2011

It was a chilly but beautiful Friday when the Food Safety Discovery Zone joined vendors at the USDA Harvest Festival to celebrate the end of a successful growing season for the People’s Garden. Even among the jazz band, petting zoo, and the smell of kettle corn in the air, the giant yellow Food Safety Discovery Zone was impossible to miss. Designed to make food safety education fun for kids, the 40-foot long mobile exhibit attracted masses of visitors of all ages who wanted to know how to safely prepare the food they were buying at the festival or for the upcoming holidays.

Cross posted from the White House blog.

This Friday, as on Veterans Days past, we stand with the men and women who have served this nation in uniform and commemorate their achievements. As preparations are made for a week of USDA events and celebrations, I am reminded of the everyday courage and strength these men and women display, and without whom our great country would not be what it is today. While we can never fully repay our debt of gratitude to the service members who have been wounded and died while protecting our country, we should take time to recognize the more than 20 million living American veterans and offer special thanks to them for all they’ve done for us throughout the years.

How are you putting more fruits and vegetables to your plate? USDA is challenging you to show how you’re adding more fruits and vegetables to your diet without straining your budget. Speaking of your budget, the challenge is offering cash prizes for creative videos! All you have to do is create a short video (approximately 30 seconds) showing how you build a healthy plate with fruits and veggies on a budget. What does YOUR MyPlate look like? Share your most inspiring tips, tricks, and how-tos. Get creative with your video! It can be a song, a skit, or a how-to in action, as long as it includes the message “Make half your plate fruits and vegetables.”

The USDA Meat and Poultry Hotline has been answering consumer questions related to Holiday meals for over 25 years. Of course, we get the usual questions about buying, thawing and roasting a turkey. But we also get some of the same not-so-typical questions each year. You may have had these questions yourself.

As a federal employee for USDA’s Food and Nutrition Service, it is part of my job to know the many faces of hunger. People in need can come from all backgrounds, ages, locations, and walks of life. They are children. They are senior citizens. They are even those who are newly unemployed during our nation’s economic downturn. I knew all of this. But what caught me off guard was the fact that many are also our nation’s veterans.

At the USDA’s Agricultural Marketing Service (AMS), we employ several veterans from different branches of the armed services.  Their experience and training built them into strong multi-taskers, leaders and analytical thinkers—all of them invaluable teammates and civil servants.  They each took a different path to get to USDA, and the skills and abilities they honed during their military service were crucial to their successful transition into their civilian career paths.

Satellites orbiting the Earth help us in countless ways. For example, they allow the GPS in our smartphones to tell us where we are located and they help us watch football games on weekends. And now a new NASA satellite scheduled for launch in 2014—the Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) instrument—will help USDA better predict agricultural productivity and forecast drought conditions.

There are three things of utmost importance to farmers—soil, sun and water. SMAP will serve at the junction of two of these variables, helping USDA and others improve its knowledge and understanding of soil moisture. Measuring soil moisture helps scientists, farmers, water managers and others understand how much water will be available at any given time, which influences the key decisions they make about managing and using water supplies.

Year three of the “Garlic Mustard Challenge” produced a bumper crop, not for hot dog relish, but bags of the non-native invasive species garlic mustard.  The goals of this challenge and the weed pull are not simply in eradicating the invasive garlic mustard plant, but also in educating and inspiring individuals to get out and enjoy our national forests and grasslands.

When Estelle Bowman was a little girl, she tagged along to meetings with attorneys who worked with her mother in the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Shiprock, N.M. As she grew older on the Navajo reservation town, she knew that she would one day become an attorney and serve her Navajo community.

Over the years, Bowman has done both and more. Today, the former district prosecutor for the Navajo Nation Department of Justice is the assistant director of the Office of Tribal Relations in Washington, D.C. for the U.S. Forest Service.

The wily and elusive American marten, which looks like a cross between a mink and a fox, is getting even harder to find according to recent study by the US Forest Service.