To help enlighten UW-Madison students about the Maple Leaf State, forestry professor Jeff Stier will teach a new class this fall about Canadian environmental policy.

Tewodaj Mogues returned to her native Ethiopia to learn how rural families cope with disasters such as drought. The project seeks to identify policies that help poor households retain assets during these shocks so they can avoid recurrent cycles of poverty and reliance on food aid.

Vitamin A, a nutrient found in foods like eggs, meat and dairy products, appears to play a key role in preventing heart defects in developing embryos and may promote healthy adult hearts as well, according to a UW-Madison scientist.

Wisconsin’s dairy industry is in the midst of major restructuring, brought on by changes in national and international competition, new federal marketing and pricing programs, and challenges of mature production and processing infrastructures. If the state’s dairy industry is to prosper and expand, it must find new ways to produce milk at prices competitive with other regions of the country and the world, and do that while protecting environmental quality and enhancing agriculture’s natural-resource base.

To certify or not to certify: that is the question facing state foresters and policymakers this year. Certification of forests is comparable to having the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval. It assures consumers and industry purchasers that the wood products they buy come from forests that are managed well, with sustainable, ecologically sound practices. This is a far cry from the early 20th-century practice of

Cranberry growers know the symptoms well: hard, dark-colored bumps on stems, brown leaves and dried-up fruit. The disease, cranberry stem gall, causes major damage to crops and shrugs off treatment with fungicide. However, a UW-Madison plant scientist’s latest research suggests that the key to understanding the disease may lie in the previously unexplored combination of bacteria in the soil and environmental factors.

Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison are developing a vaccine against Toxoplasma gondii, a parasite that is the third leading cause of foodborne deaths in the United States.

The milk-price roller coaster will flatten out a bit for Wisconsin dairy farmers in 2004, according to University of Wisconsin-Madison market analysts. Milk prices should average 50 cents to 70 cents per hundredweight higher than in 2003, but highs will be lower and lows will be higher. Wisconsin’s net farm income should total $1.1 billion to $1.3 billion in 2004 if higher milk prices prevail. That’s up from $950 million in 2003 and just $640 million in 2002, when milk prices plummeted, say agricultural economists at the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences.

At this time of year, most people are aware that some holiday plants, such as mistletoe and poinsettia, can be toxic. In addition, wintertime is the season for poisonings from a variety of toxins, especially in rural settings, says Donna Lotzer, poison education coordinator at the UW Hospital Poison Prevention and Education Center.

We’re seeing one effect of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s successful deer trapping and collaring program, aimed at tracking the movements of whitetails in the CWD intensive harvest zone around Mt. Horeb. Hunters are now spotting radio-collared deer, and wondering if it’s alright to shoot them.