Around CALS
CALS leads new $9.9 million initiative on dairying and climate change
U.S. Ag Secretary Tom Vilsack came to campus last week to announce a new, CALS-led, $9.9 million effort to help dairy farms reduce their output of greenhouse gases and become more resilient to the impacts of a changing climate (see coverage in this week’s CALS in the News). Matt Ruark, assistant professor of soil science, [...]
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This week’s PBS “Nature” features CALS deer research
Friday, May 3rd, 2013This week’s PBS Nature episode features work by two CALS students and a recent grad. The episode, The Private Life of Deer, includes footage of fieldwork by DNR research scientist Mike Watt, who received his MS in Forest and Wildlife Ecology in 2012, and grad students Andrew Norton and Camille Warbington—both advised by FWE professor [...]
When competition gets down in the dirt
Monday, April 29th, 2013The national collegiate soils judging competition was held at the UW-Platteville last week, and a team from CALS was in the thick of it. “They did very well given that it is the first time UW Madison competed at the national level in 20 years,” Alfred Hartemink, associate professor of soil science, who coached the [...]
24 hours: CALS stories from #UWRightNow
Monday, April 22nd, 2013From a 3 a.m. calving at the Lancaster research station to a warp-speed video of a class change in 125 Ag Hall, a lot of good CALS stories got told during last week’s #UWRightNow multimedia project. We couldn’t capture them all, but here’s a sampling. [View the story "CALS stories shared during #UWRightNow" on Storify]
The Stock Pavilion will be glowing Friday night
Monday, April 15th, 2013On Friday night the venerable Stock Pavilion will be the site of the 2013 Biennial Neon and Light Exhibition, a national invitational featuring artists working with light as a medium. Schools and individual artists from around the country come to Madison every second April to exhibit luminous sculpture. This magical event is lit only by [...]
Grind, grill, taste, repeat: Students aim for the perfect burger
Monday, April 8th, 2013If you think all ground beef is alike, you need to get beyond the same old grind. Each and every cut of beef that can be purchased at a grocery store can be ground up, and each has its own unique set of taste and flavor attributes. And as a group of CALS students learned [...]
Wisconsin Energy Institute grand opening and Science Expeditions this weekend
Monday, April 1st, 2013The first weekend in April brings with it an array of science activities on campus for visitors of all ages. The grand opening of the Wisconsin Energy Institute–the new building on the corner of Old University and Campus Drive–takes place with a ribbon cutting, public symposia, a career fair and fun family activities April 5-6. [...]
Dave Nelson’s path to science historian
Monday, March 25th, 2013Last week the Daily Cardinal published a fantastic profile about biochemistry emeritus professor Dave Nelson, giving an overview of his career and explaining how he ended up functioning as a historian for the department and CALS. In the article Nelson explains how he first inherited some old scientific instruments from a retiring UW professor and [...]
Catching up: John Vrieze’s dairy gets greener by growing greens
Monday, March 18th, 2013John Vrieze has been busy since he was featured in the spring 2009 issue of Grow Magazine. That article described how the CALS board of visitors member (now emeritus) was using manure from his dairy to produce natural gas. That’s just the beginning of his sustainability efforts, as this video illustrates. On Vrieze’s Future Farms, methane [...]
UW experts help take a fresh approach to fighting hunger
Monday, March 11th, 2013Most of the state’s diversified, fresh-market farms are pretty small and pretty rural. Then there’s The Farm. It’s big and anything but pastoral—it’s on the grounds of the Milwaukee County House of Corrections—and tended by hundreds of people, mostly volunteers. And they give away everything they grow. The nonprofit Hunger Task Force runs The Farm to provide [...]
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