Chelsea Harbach
Chelsea Harbach is the plant disease diagnostician in the Plant & Insect Diagnostic Clinic. She is passionate about plant pathology and helping people, which makes a career as a literal plant doctor a perfect fit.
Initially from a family farm in the very most northwest corner of Illinois, Chelsea found her passion for plant pathology after switching to the Crop Sciences Department at the University of Illinois her junior year. She received her M.S. with Dr. Glen Hartman (retired USDA-ARS) at the University of Illinois and continued to earn her Ph.D. with Dr. Greg Tylka at Iowa State University. Chelsea fell in love with Ames and Iowa State University. After completing her Ph.D., she worked for three years as a Commercial Agriculture Extension Educator with University of Illinois Extension in western Illinois, where she had the opportunity for continued collaborative work with Extension educators at Iowa State University. The opportunity to return to Ames to work in the Plant & Insect Diagnostic Clinic is a dream come true.
In her free time, Chelsea enjoys spending three-legged corgi, listening to books, playing TTRPGs, riding bikes, and more. She also enjoys creating art through hand embroidery.
Subscribe to RSS FeedField crop health matters throughout the entire growing season. The types of diseases on crops depend on the point in the growing season and the environmental conditions. Many later-season diseases result from soilborne pathogens over which in-season fungicide applications have no control. Most...
We’re well into the growing season in Iowa. We are in full swing in the Plant & Insect Diagnostic Clinic (PIDC) as growers, certified crop consultants, and field agronomists start to notice problems in their fields. While there is information on our PIDC webpage (...
The number of acres planted to cover crops annually has been steadily increasing in recent years throughout the United States. Meanwhile, the soybean cyst nematode (SCN) continues to sit atop of the U.S. list of yield-suppressing pathogens. It’s no coincidence, then, that there is an increasing...
By: Daren Mueller and graduate students, Xavier Phillips and Chelsea Harbach
Some are noticing plants with green, yellow or purple...