2013

USDA Wildlife Services (WS) employees in New Mexico have been fabricating the traps and tools for their jobs for many years.  As feral swine management work began in the state, naturally we began to build our own traps and gates to contain this invasive and damaging mammal.

Northern Marianas College in Saipan has an extraordinary group of student volunteers eager to answer conservation’s call.

These students, members of a college club called Environmental & Natural Resource Organization, are known throughout the community for their environmental work. Whether cleaning beaches and city streets or tending public gardens, they are role models and valuable volunteers in the USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service Earth Team program. Earth Team is the volunteer workforce of NRCS.

A faculty member in the NMC Math, Science, & Health Department founded ENRO in 2009. Since then, students have led, planned and organized conservation activities. These students log countless volunteer hours cleaning up and improving the environment of Saipan. In addition to picking up trash and weeding, they spend their free time learning about more complex methods of conservation.

“Clear, direct and easy to understand” may not be the first words most Americans associate with government publications and documents, but that is changing. Thanks to the Plain Writing Act, signed into law by President Obama in 2010, all federal agencies must now put their readers first when writing new documents or revising old ones.  That means before putting pen to paper or fingers to keyboard, we must first think hard about how our language connects with customers and helps them get the most from USDA’s services and programs.

Secretary Vilsack has asked (PDF, 54.2 KB) us at USDA to improve our writing to better serve the public.  He believes we cannot carry out our mission effectively if we cannot communicate clearly with those whom we serve. He has made plain writing a cornerstone of his efforts to transform USDA’s culture. Now all of us—even our lawyers—are making our writing easier for the public to read and understand.

This is good news for the American people whose lives are affected every day by USDA’s  leadership on issues from agriculture, to nutrition, trade, and energy. The public uses the information in our documents to build strong rural communities, to protect the environment, and to produce our safe and abundant food supply. 

Cross posted from The Huffington Post:

U.S. dairy producers are leading the way in productivity and innovation when it comes to sustainable practices. Earlier this afternoon, I joined Innovation Center for U.S. Dairy CEO Tom Gallagher to renew an historic agreement with the dairy industry to lower greenhouse gas emissions and to accelerate the adoption of innovative waste-to-energy projects on U.S. dairy farms which help producers diversify revenues and reduce utility expenses on their operations. Today's extension of the Memorandum of Understanding is an acknowledgement of the dairy industry's legacy of stewardship and its ongoing commitment to improve our farms.

One of America’s most well-known, beloved and important icons is going to have a little work done over the next several weeks in preparation for his upcoming 70^th birthday in 2014.

The mechanical Smokey Bear that welcomes scores of visitors to the U.S. Forest Service headquarters building in Washington, D.C., is going in to have his fur checked, his motor – er, “heart” – fine-tuned and will undergo a thorough cleaning.

In conjunction with National Park Week, the National Park Service conducted the tree planting at the Flight 93 National Memorial on April 20, one of four tree planting days planned at the site this year.

Dr. Paul Rutledge was recently honored with a National Individual Volunteer Award for his contributions to the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service Earth Team.

Earth Team is a volunteer workforce that helps NRCS maintain and improve natural resources on private lands. Out of the 19,075 Earth Team volunteers across the nation, only four individuals received this award this year.

It’s National Volunteer Week and an ideal time to share how USDA employees and partners are volunteering their time to green communities and provide fresh food to those in need.

It all started in 2009 when Agriculture Secretary Vilsack established a Department-wide volunteer program for the People’s Garden Initiative. He encouraged every USDA employee to get involved by volunteering time and expertise to create a People’s Garden - a challenge he then extended to all Americans.

Amanda Carrell’s two passions in life are volunteering and agriculture.

Luckily, as a student in a soil and water conservation course at Arkansas State University, Carrell was introduced to the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service’s Earth Team program, which allowed her to combine the two.

This past March, almost 11 years after being found in New Jersey, federal and state agriculture officials are finally able to say that the state’s long-running battle against the non-native Asian longhorned beetle (ALB) is over.

New Jersey is the second state to declare itself free from the invasive tree-killing insect.  The beetle was successfully eradicated from Illinois in 2008, and the ALB-regulated area of Islip, New York, also achieved eradication in 2011.  So, getting rid of this “hungry pest” is possible.  That’s good news, because, depending on where you live, 70 percent of your community’s tree canopy could be lost to ALB.