From Lynn Sosnoskie, Assistant Professor, Horticulture Section

Cornell’s undergraduate weed team finished second in the 2025 Northeastern Weed Science Society Weed Contest, July 29 at the Rutgers Agricultural Research and Extension Center, Bridgeton, N.J. This educational event brought together 114 attendees and volunteers, including 51 graduate and undergraduate students from 5 universities across the northeastern region and Canada.

Cornell’s undergraduate team — Breawna Smith, Sky Xu, Anas Ashfaq, and Jacob Czarnecki – was coached by Soil and Crop Sciences faculty Vipan Kumar and Antonio DiTommaso. Team members scored well in the weed identification portion of the contest, as well as the farmer problem section, where participants diagnose real-world weed management issues faced by growers, integrating field observations, crop production practices, weed and herbicide knowledge, and integrated control strategies to propose practical solutions.

Graduate students Henrique Scatena, Preetaman Bajwa, Midhat Zulafkar Tugoo  and Rebecca Stup also performed well in  the problem solving and weed identification portions of their division, with Henrique and Preetaman achieving the high scores for two of eight farmer problems.

Special thanks go to my fellow organizers Thierry Besancon (Rutgers University) and Erin Hitchner (Syngenta Crop Protection AG), and Jane Petzoldt and Aleah Butler-Jones from my lab who oversaw the weed identification section of the event.