I spent a good seven nights (though not all at once) this summer a few blocks from the old location of the Reno House on Sacramento St. near Kearney in San Francisco. It’s where Van Vandover is living as he concludes his downward slide in Frank Norris’ novel Vandover and the Brute, written in the …
Ironically, after almost two weeks in China I still haven’t had any tea. I have dined in homes and in restaurants, with young and older people but have not encountered this elusive cornerstone of Chinese culture. However, I have encountered many products made from soybeans (黃豆). After being harvested from the field, 85 percent of …
-E. Hill This year’s Weed Tour may have been one for the record books. There were upwards of 300 participants! When I wasn’t driving tractor or visiting with participants I managed to grab just a few photos to share…please enjoy! Also, if you were at the tour and did not receive a tour book because …
Recently Karen Renner has begun working with MSU’s soil biologist, Lisa Tieman, to explore how cover crops influence the microbiology of the soil and weed seeds. Last week we put tiny mesh bags of weed seeds into an incubation experiment hoping to gain some preliminary information. It is always exciting when different disciplines come together …
This year we have been using every window of opportunity to get our major weed control studies planted. This is the first year we have gotten corn in during April, ever. We also had an early opportunity to get the bulk of our soybean studies planted this week. Many of our studies have treatements with …
After a full week of when daytime highs rose well above forty degrees and nighttime lows remained above freezing there is quite a bit of muddy green showing in the Michigan landscape this morning. There is also still a fair amount of snow in my yard. I doubt that the areas along the curb where …
One of my favorite thinkers/doers in the world today is British science writer and now activist, Colin Tudge. In a recent blog post on Groundhogs’ Day, Tudge comes out to show us there is a sane way out of the madness of what he calls Neoliberal-Industrial (NI) agriculture “The Keys Ideas of Enlightened Agriculture”. In …
-E. Hill Today the Weed Science Society of America released an article about women in weed science, which is particularly relevant since there are two women professors in weed science here at Michigan State University along with two staff members and several graduate students trained in the discipline. Please take time to read the article at …
I’m involved in a new podcast called Food Fix that’s launching today. It features interviews with researchers who are figuring out how to better feed the world. It’s funded by Michigan State University’s Global Center for Food Systems Innovations. Give it a try! It should be in iTunes soon. Tweet
Sherlock Holmes in the 2009 movie stated, “It is a huge mistake to theorize before one has data. Inevitably one begins to twist facts to suit to theories instead of theories to suit facts.” When one forms theories before having the data, one grows attached to one’s “dearies” and increases risk of confirmation bias. The …
Last week the majority of our weed science research team attended the annual Weed Science Society of America meeting in Lexington, KY. We are pleased to report that in the first ever graduate student competition both of our graduate students placed. Jonathan Kohrt tool 1st place amongst the Ph.D. candidate posters and Amanda Goffnett placed …
A new NASA satellite that will record measurements on soil moisture all over the world for three years has just been successfully launched. Its full name is the Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) observatory, and it has radar and radiometer equipment that can penetrate vegetation and clouds to two inches into the soil to create …
It violates the spirit of the World Trade Organization agreements. It turns its back on the single-market principle of the European Community. It upends the status of science as the neutral arbiter. Nonetheless, I am optimistic about the new legislation in the European Union that will give member states the power to ban gene-engineered crops …
The theme for ‘food ethics icons’ month is the world hunger/population growth tangle. Our thinking has been bracketed by two opposing nostrums: On the one hand, agriculture is in a race with population growth, on the other hand, the problem is not agriculture but the distribution of food we already have. Both of these are …
If Amartya Sen deserves to be called a food ethics icon for dismantling the idea that the total amount of food produced provides a good index for understanding the ethics of hunger, we should probably look the source of that idea for our next entry for “food ethics icons month”. Is there anyone out there …
Amartya Kumar Sen was born in 1933 in a province of what is now Bangladesh. He won the 1998 Nobel Prize in Economics for a pretty diverse portfolio of work, most of which doesn’t concern us here. Let it just suffice that Sen was a major figure in shaking economists out of a dogmatic slumber—even …
A Canadian company called Protec-Style is growing the first industrial crop of milkweed in Quebec in order to manufacture absorbent socks to absorb oil from oil spills. A division of the company called Encore-3 is taking advantage of unique properties of common milkweed seeds to develop this product. Milkweed fruits are called follicles, and they …
Via Gwern. See also Genomic Prediction: No Bull and It’s all in the gene: cows. National Geographic: … The ideal rib eye in the American market is a marriage of opposites: It’s richly marbled with internal fat to give it flavor, but it has only a thin layer of the back fat that no one …
It’s the Sunday after Thanksgiving. Sometime today I have to sit down and write another “key blog”. I have to provide links to previous key blogs last year, the year before and also the year before that. Above all, I have to encourage readers to follow a link all the way back to 2009, when …
There’s an old saying to the effect that people who live in glass houses should not throw stones. Good advice for bloggers, I think. If you are “out there” and visible, you should think twice about digging in to someone for something that you could be dug into yourself. There’s also a variation on the …
People have been worried about the decline in honeybees over the past few years, and one factor that has not helped their situation has been their sometimes-constant exposure to pesticides. Pesticides are sprayed by gardeners on their flowers, by farmers on their flowering crops, and beekeepers use certain pesticides in beehives to keep harmful mites …
Whenever either of my regular readers sees that I end the Thornapple blog with a question like I did last week, they halfway expect me to come back and answer the question in the next blog. Or maybe that’s going a little far. It’s not like we ever answer very many questions here. But maybe …
I am going to be taking the next week off from blogging because I’m getting married on October 4th! I’ll be back with normal posting on October 7th. No, I am not having a mortuary archaeology themed wedding (Although we have a few surprises that my archaeology friends might pick up on- had to sneak it …
This article is one of those stories that is interesting to read in the author’s words, and describes the discovery and final determination of a new species of wildflower on the California coast. What makes this story unique, however, is that there only exists one population of this plant in a farm field. I don’t …
Is there a robot out there who can help me with one of my more importunate research problems? Some time ago—maybe four or five years back—there was a particular aphorism that was circulating in sustainability studies. I wouldn’t say that it had gone viral, but I must have heard a half dozen different speakers recite …
One of the major debates in archaeology is when do we begin to see inequality among human groups, and what caused this this to happen. Social inequality has been defined within most archaeological studies as being a state of a community where the economic surplus is taken by a subset of the larger group. Without …
The late comedian George Carlin used to do a routine in which he feigned deep puzzlement in asking his audience “Where’s the blue food?” Of course folks in Michigan know blue food, and I’m here to tell you that even if they are “late” and even if, as some are saying, it isn’t a particularly …
Some years ago a German driver took me from the Perimeter Institute to the Toronto airport. He was an immigrant to Canada and had a background in dairy farming. During the ride he told me all about driving German farmers to buy units of semen produced by highly prized Canadian bulls. The use of linear …
I’m just back from the International Development Ethics Association meeting where I blew everyone away with my presentation on food security. Well, maybe I’m overstating it a bit, but people did seem to appreciate what I had to say. And come to think of it, what I had to say was not really all that …
How could someone determine what you eat from only examining the things you leave behind? To add to the challenge, you would be hypothetically deceased and unable to communicate your food preferences and cooking methods. Making it even harder, anything that is degradable such as the food itself, the cardboard containers, and the paper labels …
Yesterday’s 2014 MSU Weed Tour was yet another successful event, with over 230 people in attendance. Thank you to all of you whom attended and to the many people in front and behind the scenes who made it all possible. Please enjoy a few photos of the event below. The plot signs will probably remain …
I spent a couple of days last week amongst folks who are diligently at work developing new crops. They are after new varieties that do well in the dry conditions farmers may experience during climate change, and they’re working on varieties that resist disease, too. And then there are the longstanding enemies: weeds and insect …
Since Father’s Day happens to fall on a Sunday this year, I’m dedicating this edition of the Thornapple Blog to my own personal father. Don’t laugh. Lots of people have their own personal fathers, so why should it seem strange to be talking to them on Father’s Day? By chance my own personal father (who …
With a camera constantly at my fingertips I thought a spring review in photos would display what we have been up to lately. The cold winter was hard on wheat stands around Michigan Planting soybeans on campus Staking out the soybean plots Glyphosate resistant marestail in Gratiot county. At this location we are conducting research …
Diane and I have spent a chunk of the morning trying figure out where we can get a new Garden Bandit™. This can only mean one thing. The weeds are coming up and something needs to be done about them. We bought our current Garden Bandit™ in Stratford, Ontario a few years back when we were …
So here is one of those occasions where I couldn’t get everything off my chest last week so I just have to follow up with another blog entry on food sovereignty. We’ve raised this subject at least once some time back in the Thornapple blog, but maybe it’s time to come around again and think …
A bunch of us were sitting around in a circle this week talking about food sovereignty. A lot of the talk was about legal rights and obligations, but one person had something different to say. He was a big man, at least fifty and maybe older. It’s often hard to tell with someone whose daily …
Our North American bees need a lot of help if they are to keep pollinating our crops. Up to a third of honeybee colonies have been lost every year due to colony collapse disorder, and native bees (honeybees are not native here) have also been declining. Many non-honeybees are solitary and burrow in the soil …
Let me set the festering minds of everyone who arrived at this website hoping to read up on supernatural horror flicks or prurient tales of some wayfaring maiden at rest immediately. This blog is about seeds, as in those little niblet things that grow into plants once they have been safely ensconced in soil and …
Norman Wirzba was on campus at MSU this week. He gave a rousing foodie talk to an audience of mostly undergraduates. He was encouraging them to think about where their food comes from, and since Norm is a theology professor at Duke University, he didn’t shrink from the God-talk in making his case. I picked …
Many of you may know that many factory-farmed animals are given excessive amounts of antibiotics. Did you know that the antibiotics are not fed to them solely to keep them healthier, but also to make them fatter? Soon after antibiotics were developed in the late 1940s, antibiotic-laced food was fed to chickens, pigs, sheep and …
Ever so frequently I wake up on Sunday morning with the urge to blog on a topic that has some nominal connection to the “food ethics” theme of the Thornapple blog. Then there are Sunday mornings like this one, when I’m sitting there with my coffee and thinking that I’m supposed to post a blog …
With quick adoption of Roundup Ready sugarbeets by Michigan producers we have seen an increase in volunteers corn plants that are also resistant to glyphosate. One of our Master’s students, Amanda Harden, has spent the past two summer looking at management options, timing, and competitiveness of RR volunteer corn in RR sugarbeet. You can see …
What does 2020 make possible for the Cooperative Extension system’s digital strategy called eXtension? Last week in DC, I had the privilege of kicking off a strategic “e-nnovation session” for the eXtension strategy team. It was expertly facilitated by Teresa Hogue, Jeff Miller and Gae Broadwater of the Cascade Center for Community Governance. In my talk, …
Monsanto gives up on GMO but uses phenotype-genotype modeling to crossbreed vegetables. WIRED: … Furthermore, genetically modifying consumer crops proved to be inefficient and expensive. Stark estimates that adding a new gene takes roughly 10 years and $100 million to go from a product concept to regulatory approval. And inserting genes one at a time …
About a decade ago a wrote a little essay on what people mean when they talk about “natural food”. Now to launch right off on the obligatory tangent right from the get go, I would need to clarify: There’s really no telling what some people have in mind when they are talking about “natural food”. …
I got on an airplane last week for the first time in several months. For the first year of the blog I would routinely reflect upon my peripatetic ways, almost always from a different locale every week. 2010 was particularly dense with travel for me, and included an unplanned and enforced 3-day vacation in Rome …
-E. Hill We have put all of our extension and research findings related to organic weed management now in one place at MSUweeds.com called “Organic options“. In this section you will find: Extension materials (that have resulted from our research and work with area farmers) Peer reviewed publications relating to organic weed management Presented research …
It looks like February 2014 was ontology month. That’s “on” as when Sylvia Tyson sings ‘When I woke up this morning, you were on my mind.’ It’s ‘tol’ as when Little Richard sings ‘Long Tall Sally she’s built for speed.’ It’s ‘o’ as when he sings “Oh, my soul” and gee as when Cliff Richard …
We’re sitting underneath a ton of snow and cold weather here in Michigan this February. It’s a good idea to fill up the calendar with annual events to tick off during the long wait for Spring. Punxsutawny Phil, the wonderfully-fantastic excrescent bowl, the North Michigan Small Farm Conference that we talked about last week, Valentine’s …