Agriculture Commons^™

Usu Student Organic Farm, Usu Student Organic Farm

USU Student Organic Farm Newsletter

The semester has started! PSC 4900 is the Student Organic Farm practicum class, and this year’s students and some of the farm team met for our first class on Monday. Dr. Jennifer Reeve teaches the class and will be back at the end of September after mater­nity leave. This month Dr. Melanie Stock will lead the class in sampling the soil for next year’s farm field, calculating required nutrient ammendments, spreading compost and testing the irrigation system for the fall cover crop.

Meanwhile, the team is maintaining the fall crops, harvesting and preparing for the grand finale Harvest Festival coming …

Usu Student Organic Farm, Usu Student Organic Farm

USU Student Organic Farm Newsletter

Fall crops are coming up, and they’re amazing. We started digging up the potatoes today and it is so crazy to see how many potatoes can grow from planting a chunk of potato with a couple of eyes on it! Some of these plants have two pounds of potatoes growing off of them. The pumpkins are already enormous, and the butternut squash are still ripening but are really good-sized already. The melons are taking longer than expected, but look great. Our one warm-season failure seems to be the eggplant- but watch them produce like crazy now that I’ve said that. …

Usu Student Organic Farm, Usu Student Organic Farm

USU Student Organic Farm Newsletter

We’re getting ready for volunteer season! We’re so thankful to our regulars who have been so much fun to have on the farm, and whose work has been a huge contribution to the farm’s success this summer. Now we’re getting back to lovely mornings and evenings, and are going to plant vegetables that have to over winter, clean up our perennial berry patches, repair and winterize the hoop houses and other farm structures, prep the field for cover crops, etc. - all while making sure our baskets are abundant and selling veggies at the farm stand and at the USU …

Usu Student Organic Farm, Usu Student Organic Farm

USU Student Organic Farm Newsletter

Six weeks until the first frost date means we are done planting. We put in some beets and radishes today just on the off chance they’re ready in time for the final week of CSA shares (38 and 40 days to maturity, respectively). Otherwise, we’ve got fall broc­coli and kohlrabi in the ground, a new asian green called Shungiku (see the recipe be­low), rutabaga, fresh kale, and lettuce starts planted and on the menu for September.

Usu Student Organic Farm, Usu Student Organic Farm

USU Student Organic Farm Newsletter

It’s all coming together! With a few serious harvests under our belts now, we’re getting our groove. We’re harvesting some things every day now! A day or two of growth turns a green pepper yellow, a green tomato red, a yellow tomato overripe, a squash into a gourd and a cucumber into a zucchini. That last isn’t really true, but you’ve probably noticed the big seeds and sorry about that! We hope you’re enjoying your big baskets; they’ll be abundant for a good while yet.

Usu Student Organic Farm, Usu Student Organic Farm

USU Student Organic Farm Newsletter

So much food! It’s so fun to see it! The cabbage, broccoli, early curcubits, tomato, pepper and tomatillo plants are loaded, and the melons, fall squash, beans and potatoes are looking super promising. We have a shed wall covered in garlic, and about 20 lb. of broccoli in the cooler, with more to harvest. We’ve got a good rhythm now with reseeding beets and radishes, and are expecting them and car­rots in August and hopefully Sept. It’s also fall planting month, and over the next two weeks we’ll be transplanting more Asian greens, lettuce, mizuna, arugula, broccoli and kohlrabi as …

Usu Student Organic Farm, Usu Student Organic Farm

USU Student Organic Farm Newsletter

We’ve moved back into mitigation mode! It’s nice that the weather and pest situation in May and June was manageable- we already had our hands full with field logistics, bed preparation, planting, weeding and establishing harvesting and processing routines. Now that we’ve got the basics fairly under control, we can better respond to increasing daytime and nighttime temps, and the pests and weeds that come with it. In the last two weeks, we’ve used Neem Oil for aphids, Bacillus Thuringiensus (B.T.), for cabbage moth caterpillars, and tonight are spraying Pyrethrin to stay ahead of Utah’s 2018 grasshopper plague. All of …

Usu Student Organic Farm, Usu Student Organic Farm

USU Student Organic Farm Newsletter

Anyone reading this is in touch with your culinary creative side, having committed for a whole summer to weekly making the most of whatever produce the student farm can offer you. We salute you! Some fun stuff is coming up soon and we’re getting the hang of succession planting.

Usu Student Organic Farm, Usu Student Organic Farm

USU Student Organic Farm Newsletter

Many hands make light work, as the saying goes. We’ve had so much volunteer help, including friends, CSA members and their kids. Now that we’re getting some skills under our belts, we’ve been able to provide some help to other grow­ers, too, which is fun. We’ve helped set up irrigation and low tunnels for research plots, and planted and pounded posts with the permaculture garden team at the UCC property near Logan Canyon. In a few weeks we’ll put out a call to help planting for the fall, and in the meantime, we can always use a hand with weed­ing …

Usu Student Organic Farm, Usu Student Organic Farm

USU Student Organic Farm Newsletter

Learning from the pros is solid gold for beginning farmers, and at USU we have access to some of the most knowledgeable ag specialists in the state, as well as successful farmers and gardners throughout the community. We’re really getting a lesson in the juggling act that is farming, and we are lucky to have experts to talk to as we work things out. There is so much to learn about soil fertility, pest and weed management, choosing crop varieties and working out how to cultivate them well, planting successions, irrigating, etc. Meanwhile, we are working with curve balls from …

Usu Student Organic Farm, Usu Student Organic Farm

USU Student Organic Farm Newsletter

We’ve got water! It was pretty funny when we finally got the irrigation system up and running Saturday evening of the holiday weekend, and the sky opened up. But we’re all really glad to have it ready for all those babies after a baking hot day! We’ve got the warm weather crops in, including squashes, tomatoes, tomatillos, eggplant and peppers, and melons will be planted tomorrow. We’re lovingly encouraging the tail end of the cool crops to make some food already - you may have noticed your bokchoi is delicious, and so did some cabbage fam­ily loving beetles, who are …

Usu Student Organic Farm, Usu Student Organic Farm

USU Student Organic Farm Newsletter

The field is almost fully planted! Thanks to a little help from our friends at the Greenville Research Farm, we’ll have squash, tomatoes, eggplant, peppers and tomatillos in the ground this week, and be done with our most intensive plant­ing! Dr. Dan Drost’s team from Greenville Research Farm, James Frisby, Jewely Anna Swensen, Christina Nolasco and Maegen Lewis, spent hours with us set­ting up our squash and pumpkin beds with plastic mulch and a drip irrigation system last week and this week, and we had some help with tilling and mowing from Eric Galloway and his technician, Jayden Gunnell.

Tetracycline And Sulfonamide Antibiotic Resistance Genes In Soils From Nebraska Organic Farming Operations, Marylynn Cadena, Lisa M. Durso, Daniel N. Miller, Heidi M. Waldrip, B. L. Castleberry, Rhae A. Drijber, Charles S. Wortmann

Department of Agronomy and Horticulture: Faculty Publications

There is widespread agreement that agricultural antibiotic resistance should be reduced, however, it is unclear from the available literature what an appropriate target for reduction would be. Organic farms provide a unique opportunity to disentangle questions of agricultural antibiotic drug use from questions of antibiotic resistance in the soil. In this study, soil was collected from 12 certified organic farms in Nebraska, evaluated for the presence of tetracycline and sulfonamide resistance genes (n = 15 targets), and correlated to soil physical, chemical, and biological parameters. Tetracycline and sulfonamide antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs) were found in soils from all 12 …