News Stories - Page 73

Two University of Georgia faculty members in the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences were honored with national teaching awards recognizing their outstanding teaching and student engagement from the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities and the U.S. Department of Agriculture National Institute of Food and Agriculture.

As fall temperatures cool down, much of our lawn and garden equipment begins to lay idle. Tillers, lawnmowers and weed eaters are no longer being used with the frequency they were during the warm temperatures of summer. The temptation is to just store them away until we need them later in the spring, but that could cause problems later unless the equipment is properly prepared for storage.

With supply chain issues ramping up the stress for consumers, we asked experts in the Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics in the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences how they thought fears about low supplies and consumer behavior might flavor the holidays.

From an early age, we’re told by our parents to make sure we eat our vegetables. The U.S. Department of Agriculture recommends that people eat five to nine servings of fruits and vegetables per day. However, there’s long been confusion around what is a vegetable versus a fruit. So, when is a vegetable actually a fruit — or a root or a shoot?

The University of Georgia broke ground Monday on the site of a new, technologically advanced Poultry Science Complex in Athens. The project will dramatically increase capacity for instruction, research and collaboration supporting Georgia’s multibillion-dollar poultry industry, the largest sector of the state’s No. 1 agriculture and agribusiness industry.

In the latter months of 2019, a novel coronavirus probably leaped from a yet-unknown animal in central China into a human. Some speculate that SARS-CoV-2 leaked from a laboratory in Wuhan, China. But evidence suggests that it’s far more likely that the virus was a natural “zoonotic” leap from animal to human. The resulting COVID-19 pandemic has killed hundreds of thousands of Americans, including more than 23,000 Georgians, and mutated into dangerous new variants.

The Trial Gardens at the University of Georgia have announced the 2021 Classic City Award winners from the hundreds of varieties tested over the long, hot summer. The Trial Gardens are known as the “go-to research trial garden to test plants for the combination of heat and humidity,” said John Ruter, director of the Trial Gardens and 2021 UGA Inventor of the Year.

As climate issues capture governmental and public attention — from the effects of methane emissions to weather extremes — it is incumbent on the world to take action. Experts in UGA's College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences are focused on helping residents address climate challenges in ways that will benefit the environment and ensure both profitability and sustainability for industry.

With the support of a five-year, $6.2 million grant from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the Elevate project leverages the vast University of Georgia Cooperative Extension network and several community partners to deliver evidence-based healthy-couples and relationship-education programming to couples across Georgia.

When University of Georgia peanut pathologist Bob Kemerait does something, he does it wholeheartedly. A passionate advocate for producers both near his academic home at the University of Georgia Tifton campus and around the world, Kemerait describes himself as “a field guy,” most comfortable among the rows detecting, diagnosing and addressing the myriad diseases and pests that threaten Georgia’s second-largest row crop.