College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at Cornell University

10/23/2026

Want to keep your carved pumpkins looking their best through spooky season? A CALS horticulture expert shared these science-backed tips!

🎃 Look for a pumpkin with a sturdy stem and no soft spots. If it's fragile, some plant diseases may be able to get in and rot the pumpkin faster.

🎃 Wait until a few days before Halloween to carve your pumpkin. Once carved, bacteria and fungi can start the rotting process and your pumpkin will only last about a week!

🎃 Open your pumpkin from the bottom, leaving the stem end intact. Sit the pumpkin on top of the candle. Moisture will flow out the bottom rather than accumulate in a mushy mess.

🎃 Make your carved pumpkin last longer by spraying the inside and outside daily with a mix of peppermint dish soap and water, and by using LED candles.

10/22/2026

Insectapalooza is almost here! 🐛🦋🐜

10/22/2026

Picked apples this month? Here's how to store them so they stay crisp and fresh-tasting for weeks.

Apples don't stop ripening when they're picked. They continue to respire and produce ethylene, a natural ripening hormone. To keep apples crisp and flavorful, the goal is to slow those processes down.

✅ Store apples in the refrigerator, ideally in the crisper drawer. Cool temperatures slow respiration and help apples stay firm, juicy, and flavorful.

✅ Keep them in a perforated plastic bag. The bag helps maintain humidity so apples don't lose moisture and become soft or shriveled, while the small holes allow excess moisture and gases to escape.

✅ Wait to wash apples until you're ready to eat them. Extra moisture during storage can encourage mold and spoilage.

✅ Check for bruised or damaged apples. A bruised apple deteriorates faster and can speed spoilage in the rest of the batch. Maybe there's a little truth to the saying, "One bad apple spoils the bunch."

🍏 Fun fact: Commercial apple storage facilities can keep apples crisp for months by storing them just above freezing in high-humidity, low-oxygen rooms that dramatically slow ripening. Your refrigerator can't replicate the low-oxygen environment, but it can mimic the most important part: keeping apples cold.

10/08/2026

Whether you’re looking for a moment of quiet in nature, a chance to reflect, or simply an opportunity to pause during a stressful time, we welcome you to join us for Let’s Meditate, a free guided mindfulness meditation series held every Friday from 3:30 to 4 p.m. at the Cornell Botanic Gardens Summer House. Led by a licensed social worker and in partnership with Cornell Botanic Gardens and the Nature Rx Initiative, this longstanding Cornell Health program is open to all members of the Cornell community and requires no prior meditation experience.

The Summer House is located behind the Nevin Welcome Center, a five-minute walk from Mann Library. In inclement and winter weather, the meditation moves inside the light-filled welcome center.

Check out the full schedule of Let’s Meditate offerings at health.cornell.edu/meditate

09/22/2026

How do you get a community to care about a bird they may know little about?

Angelina Tang ’28, a communication and animal science student in Cornell’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, spent her summer as a Cornell Cooperative Extension summer intern at the Cornell Biological Field Station near Syracuse, helping more people discover the common terns of Oneida Lake.

Angelina created educational resources, visited schools and summer camps, connected with local businesses and helped launch “A Tern in Every Town” — a scavenger hunt featuring 3-D printed tern figurines placed around the lake.

Through her outreach, Angelina reached more than 15,000 people, building awareness of a species whose numbers have declined dramatically and whose nesting habitat continues to shrink. Along the way, she found inspiration in the terns themselves and their determination to keep trying, even after storms destroyed many of their nests.

Thank you to Angelina for her work this summer and for her contributions to common tern conservation!

Learn more about her CCE summer internship experience:

The common tern is a sweet little waterbird, with white wings like an angel’s and a distinctive kee-er cry. They are fierce protectors of their families, fearlessly chasing down eagles and tirelessly building up their ground nests, which they make on islands and shorelines, as waves threaten to wa...

09/21/2026

📍Where to find us at Climate Week NYC 2026

From AI and climate finance to energy, critical minerals, circularity and more, we are convening Cornell University researchers and partners at events across New York City September 20-27.

📌 Browse the full Cornell at Climate Week NYC agenda:
https://atkinson.cornell.edu/projects/nyc-climate-week/
📌 Learn more about our delegation and line-up: https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2026/09/cornellians-address-ai-ny-energy-future-climate-week-nyc

09/16/2026

HyperBird, a cutting-edge imaging platform for observing microscopic traits in plants, can detect grape diseases – such as powdery and downy mildews, which cost vineyard owners billions in annual losses globally – days before physical symptoms become visible.

The advancement will potentially allow plant breeders to speed the development of disease-resistant grape varieties, cue growers to target fungicide use early in a disease’s progression, and provide vineyard workers with better and earlier information for crop management.

While regular cameras record three bands of wavelengths (red, blue, and green) within the visible light spectrum, hyperspectral imaging records hundreds of narrow bands. With this hyperspectral power, the researchers created a high-throughput phenotyping microscope – meaning it can process hundreds of leaf samples within a few hours for observable traits related to disease resistance.

This capability lets it detect changes inside a leaf before they are visible on the surface.

Read more: https://news.cornell.edu/index%2Ephp/stories/2026/09/hyperbird-spots-grape-diseases-theyre-visible.

09/14/2026

Fruits and veggies aren’t the only things growing at Dilmun Hill Student Farm! 🫐🥦

Since 1996, Cornell’s 12-acre student-led farm has been a living laboratory for experiential learning. Here, students can cultivate their passions in sustainable agriculture and food systems as they work together to plant, harvest and provide fresh produce to the Cornell community. Members are encouraged to pursue their own interests through independent projects at the farm and explore agricultural practices such as agroforestry.

Dilmun Hill is also home to student clubs, research projects and classes, and hosts community events and farm tours.

Come celebrate Dilmun Hill’s 30th anniversary during its Open Farm Day on Sept. 18 from 3 to 6 p.m. https://cals.cornell.edu/events/dilmun-hill-30th-anniversary-open-farm-day

09/10/2026

We were honored to welcome USDA Undersecretary Richard Fordyce and Clark Putman, New York State Executive Director of the USDA Farm Service Agency, for a visit across Cornell CALS yesterday.

The visit explored how our Land-Grant mission comes to life through research, extension and innovation that support New York's farm and food sectors.

We're grateful for our partnership with the USDA, which helps drive meaningful impact for farmers, food producers and communities across New York and beyond.

09/09/2026

Fifteen years ago, labor accounted for about 30% of total costs at the Washington Fruit and Produce Co. Today, it’s over 60%.

“Our costs have just been skyrocketing, largely around labor, but everything else as well – meanwhile, apples sell for the same price they did 20 years ago,” said Gilbert Plath, technology director for the Yakima, Washington-based orchard, which grows apples and cherries on 10,000 acres.

“Who gets squeezed at that point? It’s not the warehouse, and it’s not the grocery store. It’s the farmers. We need to find ways to do more with less.”

Plath’s fourth-generation family of growers is one of nine organizations nationwide collaborating on a Cornell-led research project to develop robots that can perform labor-intensive orchard operations such as pollinating flowers, thinning fruits, harvesting apples and weeding between rows. The project is supported by a newly announced four-year grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Specialty Crop Research Initiative. The grant will establish a Center of Excellence for Orchard Robotics in Cornell’s Department of Biological and Environmental Engineering.

Read more: https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2026/09/cornell-leads-project-putting-robots-work-us-orchards.