Browse General Agriculture Stories - Page 18

Pine straw production, timber sales and wildlife management will top the list of topics at the Agroforestry and Wildlife Field Day slated for Thursday, Sept. 20, at the University of Georgia’s Westbrook Research Farm in Griffin, Georgia.

To avoid disaster due to subfreezing winter temperatures, leaky pipes and uninvited rodents, University of Georgia Cooperative Extension irrigation specialist Wes Porter recommends that Georgia growers inspect their irrigation systems before planting their crops this spring.

The Farm Again program will host a workshop to introduce potential farmers to U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) programs and loans at the University of Georgia Tifton campus on Wednesday, Feb. 28.

Rice has been a staple food crop around the world for millennia, but little was known about the wild origins of the world’s most widely produced crop until the recent mapping of the genomes of 13 ancestral rice species. Scott Jackson, director of the University of Georgia Center for Applied Genetic Technologies (CAGT) in the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, helped to map these genomes as part of The International Oryza Map Alignment Project.

Dennis Hollingsworth was fresh out of college the first time he tried running a farm. It was the early 1980s in south Georgia, and he stuck with it for four years in some of the toughest economic conditions since the Great Depression. Then he left for an IT job.

When the public thinks of NASA, the first images that come to mind are often rockets or satellites. In the future, images of greenhouses might also make the list.

Conservation tillage saves farmers time and money and improves the soil, but only 20 or 30 percent of Georgia farmers use this system, according to University of Georgia Cooperative Extension soils and fertility specialist Glen Harris.

As part of an irrigation efficiency study by University of Georgia Cooperative Extension, a 29-person team of social scientists, agricultural economists, climatologists, agricultural engineers and UGA Extension agents from the UGA College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences is studying agricultural irrigation in order to increase the water-use efficiency in row crops common to southern Georgia.

University of Georgia Cooperative Extension recently welcomed eight water educators to the organization. Formerly part of the Georgia Soil and Water Conservation Commission, the positions were transferred to UGA Extension by Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal.

As farmers around the world battle extreme drought and other climate events, researchers turn to pearl millet to find ways to make other grains more resilient to climate change. A global team of 65 scientists, including nine from the University of Georgia, have decoded some of the secrets to the crop’s coping strategies.