From the Station Director | |
In 10 years, what should be a top goal for New Hampshire's agricultural, food and forestry research and extension, and how do we get there? That was a question posed in mid-October in a meeting of the NHAES–Extension advisory committee—a group of farmers, land managers, and municipal, state and non-profit leaders who help represent the communities that inspire and are impacted by UNH's research and extension. The discussion was energetic and fruitful, helping not only to identify key needs from a cross section of NH professional and geographic communities, but also the milestones needed to achieve those goals. I'd like to invite you to also provide your thoughts about where research can make the biggest difference in the Granite State in 10 years for supporting our state's agricultural, food and natural resources. | |
Dr. Chris Hernandez at the 2023 Pumpkin Day at the Kingman Research Farm, where families decorated research pumpkins, learned about the UNH cucurbits breeding program, and interacted with COLSA partners from Gather food pantry. | |
Matt Biondi, manager of the Macfarlane Research Greenhouses, provided an overview of the greenhouses at the Greenhouse & Nursery Twilight Meeting held by UNH Extension. | |
Later this week, if you are planning to attend the Northeast Greenhouse Conference and Expo—located in Manchester, NH on Nov. 8–9—we hope you stop by the NH Agricultural Experiment Station booth to meet the faculty and staff who support the public agricultural research at UNH. There, you can meet Dr. Md Sazan Rahman, who joined UNH this fall and whose research focuses on developing carbon-free sustainable materials for growing plants for preserving energy and water. | |
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We will also be at the 2023 Corn and Forage Meeting, hosted by UNH Extension on Nov. 16, to provide an update about the ongoing applied field management experimentation, cover crop implementation and use of innovative technologies at the Station. Peter Davis, manager of the farm services unit, will provide a discussion on the experiences and insights from several of these efforts. We hope to see some of you there.
Thank you for all your continued support of the agricultural, food, forestry, and natural resources research mission of the NHAES.
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Director, NH Agricultural Experiment Station
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Plant breeder and NH Agricultural Experiment Station scientist Dr. Chris Hernandez leads the UNH cucurbits breeding and genetics program — considered the longest continuously running plant breeding program of its kind in North America. Hernandez is developing new cucurbits varieties with improved characteristics like increased market yield, disease resistance and nutritional quality.
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New research from Station scientist Iago Hale is seeking to identify an ideal grain crop for the Northeast — one that can be a staple in diets, offers significant nutritional benefits, provides price premiums for New Hampshire producers, and is highly resilient to the increasingly variable and unpredictable weather in the region. And he and his team believe they have an excellent candidate—an underutilized and lesser-known crop known as Tartary buckwheat. Learn about the many nutritional and growth advantages of the superfood Tartary buckwheat.
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Station scientist Sherman Bigornia’s current NHAES research focuses on understanding what changes are needed to help promote the greater consumption of both seafood and dairy among New Hampshire adults. By identifying some of the barriers that Granite Staters have to accessing local seafood and dairy products, this work could achieve the dual benefit of reducing the risk of age- and lifestyle-related health conditions for those New Hampshire residents that increase their seafood and dairy intakes, and increasing demand for local products from the state’s commercial dairy and seafood sectors, which provide an estimated $140 million and $90 million, respectively, in annual economic output. Read how Bigornia's work will support SNAP-Ed in New Hampshire and beyond.
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Station scientist Russell Congalton and his team at the UNH Basic and Applied Spatial Analysis Lab have developed a promising alternative for identifying aquatic cyanobacteria blooms—using unpiloted aerial systems (UAS), or drones. Congalton's research team demonstrated that by equipping UAS devices with special sensors, flying them over bodies of water, and collecting and analyzing images of the waterbodies, this enabled the researchers to accurately determine cyanobacteria concentrations based on spectral response. Learn how the collection and processing of the UAS imagery took significantly less time than the traditional water sampling method.
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A new study co-authored by Station scientist Wil Wollheim found that a potential U.S. climate policy could lead to a significant decline in the nation’s carbon emissions while also reducing the size of the Gulf of Mexico’s dead zone by 3-4% per year. In the study, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers explored how adding an extra “social cost” to fossil fuels – which are often essential to produce the fertilizer used in agriculture — could lead to a cascade of effects to numerous systems: CO2 emissions could decline by as much as 50 percent. Learn how different models accounting for the rising costs of fertilizer could provide different CO2 emissions outcomes.
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Through COLSA's global partnerships, the school welcomed several students to tcampus this past summer, among them Eliudes Camps Marcano of the University of Puerto Rico-Mayagüez and Gillian Newbold of the State University of New York at Morrisville. For both these students, COLSA served as a bridge to new opportunities. Read how these students trained and advanced their skills during their summer internships with COLSA.
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