Duane Sinning, formerly Colorado Department of Agriculture’s assistant director of the Plant Industry Division, will be taking the helm of the section as director. The vacancy was created when Mitch Yergert announced his retirement from CDA after nearly 31 years of service. Sinning assumed his new role on April 1.
“Duane has served this agency and Colorado’s agricultural community well over the years; his leadership ability has been apparent with our staff. Duane’s career has been focused on furthering plant and seed development and I’m confident that his dedication to agriculture will help him successfully transition into his new role,” said Commissioner of Agriculture Don Brown.
Sinning joined CDA in 2014 as the assistant director of the Plant Industry Division where his duties include enforcing statutes and rules for numerous agricultural programs such as nursery, seed, phytosanitary and organic. He has also spearheaded the development of the rules and implementation of Colorado’s Industrial Hemp program. This position also required a number of supervisory responsibilities and supporting the division’s strategic goals.
Before joining CDA, Sinning worked in private industry where his roles included oversight and maintenance of variety (seed) lines in traditional and GMO breeding programs, risk mitigation and isolation for compliance, variety evaluation, product positioning, staffing, budgeting and business development. His career has taken him to Iowa, where he was a nursery farm manager; Michigan, where he managed the operations for a national horticultural company; and then to Colorado where he was a senior sales consultant to the greenhouse industry. The overseas portion of his career included Germany when he joined an international ornamental plant breeding company as the North Americana vice president of sales and marketing tasked with overseeing plant breeding projects, product selection, expanding their market presence and improving distribution operations. Sinning received his bachelor’s in agricultural business-horticulture and commercial economics from South Dakota State University.
“This is an exciting time in my career. I have dedicated my life to furthering agriculture and horticulture because we have the ability to put food on everyone’s plate and improve quality of life. I look forward to working with our farmers and ranchers who are dedicated to making sure everyone has a reliable source of food and access to a healthy meal,” said Sinning.
The Plant Industry Division is comprised of a number of state and federal programs including seed and nursery registration; plant and plant product export certification; organic certification; hemp registration; commercial and private pesticide applicator testing and licensing; restricted use pesticide dealer licensing; pesticide product registration and the inspections and enforcement necessary to support those programs. The division also develops and enforces quarantines to prevent or minimize the threat of exotic pests to the agricultural and horticultural industries of the state and monitors exotic pests through trapping and other means.
For more on the Colorado Department of Agriculture, visit www.colorado.gov/ag.
