News Stories - Page 169

Beginning March 1, Robert N. Stougaard will be the assistant dean of research for the University of Georgia College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences. He will be responsible for the overall supervision of the college’s seven research centers and farms and three major agricultural experiment stations located across the state.

Judges selected 33 products to compete in the final round of the University of Georgia’s 2018 Flavor of Georgia Food Product Contest in Atlanta set for March 20. The contest is the state’s premier proving ground for small, upstart food companies as well as time-tested products. This year’s finalists represent all corners of the state and the best of Georgia’s diverse culinary heritage.

A $198,000 U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA)-sponsored Conservation Innovation Grant will support ongoing University of Georgia research on cover crops and the effects of those crops on water quality and availability for row crop production.

A team of researchers at the University of Georgia’s Regenerative Bioscience Center and ArunA Biomedical, a UGA startup company, have developed a new treatment for stroke that reduces brain damage and accelerates the brain’s natural healing tendencies in animal models.

Once a top agricultural commodity in Georgia, the Southern pea’s presence in the state is now minimal. Growers are reluctant to plant the crop due to a tiny weevil, the cowpea curculio.

The key to managing Exobasidium leaf and fruit spot disease in blueberries, which makes the fruit unmarketable, is one application of lime sulfur approximately two weeks prior to bud break, according to Jonathan Oliver, University of Georgia Cooperative Extension fruit pathologist.

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.

Pruning young pecan trees is a necessity and, if done properly, can save farmers the hassle of pruning older, much larger trees, according to University of Georgia Cooperative Extension pecan specialist Lenny Wells.

Commodity updates for high-value row crops like peanuts and cotton highlight this year’s Georgia Ag Forecast meetings, which are currently being held statewide.