Katie Tritsch Receives Southern Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education (SSARE) Graduate Student Grant
The Graduate College is thrilled to recognize Katie Tritsch as a recipient in the 2019 Southern Sustainable Agriculture Research & Education (SSARE) Graduate Student Grant competition cycle. Founded in 2000, the Southern SARE Graduate Student Grant program provides funding for master’s and Ph.D. students to conduct one-year or two-year sustainable agriculture research projects that address issues of current and potential importance to the Southern region and the nation. Grantees receive a maximum award amount of $16,500 for project materials and supplies, equipment, sampling and data analysis costs, labor, and travel. Katie is the first-ever Texas State University graduate student to receive this grant.
Katie is pursuing an M.S. in the integrated agricultural sciences program in the College of Applied Arts with a focus on agricultural policy and economics. She earned a bachelor’s degree in geography from Texas State in 2012. Her honors thesis reviewed permaculture practices in the U.S.—land stewardship practices focused on creating resilient landscapes of self-reinforcing and self-sustaining crop systems—and investigated the potential integration of permaculture initiatives with institutes of higher education, using TXST as a case study. Katie also received an Undergraduate Research Fellowship (URF) in 2012 to attend a permaculture conference at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst to learn about permaculture initiatives she could bring to TXST. Receiving that award helped Katie discover she had an aptitude for grant writing. She is currently the Graduate Research Assistant and Program Contact for the Small Producer’s Initiative (SPI) at Texas State, a program with major funding from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, where she communicates with Texas farmers, organizes the annual "Farm & Food Leadership Conference" in partnership with nonprofits in the state of TX, and conducts workshops and webinars for historically underserved Texas small-scale producers.
Raised in the Houston suburbs, Katie was introduced to permaculture gardening during a land stewardship internship at the Aprovecho Sustainability Education Center in Cottage Grove, Oregon during her undergraduate degree, after which she founded the PERMIES initiative in the Department of Geography and began volunteering on local farms. She then spent several years managing diversified organic vegetable farms in both Texas and California. These experiences gave Katie hands-on insight into the benefits and challenges of sustainable agriculture, engendering a fondness for the tangibility of agricultural work and a deeper understanding of the intangible connections within food systems. They also taught her about the political-economic challenges of sustainable agriculture that motivate her current research.
Katie’s Southen SARE research project, “Roadblocks to Success: Needs assessment of small producers in Texas,” advised by Dr. Ken Mix, assesses the needs of small producers in Texas through participatory, mixed methods research. Her goal is to evaluate educational, financial, and policy needs to strengthen a crucial but marginalized sector of the Texas agricultural economy.
Katie advises applicants to get help from The Graduate College external funding coordinators and strongly emphasizes the importance of formatting throughout external funding applications, as well as the need to be extremely precise on budgets and budget justifications—"especially for federal grants, even for experienced writers and grant applicants.” She also encourages graduate students to "just keep applying” because learning how to apply for funding takes practice.