Grow-NY startups pioneer food and ag innovations

News

From fully autonomous berry harvesters to plant-based lupini bean protein bars, the startups competing for $3 million in prize money at this year’s Grow-NY Food and Agriculture Competition are bringing revolutionary innovations to market.
  • Cornell AgriTech
  • Cornell Cooperative Extension
  • Department of Entomology
  • Agriculture
  • Digital Agriculture
  • Entomology
  • Food
Rolling Hills

New no-till guide for organic soybean production

News

Farmers interested in using the rolled cover crop organic no-till soybean system can now find techniques and tips in the new guide produced by the Sustainable Cropping Systems Lab at Cornell University. The guide is by Matt Ryan of Cornell...
  • School of Integrative Plant Science
  • Soil and Crop Sciences Section
  • Agriculture
  • Field Crops
  • Organic
soybeans in cover crop

Elephant project recordings evoke the rainforest

News

ELP researchers, in collaboration with the Wildlife Conservation Society, use remote recording units to capture the entire soundscape of a Congolese rainforest. Their targets are vocalizations from endangered African forest elephants, but they...
  • Lab of Ornithology
  • Animals
  • Environment
  • Nature
A man deploying a sound recorder in the rainforest

NSF grants $2.5M for seagrass, marine ecosystem research

News

To seek solutions, the National Science Foundation’s Division of Ocean Sciences and Environmental Biology awarded a four-year, $2.5 million grant to Drew Harvell, professor emeritus in ecology and evolutionary biology in the College of...
  • Cornell Atkinson
  • Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
  • Biology
  • Biodiversity
  • Nature
  • Water
  • Ecosystems
  • Plants
 Olivia Graham examines a seagrass meadow at low tide on the San Juan Islands

Stormy Weather, Community Resilience

News

Communities of all kinds are rocked by environmental issues that test their fortitude and adaptability. Shorna B. Allred, Natural Resources and the Environment, wants to help them build resilience to these shocks. Her own experience growing up on the Gulf Coast of Texas in a county with 30 petrochemical and oil refineries has a lot to do with that.
  • Global Development Section
  • Natural Resources and the Environment Section
  • Environment
  • Natural Resources
  • Land
  • Health + Nutrition

Multidisciplinary partnership aims to cure people with HIV

News

Over the last 40 years, HIV has shifted from a deadly and mysterious virus to one that can be controlled with daily drugs. But attempts to completely eliminate the virus from the bodies of people living with HIV, curing them for good, have failed.
  • Molecular Biology and Genetics
  • Digital Agriculture
  • Biology
  • Health + Nutrition
an HIV AIDS ribbon

$25M center will use digital tools to ‘communicate’ with plants

News

A new multi-institution, transdisciplinary center will develop systems for two-way communication with plants, allowing scientists to remotely sense a plant’s biology and its immediate ecosystem, in hopes of one day using the information to improve plant growth.
  • Cornell Institute for Digital Agriculture
  • Plant Biology Section
  • Plant Breeding and Genetics Section
  • Plant Pathology and Plant-Microbe Biology Section
  • Digital Agriculture
  • Plants
Scientists look at plants.

Cornell AgriTech renovation supports distance learning for NY food and farm workers

News

A $3.5 million renovation of Jordan Hall on the Cornell AgriTech campus will enable more distance-learning opportunities for entrepreneurs, professionals and workers in New York state’s food and farm economy.
  • Center of Excellence in Food and Agriculture
  • Cornell AgriTech
  • Agriculture
  • Digital Agriculture
  • Applied Economics
  • Climate Change
  • Food
Elected officials cut the ribbon on a new facility.

Cornell celebrates 65 years of leadership in biogeochemistry

Spotlight

For 65 years, Cornell CALS has been a leader in biogeochemistry, an interdisciplinary field that studies elemental cycles through Earth’s air, land and water, and is critical to understanding climate change. The first journal in the field was founded by Professor Bob Howarth in 1984.
  • Environment
  • Climate Change
A river from above.

Ida’s remnants struck idling front for historic deluge

News

Packed with an historically massive amount of tropical water, the remnants from Category 4 Hurricane Ida deluged eastern Pennsylvania, New Jersey and New York City with unmatched rainfall on Sept. 1.
  • Cornell Atkinson
  • Northeast Regional Climate Center
  • Earth and Atmospheric Sciences
  • Environment
  • Water
  • Climate Change
Cars submerged in flood waters.

From community-based organizing to the U.S. Congress

Field Note

Melanie Stansbury , M.S. ’07 arrived at Cornell in 2006 searching for new tools and knowledge to make a difference in her hometown community in Albuquerque. Backed by new insights into the theory and practice of community sociology, she returned...
  • Global Development Section
  • Global Development
U.S. Congress building

New hub promotes farmer producer organizations in India

News

A new resource at the Tata-Cornell Institute (TCI) for Agriculture and Nutrition’s Center of Excellence in New Delhi will help empower India’s 125 million smallholder farms to take advantage of growing opportunities in the agricultural sector.
  • Charles H. Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management
  • Global Development Section
  • Nutritional Sciences
  • Agriculture
  • Applied Economics
  • Global Development
  • Health + Nutrition
A woman working in a field in India

Global action to save wheat

Spotlight

When Norman Borlaug said, “Rust never sleeps,” he was warning of the emergence of a highly virulent stem rust pathogen that threated wheat crops around the world. First identified in the wheat fields of Uganda, the fungal pathogen known as Ug99...
  • Global Development Section
  • School of Integrative Plant Science
  • Global Development
A man and a woman stand in a field of wheat, examining the growing plants

Warming Atlantic forces whales into new habitats, danger

News

Without improving its management, the right whale populations will decline and potentially become extinct in the coming decades, according to a Cornell- and University of South Carolina-led report in the Sept. 1 journal Oceanography. “Most of...
  • Earth and Atmospheric Sciences
  • Animals
  • Environment
  • Nature
  • Planet
  • Water
  • Ecosystems
  • Climate Change
A right whale breaches the surface

Perspectives in Global Development seminar series announced

News

Eleven development scholars and practitioners will address some of the world’s most urgent challenges — from racial and gender inequalities to climate change and resilient food security — in a new seminar series confronting perceptions about...
  • Charles H. Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management
  • Global Development Section
  • Natural Resources and the Environment Section
  • School of Integrative Plant Science
  • Agriculture
  • Natural Resources
  • Climate Change
  • Food
  • Global Development
Jenny Aker

Bacteria may hold key for energy storage, biofuels

News

A new study identifies bacterial genes that may make it easier for scientists to engineer a bacteria that takes in renewable electricity and uses the energy to make biofuels.
  • Biological and Environmental Engineering
  • Energy
  • Bacteria
  • Microbiology
Buz Barstow working in his lab at a lab bench

To sustainably harness cow manure’s usefulness, fire it up

News

Judiciously decomposing organic matter from 700 degrees Fahrenheit to 1,200 degrees F, without oxygen – a process known as pyrolysis, very different from incineration – and retaining nutrients from dairy lagoons can transform manure into a...
  • School of Integrative Plant Science
  • Soil and Crop Sciences Section
  • Agriculture
  • Climate Change
  • Soil
 Margaret Ball tending to plants growing in a tray in a grow room.

Undergrad’s blogs, tweets stay ahead of storms

News

Four days before the pop-up Category 4 Hurricane Ida made landfall Aug. 29 in Louisiana, Feuerstein had blogged and tweeted late on Aug. 25 about a group of muddled clouds forming in the south Caribbean. Meteorologists dubbed it 99L. Technically...
  • Earth and Atmospheric Sciences
  • Nature
  • Climate Change
An aerial view of a hurricane