Dr. Alison Van Eenennaam, faculty member and Cooperative Extension Specialist at the University of California-Davis was awarded the 2014 Borlaug CAST Communication Award by the Council for Agriculture Science and Technology (CAST). She received the honor during this year’s World Food Prize taking place in Des Moines, Iowa. This year’s award was sponsored by DuPont Pioneer who announced they will …
Bio S.I. Tech’s SD 25 Aids Drought Stricken Farm Land
While the Midwest is rife with rain, other areas of the country including California and the southwest have been drought stricken for several years. When this occurs, the farmland needs extra help with naturally occurring microbes. Some areas use pile and burn tactics to improve soil health but not only does this strategy not restore the soil with carbon and …
Verdeisan Adds Sales Expertise
Verdesian Life Sciences has increased its sales staff with the hiring of four sales experts: Bob Bischoff, John Henize, Brad Meckle and Mark Seipel who will join Verdesian as regional sales managers. The new team members will help to drive sales growth and support relationships with key customers in the plant nutrition, seed treatment and inoculants product categories. “As we …
Alltech Appoints Aidan Connolly CIO
Alltech has appointed Vice President Aidan Connolly as chief innovation office (CIO) as part of the company’s global research department. Connolly will work closely with Dr. Karl Dawson, vp and chief scientific officer in developing their innovation pipeline and take products from test scale to commercial scale. In his new role, Connolly will put together a team within the company’s …
Analysis of Soil Samples Using LIBS
Science is fun. Let me explain. During the Vedesian Life Sciences Los Alamos Media Tour we learned about a cool soil sampling technology coined Laser-Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy (LBIS). In an attempt to not use to much technical jargon, LBIS is a focused pulse laser beam that generates a microplasma (think spec or dot). From here, the emission from the plasma …
Using CAFOweb on Your Dairy Operation
Dairy farmers in New Mexico are using a great new tool called CAFOweb. The online data management tool allows dairy farmers to better manage nitrogen. As Tara Vander Dussen and Jay Lazarus explained, nitrogen from manure solids and/or effluent can leach into the ground water is not applied at agronomic rates. In other words, said Lazarus, most dairies were not …
Innovation Will Meet Needs of America
Dave Pesiri is the director of the Feynman Center for Innovation. He defines innovation as taking a new technology of idea into a new market. Los Alamos National Laboratory is a place where a lot of new technologies emerge, and the Center dedicates much of its time to working with others to deploy the technology from the pages of a …
LANL’s Four Scientific Pillars
Back in the days of the Manhattan Project, Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) was a secret to the outside world. Founded to develop technologies to defend America, that mission is still in place today. During the Verdesian Los Alamos Media Tour, ag reporters had the opportunity to learn about the work being done at LANL as well as how some …
Verdesian Mission: Education
Verdesian has a mission as part of being a science-based company. And part of that mission is education – education of both journalists and farmers. To learn more about why this is so important, I spoke with Michael Berry, senior marketing manager with Verdesian, who hosted about half a dozen ag media at Los Alamos National Laboratory. As Berry succinctly …
Los Alamos Nat’l Laboratory Ag Innovations
I recently had the opportunity to spend some time at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL). While the federal lab’s main mission is military defense, many innovations can be reimagined to work well in agriculture. To learn more about going from the lab to the field, I spoke with John Mott, technical writer for LANL. Mott first started at LANL …