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Jennifer Thompson (left), associate research scientist in the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, and Tim Griffeth (green shirt), an agriculture teacher at North Oconee High School, are among those working in UGArden. CAES News
Grow It Know It
As a kindergarten teacher, Robin Edens was an outlier in the group of mostly middle and high school teachers at the University of Georgia learning how to introduce food-based learning to their students.
CAES senior Trent Sutton says he has gained a new appreciation for all the work that goes into a finished bottle of wine.  CAES News
Vineyard Internships
When students begin seeking internships, they look forward to gaining firsthand experience in their chosen fields and seek opportunities that will help further their education and develop future job skills. Some may get stuck making coffee, sorting files or answering phones, but for three University of Georgia interns, the summer internship experience has been much more engaging.
Hemp is the same species as marijuana (Cannabis sativa), and the only difference is a legal one: Plants with less than 0.3% of the chemical that gives users a “high”— tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC — are hemp, and anything over 0.3% THC is marijuana. CAES News
Hemp Genetics
When you buy something at the store, you have a pretty good idea of what you’re getting no matter where you buy it — a Coke is a Coke, Oreos are Oreos — and whether you buy them in Atlanta or Seattle doesn’t really change what you get. Farmers are in a similar position when they choose what to plant, but in the burgeoning field of industrial hemp, it turns out that things are much more complicated.
An official walks across the infield of the National Stadium in Tokyo, home of the 2020 Olympic Games. A UGA-bred grass will be used on the field. (Photo by PHILIP FONG/AFP via Getty Images) CAES News
TifSport and TifGrand
The Summer Olympics may be in Japan this year, but Team USA was on home turf when they took the field for today’s Opening Ceremony. The Japan National Stadium’s field is currently sodded with TifSport bermudagrass, developed in south Georgia. One of many grass varieties created and tested at the University of Georgia’s Tifton Campus, TifSport is a dense, medium- to fine-textured grass bred to withstand the high traffic sports fields see while tolerating herbicides.
At UGA’s College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, 2021 Borlaug Undergraduate Scholar Samantha Wegener discovered precision plant breeding — the combination of gene editing and engineering — which showed her a path to solving complicated issues to improve plant varieties. CAES News
2021 Borlaug Undergraduate Scholar
Samantha Wegener enrolled at the University of Georgia’s Tifton campus after earning her associate’s degree in biology from the Technical College of the Lowcountry in Beaufort, South Carolina. It was during her last semester in Beaufort that Wegener was introduced to the world of plant breeding.
Large patch disease, pictured here, can infect all warm-season turfgrasses, but centipede, St. Augustine, and zoysia are particularly susceptible. CAES News
Large Patch
As warm-season turfgrasses continue to green up, diseases are rearing their ugly heads. The main culprit this time of year is a fungus, Rhizoctonia solani, that causes large patch disease in lawns. Large patch can infect all warm-season turfgrasses, but centipede, St. Augustine, and zoysia are particularly susceptible.
A DSSAT training workshop that draws international participation is held on the University of Georgia Griffin campus each year. This year, 35 researchers attended the workshop, held from May 17 to 21, to learn the latest version of the precision agriculture software. CAES News
Decision Support System for Agrotechnology Transfer
Anyone familiar with agriculture knows that a successful harvest largely relies on environmental factors. An especially hot summer with no rain in sight or poor soil quality can cause as many problems as a late cold snap right in the middle of planting season. Often farmers must rely on trial and error to get the best results. But for agricultural scientists, the guessing game can be reduced thanks to a computer software program called Decision Support System for Agrotechnology Transfer (DSSAT).
UGA Weather Network Director Pam Knox checks one of the data-logger boxes maintained by the network. All of the observational instruments connect to the data-logger, which collects and transmits weather data at 15-minute intervals, which is then disseminated through the UGA Weather Network website. CAES News
UGA Weather Network
On June 1, 1991, the first agricultural weather station operated by the University of Georgia began transmitting data from Griffin, Georgia. Since then, the UGA Weather Network has grown to include 87 stations scattered across the state, providing weather data to a variety of users. On June 1 this year, this 30-year record of continuous weather data makes the UGA Weather Network one of the oldest state weather networks in the country.
Professor David Bertioli and senior research scientist Soraya Leal-Bertioli work together with peanut plants in their greenhouses at the Center for Applied Genetic Technologies. CAES News
Best of Both Worlds
The wild relatives of modern peanut plants have the ability to withstand disease in ways that modern peanut plants can’t. The genetic diversity of these wild relatives means that they can shrug off the diseases that kill farmers’ peanut crops, but they also produce tiny nuts that are difficult to harvest because they burrow deep in the soil.
Most of the U.S. was warmer, and the eastern two-thirds of the contiguous U.S. was wetter, from 1991–2020 than the previous normals period, 1981–2010. With 20 years of overlap between the current normals and the previous iteration (1991–2010), annual changes between these two data sets were somewhat muted compared to trends over the same period. Monthly and seasonal changes are more dynamic. For example, the current normals for the northern-central U.S. are cooler in the spring, while much of the Southeast is now warmer in October, cooler in November and warmer again in December. Atmospheric circulation dynamics and surface feedbacks result in substantial differences from month to month and region to region. CAES News
New Normals
Day-to-day swings in temperature are an accepted part of the weather in many areas around the country. However, when 30-year averages of daily temperature fluctuations from thousands of stations around the country indicate a steady change in average temperatures over time, there are tangible implications for agriculture, energy consumption and many other aspects of daily life.