Several years ago, the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources announced a program to clean up Lake Mendota at a cost of almost $18 million over 10 years. However, county residents say they’d be willing to pay $52 million for the job, according to a University of Wisconsin Madison survey.

The amount of nitrogen that leached from two corn fields during a three-year study was many times greater than that leaching from a restored prairie, according to University of Wisconsin-Madison scientists.

Among the first to identify bacteria that break down nitroglycerin, the active component of dynamite, University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers now have identified two enzymes that enable bacteria to degrade both nitroglycerin and TNT, another explosive. The scientists have sequenced the genes that code for the two enzymes.

Overfeeding phosphorus costs dairy farmers about $12 to $15 per cow per year in added feed costs, according to Larry Satter, a dairy scientist with the U.S. Dairy Forage Research Center at UW-Madison

One day those unused scraps of clean wallboard from construction sites and remodeling projects may be crushed and spread on agricultural fields.

Custom-tailored forage digestibility predictions may soon replace “one-size-fits-all” forage analysis in the upper Midwest. Digestion kinetics adjusts digestibility predictions based on a cow’s forage intake, and more accurately measures the energy value of forages for cows at various intake levels, according to Dave Combs, a dairy nutritionist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s College of Agricultural and Life Sciences. Digestion kinetics formulas, coupled with near-infrared reflectance spectroscopy, should help dairy farmers to fine-tune ration formulations and forage-purchasing decisions.

Margaret Krome of the Michael Fields Agricultural Institute will be honored Tuesday, March 16 for applying the

Feeling knee-deep in goose doo-doo?

As federal support for applied research declines, the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison faces growing difficulty addressing agricultural and natural resource problems in Wisconsin.

Next time you admire the plant diversity in a southern Wisconsin woodland, thank the neighboring farmers. A University of Wisconsin-Madison study has shown that while deer numbers in parts of south-central Wisconsin were above most damage-threshold estimates, foraging whitetails did little damage to woodland plants because they filled up on farm crops.