Other Ag News:
WASHINGTON, Jan. 29, 2025 – The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced that people recovering from the impact of recent wildfires and straight-line winds may be eligible for food assistance through USDA’s Disaster Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (D-SNAP). Approximately 81,477 households in 28 zip codes in Los Angeles County are estimated to be eligible for this relief to help with grocery expenses.
Our current season of online courses is well underway, and the fourth and final block of courses will start live instruction in one month. With courses on business, grazing management, soil health, growing fruit, and more, this is a great opportunity to learn before the growing season begins.
Our suite of online courses is offered on a user-friendly platform, which grants registrants permanent access to their course content. Also, courses have tiered pricing based on household size and income to make access to the courses more affordable and equitable for everyone.
Registration is open for all courses, with live content starting at the end of February for our third block of courses.
Mondays: February 24 – March 31
Are you trying to navigate the legalities of owning a farm? This course helps early-stage farmers assess and manage a variety of risks that they will face, including the business, tax, and regulatory implications of your farm.
Mondays: February 24 – March 31
Arm yourself with a business plan and you will have a guide to aid your farm decision-making and demonstrate to yourself and your family that your ideas are feasible. This course is designed to help you build your plan, including developing financial statements.
Tuesdays: February 25 – April 1
Grazing is more than simply turning livestock out onto a green pasture and hoping for the best. With sound grazing management, you can reduce workload, keep animals happier and healthier, and improve the overall productivity and profitability of your farm.
Tuesdays: February 25 – April 1
From site selection and ecosystem expansion to marketing and profit potential, determine whether incorporating uncommon fruit into your operation is the right fit for your farm or forest.
Season Extension with High Tunnels
Wednesdays: February 26 – April 2
Adding weeks to your growing season can mean attaining a premium for having products available well before (or long after) other local growers. This course will introduce you to unheated plastic-covered “high tunnels,” covering cost, management and more.
Wednesdays: February 26 – April 2
The health and productivity of the soil forms the basis for any farm’s success, profitability, and ecological sustainability. Be a successful farmer by developing a holistic approach to preserving and building soil health and fertility through this course.
Wednesdays: February 26 – April 2
Effective pest management is essential for orchard health and production of a successful crop. Routine monitoring and scouting are required to identify pest activity and managing pests must be conducted efficiently to be economically viable.
Introduction to Tree Fruit Production
Thursdays: February 27 – April 3, with two additional Monday webinars on March 17 and March 24
Tree fruit are an important component of the agricultural and homeowner landscape. This course, which offers eight live webinars for its 2025 offering, trains beginning tree fruit growers in fundamental concepts in orchard planning and management.
Social Media & Online Marketing
Thursdays: February 27 – April 3
Which online tools and strategies will attract customers, broaden awareness of your business, and increase sales? This course provides real-life, practical ideas and explanations to help you build a successful online presence, grow your customer base, and sell more farm products.
Our program offers nearly three dozen online courses to help farmers improve their technical and business skills. These courses cover a range of topics any farmer needs to succeed.
Experienced farmers, extension educators, and agriculture service providers guide students through course content, including weekly live webinars, videos, and resources. We offer scholarships for eligible farmers in New York who face an entry barrier to farming, and for military veterans in New York.
In recent years we added “Growing Uncommon Fruit,” which will help you determine whether incorporating uncommon fruit into your operation is the right decision for you, and “Stress Reduction for Farmers,” which offers strategies for streamlining your farm. Other newer additions include “Cut Flower Production” on the business of flower farming; a course on “Beef Cattle Management;” a primer on “Social Media & Online Marketing” for your farm business; and a 4-week intensive in how “Reading the Land” can help you monitor its health.
In addition to new courses, we have expanded our Spanish-first online course offerings with our “BF 101: Cómo Iniciar su Negocio Agrícola” and “BF 102: Mercados y Rentabilidad.”
The bulk of the course happens on your own time, with discussions, readings, and assignments in Teachable, our online course platform. To add to the experience, webinars will be woven into the interface of the course for a dedicated time slot each year to allow you to meet on a weekly basis to learn from presenters and ask questions in real-time. If you miss one, they are always recorded and posted for later viewing.
You can browse all of our course offerings on our website. You can learn more about our courses, including answers to common questions, on our course FAQ.
The post Grow Your Knowledge and Your Farm Business with Our Final Block of Online Courses appeared first on Cornell Small Farms.
WASHINGTON, January 27, 2025 — If you’re hosting a Super Bowl party, keep food safety in your playbook to ensure that bacteria doesn’t run out the clock. The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) has a game plan to keep your Super Bowl servings penalty free.
“One of the biggest threats to a successful game day meal is bacteria that causes foodborne illness,” said USDA FSIS Administrator Dr. Denise Eblen. “Make sure that takeout or delivered food is quickly refrigerated or placed in an oven until your guests arrive.”
Washington, D.C., Jan. 24, 2025 — The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) today announced key appointments by President Donald J. Trump to support his administration’s focus on forest management, wildfire prevention, and natural resource conservation. Ahead of the President's visit to California to assess wildfire damage, these appointments highlight a renewed dedication to protecting communities, enhancing forest health, and ensuring responsible stewardship of natural resources.
Washington, D.C., Jan. 21, 2025 — The U.S. Department of Agriculture today announced the names of the following individuals who will hold senior staff positions in Washington, D.C. These appointees have been selected to implement President Trump’s America First agenda, ensuring that the needs of America’s farmers, ranchers, and producers remain a top priority.
Kailee Tkacz Buller Appointed as Chief of Staff of the U.S. Department of Agriculture
WASHINGTON, Jan. 17, 2025 – Today, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) announced an additional six states are enrolling in the National Milk Testing Strategy (NMTS).
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s aura in my childhood home was so pervasive that you would have thought he was a member of our family. My mother, who’d been born on our family farm in Mississippi and later raised in Chicago, came to age at the height of the 1960 Civil Rights movement and understood the period in a way that history books never fully explain.
Roughly three-quarters of North American plant species require an insect for pollination, including many key food crops. Image Provided
Cornell researchers studying obesity prevention, herbicide-resistant weeds, protection for native bees and other topics have received $1.6 million in federal funding for 54 new projects that support New York’s agriculture, environment and communities.
The Ithaca-based Cornell University Agricultural Experiment Station (Cornell AES) administers yearly funding from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture. Every year, land-grant universities in all 50 states receive funds to address locally important problems in agriculture and food systems, the environment, applied economics, and community and individual development. The grants can be used as seed funding for researchers to explore ideas individually, or as a mechanism to bring together diverse researchers in multiple states to address issues of regional or national importance.
Two of this year’s awardees will contribute to a 15-year Multistate Research Project addressing sustainable solutions to problems affecting bee health. Roughly three-quarters of North American plant species require an insect for pollination, including many key food crops. Pollinators are estimated to contribute more than $15 billion per year to the U.S. economy.
Bryan Danforth, professor of entomology in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences (CALS), is collaborating with partners at Pennsylvania State University, Rutgers University and the University of Massachusetts to study management strategies for ground-nesting native bees. Working in collaboration with apple orchard growers, researchers will install “bee bed” habitats ideal for native pollinators, then relocate priority bee species to these orchards to increase bee diversity and pollination resilience.
“An increase in the richness of diversity of native pollinators can facilitate higher fruit yields,” Danforth said, “leading to increased economic activity, enhanced food security and more resilient farming practices for New York growers.”
Minglin Ma, professor of biological and environmental engineering (CALS), and Scott McArt, associate professor of entomology (CALS), will continue development of microgels that can protect pollinators from the harmful effects of pesticides. Their previous work showed that when bumblebees were fed their microparticle antidote and then exposed to lethal doses of neonicotinoids (the most common class of pesticides in the U.S.), they had a 30% higher survival rate than bees that didn’t receive the treatment. The new research seeks to optimize this work by using a molecular imprinting technique that can more effectively bind to neonicotinoids and protect bees.
“One-third of the food we consume is dependent on managed and native pollinators for sustained production, yield and quality,” Ma said. “We hope that this more-potent and universal detoxification strategy will improve bee health, limit bee declines and promote agriculture and food security.”
Margaret Smith, associate dean and director of Cornell AES, said multistate projects like Ma, McArt and Danforth’s enable researchers with diverse expertise to effectively tackle difficult regional and national problems through collaboration.
“The purpose of the land grant is to support research of local interest, but there are many challenges that are not restricted to state borders,” Smith said. “When we collaborate across states, we can develop research that’s more robust and broadly applicable.”
Some of the other 54 projects funded this year will explore:
Preventing obesity – African Americans in the U.S. are disproportionately affected by type 2 diabetes. It has been shown that eating proteins and vegetables before carbohydrates can suppress appetite and lower blood sugar levels. This project, led by Joeva Barrow, assistant professor of molecular nutrition in the College of Human Ecology, will study whether such nutrient sequencing can normalize blood glucose to prevent the onset of type 2 diabetes in African Americans.
Managing herbicide-resistant weeds – Herbicide-resistant weeds threaten crops in New York and nationally. Vipan Kumar, associate professor of weed science in CALS, is leading a project to understand the extent and locations of herbicide-resistant weeds in New York field crops and develop cost-effective integrative weed management strategies. His lab will conduct statewide field surveys to identify the evolution of herbicide resistance among the most troublesome weed species – including Palmer amaranth, common waterhemp and horseweed – in New York field crops.
Supporting dairy farms – Like humans, some cows develop excessive inflammation after giving birth, which harms their health and may impact the health and growth of their calves. Jessica McArt, associate professor and department chair, and Taika von Königslöw, assistant professor, both of Population Medicine and Diagnostic Sciences in the College of Veterinary Medicine, will assess differences in colostrum (the first milk produced after birth) and blood samples between healthy and unhealthy cows shortly after birth. Then they’ll evaluate whether the cows’ health status impacts calves’ early-life health and growth.
Designing rural ditches to prevent flooding and improve water quality – Roadside ditches in rural areas play a critical role in flood control and water quality. Anne Weber, assistant professor of landscape architecture (CALS), and Rebecca Schneider, associate professor of natural resources and the environment (CALS), will explore how roadside ditches can be better designed to improve water quality and enhance ecological services. They’ll test a range of custom seed mixes and maintenance strategies to meet ecological needs and aesthetic expectations.
Assessing forest carbon storage with lasers – Forests play a critical role in absorbing atmospheric carbon dioxide. Traditionally, researchers gauge how much carbon forests are storing based on tree diameter and height, but the equations used to make these estimates have high uncertainty; improving these equations requires cutting down and weighing trees. Xiangtao Xu, assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology (CALS), and Peter Smallidge, New York state extension forester (CALS), seek to improve carbon storage accounting by using LIDAR (light detection and ranging) technology, which more accurately and rapidly measures tree volume without harming trees. The project will also train foresters to use these new assessment techniques and to access opportunities for carbon markets.
This article originally appeared in the Cornell Chronicle.
The post $1.6M Supports Land-Grant Research for NY Farms, Forests, Communities appeared first on Cornell Small Farms.
WNY Farm Field Day Highlights Apple Production, Soil Health, Leadership
Sergio Rosario and Silvia Rios, co-owners of Rosario Brothers LLC, welcomed nearly 30 participants to an educational field day at their apple orchard in Albion, in western New York State.
The field day, conducted in Spanish, began with a farm tour where Rosario explained his strategies and practices for apple production, including pruning, the use of reflective tarps, and grafting.
Farmers learn about apple production at Rosario Brothers Farm. Tim Shenk / Cornell Small Farms Program
The field toured as part of the field day has been owned by Rosario Brothers Farm for about three years. During this time, many many significant improvements have been made to the quality and productivity of the orchard. Rosario’s goal is to produce “extra fancy” quality apples that have a higher value in the fresh apple market than apples for processing, which was the goal of the previous owner.
After the tour, participants learned about the importance of soil in agriculture. María José Oviedo from the Cornell Small Farms Program’s Futuro in Ag team presented on the importance of soil health and demonstrated different physical properties such as soil aggregate stability and soil water filtration, showing the importance of soil health in the movement, filtration and storage of water and nutrients.
Mildred Alvarado, coordinator of Futuro, then led the group in a discussion and exercises on the importance and management of personal and business finances as a key factor in building sustainable enterprises.
Honorato Martínez shares his appreciation for having Spanish-first leadership training.
Hormis Bedolla, an employee in the apple industry for more than 20 years and supervisor of work crews, presented keys to developing leadership skills.
Rosario and Rios finished out the day by awarding certificates of recognition and appreciation to high-achieving members of their team who make it possible for Rosario Brothers Farm to contribute to the local and regional economy with their hard work and love for the production of high-quality apples.
The participants at the farm field day appreciated the openness of the owners for creating a space to share their knowledge acquired over many years of experience. During the event there was an atmosphere of trust and an invitation for each of the participants to begin their path to becoming successful entrepreneurs.
Long Island Latinx Farming Community Trained in Cover Cropping
Members of Long Island’s Latinx agricultural community gathered at the Horticulture Research and Extension Center in Riverhead, NY on August 20, 2024 for an afternoon of learning and community building.
The main topics of the Spanish-language event were the importance of soil health for agricultural production, the benefits of cover crops and learning about different summer cover crops that can be adapted to the conditions of the region.
In addition to cover crops, the event was a unique opportunity to expose the Long Island Latinx community to educational and research opportunities, showing them that they can also play a role in the institutions that support agricultural development.
It was gratifying to see in attendance Long Island farm worker families and entrepreneurs looking to get started in agriculture. It was a joy to watch the children enjoying the scientific demonstrations and research, understanding the hows and whys behind the practices being shown. Most of the families had never had access to hands-on training opportunities, doing it in their own language and with high-level scientific information.
Cover crops are crops planted in rotation or at the same time as certain vegetables. The benefits of implementing cover crops in agricultural production include improving soil structure and protection during rain and runoff events, improving water filtration into the soil, helping with weed, pest and disease control, and increasing the availability of nutrients to the soil, among many other benefits.
The day was made possible through the collaborative effort of the Cornell Small Farms Program’s Futuro in Ag project and Cornell Cooperative Extension (CCE) of Suffolk County, as well as support from the New York State Soil Health Program.
The Latinx population on Long Island is significant. According to the 2020 Census, more than 20 percent of Long Island identifies as Hispanic. This represents nearly 600,000 people. Because of this, education and research in Spanish continues to grow in importance.
During the event, more than 20 participants were able to hear information relevant to the use of summer cover crops and soil health, observe rainfall simulations and the results with different crops, as well as observe different cover crops. For many participants, it was the first time they had learned about cover crops, and receptivity was high related to the options and benefits of using cover crops in different scenarios.
More Than 80 Participate in Bilingual Field Day
More than 80 people participated in a bilingual Farm Field Day at West Haven Farm in Ithaca, New York, focused on equity in agriculture and the impacts of climate change on food production this past Sunday, July 28. The event was organized by the Cornell Small Farms Program’s Futuro en Ag team, along with the Northeast Organic Farmers Association of New York (NOFA-NY) and West Haven Farm. The event was also supported by the New York Soil Health Program. The presentations were conducted primarily in Spanish, with simultaneous interpretation into English.
The hosts, Carlos Aguilera and Lorena Mendoza, along with their staff and technical specialists from Cornell, shared their experience and knowledge of production in high tunnels, microgreens production, the importance of soil in agriculture, soil health, reduced tillage, cover crops and seed saving.
The afternoon session focused on the food system and the importance of the participation of small-scale producers, entrepreneurs and other actors in the food chain. Owners of Four Leaf Farm and Mama Said Hand Pies also participated, providing vegetables, chickens and cooking prowess for the event.
The event highlighted the importance of equity in agriculture and sustainable farming practices. The organizers noted the effort of New York’s Latino/a/x agricultural community, who attended from Central and Western New York, Hudson Valley, Long Island and New York City.
Successful Field Day for Latino/a/x Farmers in Hudson Valley
The Latino/a/x farming community gathered for the Second Annual Hudson Valley Area Latinx Farmers’ Field Day on July 15, 2024. The Spanish-language event was hosted at Three Sisters Farm in Kerhonkson, NY, where co-owner José Rodríguez and his family welcomed more than 30 participants. Rodriguez shared his family’s experience of building a farm business, immersing themselves in farming in New York with the same love, hard work and perseverance as they did in their native Mexico.
María José Oviedo from the Cornell Small Farms Program’s Futuro in Ag team teaches the importance of soil health. Tim Shenk / Cornell Small Farms Program
The educational content was facilitated by the Cornell Small Farms Program’s Futuro en Ag team in collaboration with the Orange County Cornell Cooperative Extension Office, and with the support of the New York Soil Health Program. Facilitators from Three Sisters Farm and West Haven Farm focused on how to improve resilience in agriculture, as well as developing and pursuing goals at the level of the individual, the family, the farm, and the business.
Participants saw demonstrations of different technologies and equipment for vegetable production that comprise climate resilient practices for water conservation, mulching, soil health, cover crops, and pest and disease management. Participants learned the importance of doing cost-benefit and market analysis in order to develop sustainable and profitable production systems.
The active participation of the producers and the friendly exchange of experiences and lessons contributed to this welcoming field day. The atmosphere was full of camaraderie and learning. Farmers in attendance exchanged tips and experiences, creating a true community spirit.
The event lasted from 9:00 am to 3:00 pm. Participants expressed gratitude for being able to learn from the Rodríguez family’s experience, in addition to the formal presentations and informal conversations that took place throughout the field day.
The post Field Days Bring Together Latino/a/x Farming Community appeared first on Cornell Small Farms.
WASHINGTON, Jan. 15, 2025 – Today, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced the publication of an interim rule on Technical Guidelines for Climate-Smart Agriculture Crops Used as Biofuel Feedstocks. The interim rule establishes guidelines for quantifying, reporting, and verifying the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions associated with the production of biofuel feedstock commodity crops grown in the United States.
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