Ice cream treat!!

It's our tradition to host high school students from NC School of Science and Math (NCSSM) in CAALS 3D program. Among of other hands-on lab experience, this is one of the important activities that they need to learn.

Spring Sprung

A rapid fire look at photos I've snapped from March and April.  Getting ready for new greenhouse gas research, corn planting, and celebrating our rainy and productive North Carolina Spring.  

Wheat before a spring storm, Goldsboro, NC.

Hurry up, finish soil sampling....

Sean eating some weeds.  A constant battle.  

Angel Cruz, Mary Parr, Sean Bloszies, Aaron Fox, Sarah Seehaver, and other members of Sustainable Ag Grad student assoc. celebrate Spring by stomping on some mud, sand and straw to make cob for an oven.  

 The base for a new cob oven at the Agroecology Farm at Lake Wheeler.

Back in the lab.... microbial biomass fumigation extractions.

 The Easter Bunny hid some eggs for all the good little soil science students this spring....

 We have partners in crime - Chris Reberg-Horton with the Organic Cropping Systems Lab helps direct our tractor driver, Todd, at the CEFS research farm.

 Spring means MANURE!! And lots of it.  Try weighing out 5 tons to the acre....

 Driving over a tarp, to create a manure-free zone, for greenhouse gas research.

 Fields of amber grains..... these fields are amber, because they are getting ready for CORN.

 Nitrogen gets applied at CEFS for the greenhouse gas study.  Spring is a busy season for planting and fertilizing.

Moisture and temperature sensors are installed to continuous loggers, so we can track moisture every few minutes all season long.  

Arun

Recently, I had the opportunity to visit the ECHO Global Farm in Fort Myers, Florida. ECHO is a non-profit organization with the mission of improving the food security status and livelihoods of resource poor farmers in underdeveloped regions of the world. The group is dedicated to ensuring that this increase in agricultural productivity is done in a sustainable and culturally appropriate manner. ECHO conducts research in green manure cover crops, agroforestry systems, conservation tillage, alternative crops, and in other areas of sustainable agriculture. The Global Farm serves as a learning laboratory where ECHO takes advantage of South Florida's subtropical climate to test agricultural methods that may be suitable for areas in the developing world. In addition, ECHO has Regional Impact Centers in East Africa (Tanzania) and Southeast Asia (Thailand) where sustainable agricultural models are extended to farmers.

Intercropping systems with heavy mulching to build up soil organic matter and conserve moisture

Alternative crops: Grain Amaranth

Spring break!

I couldn't help being a tree hugger at Doka Estate in Sabanilla, Costa Rica. It's a coffee farm that gives tours and has these rainbow eucalyptuses. I went with a group on a week-long trip to become more educated about food security issues in the country so we could present those challenges in ag classrooms here (here are last year's examples)

Costa Rica depends heavily on exporting its produce, including pineapple, coffee, bananas, and ... cotton? This was one of the only farms in the country, and they produce GE seed for a US company to sell to take advantage of the year round warm weather. Dairy is huge there, with about 90,000 ha of pasture compared to only 45,000 ha of pineapple.  We had lots of great cheese and met lots of very photogenic cows!

Jacob's Days in Namibia

Greetings from Namibia! It has been a hot, speedy and intriguing past month and a half for me in Southern Africa. My studies, under the theme of Nation Building, Globalization and Decolonizing the Mind (interpret that one for yourself), have taken me to Johannesburg and Pretoria South Africa and Windhoek and Swakopmund Namibia. Here we have learned about the apartheid legacy from those who lived it, from the sister of Hector Peterson to the man who named Namibia.

Now to the soil stuff. I am interning with a small NGO named "The Namibian Horticulture Trust" who serve disadvantaged communities throughout Namibia to grow food for themselves in the immediate with long-term plans for sustainable business and ecological models. I work at an orphanage called Hope Village (the panoramic below) where I help tend the veggie tunnels (small tunnels that provide shade and relief from grasshoppers) and implement new projects. We are conducting a somewhat informal test on an organic pesticide called "Agritrap" on aphids and red spider mites. I helped set this up and got compliments from some FAO folks thanks to my write-up skills and experimental design; thanks Grossman Lab! We just put together a small vermicompost site that will help with seedling mixes and hopefully be scaled up for some sales and local training in the subject. We will soon implement a dripline irrigation system and I continue to help write grants for them, mostly to the Finnish Embassy. I have had a lot of fun working with the other gardener, Emmanuel, who has some good hands on knowledge of gardening/farming but no institutional education whereas I am a bit of the inverse of him, making us a good team that can share quite a bit of knowledge between us. I recently gave him the entirety of my lecture material from SSC 427....I hope I don't get sued, but he was very appreciative and has already read halfway through "Building Soils for Better Crops" so hooray for knowledge!

I have found this land to be full of wisdom and intrigue; there are no vivid colors or revolutionary happenings, just rolling desert hills and endless nitrogen fixing acacia trees feeding the landscape. I am impressed with the peace of this country, being the second least dense in the world and having peaceful transitions in government.

Best wishes for NC and the pursuit of all good things,
Jacob

Ciencia con Microbios!!

Amanda Roth ('14) working with Rhizobia cultures in the lab.  Congrats, Amanda!! She was just been accepted into her study abroad program in Valencia, Spain.  This summer she will study Spanish Art History.  Have fun in Spain!

Pretend Science?

We do a lot of real science.  But once in a while we have to do some "pretend science" for a photo shoot.  Our students are so popular that they are featured in magazines and articles all the time. I got a chance to photograph one recent lab photo shoot.  Our lab is very photogenic!

Suzi O'Connell (on the left) - a PhD student in Horticulture and Soil Science - was recently featured in the CALS Student Perspectives for her participation in a study abroad partnership with the University of Zagreb’s Faculty of Agriculture in Croatia.  For some amazing photos of her trip to Croatia see:  NCSU Ag goes to Croatia

In the picture above:  Suzi O'Connell, her paparazzi, some actual Congo Red dye used in our petri dishes, and some real-life dirty lab dishes (not pretend)!