News Stories - Page 53

Recent data shows that the University of Georgia College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences produced the third-most plant-breeding Ph.D. graduates between 2015 and 2020. With over 80% of alumni employed at public or private institutions, the plant breeding, genetics and genomics Ph.D. program also ranked highly for its graduate employment rate.

A multidisciplinary team of researchers at the University of Georgia and two partner institutions have been awarded a $15.8 million grant over five years from the U.S. Department of Energy to reengineer poplar trees to be used as a sustainable energy source. The researchers will use biotechnology approaches to breed the trees as a multipurpose crop that can be used for bioenergy, biomaterial and bioproduct alternatives to petroleum-based materials.

October is National Farm to School Month, and this year students will learn more about a leafy green that is packed with nutrition through the theme “Spinach to Win It.” Farm to School Month is coordinated by Georgia Organics in partnership with University of Georgia Cooperative Extension and other institutions. Together, they focus on a specific crop to help students across the state learn more about agriculture and how food ends up on their plates.

The gardens JoHannah Biang imagined creating when she was an undergraduate student were filled with ornamental flowers and trees, lush and beautiful, nourishing to the soul. Now, as a doctoral student and long-time manager of UGArden, University of Georgia’s student-run farm, Biang is an integral part of creating and sustaining an operation that has put food on the plates of thousands of underserved individuals and families in the greater Athens area.

Animal geneticist Alison Van Eenennaam, a University of California Cooperative Extension biotechnology specialist in the Department of Animal Science at the University of California, Davis, is the keynote speaker for the 2022 D.W. Brooks Lecture and Awards, to be held Nov. 8 at the University of Georgia Center for Continuing Education & Hotel.

If you’ve ever wished that the orange juice you buy from the grocery store tasted like you squeezed it yourself — and stayed fresh at home — you may be interested in an electrifying project at the Food Product Innovation and Commercialization Center on the University of Georgia Griffin campus. Food technology company Food Physics is working with FoodPIC scientists to perfect a technique known as pulsed electric field technology.

It’s a familiar sight for many — a ground sprayer slowly making rounds in a field, applying pesticides to row crops to give producers the best chance of protecting crops from pests and seeing high yields at harvest. These ground sprayers, with booms that can be up to 120 feet wide, are the tool of choice for producers who are spraying large areas with agricultural chemicals.

Agriculture is the No. 1 industry in Georgia, and poultry is the largest sector of that industry, with nearly 1.4 billion broiler chickens produced each year on thousands of farms around the state. University of Georgia researchers are using multiphysics computational simulations to create a machine learning model to evaluate bird comfort during loading, transportation and holding prior to processing.

Leah Whitmoyer of Tucker, Georgia, a third-year student in the University of Georgia College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, is one of 100 college students from across the nation to be selected for the inaugural cohort of the Voyager Scholarship, the Obama-Chesky Scholarship for Public Service.