Posts Tagged: grant
WEDA and WAAESD meet in Denver
Ever wonder how Extension and Ag Experiment Directors share information? The Western Extension...
UC Davis awarded grant to advance strawberry breeding, genetic tools
The $6.2 million grant centers on protecting crops in the future
The federal government is awarding $6.2 million to University of California, Davis, to study how to use breeding and genetic information to protect strawberry crops from future diseases and pests.
The four-year grant from the National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) centers on addressing expanding and emerging threats to strawberries, a popular fruit packed with Vitamin C and key to the diets of many Americans.
Enhanced plant breeding, gene editing and other technologies will be key to ensuring strawberry crops are sustainable in the face of climate change and possible restrictions on chemical use, said Steve Knapp, director of the Strawberry Breeding Center and a distinguished professor in the Department of Plant Sciences.
“We need to have the technology so that we can deal with the challenges strawberries face around the world,” Knapp said. “Can we use genetic knowledge to change the DNA in a specific way to get the resistance we need?”
USDA funding
The grant award was one of 25 announced Oct. 5 by NIFA – an agency of the U.S. Department of Agriculture – as part of the Specialty Crop Research Initiative program, which addresses “key challenges of national, regional and multistate importance in sustaining all components of food and agriculture…,” the agency said.
The strawberry industry has lagged behind crops like tomato and wheat when it comes to genetic and technical innovation, Knapp said, and the grant signifies that “now they want the foot on the accelerator.”
A key priority is identifying whether changing DNA molecules can improve disease resistance and what technologies would be needed. Ensuring some genes are expressed while others are suppressed would be part of the analysis.
“We're trying to build in natural resistance to pathogens through the genes that already exist but could be modified with this knowledge,” Knapp said. “If we were able to edit a gene that improves disease resistance, people would want us to use that in breeding.”
The intent is to produce disease-resistant cultivars and identify better ways to diagnose, prevent and manage disease. The research project will also include an economic forecast evaluating the consequences of production changes and communicating with farmers about the laboratory advances, according to the grant proposal.
Gitta Coaker from plant pathology and Mitchell Feldmann, Marta Bjornson and Juan Debernardi from plant sciences are participating in the research, as are scientists from California Polytechnic State University, UC Agriculture and Natural Resources, UC Berkeley, University of Florida and USDA's Agricultural Research Service.
/h3>/h3>Peppermint season
Peppermint season is here. Already candy canes are available in many colors and flavors. Any idea...
Tom Willey presents CIG Project's reduced disturbance organic vegetable production project in You Tube video
August 21, 2022
Madera, CA long-time organic farmer and key farmer member of California's CIG reduced disturbance organic vegetable project, provided a recorded copy of the presentation that he gave at the 2022 Annual Conference of the Soil and Water Conservation Society in Denver, CO on August 2nd. The video can be viewed at the You Tube link
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VfiaJYuu1WU&t=6s
Tom's video presentation goes into the history of the CIG effort and summarizes challenges that the group has faced.
Capture Tom Willey SWCS
CASI's Mitchell meets with researchers from Rothamsted Research in UK, March 17, 2022
March 20, 2022
CASI's Jeff Mitchell was invited to meet with eight researchers of the Rothamsted Research facility in Great Britain as part of a research exchange program organized by the College of Agriculture and Environmental Sciences at the University of California, Davis along with several other campus researchers on March 17, 2022. Rothamsted Research is the longest-running agricultural research institution in the world. Its foundation dates from 1843. The exchange was hosted by the Global Exchange Office at UC Davis and involved individual presentations and follow-up discussions between UC Davis researchers and the Rothamsted Research visitors. Mitchell was asked to present a discussion on the topic of "Cooperative Extension in California" and shared several aspects of our CASI Center as well as the historical background of Cooperative Extension, the land-grant university, and the agricultural experiment station system in the United States.
Roth Mitchell-Extension-Botswana 220317