The Fairchild Dairy Teaching and Research Center, a facility of the NH Agricultural Experiment Station (NHAES) at the University of New Hampshire College of Life Sciences and Agriculture (COLSA), has been awarded a 2014 Gold Quality Award by the Dairy Farmers of America.

Preliminary results of a University of New Hampshire research project investigating the potential cost savings of using heat pumps to heat and cool greenhouses suggest that heat pumps could substantially reduce heating oil consumption.

Decades ago, bobcats were commonplace across the Granite State, but their numbers dwindled to near extinction because of land use changes and hunting. Since 1989, they have been protected, and scientists with the NH Agricultural Experiment Station (NHAES) at the University of New Hampshire College of Life Sciences and Agriculture (COLSA), are using DNA analysis to assess the abundance and range of the state’s bobcat population.

In the first study on growing Brussels sprouts in northern New England, a researcher with the NH Agricultural Experiment Station at the University of New Hampshire has found that different varieties of the vegetable perform much better than others, and the practice of topping has the potential to increase marketable yields.

The University of New Hampshire will conduct a market feasibility study to assess the viability of cold-hardy kiwifruit, or kiwiberries, as a novel, high-value horticultural crop that could spur economic development among small farms in northern New Hampshire.

Among birds, the line between species is often blurry. Some closely related species interbreed where their ranges overlap, producing hybrid offspring that can backcross with either parent species, until a whole population of mixed-species birds forms in the area and creates what’s known as a “hybrid zone.” In the coastal marshes of New England, this has been happening between two sparrows— the Saltmarsh Sparrow and Nelson’s Sparrow.

The new fruit was developed by Becky Sideman, a researcher with the NH Agricultural Experiment Station and extension professor of sustainable horticulture production, and her collaborators Elisabeth Hodgdon at the University of Vermont and Jennifer Noseworthy of Gordon College. Both are former UNH graduate students and worked on the development of Rambling Rose while at UNH.

Researchers from the College of Life Sciences and Agriculture and the NH Agricultural Experiment Station at the University of New Hampshire recently were honored for their intellectual property contributions to the university in the last year, including new inventions that manipulate the caffeine content in a tea plant and the development of a new way of detecting a pathogenic virus in shellfish.

For more than 40 years, policy makers have been working to reduce acid rain, a serious environmental problem that can devastate lakes, streams, and forests and the plants and animals that live in these ecosystems. Now new research funded by the NH Agricultural Experiment Station (NHAES) at the University of New Hampshire College of Life Sciences and Agriculture indicates that lakes in New England and the Adirondack Mountains are recovering rapidly from the effects of acid rain.

Researchers at the University of New Hampshire have found that grafting melons onto the rootstocks of hybrid squash substantially increases the production of melons, a potential source of increased revenue for New England farmers.