Virginia Turfgrass Journal – Julie Holt, Content Director, TheTurfZone.com
The Turf Zone: Welcome to The Turf Zone. In this episode of Virginia Turfgrass, we’re talking to Ray Funkhouser, VTC Board Member. Welcome Ray, how are you today?
Ray Funkhouser: Very good, thank you.
 
TTZ: First of all, thanks for taking some time to chat with us for this podcast episode. Let’s jump right in and talk about your work in the turfgrass industry. We know you’re retired now, but tell me a little bit about your job in the past and how you got to where you are now, happily retired and living the good life.
RF: Well, actually I came into the turf industry about halfway through my professional career. My entire career has been involved with, particularly, the crop protection chemical side of the business and started off on the agricultural side, working with a number of crops starting off with the fruit crops here in Virginia and moving over to a lot of the agronomic crops. Then I had the opportunity to move over to the specialty side, which included turf, which was always an area of interest for me. So half of my career was spent specifically in the turf side, the turf management side.
 
TTZ: How big of a change was that to go from the agricultural side and move into turfgrass?
RF: Very easy to do – it’s kind of a natural transition because there’s so many similarities between the two. We’re dealing with plants, we’re dealing with a lot of botany and how plants grow, how they function, how they thrive and the threats that can attack them. So it’s really dealing with just a little bit of a different crop of the end result of what you’re trying to accomplish. But many of the techniques are very similar. Then you combine that with the fact that a lot of the chemistries that we use on both sides are the same chemistries. So understanding mode of actions and also weed life cycles are very similar for both the agricultural side and the turf side. It’s just getting to know very specifically what you’re dealing with and what end result are you trying to obtain.
 
TTZ: Where did you start with your education? What made you decide to go into this field and what route did you take from there? 
RF: I guess I want to say I’ve been very blessed in my career that I had exposure to a number of areas which truly led to where I ended up. When I was coming out of high school I knew I wanted to have a career in science, I wanted to have a job where I could be using science on a daily basis, and particularly on the plant side. I grew up, I was one generation removed from the farm that my father grew up on, but my family went back to that farm often. So I was surrounded by a lot of agriculture, and I liked that area. So I decided to go to, at the time it was called Delaware Valley College, which is now Delaware Valley University. I was originally accepted as a horticulture major, but I knew I needed to go on and get an advanced degree and in talking to some people that had gone before me, they mentioned about the amount of chemistry that was needed when you went into the graduate programs and some of them had to make up chemistry courses later. So I changed my major to biology just because, looking at the curriculum, I felt I was going to be better prepared for going on for graduate study with all the courses, and I wouldn’t have to so-called “make up” any weak areas. Which in fact was the case when I went on to graduate school, I was the only one in the group that I came in with that wasn’t lacking in one of the science areas that had to take some undergraduate classes to kind of get caught up. But specifically getting into the agricultural crop protection area, I was very fortunate in that at the end of my freshman year in college – and we had to work a total of 20 weeks during out time at the school to graduate,