Suppressed growth trees can contain decades of growth rings in a half-inch section of wood.

The Ring Profiler may sound like the title of fantasy novel but in fact it’s an innovative tool U.S. Forest Service scientists are using to better determine how much a tree grows annually. Read more »

The original slogan of the trekking group GreenXC read: Share a Ride, Tell a Story, Save a Park. Now they added and a National Forest (as in the U.S. Forest Service). This is because these young folks (all under 30), embarking on this bold transnational ride-share journey that departs July 27^th, have broadened the focus of its environmental protection campaign to include the myriad of issues facing the U.S. Forest Service and the national forest system.

One of their stops will include the USDA Forest Service, Forest Products Lab, in Madison, WI. The group will tour the world renowned lab and learn a great deal about the science of forestry. Aside from driving through many northern forests including the Gallatin, north of Yellowstone, and Mt Hood in OR, GreenXC will visit in California the oldest living and tallest trees in the world at the Inyo and Sequoia national forests respectively. Read more »

A butterfly gathers nectar from a mimosa flower in Adams County.

Along the lush banks of the Sunflower River, Steve Martens has a slice of paradise. The Madison, Miss. resident owns 1,600 acres of farmland and forests, hospitable not only to soybeans and corn, but also to whitetail deer and bobwhite quail. Read more »

You might say that Dave Kretschmann has engineered his way into Major League Baseball’s history books. Kretschmann’s work as a research general engineer led him to figure out why so many bats used by Major League Baseball were shattered.

“Since late in the 2008 season, we’ve seen video of every shattered bat in Major League Baseball,” said Kretschmann, who is assigned to the Forest Products Laboratory in Madison, Wis., “We’ve tested hundreds of bats and recorded the who, when, and how of every shattered bat in 2009 and 2010. As a result of the implementation of our recommendations and the work of TECO, an independent certification and testing agency for wood products, there’s been a 50 percent reduction in the rate of multiple piece failures since the 2008 season.” Read more »

The National Agricultural Wildlife Conservation Center (AWCC) in Madison, Mississippi is partnering with the city of Madison to create a pollinator garden. Read more »

USDA Agriculture Secretary Vilsack kicked off the third in a series of five workshops on competition in agriculture today. Speaking to a packed house of more then 500 small and large dairy farmers, FFA members and members of the public at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, Vilsack highlighted the struggles of those living in rural America and the need to explore the appropriate role for antitrust and regulatory enforcement in the dairy industry. Read more »