Prof. Schalk Baard

Prof. Schalk Baard became an important influence during my early development as a plant pathologist at the University of the Free State. My Honours period, as I remember it, coincided with the transition between Prof. Gert Pauer and Prof. Baard, with Pauer still involved in my academic development and Baard becoming increasingly important. Schalk subsequently succeeded Prof. Pauer as Head of the Department of Plant Pathology in the Faculty of Agriculture at UFS.

Some of my strongest memories of Schalk are not from the lecture room or laboratory, but from the field. I remember travelling with him to Vaalharts, where we conducted trials on groundnuts and Thielaviopsis — as the pathogen was known at the time. These were among my first real field visits and field trials as a young plant pathologist.

Those trips helped establish an approach that has remained with me throughout my career: go to the field, look carefully at the crop and the disease, test your ideas, and try to find practical answers. Looking back more than four decades later, I realise how formative those seemingly simple field trips actually were.

Schalk had broad experience in applied plant pathology, with research involving diseases of crops including wheat, cotton and groundnuts. After a long academic career at UFS, he retired in 1995 and settled in Stilbaai in the Western Cape, where he spent the final years of his life.

If my memory and the historical records serve me correctly, Prof. Schalk Baard passed away on 2 March 2008.

Today I often find myself travelling through or visiting Stilbaai. It is a peaceful and beautiful place, and when I am there I frequently think of Schalk — and of those much earlier days when I was still learning how to become a plant pathologist.

There is something rather special about now regularly passing through the place where one of my early teachers chose to spend his final years. The years have moved on, but the memories of those first field trips to Vaalharts remain remarkably clear.

Prof. Schalk Baard helped teach me that plant pathology belongs as much in the field as it does in the laboratory — a lesson that has stayed with me throughout my career.

He will always have a place in The Robigalia Circle.