Katie Lewis earns Texas Environmental Excellence Award for Agriculture
AgriLife Research scientist focuses on agricultural production support, strength
Texas A&M AgriLife Research scientist Katie Lewis, Ph.D., will be honored with the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, TCEQ, 2026 Governor’s Texas Environmental Excellence Award for Agriculture.
Lewis is a soil chemistry and fertility scientist and professor in the Texas A&M Department of Soil and Crop Sciences, located at the Texas A&M AgriLife Research and Extension Center at Lubbock.
These annual awards celebrate citizens, communities, businesses and organizations working to help preserve and protect the Texas environment, while inspiring others to become better environmental stewards in their communities, according to TCEQ.
TCEQ will celebrate this year’s winners and finalists during the annual awards banquet at the Bullock Texas State History Museum on June 9 in Austin. Lewis will be recognized for her project — Sustainable Agricultural Intensification and Enhancement through the Utilization of Regenerative Agricultural Management Practices.
Lewis strives for producer resilience
The goal of Lewis’s project is to intensify agricultural production in a way that strengthens agronomic, economic and community resiliency across the southern Great Plains.
By successfully integrating practices such as livestock grazing, cover cropping and conservation tillage into cotton and wheat systems, her research is breaking new ground in a region where such approaches have seen limited application, according to her nomination.
Lewis has spent the past 11 years building her AgriLife program around developing practical solutions for producers. Her work is focused on three areas: nutrient management, resilient cropping systems and soil health.
She works with graduate students to quantify the environmental impacts of intensified agricultural practices, generating data that directly supports more improved land use. Her team utilizes unmanned aerial systems to capture high-resolution measurements that feed into the development of a first-of-its-kind decision support tool.
Through advanced modeling and field validation, Lewis has shown that integrating targeted practices can lead to measurable increases in organic carbon in soil, even in semi-arid, drought-prone regions like the southern Great Plains.
