A good story for Thanksgiving

A new farmer has joined the profession. And he comes from a far different, but usually similarly green-colored, field: the gridiron. Center Jason Brown recently left the NFL to (1) start a 1,000-acre farm in North Carolina without having any farming experience going into it, and (2) use the farm to grow food to feed the hungry. Details on his story in, among others, People, Business Insider, the Boston Globe and the Sporting News. Also on CBS News, above.

Scarlet, gray and some really fresh greens

OSU Corporate Executive Chef Lesa Holford Food Science student Courtney George Elaine Grassbaugh HCS CFAES greenhouseOhio State’s Student Life Dining Services department and CFAES have teamed up to grow some of the produce served to students in the campus’s dining halls and cafés. Read the story. (Photo: Dining Services Corporate Executive Chef Lesa Holford and CFAES student Courtney George by K.D. Chamberlain, CFAES Communications.)

Nov. 25: 700-plus Ohio State students to share their environmental science work

picture of student symposium 3 for GBMore than 700 Ohio State environmental science students will present posters on their final course projects — featuring such timely topics as climate change, water quality, renewable energy and more — at the third annual Environmental Science Student Symposium. The event goes from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Tuesday, Nov. 25, in Ohio State’s Ohio Union in Columbus. All the students are enrolled in Introduction to Environmental Science, taught through CFAES’s School of Environment and Natural Resources. Read more. (Photo: A scene from last year’s symposium; Molly Bean, SENR.)

Nov. 25: Making bio-based products from lignocellulosic biomass

The University of Toledo’s Patricia Relue speaks on “Bio-Based Products from Lignocellulosic Biomass: Sugars to Platform Molecules” from 1:50-2:45 p.m. on Tuesday, Nov. 25, in the autumn seminar series by CFAES’s Department of Food, Agricultural and Biological Engineering. Relue is professor and undergraduate program director in Toledo’s Department of Bioengineering. Attend in 219 Agricultural Engineering Building, 590 Woody Hayes Drive, on Ohio State’s Columbus campus; or in 108 (Old) Administration Building at CFAES’s research arm, OARDC, 1680 Madison Ave., Wooster. Details: hadlocon.1@osu.edu.

‘America’s food future in Cleveland’s struggling neighborhoods’

Morten Damm Krogh takes a firsthand look at food deserts and urban farming around Cleveland in a great read on the German Marshall Fund Blog. He features the work of Morgan Taggart of CFAES’s outreach arm, OSU Extension, who showed him around on his visit. “To be perfectly honest,” he writes, “I saw more of America’s food future in the struggling neighborhoods in East Cleveland than I did in the corn and soybean fields of Nebraska.” Krogh is a special adviser for Denmark’s Ministry of Food, Agriculture and Fisheries and a fall 2014 European Marshall Memorial Fellow.

Plant green trees to stop global warming? Answer has shades of gray

Kaiguang ZhaoCould planting trees actually worsen global warming? CFAES scientist Kaiguang Zhao discusses the seemingly counterintuitive question Thursday, Nov. 20, in the autumn seminar series by CFAES’s School of Environment and Natural Resources. Zhao’s research, according to his website, “focuses on mapping, monitoring, modeling and managing terrestrial environments across scales, especially in the context of global environmental changes.” (Photo: SENR.)