February 12, 2021
Penn State’s College of Agricultural Sciences has named the recipients of its first-ever Consortium for Ukraine’s Rural and Agricultural Development Virtual Fellows Program.
January 12, 2021
Pennsylvania's largest farms claimed the lion's share of agricultural product sales and net farm income between 2012 and 2017, but the state's many small farms made significant contributions beyond their economic impact, according to researchers in Penn State's College of Agricultural Sciences.
December 22, 2020
A new pilot course, “Agricultural and Extension Education 597: Innovation and Critical Thinking Practicum,” offered by Penn State’s College of Agricultural Sciences, provides the opportunity for students to gain real-world experience and to cultivate relationships with professionals in their desired career field.
December 3, 2020
Penn State’s College of Agricultural Sciences announced recipients of its 2020 Staff Laureate Awards during a recent virtual collegewide staff meeting.
November 18, 2020
Job losses resulting from the coronavirus pandemic have affected wide swaths of the population, but workers in some demographic groups and industry sectors have been hit harder than others, according to "COVID-19 and Pennsylvania’s Economy," a series of reports compiled by researchers in Penn State's Center for Economic and Community Development.
October 13, 2020
Earlier this year, Krista Pontius, who earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in agricultural and extension education from Penn State’s College of Agricultural Sciences, was named one of three 2020 National Teach Ag Champions.
October 2, 2020
A Gender Fellows Cohort, which began last fall under the auspices of the College of Agricultural Sciences' Gender Equity through Agricultural Research and Education initiative, examines gender equity in rural sociology, soil science, plant science and entomology as part of the International Agriculture and Development dual-title graduate degree program.
August 11, 2020
Two students in Penn State’s College of Agricultural Sciences, Janelle Answer and Justin Kurtz, have received the Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarship.
July 29, 2020
A team led by Penn State College of Agricultural Sciences researchers is almost a year into a five-year study aimed at creating economically and environmentally sustainable agricultural systems in the face of development pressures and other challenges of urbanization.
July 20, 2020
Penn State graduate students in an advanced course, titled “Applied Youth, Family and Community Education 535: Youth Civic Development,” served as civic engagement mentors to middle- and high-school students in “Bridging Divides: Exploring Diversity and Social Justice,” a class offered through the State College Area School District's Delta program.
July 8, 2020
Shah Rafayat Chowdhury, a 2018 graduate of Penn State’s College of Agricultural Sciences, has received the Diana Award, one of the highest accolades a young person can achieve for social action or humanitarian effort.
June 23, 2020
A new online resource developed by faculty at Penn State can help educators better identify students who need additional support in honing the communication skills they need when interacting with the communities they hope to improve.
June 1, 2020
The Penn State Center Philadelphia, Center for Immigrants’ Rights Clinic, and faculty in the Department of Agricultural Economics, Sociology and Education at Penn State worked with students in Penn State Law on a project designed to address the needs of immigrant communities in the context of COVID-19.
May 26, 2020
Farmers whose operations have been impacted negatively by changing precipitation patterns — either too much or not enough water — are more likely to acknowledge the link between extreme weather conditions and climate change. That is one of the findings of a study examining farmers’ perceptions of resource availability and climate change, published recently in Organization and the Environment.
May 18, 2020
Researchers in the Center for Economic and Community Development in Penn State's College of Agricultural Sciences have developed an online StoryMap, titled "Vulnerable Pennsylvanians in the Context of a Pandemic," that they hope will facilitate engagement and help communities become stronger in the wake of COVID-19.
May 14, 2020
Students majoring in community, environment, and development in Penn State’s College of Agricultural Sciences can add a new option to reflect a growing interest in corporate responsibility. The social and environmental responsibility option takes effect in the fall 2020 semester.
May 1, 2020
A $450,000 grant from the U.S. Agency for International Development’s Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Peanut Research will aid researchers in Penn State’s College of Agricultural Sciences as they explore the potential to empower women farmers in northern Ghana through peanut production.
April 13, 2020
Heather Randell, assistant professor of rural sociology and demography in Penn State’s College of Agricultural Sciences, has been named the recipient of the 2019 Roy C. Buck Faculty Award.
March 5, 2020
Penn State's College of Agricultural Sciences has recognized nine faculty members for outstanding teaching in 2019.
February 28, 2020
Ways of thinking about, planning and designing intergenerationally enriched environments are explored in a new book co-edited by Matt Kaplan, professor of intergenerational programs and aging in Penn State's College of Agricultural Sciences.
January 23, 2020
American households waste, on average, almost a third of the food they acquire, according to economists, who say this wasted food has an estimated aggregate value of $240 billion annually. Divided among the nearly 128.6 million U.S. households, this waste could be costing the average household about $1,866 per year.
December 13, 2019
Xavier Mack, a student in Penn State’s College of Agricultural Sciences, spent his summer in the rolling hills of Nebraska. As part of his journey toward a future career in science communications, Mack, a sophomore majoring in agricultural science, participated in an internship program at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
November 22, 2019
Justin Kurtz’s first encounter with the FFA transformed the way he thought about agriculture, the world and, most importantly, himself. Kurtz, an agricultural and extension education major in Penn State’s College of Agricultural Sciences, first began working on a farm at the age of 10 in Kent County, Maryland.
October 16, 2019
A unique thesis project in Penn State’s College of Agricultural Sciences showcases the stories of women in urban agriculture through photographs captured by the participants themselves.
October 9, 2019
The 2019 National Symposium on Family Issues will provide an overview of the many interconnections between families and food on Oct. 21-22 at the Nittany Lion Inn.
August 30, 2019
The rural sociology program had a strong representation at the RSS annual meeting in Richmond. Thomas Mueller and Matt Brooks won both the Olaf Larson Graduate Student Paper Award and the student paper award of the Natural Resources Research Interest Group for their paper “Who Bears the Burden of Renewable Energy: A Multi-scalar Analysis of Distributional Injustice and Wind Energy.” Maria Vivanco Salazar won a doctoral dissertation award for "Neglected and Underutilized by Whom? Neo-colonialism in the Definition of Crops from the Andean Region" and Effie Smith won a master’s thesis award for "Livelihoods in the Balance: Haitians, Haitian-Dominicans, and Precarious Work in Rural Dominican Republic." Katrina Alford won the student paper award of the Population Research Interest Group. Altogether, 14 rural sociology graduate students and 13 faculty were on the program with presentations, and others as panelists. In addition, 13 rural sociology graduate program alumni were on the program, so in total Penn State had a 40-person contingent, the strongest of all universities.
August 28, 2019
For many students, there is a class or subject they are nervous to take. Sometimes, however, it is in those classes that a student finds an inspirational teacher — a teacher who makes learning what may be a difficult subject a joy to learn. For alumni Louis Swanson and Carol Gertsch, that subject was statistics, and the teacher was Fern “Bunny” Willits, professor emerita in the Department of Agricultural Economics, Sociology, and Education.
August 20, 2019
Penn State's College of Agricultural Sciences recently recognized recipients of the Outstanding Senior Award and Outstanding Student Awards for the 2018-19 academic year.
July 19, 2019
For a new food hub to succeed, it should be located in a community with a population sufficient to sustain it, according to a team of economists, who found that a county seeking to establish its first food hub needs roughly 182,000 residents for that food hub to break even.
July 10, 2019
Ted Alter, professor of agricultural, environmental and regional economics in Penn State’s College of Agricultural Sciences, is among an international group of community, industry, government and academic leaders who are being lauded for their work to help manage an invasive and destructive species in Australia.
