Ongoing research

[Updated June 9, 2023, to add Guilherme De Moura Araujo to Amiggie advisors.] A robot designed to reduce farmworker injuries and streamline harvest took the top prize in the Farm Robotics Challenge 2023.

The warm weather has arrived, and so have the pests! By now you've probably noticed a few munching on plants in your vegetable garden.

The UC Master Gardener Program completed a UC ANR statewide program review in 2022 covering 2011-2021.

Seven entities recently received $21.7 million to conduct research into combating and preventing HLB at the farm level. The funding is from the U.S. Department of Agriculture's National Institute of Food and Agriculture (USDA NIFA) Emergency Citrus Disease Research and Extension program.

Not every garden mystery can be solved, but it is fun to research and try to figure things out. A few years ago, I noticed that daffodils and snowdrops in a certain non-irrigated area of my yard had very short stems compared to their normal growth. These are not petite varieties.

We are trying something this year that we have not ever tried. We are drill seeding rice into fields that have not been tilled this season. Why are we doing this? It is one way to save considerable amounts of irrigation water. We estimate that up to 0.5 ac ft/ac of water could be saved.

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The Spotted Lanternfly (SLF) is an invasive pest that poses a great threat to California's agriculture. It was first discovered in the U.S. in Pennsylvania in 2014 and has since taken the east coast by storm, causing damage to many plant species and proving to be difficult to control.

A recent study conducted in California examined the impact of increased cash value benefits to purchase fruits and vegetables in the federal Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) during the COVID-19 pandemic.

An unfortunate fact of life is that emergencies and disasters can and do occur. These events, which include earthquakes, wildfires, outbreaks of infectious disease, and more, can happen at any time and often do so with little or no warning.