Sustainability

Written by Antoinette Avorgbedor, Intern at Washington State University’s Tree Fruit Research and Extension Center and the Center for Sustaining Agriculture and Natural Resources. Did you know that people indigenous to the hotter equatorial regions have much lower sweat rates than people in cooler regions of the world? Similar to the ability of the human body to adjust to different climatic conditions, plants have evolved various mechanisms to survive extreme weather conditions. Besides long-term evolutionary modific…

Written by Antoinette Avorgbedor, Intern at WSU’s Tree Fruit Research and Extension Center and CSANR. More likely than not, you have passed large apple orchards in your travels around the Pacific Northwest area and observed nets spanning wide areas of apple trees. Sometimes the entire top and all the sides of orchards are enclosed. A 2017 survey conducted in Washington State to assess the exte…

Soil health – the pursuit that launched a thousand soil tests. I have not actually counted them, but many people are working on many ways to evaluate soil health. Some are looking at indicators of soil biology status, others…

This Changes Everything. That is how everything is presented in today’s media. New cars, new policies, new science. An example of the latter are the recent advances in the field of soil microbiology, or…

Managing crop residue is essential to reduced and no-till farming systems that enhance soil health and reduce soil erosion. And growers in different parts of the dryland Pacific Northwest are likely seeking different residue characteristics. In most areas with less than 12 inches of annual precipitation, wheat is grown every other year, and land is fallowed in between to…

Peptide elicitors are naturally occurring signaling compounds that act within plants to induce and amplify defense responses. If specific peptide elicitors could be identified and synthesized, they could be used to maximize plants’ natural immunity, providing a more sustainable approach to controlling disease caused by pathogens and…

Biochar has the potential to sequester carbon and improve the properties of soils when used as an agricultural amendment. However, biochar will only be a viable option for carbon sequestration if there are uses and…

Picture this future scenario: it’s a hot summer day and you are sitting with some friends on their deck enjoying a cold beverage. You notice they recently replaced their deck and, interested, you ask about the decking material they used, only to find out that it’s made partially out of . . . manure from dairy cows! Surprised? Work done by researchers at Washington State University…

First, I would like to thank CSANR for generously funding my, and my classmates’, attendance at TILTH Conference 2018. Especially for undergraduates like myself, conferences such as TILTH are a welcome departure from the oftentimes synthetic academic track, onto a more organic (no pun intended) professional…

My name is Matthew Tumlinson, and I’m a junior undergraduate transfer student in my first semester at WSU. I’m working on my B.S. in Field Crop Management with a minor in Crop Science and working toward a certification in Organic and Sustainable Agriculture. I grew up mostly in Vancouver, Washington. I also lived in a pear growing region of northern California and a…