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News

Manure Management Advisory System

Department staff Laura Good and Rick Wayne have launched a new web site housing some exciting new tools. The Wisconsin Manure Management Advisory System is a set of maps to help farmers and others who apply nutrients to identify suitable cropland areas for spreading. Read more.

Brown Lawns are Not a Problem

Turfgrass specialist Dr. Doug Soldat is featured in a segment for Wisconsin Public Television suggesting homeowners let brown summer grass be brown! He also shows us an alternative, low maintenance grass. Watch the WPT video.

Nanopods

Soil scientist Dr. Bill Hickey has discovered a new structure formed by soil bacteria. His groundbreaking research was recently highlighted by Nature Microbiology Reviews. Read the Nature story here.

Arctic Soils

Soil scientist Dr. Jim Bockheim studies carbon-rich soils in the Arctic and Antarctic, in hopes of better understanding how much carbon dioxide they will release as the climate warms. Watch the video on YouTube.

Award-Winning Soil Science Faculty

Congratulations to Dr. Birl Lowery on receiving the 2011 Conservation Research Award from the Soil and Water Conservation Society; Dr. Stephen Ventura on receiving the CALS Spitze Land Grant Faculty Award for Excellence; Dr. Carrie Laboski on receiving the CALS Pound Extension Award; and Dr. Bill Hickey on being appointed the first O.N. Allen Professor of Soil Microbiology.

Balster Paper Selected

A paper by Dr. Nick Balster was selected for inclusion in a 2010 highlights special issue of CBE-Journal of Life Science Education (CBE-LSE). This is an annual award of a paper providing "novel contributions to the scholarship of teaching and learning". Check out the paper here. Congratulations, Nick!

2011 U.S. Professor of the Year

Dr. Teri Balser has won the 2011 U.S. Professor of the Year award! Congratulations to Teri for earning this honor. Read more here and watch her video here.

UW Soil Judging Team competes at NIU

For the first time in nearly a decade, the Badgers competed at a Soil Judging Contest. Historically, Madison's soil judgers were nationally recognized, and we hope to restore our reputation. We want to give you an idea of how the competition went, and to recognize the enthusiastic team: David Evans, Gloria Ambrowiak, Kyle Rudersdorf, Lisa Zamzow, Peter Ganzlin, Trent Mayer, assistant Coach Betina Umiguez and Coach Nicholas Haus.

This year's competition was held at Northern Illinois University, in Dekalb and Kane counties. The team travelled to Dekalb on Wednesday, October 6th to spend the day describing soils at a few private farms. The first of these practice pits was located along the Kishwaukee River, where we saw Wisconsin age outwash, till and recent alluvium deposits. That evening, soil judging teams from the six competing schools gathered at the NIU campus to hear a presentation by Dr. Mike Konen of NIU's geography department regarding local soil geomorphology and landforms. Afterwards, we shared the campground and a wonderful campfire with our competitors, the friendly soil judgers of UW-Stevens Point. Upon waking, it was practice time! Sunup to sundown, we described a lot of soils, visiting three different locations. We began at the Bloomington terminal moraine, deposited at the end of the last glaciation, and ended the day to the north, in a complex series of recessional moraines, outwash plains, and till plains that contained kettles, kames, eskers, deltas and numerous ice-walled lake plains. Our final hours of practice consumed the next morning, and by afternoon, we were ready for the competition to begin! The first event was a group soil judging wherein each university described two soils as a team. The group judging soil pits were located on a turf grass farm 30 miles east of NIU, where a recessional moraine terminated into an outwash plain with a pro-glacial lake and delta immediately adjacent. Our team did well in the group competition.

On Saturday morning, we woke at 5:30 am and were led to a historic farm from the 1850's, the site of the individual competition. At this stage, each contestant described four soil pits, spending less than 50 minutes in each pit. What began as an unusually beautiful and warm fall day on the farm's lush rolling hills became a tough and competitive environment when temperatures broke 90 degrees! The Badgers, as a brand new team, were underdogs in this competition and did not upset the more experienced teams in the end, but we left in good spirits, with a greatly expanded knowledge of soils and landscape evolution, and vowed to return to compete next season! This team was incredibly hard working and it was amazing to see how much our view of the landscape evolved in less than a week. As we drove to the competition, we saw only cornfields and buildings on a flat horizon, but on our return trip, the same undistinguished landscape was transformed before the newly educated; now we saw floodplains, stream terraces, lake plains and moraines!

Drinking water contest

Department of Soil Science chair Bill Bland helps pick the best of the best of Wisconsin's drinking water.

Special Guest

The Department of Soil Science welcomes Dr. Alfred E. Hartemink the week of November 8. Dr. Hartemink is a soil scientist and head of the World Soil Museum at ISRIC-World Soil Information in Wageningen, the Netherlands. Read more about Dr. Hartemink here