In the news

Ag station student group turns garden harvest into food donations [Cornell Chronicle 9/14/2012] – Student Association of the Geneva Experiment Station donates about 40 bushels of produce from their garden to the food pantry at the Geneva Center of Concern. Many faculty members stepped in to supplement the students’ donations with produce from their own field experiments. Thomas Björkman, Ph.D. ’87, and Stephen Reiners, associate professors of horticultural sciences, provided sweet corn and green beans, respectively. Terence Robinson, professor of horticultural sciences, contributed peaches; Chris Smart, associate professor of plant pathology, contributed tomatoes.

Please Explain: What Organic Labels Mean [Leonard Lopate Show 9/14/2012] – Thomas Bjorkman, professor of horticulture at Cornell’s New York State Agricultural Experiment Station in Geneva, NY, and Dr. Urvashi Rangan, Director, Consumer Safety and Sustainability Group at Consumer Reports, discuss the issues on WNYC radio.

New apple varieties being developed in Geneva [Rochester Democrat and Chronicle 9/14/2012] – When Susan Brown, associate chair in the Department of Horticulture, breeds apples, she has two audiences in mind: consumers and growers. She selected traits in New York 1 and New York 2 — two new Cornell-developed varieties poised to hit the market in 2014 or 2015 — that would satisfy both. Brown also explains what it takes to develop a new apple variety in the author’s blog post And you thought baking apple pie was hard. Try breeding an apple. And the Cornell apple breeding program was also featured in A Bittersweet Bite in the Fall issue of Life in the Finger Lakes, and she talks with Fruit Grower News on YouTube.

The Art of Apples – [Bon Appetit 9/6/2012] – Artist Jessica Rath sculpts apples from the USDA’s Plant Genetics Resources Unit and photographs silhouettes of Susan Brown’s apple tree crosses.