From fad diets to herbal supplements, healthy eating can seem like a complicated chore these days. But eating well doesn’t require a degree in biochemistry. Fruit, vegetables, eggs, meat, cheese and other foods grown by farmers across southern Wisconsin are simple ingredients in a healthy diet.

Hybridization-or breeding for certain desirable traits in a plant-is relatively new to corn silage development. While hybrid silage can produce highly digestible feed for dairy cows, farmers must take additional measures and make planting decisions early in the season to capture the economic benefits of new hybrids. To help farmers evaluate their options, crop scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison conduct ongoing research on corn silage hybrids.

Scholarships worth $80,000 will be awarded to students attending the Farm and Industry Short Course at the University of Wisconsin-Madison College of Agricultural and Life Sciences this year.

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.

The bounty of our spring and summer gardens is still a few months away, yet hundreds of Madison school children and their families will enjoy Wisconsin fruit and vegetables in the middle of winter during three upcoming winter harvest dinners.

Doug Maxwell, a town of Verona resident and emeritus professor of plant pathology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, received the Chair’s Award for Scientific Excellence from the Board for International Food and Agricultural Development at a ceremony Feb. 4 in Washington, D.C. BIFAD is an advisory board to the U.S. Agency for International Development.

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.

While summer and county fairs are still a few months away, Wisconsin dairy cattle judges need to be thinking about renewing or obtaining their Wisconsin Purebred Dairy Cattle Association judging certification. PDCA has scheduled its annual judges training for April 30 at the Vernon County Fairgrounds in Viroqua.

Do you know of a farmer or rancher who truly is outstanding in the field, on the range or at the farmers market? Do you […]

Prospective dairy farmers have until April 1 to apply for an innovative program, now entering its tenth year, to help them establish their own grass-based dairy farms in Wisconsin.