John Lee

That’s part of the reason he came to North Carolina A&T to study for his master’s degree — and how he ended up in the right place at the right time to land a career-defining opportunity.

Lee, who earned his master’s degree in plant and soil science from A&T, is now a natural resource specialist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Water Management Center.

Based in Little Rock, Arkansas, the center provides financial and technical assistance nationwide on watershed projects — erosion, flood control, water supplies, water quality, rehabilitating of aging dams, restoring ecosystems, improving fish and wildlife habitats and more. Lee serves as a project point-of-contact in 11 southern states stretching from Texas to North Carolina.

“USDA has allowed me to do what I think I’ve been called to do, and that’s to provide service to people — to serve mankind,” Lee said. “This job allows me to do it at a much larger scale.”

Lee’s love of the land started when he was growing up on a farm in eastern Arkansas. He knew early on that he wanted to study agronomy — crop and soil science — in college. After getting his bachelor’s degree in agronomy from the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff, Lee wanted to continue his education.

His search for a master’s program came down to three schools. One didn’t offer the exact program Lee wanted. The federal government would have paid for Lee to attend another university because Lee was then working for the Soil Conservation Service (now the Natural Resources Conservation Service). But that would have put Lee on a waiting list, and “I wasn’t patient enough to wait until my name was pulled,” Lee said.

Lee’s best option was A&T, which came recommended by his Pine Bluff professors and offered him a research assistantship. So Lee chose A&T.

Lee credits several A&T people with helping him adjust to big-city life in Greensboro and work on his research on phosphorous and potassium runoff from poultry litter applications. Among them: M.R. Reddy, a soil science professor and Lee’s adviser; Ray McKinney with Cooperative Extension; and Leon Moses, the superintendent of the N.C. A&T University Farm where Lee conducted his research.

When Lee finished his A&T course work in 1995, S&ME, a Greensboro engineering firm, was looking to hire someone with a background in agronomy, environmental science and waste management. Lee, as it turns out, was the only available graduate student with that trifecta of skills.

“A&T was major in preparing me for and introducing me to a lot of the concepts I needed when I started working for that engineering firm,” Lee said.

A month after Lee joined S&ME, the firm was hired to help repair a hog manure lagoon that had spilled 25 million gallons of waste into the Neuse River. That gave Lee additional experience with large-scale waste operations, which he parleyed into jobs with the food processing company Perdue Farms and N.C. Cooperative Extension. He also took doctoral classes at N.C. State and Mississippi State universities.

In 2005, Lee returned to USDA, where he had worked in college, as the state agronomist for Mississippi. He became the state water quality specialist and state agronomist in his native Arkansas in 2010 before moving into his current role in 2016.

Looking back, Lee said, “I had a really good experience at A&T. For sure A&T played a major role in me being where I am today and enjoying the kind of comforts I have from the job. Definitely A&T prepared me for it.”