Look at a penny and zero in closely at Lincoln’s nose. That’s the size of the redbay ambrosia beetle (RAB), a tiny insect and key player in laurel wilt, an aggressive fungal disease of trees in the Lauraceae family transmitted by the RAB. Although important landscape and forest trees are in this fam...

At the American Society for Horticultural Science ’s sizzling summer summit in New Orleans, an unexpected underdog dazzled the data-driven crowd: the snow pea. Crisp and colorful, this cool-season crop took the spotlight in a seminar by Jacob Schwab, a graduate research assistant at the University o...

Our sun has some incredible powers, not least of which is feeding the plants which feed us. But we can also harness its energy to help eliminate the plants we don’t want to grow – aka weeds. Soil solarization uses the passive solar heating of moist soil under transparent plastic tarping to reach hig...

First, federal news: On Dec. 18, President Donald Trump issued an executive order to amend marijuana’s longstanding classification as a Schedule I federally controlled substance without accepted medical value. The order seeks to finalize a 2023 recommendation by the Department of Health & Human Serv...

Happy New Year, farm family! As I type these words, I find myself straddling the space-time continuum in a way that I don’t often do. The change from one year to another has heightened my awareness of both the nature and passage of time. What is the nature of time? In my writing present, it is still...

It’s no secret that summers are getting hotter – as are autumns, winters and springs. That can make growing cold-season crops, such as broccoli, difficult. Luckily, a team of university researchers have assembled like the Avengers to help mitigate this dilemma. Conducting a multistate evaluation of ...

Receiving funding through a grant is a huge honor and success, but it takes a lot of work to earn it. Going through the process of applying for a grant can be really overwhelming, but the Tri-State Extension Dairy Team hosted a webinar to make the process easier to comprehend. UVM Extension Dairy Re...

Over the past few years, there’s been a lot of uncertainty when it comes to the environment. With droughts, floods, fires, heat waves and other extremes, a lack of control can be completely paralyzing. Maud Powell, a professor of practice in the Small Farms Extension program at Oregon State Universi...

Not all scientific research is done in a sterile lab setting or in carefully planted test plots. Some of it is done on plates, with forks and knives. A group from Washington State University Extension – Laura Schulz, Jordan White and Carol Miles – shared their results from a study titled “Finding th...