Join us on the Cornell University campus for a seminar on Perrenials: From groundcovers to grains by Cynthia Bartel. The seminar will be held in room 135 Emerson Hall.

Annual grain crops occupy approximately 75 percent of U.S. cropland and account for more than 70 percent of people’s food calories. Perennial crops are widely recognized for their ability to mitigate the losses in wildlife habitat and biodiversity, offset reliance on fossil fuels, and curb soil and water degradation caused by intensive production practices of annual grain crops. Bartel’s research focuses on the targeted integration of perennials, including perennial groundcover in annual row crop systems and production of new perennial grain crops such as intermediate wheatgrass and perennial cereal rye, to reconcile the natural resources-related concerns of intensive annual grain crop systems.

Cynthia Bartel is a 2018 Atkinson Center Postdoctoral Fellow in the Sustainable Cropping Systems Lab at Cornell University.  After finishing her undergraduate education in agronomy, she obtained an agricultural legislative fellowship in the United States Senate, and also worked at the World Bank as an Agricultural and Rural Development Consultant on the first Agriculture Investment Sourcebook.  She then served for seven years as the agriculture, nutrition and trade policy advisor to United States Senator Tim Johnson in Washington, DC.  A year-long Robert Bosch Foundation fellowship in Germany included placements in both the Committee on Food, Agriculture and Consumer Protection in the German Parliament and within the global headquarters of Bayer CropScience. She earned her Doctor of Philosophy in Crop Production & Physiology and doctoral minor in Statistics from Iowa State University and Bachelor of Science in Agronomy from University of Wisconsin-Madison.