Oral history interview with Timothy P. Croughan

2025-04-18T09:42:43-04:00

Timothy P. Croughan was born in Santa Cruz, California, in 1950. His parents were from the Midwest, moved to California as children, met and married in college, and moved to Santa Cruz upon graduation. Croughan was one of six children, and he loved being outside as a child. When he was four, the family moved to Marin County, California, so that his father could go to seminary. When his father got his first job as a minister, the family moved to Augusta, Kansas, to start a new Presbyterian church. Croughan remembers retreating to safety in the lower level of the family home during tornado watches. He talks about his parents’ high expectations for the children in chores and education. His mother was involved in politics and supported women’s rights. She also worked in hospitals as a microbiologist and brought her children to work with her sometimes. When Croughan was eleven, the family moved back to California, and he started getting more interested in science. He participated in the Boy Scouts and went hunting during his free time. He learned about Reed College from his sister Kate and decided to attend. He had originally planned to become a physician, but changed his career trajectory after reading an article in the paper that children around the world were dying from a lack of food. He decided he wanted to help produce food. In college, he enjoyed working on calligraphy and spending time in his garden. He knew his next step was graduate school, and he decided on the University of California, Davis, working with Professor D. William (Bill) Rains in the Department of Agronomy.

Croughan started working on cell culture and salt tolerance in Rains’s lab. He learned new techniques and discusses his daily life in the lab where he met his future wife, Sue. In his free time, he continued to garden and also got involved in winemaking and brewing beer. He even established a class at Davis, “Agricultural Science and the World Food Crisis,” and invited well-known scientists to come and speak to the class. As Croughan considered his career after earning his PhD, he started becoming more interested in working on rice. He was offered a position at Louisiana State University’s Rice Research Station as a faculty member focused exclusively on research with no teaching responsibilities. He talks about setting up his lab, which he would later share with his wife, and hiring technicians. He also traveled around the world to learn more about rice. When Croughan returned to the United States, he began trying different techniques to find herbicide-resistant plants, including spraying plants and studying chemical mutation. When Sue came in 1984 to study soybeans and forage crops, the couple worked side-by-side in the same lab, even checking each other’s math. They raised their three children on the Rice Research Station property and speak fondly of their time in Louisiana. In the early 1990s, Croughan discovered an herbicide-resistant plant and tested it, eventually filing a patent in 1994, which he received in 1996. He begins backcrossing seeds and working with companies who want to use his patented technique. For the next ten years, he continued his work, retiring on January 1, 2005. In retirement, Croughan turned his focus again to gardening, this time raising native Louisiana trees. He concludes the interview by discussing his children and how proud he is of them.