News Stories - Page 72

Since the beginning of the year, University of Georgia College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences graduate student Kristen Dunning has won $35,000 in new capital to expand her growing clean skin care line, Gently Soap. On March 31, a team of judges — all veterans of the consumer products industry — awarded her the top prize of $25,000 in the Collegiate Great Consumer Brands Competition.

The University of Georgia College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences will host the second annual Georgia Precision Poultry Farming Conference via Zoom May 3. The $40 registration fee is waived for students, but registration — open until May 1 — is required for all participants.

The College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences Alumni Association recognized eight outstanding college alumni at the 66th CAES Alumni Association Awards banquet on April 9 at the University of Georgia Tate Center Grand Hall. Two Georgia agricultural leaders were honored with induction into the Georgia Agricultural Hall of Fame.

As the inaugural cohort of the Rural Scholars Program completes their first year in the University of Georgia’s College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, the next cohort of three scholars has been chosen.

In the decades since Keith Kelly graduated from the University of Georgia’s College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences with a degree in agricultural economics, he has built a diversified slate of agricultural businesses encompassing 17 distinct brands. Now Kelly is applying his agricultural knowledge and Kelly Products Inc. to a new initiative to combine leading-edge technology with the expertise of UGA’s Department of Animal and Dairy Science.

Judges have selected 32 finalists to compete in the second and final round of the University of Georgia College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences’ annual Flavor of Georgia Food Product Contest. Narrowed from a field of 148 products, the finalists will compete on April 21 at The Classic Center in Athens with an award ceremony to follow.

Warming temperatures will have tegus on the move in southeast Georgia. Reporting sightings of tegus, alive or dead, is needed to keep the big, South American lizards from gaining a foothold in the state, according to the Georgia Department of Natural Resources.

The winner of the University of Georgia’s 2022 FABricate Entrepreneurial Initiative competition is a novel automated system designed to help pasture-raised egg producers increase their efficiency. Conceptualized by a team led by poultry science undergraduate student Chris Ayers and biological engineering student Jeffery Whitmire, Chiktopia is an automated chicken tractor designed to move pasture-raised chickens easily and efficiently while preserving the land and saving labor costs.

Jena Johnson, a lab manager in the Department of Entomology in UGA’s College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, captures what she observes working with mosquitoes and other insects in the lab of entomology professor Michael Strand. She finds scientific and artistic meaning in her photos, which offer a glimpse at both intriguing behavioral phenomena and unexpected natural beauty.