USDA Blog

USDA Forest Service research is transforming exhausted farmland in Arkansas, Illinois, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri and Tennessee into thousands of acres of hardwood forests that will provide revenue to landowners, remove carbon from the air and serve as habitats for wildlife. In 1998...

Why does land wear out? This great agricultural mystery led generations of farmers to simply move when the land no longer supported agricultural production. That changed in 1905, when a soil scientist unearthed the key to sustained productivity by linking soil erosion and degradation of soil quality...

This post is part of the Science Tuesday feature series on the USDA blog. Check back each week as we showcase stories and news from the USDA’s rich science and research portfolio. In forests, climate change ramps up stress already occurring from extreme weather events, disease and insect outbreaks...

Forests absorb carbon like a giant sponge into what scientists call a carbon sink. This fact is well known throughout the scientific community. However, what scientists weren’t sure of until now is the amount of carbon forests can store. For years scientists knew a large amount of carbon was somehow...

On January 24, 2011, a wintry day in Chicago, 20,000 high school students in the Chicago Public Schools were treated to a prize-winning, delicious and healthy school lunch created by their fellow students. Topping the menu was Afro-Caribe Plancha (Cuban turkey, black beans, provolone cheese and...

Beth McKew, DVM, Staff Officer, State Outreach and Technical Assistance Staff, Office of Outreach, Employee Education and Training, Food Safety and Inspection Service

Veteran Tray Middlebrooks grew up in Merritt Island, Florida, and Manassas, Virginia. After college, he wanted to follow a reliable and purposeful path forward. He went on to serve 10 years of active duty as an Air Force medic stationed in Nevada and Florida followed by three years in the Florida...

It takes a village to get those red ripe watermelon or sweet ears of corn to the neighborhood grocery store at the right time for consumers. Producers must decide when to plant and pick crops, package produce, find buyers and select the right shipper to transport products to market. Hundreds of...

When most people think of forested lands in our country what comes to mind are public wild lands like the Mount Hood National Forest in Oregon or the Shenandoah National Park in Virginia. But the reality is most forests in America, nearly sixty percent, are owned by private landowners who very much...

Private landowners in Arkansas, Mississippi and Louisiana have protected 700,000 acres of critical wetlands in the past 25 years, which accounts for one-third of all wetlands under USDA conservation easements in the country. USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) and several...