Gene Dr. Pesti earned his Bachelor of Science in Agriculture degree majoring in Agricultural Sciences from The Ohio State University. To complete his degree, interviews at a job fair were required, and he chose one based solely on a convenient time. From that interview he was offered a job at a farm conducting research on dairy cows, swine and poultry.
His experience working on commercial research farms from 1972 to 1974 piqued his interest in animal research. The farms were in Western Ohio where the soils are particularly low in selenium. Pigs fed locally produced ingredients suffered white muscle disease (selenium deficiency) making Pesti acutely aware of the importance of variation in feed ingredients to feed formulation. During that time there was a crop failure in the Soviet Union. The Soviet purchase of large amounts of American soybean meal quadrupled its price in a few months. That stimulated Pesti’s lifelong interest in animal feed formulation and its importance in efficient food production. Dr. Pesti did his post-graduate studies at Auburn University (MS) where he worked on nutrition and disease interactions, specifically selenium nutrition and coccidial infections. For his PhD at the University of Wisconsin (Poultry Science and Nutritional Sciences), his charge was to investigate the methionine requirements of growing chickens. That work was continued when he began his teaching and research career at the University of Georgia. Eventually his group studied levels of protein, cystine, choline, betaine, vitamin B12, folic acid, copper, arginine and coccidiostats that all affect methionine requirements.
At Georgia, Pesti’s teaching assignments were initially on the Economics of Poultry Management and Poultry Husbandry. He taught poultry husbandry for most of his 38-year career at Georgia. Other courses taught included Introductory Poultry Science, Poultry Judging, Poultry Nutrition, Proteins and Amino Acids in Animal Nutrition, and Animal Bioenergetics. Seven times he took students on study abroad to the École Nationale Supérieure Agronomique de Toulouse to study French and European agriculture. Pesti and Dr. Bill Miller, an agricultural economist, developed the first in a series of feed formulation programs specifically for teaching that ran on the new (at the time) desktop “micro” computers. Later, Pesti and Evan Thomson from the University of New England developed spreadsheet versions of the feed formulation program for teaching. The latest version includes a composition matrix with Australian ingredients.
The Pesti and Miller collaboration expanded into a book, Animal Feed Formulation, Economics & Computer Applications. Pesti and his long-time colleague Dr. Remzi Bakalli and some of their post-grad students developed a text, Poultry Nutrition and Feeding, to help teach their students. Pesti also helped Dr. Malcolm Reid write a book specifically for missionaries working to help farmers in developing countries: Raising Healthy Poultry has been translated into French and Spanish.
Besides the three books, Pesti published over 210 referred journal articles, 125 abstracts and proceedings, 65 popular press articles and 5 book chapters. Dr. Pesti’s success was largely due to collaborations with his students, other faculty in his department and several other departments around the University of Georgia and world. In the 1980’s, Pesti was a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of New England where he studied nutrition and genetic interactions of laying hens and calorimetry.
In the 1990’s Pesti was a Visiting Scientist at INRA – France, Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique, where he studied nutrition and genetic interactions of broiler chickens. At Georgia, he hosted eight visiting professors. Dr. Pesti was active in the Southern Poultry Science Society. He served as Executive Secretary and later as President when it merged with the Southern Conference on Avian Diseases to become the International Poultry Scientific Forum under the umbrella of the US Poultry & Egg Associaton.
Dr. Pesti is a Teacher Fellow of the North American Association of Colleges and Teachers of Agriculture and was twice recipient of their Instructional Media Award of Excellence. For his research he received The National Chicken Council Broiler Research Award, the American Egg Board Research Award, The American Feed Industry Association Nutrition Research Award and The Evonik Award for Achievement in Poultry Science.
For the past 5 years, Dr. Pesti has been an Adjunct Professor at the University of New England, in Armidale NSW. During that time, he has been writing papers and web pages to help students and teachers apply mathematics to feed formulation and animal science. He has also been writing spreadsheets to help demonstrate experimental power and other aspects of applying mathematics to feed formulation and animal nutrition research. Pesti recently published a literature review demonstrating it is time for a paradigm shift in the way feed ingredients are analyzed (currently by proximate analysis, 19th Century technology).
