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Fall 2010

Round-Up and recovery

Locals often see Mike and Jill Thorne on the two-lane highway between their ranch outside Pendleton and the Oregon city’s rodeo grounds. As the 100th anniversary of the Pendleton Round-Up comes in September, the couple is busy preparing both the rodeo site and their community for the big party.

Since the first bronco bucked, the event has been drawing participants and spectators from across the Pacific Northwest. Today, it’s one of the 10 biggest rodeos in the country. It may be rooted in Oregon, but the event has many ties to Washington, including two of its key volunteers, Mike and Jill … » More …

Fall 2010

Tree Top: Creating a fruit revolution

treetop-bookcover

David H. Stratton

WSU Press

 

In the September 10, 1951, issue of Life magazine is a picture of a bulldozer mounding apples in the Yakima dump. Seven acres of apples worth $6 million dollars rotted as pigs rooted through them, the result of failing foreign markets and high tariffs. At the time, if Washington’s apples didn’t sell, orchardists paid $5 a ton to have their culls hauled off to rot.

Culls are rejected from the fresh fruit market due primarily to shape, size, or color, but they are perfectly sound for such traditional uses as juice. The … » More …

Fall 2010

Too much of a good thing

Science has been predicting and measuring our warming planet for more than a century now. But it was only in the last two decades that most Americans came to believe the earth’s temperature was indeed rising and that the main culprit is the growing amount of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere.

Now scientists are giving a lot of thought to another culprit: nitrogen. Like carbon dioxide, it’s seemingly benign—colorless, odorless, tasteless, and a foundation of life on our planet. Left alone, it tightly binds to itself in inert, two-atom molecules, or N2. It’s ridiculously commonplace, making up four-fifths of our atmosphere. It’s also a modern … » More …

Fall 2010

A measure of time and history

Matthew Cohen started wondering if what he knew of Renaissance architecture was true when he stepped into the San Lorenzo Basilica in Florence with a measuring tape.

The Italian city, known as the birthplace of the Renaissance, is home to many of the great works of Filippo Brunelleschi, perhaps the foremost engineer and architect of the period. And San Lorenzo has been studied by generations of architects and historians as one of the earliest examples of Renaissance perfection.

“It is one of the most famous buildings in the world,” says Cohen, an architecture instructor at WSU Spokane. He first encountered the church when he … » More …

Fall 2010

Recruiting rural health care providers

On the quirky comedy Northern Exposure, an isolated Alaskan town enticed a New York City doctor to become the community’s physician. While the city doc’s angst and the eccentric residents—including a moose from WSU—drew laughs, the show highlighted a real challenge faced by many small towns and rural areas: recruiting and retaining doctors and nurses.

“There’s a shortage of all health care providers: physicians, nurses, all of the technical programs,” says Gary Smith, a senior project associate with the Area Health Education Center (AHEC) of eastern Washington. “The demand will increase even more when the economy turns around and people want … » More …

Fall 2010

Cows deposit piles of diversity

Holly Ferguson knows her cow pies about as well as anyone. In the first study of flies in managed pastures in the Pacific Northwest, the entomologist has spent an unusual amount of time traveling the state and assessing its cow pies.

No matter the obvious jokes, dung dispersal in pastures is serious business. Wherever there are cows, there will be cow dung, and lots of it. A beef cow can produce nearly a ton of manure per month. And if that ton sits there untended, there will be problems.

Oddly enough, the conditions of the cow’s other major habitat, the feedlot, reduce the problem … » More …

Fall 2010

The kinder, gentler orchard

The Food Quality Protection Act of 1996 initiated the gradual phasing out of organophosphate pesticides. By 2012, the major chemical defense against wormy apples will no longer be available. But not to worry, thanks to a continuous refinement of Integrated Pest Management and collaboration amongst growers, industry fieldmen, and WSU researchers.

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Fall 2010

Cultivating new energy

With just a whiff of irony, let’s sing a song of praise for gasoline.

A single gallon contains more than 30,000 calories. You wouldn’t want to drink it, but in straight-up energy terms, that’s enough to power a human for about two weeks.

cultivating energy

Gasoline is convenient, portable, and for the most part, cheap. For the purposes of this story, I used it to log more than 1,000 miles around Washington State and make appointments, easily, and always on … » More …