Recent News

• Scientists name eight steps to increase soil carbon for climate action, food security

  December 4, 2018

  University of Vermont – Leading scientists call for action to increase global soil carbon, in advance of the annual climate summit of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Katowice, Poland (COP24) and World Soil Day (5 Dec). The amount of carbon in soil is over twice the amount of carbon found […]

• Alberta clippers and Colorado lows

  So far this winter Western Canada has not seen any big winter storms develop. When we do see big winter snowfalls, most of them come from areas of low pressure that develop to the lee of the Rocky Mountains. One area of development is over Alberta, producing what is affectionately known as an “Alberta clipper,” […]

• Farmers to benefit from new method of monitoring pasture nutrients

  November 27, 2018

  Frontiers – A fast new way of checking nutrient levels in grasslands allows farmers to quickly monitor changes in pasture nutrients and adapt their animals’ grazing methods accordingly. By cutting the analysis time from around 16 hours to less than a minute, this relatively cheap and easy approach will greatly improve the sustainable management of […]

• Extreme heat increasing in both summer and winter

  American Geophysical Union – A new study shows extreme heat events both in the summer and in the winter are increasing across the U.S. and Canada, while extreme cold events in summer and winter are declining. A new study in the in Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres, a publication of the American Geophysical Union, examined absolute […]

• Winter weather a big preoccupation for the railways

  November 20, 2018

  Canada’s national railways say they’re ready to meet the needs of the agriculture sector. Both CN and CP told a recent meeting of the Senate agriculture committee they’ve made major investments to improve the movement of agriculture and food products both to ships waiting at port and customers in the U.S. The investments are in […]

• The science behind snow fences

  Driving home the other day I began to notice just how many people install snow fences, either to stop snow from accumulating in an area, usually their driveway or parking area, or to trap snow in an area, mostly over septic fields. Once I really looked at where people were installing these fences I realized […]

• Spring cold spells reduce winter wheat yields

  November 13, 2018

  Institute of Atmospheric Physics at Chinese Academy of Sciences – Northern China is a major region for winter wheat agriculture. It is in the spring (March to May) in this region that the reviving, jointing and booting stages of winter wheat mainly happen. Spring cold spells in North China, hereafter referred to as “extreme spring […]

• Ragweed may head further north with climate change

  University of Massachusetts Amherst – A new predictive model developed by an ecologist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and a climate scientist at the University of Washington suggests that climate change may allow common ragweed to extend its growing range northward and into major northeast metro areas, worsening conditions for millions of people with […]

• Changing temperatures helping U.S. corn production, for now

  November 6, 2018

  Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences – The past 70 years have been good for corn production in the midwestern United States, with yields increasing fivefold since the 1940s. Much of this improvement has been credited to advances in farming technology but researchers at Harvard University are asking if changes in […]

• Hot temperatures trigger genetic response in plants

  Penn State – The stress of hotter temperatures may trigger a response in a plant’s RNA, or ribonucleic acid — part of a cell’s genetic messaging system — to help manage this change in its environment, according to a team of Penn State researchers. In a study on rice plants, the researchers found that a […]