Reupping this from a year ago …
Pumpkins rotting in landfills produce methane, a climate change-causing greenhouse gas, and an especially scary one at that—it’s 20 times stronger than carbon dioxide.
So, if you don’t send your old pumpkin out in the trash, destined for burial in a landfill, what’s the best thing you can do with it?
We talked to three experts from CFAES for options. Spoiler alert: Sometimes (dun dun dun) they come back.
Don’t blame renewable energy for rising energy costs, as some media pundits have been trying to do, wrote CFAES’ Brent Sohngen in a recent column in the Columbus Dispatch.
“Actually,” Sohngen wrote, “the only effect that renewables can have on energy markets is to lower electricity prices, which in turn will cause natural gas and coal prices to fall.”
Sohngen is a professor of environmental and resource economics in the CFAES Department of Agricultural, Environmental, and Development Economics.
The new Great Lakes Fresh Fish Finder website, according to our CFAES colleagues at Ohio Sea Grant in their monthly email newsletter, “features businesses where consumers can buy wild-caught and farmed fish and shellfish to eat, for stocking ponds, to use as bait and for ornamental purposes.” Learn more and visit the site.
CFAES’ 15th annual Stinner Summit takes place from 1–7 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 18, with options to attend either in person at the new Science Building at CFAES Wooster or virtually. The event, its website says, offers an opportunity “to celebrate the legacy of Ben Stinner, look back on the past projects funded by the Stinner Summit, and chart the future of the Agroecosystem Management Program.”
Ohio State will be the lead partner on a new five-year, multimillion-dollar pilot watershed project in northwestern Ohio designed to demonstrate that agricultural conservation practices—if used on 70% of the farmland in a watershed, and evaluated on a watershed scale—can help achieve Lake Erie’s water quality goals. CFAES researcher Jay Martin will direct the project, set for the Shallow Run watershed in Hardin County.
Read the story. (Photo: Shallow Run watershed, Laura Johnson.)
COVID vaccines aren’t just for people—new types are helping protect zoo animals too. CFAES’ Linda Saif, an expert on coronaviruses in animals, is quoted on the topic in Popular Science.
Nearly 190,000 meals were packed and delivered to families in northeast Ohio last week as part of an effort by more than 500 volunteers from Ohio State (including from OSU Extension, CFAES’ statewide outreach arm) and 200 community partners who teamed up to fight food insecurity.