April 2014

This post is part of a Microloan Success feature series on the USDA blog.  Check back every Tuesday and Thursday as we showcase stories and news from USDA’s Farm Service Agency.

For Malachi Duncan, life as a farmer is anything but boring. At age 92, he’s going strong and ready to do more.

“I was out on the tractor trying to locate a cow,” said Duncan, who farms 43 acres of his family’s land in Union, S.C.  It’s the same land he used to plow with mules before planting cotton, peanuts and corn.

“Back then, we didn’t have any tractors,” said Duncan. “Now, that was hard with long hours.  But we farmed to survive.”

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.

During the month of April we will take a closer look at USDA’s Groundbreaking Research for a Revitalized Rural America, highlighting ways USDA researchers are improving the lives of Americans in ways you might never imagine. For example, USDA research into behavioral economics as part of nutrition research to improve diet and health.

We’ve heard it all before: you are what you eat.  We’re fueled by what we consume, so it’s important to provide our bodies with nutritious food.  That’s why the agencies within USDA’s Research, Education, and Economics (REE) mission area brought together some of the brightest minds at the Federal Government Nutrition Research Workshop last month. USDA Scientists joined forces with scientists and policy makers from other USDA agencies, Health and Human Services agencies, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and the U.S. Agency for International Development to discuss the importance of nutrition research.

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.

During the month of April we will take a closer look at USDA’s Groundbreaking Research for a Revitalized Rural America, highlighting ways USDA researchers are improving the lives of Americans in ways you might never imagine.

There are “game changers” in politics, sports, art, music and the like. So it should come as no surprise that there are game changers in agricultural research as well—discoveries that changed the way food is produced, and even created new industries to feed a growing world.

Last week’s seminar commemorating Norman Borlaug’s work to launch the Green Revolution is a great example of how a strong science foundation has helped ensure a steady food supply as the world’s population has grown.

U.S. Forest Service scientists at the Rocky Mountain Research Station in Missoula, Mont., have identified a new species of fish—the cedar sculpin (Cottus schitsuumsh). Although thousands of new species are described by scientists each year, only a small percentage of them are animal species, and even fewer are found in the United States, underscoring the importance of this discovery.

Freshwater sculpins, with their characteristic large heads and fins, are bottom dwellers that can be found in cold, fast-moving streams throughout North America. Biologists have long suspected that there were undescribed species of sculpins in the Upper Columbia River Basin, but lacked the tools to recognize them. Cedar sculpin populations were previously thought to be shorthead sculpin (Cottus confusus), an understandable misidentification given that sculpins are notoriously difficult to identify based on their physical features.