Browse General Agriculture Stories - Page 16

One of the steepest barriers to profitable controlled-environment agriculture is the energy cost associated with providing the plants enough light, but new research being pioneered by University of Georgia could cut those costs by 50 percent.

Time flies, especially when you’re studying a subject you love in the heart of Italy. For University of Georgia graduate student Logan Moore, who has spent the last 18 months conducting research and pursuing his master’s degree in sustainable agriculture, his time at the University of Padova, or Università degli Studi di Padova (UNIPD), has come to an end and his degrees are complete.

From remote moisture sensors that produce a real-time feed of soil conditions to drones that use optical data to spot plant disease, the next green revolution will be fueled by new streams of data.

For the past 19 years, Julia Gaskin has worked to prove that conservation tillage and cover crops don’t have to be dirty words when it comes to conventional farming. 

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.

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.

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.

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.