If you’re looking for an agricultural researcher from a traditional ag background, Manny Deleon is probably not your guy.
Deleon, you see, didn’t grow up on a farm or ranch – those are few and far between where he was born, in the Bronx section of New York City, and grew up, on Long Island. The closest he came to a relationship with the soil in his youth was when he was tackling opposing quarterbacks while playing defensive line on his high school football team.
“My background is anything but traditional,” he said with a laugh. “I grew up pretty poor, but my parents always found a way to take me and my siblings to Puerto Rico or the Dominican Republic, where they were born, during the summer. I remember as a kid falling in love with the greenery, the beaches, the caves – we didn’t have any of those things growing up in New York.”
And Deleon readily admits he’s not your garden variety researcher. He was “a very bad student” who became a lifelong learner because of a voracious appetite for figuring out he world around him.
“I would read entire encyclopedias and learn about everything, but I just never applied that knowledge to school,” he said. “I was always tinkering, breaking things apart and trying to put to them back together. I wanted to know how things worked.”
His passion for learning eventually led him to Colorado State University, where he earned a master’s degree in soil and crop science and began working as a research associate in 2015. He specializes in water quality and works with farmers and the Colorado Department of Agriculture to monitor water quality across the state.
