The Department of Energy (DOE) Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center (GLBRC) has received $8.099 million in new funding from the U.S. Department of Energy through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act to provide crucial support for plant cell wall imaging and sustainability research.
After 34 months, nearly 2,800 announcements and a lot of good feedback from CALS faculty and staff, the CALS communication staff is making some key changes to eCALS. On August 20 we’ll begin to introduce some features that will help you get information to CALS faculty and staff more quickly and effectively. Those changes will include:
A new look online. The eCALS home page will be a news page rather than a blog
A post-it-yourself approach to newsgathering. Instead of emailing your announcement to an eCALS editor, you’ll put it up yourself, eliminating the time lag. (more…)
The Babcock Institute is helping bring cheese artisans to Wisconsin and putting Wisconsin cheese makers on the road to participate in artisan-to-artisan mentoring. The successes of two such efforts were celebrated in Madison on Monday, August 3.
In the afternoon, CALS Dean Molly Jahn awarded certificates to Honduran dairy artisans who were the first participants in an internship bringing dairy artisans to Wisconsin to study with area cheese makers. That ceremony was followed by the first-ever reunion dinner of the Dairy Artisan Research Program, which provides local artisans opportunities to travel and study their craft. (more…)
2009-2010 Bus Pass Distribution will take place 10 a.m.–6 p.m. weekdays August 10– September 4. Locations are as follows:
Working outdoors in late spring and early summer can put you and your employees at a greater risk of exposure to ticks infected with Lyme disease. Lyme disease is caused by a bacterium carried in the gut of certain ticks. When these infected ticks attach to the human body (often in armpits, groin, scalp, or other hairy, hidden body areas), they slowly feed, and within 36-48 hours they may transmit the bacterium.
Signs and symptoms. Although a majority of people with Lyme disease develop a “bulls-eye” rash, 20-40% of persons who have the disease do not have a rash. Other signs and symptoms may be non-specific and similar to flu symptoms such as: (more…)
We’ve changed our name. The old UW Department of Rural Sociology is now the Department of Community and Environmental Sociology.
What’s in a name? Quite a bit it turns out. A couple of years back, the faculty in the UW Department of Rural Sociology began a discussion about what we call ourselves. Was the term “rural” still meaningful? Did “rural sociology” adequately reflect the content of our research and our teaching? We held a retreat, we talked in the halls, we debated the meaning of the rural in a departmental seminar, and we continued our intellectually lively and institutionally consequential discussion over wine late one fall Friday afternoon.
MADISON — Wisconsin’s farms and agricultural businesses generate $59.16 billion in economic activity and provide jobs for 353,991 people, according to a recent study conducted by University of Wisconsin-Extension based on data for 2007.
The study shows that Wisconsin agriculture contributes in a significant way to the state’s economic base despite the acute financial pressures caused by low prices for several products including milk and cheese as well as high input costs. The study’s findings indicate agriculture’s economic activity increased 14.9 percent, up from $51.5 billion, from a similar study conducted in 2004 using data for 2000. (more…)
CALS engineers- and ag-marketers-to-be learned how a piece of machinery goes from concept to product during a Farm Technology Days tour.
“If you come in here with a question and these folks can’t answer it, there is no answer.” That comment was made to CALS associate dean John Shutske by one of the thousands of visitors who passed through the UW-Extension pavilion at Farm Technology Days, where 40-some CALS faculty and staff members helped answer questions on topics ranging from weed identification to genomics to bioenergy to managing family stress caused by depressed dairy prices. Farm Technology Days, held July 21–23 at the Crave Brothers Farm near Waterloo, drew more than 75,000 attendees. (more…)
Associate deans John Shutske and Bob Ray join Dean Molly John and others on the administrative scooping team for the annual CALS ice cream social on July 28.
Forget the fire alarms. If you want to empty buildings on the CALS campus, take a few 5-gallon tubs of free ice cream and add some nice summer weather, and you’ll find that it’s surprisingly easy to lure faculty, staff and students away from their desks and lab benches. The plaza in front of Ag Hall was elbow to elbow as the CALS administrative team scooped up several flavors of the world’s best ice cream during the College’s annual Ice Cream Social.
The plant pathology departments at UW-Madison and at North Carolina State University are jointly sponsoring a memorial for Arthur Kelman to be held at the American Phytopathological Society meetings. The event will take place in Room A105 of the Convention Center, on Sunday, August 2, 2009, from 4–5 p.m. There will be brief remarks from a few invited speakers, followed by an opportunity for others to provide comments, if they wish, and then a chance to mingle.
For those who did not see it, an obituary for Arthur appeared in the Madison paper thus:
http://www.madison.com/obits/listings.php?type=trans&date=07%2F05%2F2009
A nice blog article appears here: