Discovering best ways to minimize food waste

A $15 million grant from the National Science Foundation will establish the first national academic research network on wasted food in the United States, and Brian Roe, holder of the Fred N. Van Buren Professorship in Farm Management in the CFAES Department of Agricultural, Environmental, and Development Economics, is set to be one of its co-principal investigators.

Read the story.

Learn more about Roe and CFAES fighting food waste.

On our greatest hope for a sustainable future

Without healthy soil there can be no food. And without any food there can be no life.

That’s the message of an opinion piece by Rattan Lal, Distinguished University Professor of Soil Science in the CFAES School of Environment and Natural Resources and 2020 World Food Prize laureate, that recently ran on the global development website Devex.

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‘Innovation is key to addressing the climate crisis’

Conservation measures and climate-smart agriculture got a boost last week with the announcement of a $1.2 million investment by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to fund a robotic irrigation system at CFAES.

U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack made the announcement during a Dec. 10 visit to the CFAES Waterman Agricultural and Natural Resources Laboratory in Columbus. Pictured at a town hall meeting during the visit are, from left to right, CFAES Dean Cathann A. Kress; Terry Crosby, chief of USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service; Vilsack; and U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio. (Photo: Ken Chamberlain, CFAES.)

CFAES sustainability news, Dec. 14, 2021

Ohio State News, Dec. 13; featuring USDA Sec. Tom Vilsack; U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown; CFAES Dean Cathann A. Kress; Rattan Lal, Distinguished University Professor of Soil Science, CFAES School of Environment and Natural Resources; and CFAES Waterman Agricultural and Natural Resources Laboratory

Beauty when it comes to good nutrition, fighting food waste

Explaining the value of misshapen vegetables—that they are as healthful as their picture-perfect counterparts and that buying them helps reduce food waste—could help improve sales of “ugly” produce, suggests a new study whose senior author is a researcher with CFAES.

Read the Ohio State News story.

CFAES sustainability news, Nov. 9, 2021

NOAA authorizes $1.77 million to research harmful algal blooms

Cleveland Plain Dealer, Oct. 27; projects include researchers from Ohio State

‘Crop diversity underpins food security’: Scientists flag ‘enormous’ diversity loss

Food Navigator; Oct. 26; Kristin Mercer, Department of Horticulture and Crop Science, is one of the study’s co-authors