Trae Crocker

Manage a team of scouts and chemical applicators.

• Manage and motivated employees to be productive and engaged in work.
• Manage seasonal H2A workers through spring and summer

Cross-trained employees in other departments to increase efficiencies

Manage a chemical budget of over $600,000

• Kept the department under budget every year
• Develop and maintained relationships with chemical suppliers to get the best deals

Work with the state on phytosanitary certificates to ship plants across the united states and Canada (USNCP)

Inspect liners for diseases and insects before they are put into production.

Diagnose diseases, viruses, and insect issues on over 1000 species of plants and develop a treatment plan.

Established a biological control program into the current integrated pest management program.

Hold a license for drinking water class IV to manage the drinking water systems on the nursery.

• perform all required testing to stay in compliance with the state program

Hold a license for drone operations

• participate in the implementation of drone usage across the three major nurseries for Monrovia

Communicate with sales and their customers to help increase business relationships.

• Coordinate research trials with the other nursery locations
• Evaluate safety and potential phytotoxicity of chemicals across a wide range of plant varieties
• Test the effectiveness of plant growth regulators and determine if it can save labor from pruning while increasing or maintaining high quality plants
• Identify insects and diseases through lab testing
• Propose fungicide and insecticide rotations to fix the problem
• Test irrigation, fertility, and runoff to creeks via ion selective electrodes.

• All previous responsibilities carry over
• Complete statistical analysis using R for greenhouse tests
• Complete greenhouse test summaries to submit to the company.

• I continue to help with everything I did as an undergraduate research
• Manage multiple workers in the greenhouse doing various tasks
• Teach the workers some lab techniques
• Approve hours for multiple workers
• Help review experimental protocols before a test starts
• Attend meetings with companies to help set up future tests
• Help review the experiment summary.

• All tests were done in a greenhouse setting
• Set up and carry out tests with several replicates
• Mix soil with various ratios of sand and soil
• Make bacterial suspensions for treatments of seeds
• Maintain the crops everyday (watering and weeding)
• Collect soil samples and adjust pH
• Collect and clean the samples to obtain data (length, fresh weight, dry weight, and number of beans produced).