Tour a farmstead, micro dairy in the suburbs

Jedidiah Farm and Studio hosts the Suburban Farmstead and Micro Dairy Tour from 2 to 4 p.m. Saturday, Sept. 2, at 5058 Smothers Road in Westerville.

The 5-acre farm uses “ecologically inclusive principles to encourage biodiversity and resilient food production,” the event description says. “Visitors can expect to see a space that is in transition from the typical suburban to perennial food forests, guilds, woodlands and pasture, incorporating annual and perennial crops within rotational grazing principles.”

The free event is part of the Ohio Sustainable Farm Tour and Workshop Series. CFAES’s Sustainable Agriculture Team is a co-presenter of the series and is the specific presenter of this tour.

Soil testing field day is Aug. 31

A reminder that there’s a Soil Health Testing Demonstration Field Day on Thursday, Aug. 31, at Riker Farm Seed in Bowling Green.

There’s no cost to attend, but if you’d like the free lunch being offered, you need to register by today, Aug. 28. Email Alan Sundermeier at sundermeier.5@osu.edu to register.

The field day is part of the Ohio Sustainable Farm Tour and Workshop Series. CFAES’s Sustainable Agriculture Team is a co-presenter of the series and is the specific presenter of this event.

Download the series brochure.

Aug. 29: Development of the 100 percent guayule concept tire

Howard Colvin, senior scientist with Cooper Tire’s Global Technical Center in Findlay, Ohio, presents “Development of the 100% Guayule Concept Tire” from 1:50 to 2:45 p.m. Tuesday, Aug. 29, in 100 Food, Agricultural and Biological Engineering (FABE) Building at OARDC in Wooster, 1680 Madison Ave., and by video link to 219 Agricultural Engineering Building, 590 Woody Hayes Drive, on Ohio State’s Columbus campus. Continue reading

3 CFAES faculty receive USDA Borlaug Fellowships

Three CFAES faculty members, under the leadership of the college’s Office of International Programs in Agriculture, have been awarded international research fellowships through the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Borlaug International Agricultural Science and Technology Fellowship Program. Continue reading

New grant: What makes algal blooms turn toxic?

Justin Chaffin, research scientist with Ohio State’s Ohio Sea Grant program and Stone Lab, and partners in Ohio and Michigan have received a nearly $250,000 National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration grant to study what causes Lake Erie algal blooms to turn toxic.

Chaffin holds a partial appointment with CFAES. He talks about another of his algal bloom studies, this one aided by a team of Lake Erie charter boat captains/citizen scientists, in the video above.

Event to look at farming, water quality, Ohio’s efforts for both

Agriculture and water quality flow together. So do Ohio’s efforts to improve them.

The next Environmental Professionals Network (EPN) breakfast program will look at those ties and at new progress in serving the state’s farmers, food and water.

The event, which is open to the public, is Sept. 12 at The Ohio State University.

Continue reading

These skills will help you sample fish and also get a job doing it

Eugene Braig, aquatic ecosystems program director in CFAES’s School of Environment and Natural Resources, talks about Stone Lab’s Sept. 23-24 workshop on fish sampling techniques in the video above.

Braig, one of the workshop’s instructors, says the training being offered has been “very deliberately developed to provide students with marketable skills.”

Stone Lab, located at Put-in-Bay on Lake Erie and part of Ohio State’s Ohio Sea Grant program, has provided similar professional training to 40,000 people in the past five years, all of it designed to help them get jobs, keep their jobs and advance their careers.

Learn more about the workshop and how to register.