural resources and conduct sustainable agricultural practices. I thought working on their sheep ranch would be a wonderful opportunity. While working with them, I found myself doing things I had never done before and never thought I would. There was the day I helped a ewe give birth . . . I didn’t plan this, but I had a pair of hands and the shepherd needed help. I even participated in shearing sheep, and cleaned out a lot of pens. Early on, I had been told I would not know at the beginning of the Fellowship all the areas I would be contributing to and that was true.

While I supported the center’s sheep-raising program, I was asked to apply my technical and engineering expertise to develop a radio frequency identification (RFID) tagging system to more efficiently and effectively track and protect the center’s sheep across 5,300 acres of pasture. I knew the technology, but had never actually used it. I was told to just go and learn about how it’s used in sheep, and I did. I’m an engineer: I got the hardware and the software, I read the instructions, I read the manuals. I created a way to use the technology. Then, I was able to translate the technology into a customized manual for HREC, in their comfort zone and in their vernacular. I rewrote those manuals, eliminated things they didn’t need to know and concentrated on what the ranch needed.

The system I created is transforming the operations of the ranch and is being shared beyond HREC, as well. I learned a lot from countries like New Zealand and Australia, which export a lot of lamb and need systems like this to track and manage the many herds they have.

Kimberly Rodrigues, UC Hopland Research and Extension Center (HREC) Director, says “The result is truly transformational for our operations at HREC. It has raised visibility and interest at the California Woolgrowers Annual meeting and new research interests from UCD [the University of California, Davis] Veterinary Medicine School. In addition to basic animal tracking, we will be able to track mothers and twins and other critical characteristics, to inform future breeding programs. The potential of the software is not yet being fully utilized yet offers incredible growth capacity . . . while also improving our efficiency and reducing staff time reading tags manually, one animal at a time.”

What I found is that nonprofits are hungry for people who have learned to be successful in industry. You don’t have to be an expert in the nonprofits’ areas of expertise. If you know how to work on a computer or how to manage projects, you don’t have to know it all. I felt I had to be an expert when I started at Hopland because in the corporate world, you have to have an expertise, and you are promoted as you show the company you can make them more successful. The nonprofit world is more willing to work with people who have shown they are successful and who are ready to take on new activities and learn and contribute as they grow.

Another project I worked on, learning about the effects of climate change on plant life, involved co-leading a project that was part of a national study on phenology, the study of how the biological world times natural events, like cycles and seasons. We wanted to learn how climate change affected our local plant life. We had to track the leafing, budding and development of fruit; we followed ripening, when brown leaves showed, when they dropped and when there were no more leaves. What a positive experience! Not only did I learn about phenology, but it got me out on the ranch, I was outdoors all day. The ranch is so large, you can never see the same place twice.

I greatly appreciate Keysight’s support of the Encore Fellowships program as part of its retirement program. People should realize that nonprofits will utilize your skills 100 percent and ask you to learn new things to contribute to their work. The more I was interested in learning new things, the more I could contribute to the organization.

This Encore opportunity was a huge light bulb that started to shine – there’s a lot more nonprofits than I’d originally thought. I think there’s a nonprofit for just about everybody out there.

 

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