- Author: Jeannette E. Warnert
Viticulture farm advisor Larry Bettiga of the Salinas County UC Cooperative Extension office wrote a column that ran in the "Business Monday" section of the Salinas Californian today. The article makes a strong case for local agricultural research.
Local research has been instrumental in helping the Monterey County wine grape industry achieve and maintain a reputation of being early adapters of new technologies, Bettiga asserted in the article.
He noted that, when phylloxera was found in the Salinas Valley in the early 1980s requiring the replanting of some vineyards to phylloxera-resistant...
- Author: Jeannette E. Warnert
Our Master Gardeners make appearances in the media quite a bit. Usually, they pop up in my subscribed feeds for their numerous workshops, garden tours, advice columns, seminars and workshops, such as in this garden calendar from the Santa Cruz Sentinel. As a result, I don't always report on the Master Gardener stories that appear, so I missed an excellent piece in the San Jose Mercury News on Jan. 12.
Master Gardener Rebecca Jepson introduced a new monthly column in the paper, which has a weekday circulation of over a quarter million. Jepson...
- Author: Jeannette E. Warnert
Here's something on "future" ANR news . . . The media has been invited to join UC President Dynes on a tour this Friday. A 20-minute window has been set aside as a media availability.
Dynes will be visiting the Coachella Valley as part of his series of tours around the state of California. ANR's new vice president Dan Dooley will be traveling with him.
They will visit Hadley date farm and packing facility, a vegetable farm, the UC Riverside Coachella Valley Agricultural Research Station and the Kent SeaTech aquaculture facility. All are in the town of Thermal. ANR advisors and specialists will be along to explain how their programs are making contributions to the community.
Following the tour, I...
- Author: Jeannette E. Warnert
Action News 6, which serves the Central Coast, ran a story this week on an ongoing effort by UC Cooperative Extension in San Luis Obispo County to teach children and caregivers how to adopt a healthy lifestyles.
"You can teach the children, but unless the parent is involved in these changes, it doesn't always happen," UCCE health education specialist Krista Mugford said in the TV story.
The six-week-long "Eat Smart, Play Hard" program includes lessons on proper nutrition, healthful recipes, and creative and fun activities to get participants moving.
Monica Dupaix participated with three of her five children. She said in the...
- Author: Jeannette E. Warnert
The plight of the honeybee continues to make headlines, and reporters continue to seek out UC experts for comment. Today, the Sacramento Bee noted that colony collaspe disorder "hits agriculture hard."
Acccording to the story, many adult bees have mysteriously disappeared – leaving only the queen and the young brood bees – and researchers don't yet know exactly why.
"As a research community, we're just scrambling," the story quoted Susan Cobey, a UC Davis researcher and bee breeder.
According to the article, researchers and beekeepers nationwide collected samples of affected hives in 2007. Most of them were also hit by...
