Jack Rabin (CC ’78), NJAES director of farm programs, shares “Farm Calls” on the Sustainable Farming on the Urban Fringe blog. A picture is worth a thousand words in this post on cover crops. This fall, a leading Jersey vegetable grower asked, “What’s with all the recent media hype about cover crops? I’m getting ads, […]
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Floriculture Greenhouse Dazzles with its Annual Poinsettia Display and Sale
Arctic, Freedom Peppermint, Silverstar Red, Sonora Jingle, Premium Polar – they’re not holiday candies or names of rogue reindeer, but are among the many Poinsettia cultivars on display during the annual Poinsettia Open House held at the Floriculture Greenhouse on the George H. Cook campus. Almost 100 varieties provided by the leading breeders/propagators such as […]
Faculty and Staff Accomplishments
We congratulate these SEBS and NJAES faculty and staff on their accomplishments, appointments and awards below. For university-wide announcements, please visit the Rutgers Faculty and Staff Newsletter. 2024 Thomas Molnar, associate professor in the Department of Plant Biology, is the principal investigator of a four-year grant totaling $160,000 from the Ferrero Hazelnut Company (Ferrero HCo), […]
When it comes to food, ‘local’ can be a loaded term
The New Jersey Farm Bureau Policies of 2014 opposes new legislation being drafted by the New Jersey Legislature that would define “locally grown” as any product grown in New Jersey or 30 miles outside of the state. Jack Rabin, director of farm programs at Rutgers’ New Jersey Agricultural Experiment Station, agrees. “We have soy beans that we sell to Maryland to feed chickens – those chickens are then sold in New Jersey – the whole thing is local,” Rabin said…”If you’re going to say local, say where. But don’t demand local just being nearby, because we have 8.8 million people and we are a food-deficit state.”
Mini tomatoes are garden gems
They have names like Jolly Elf, Indigo Rose, Orange Fizz, Baby Cakes and Cherry Buzz. They come in stop-sign red, deep ruby, golden yellow, chocolate brown and pale orange. They can look like a big gum ball or a plump olive. They are some of the more than 100 varieties of cherry and grape tomatoes that can be found on a list compiled by the Rutgers New Jersey Agricultural Experiment Station (njaes.rutgers.edu/tomato-varieties)…”People are attracted to small-fruited tomatoes due to the wide reputation they have for extra sweetness and probably subacid tartness compared to other tomatoes,” says Jack Rabin, of the Rutgers Agricultural Experiment Station.
Professor Emeritus Bernard L. Pollack (1920 – 2014), Breeder of ‘Ramapo’ Tomato
Professor Emeritus of Plant Breeding and Genetics Bernard “Bernie” Pollack passed away on July 14, at the age of 94. Pollack joined Rutgers in 1960 as faculty in the Department of Horticulture and Forestry and retired in 1985. While his work in vegetable breeding extended to eggplant, pepper and tomatoes, Pollack is most renowned for […]
Rutgers Haskin Lab Assists Cape May Co-op in Getting Oysters to Market
Lisa Calvo, aquaculture program coordinator at Rutgers Haskin Shellfish Research Laboratory, has been a key resource in guiding the Cape May Oyster Cooperative, with additional help from experts at Rutgers New Jersey Aquaculture Innovation Center and the Rutgers Food Innovation Center. Read more from New Jersey Sea Grant Consortium on how working as a cooperative […]
What’s in Season from the Garden State: Celebrating Over 100 Years of Ag Innovation and the NJ Farmers that Helped
For a university that has been around for almost 250 years, big anniversaries are a good time to gauge progress and reflect on past accomplishments. While Rutgers University still has another two years to go before its actual 250th anniversary (it was established in 1766), the year 2014 marks two milestones that reflect the university’s […]
NJAES Assesses Needs of Organic Vegetable Growers and Launches Organic Weed Control Website
In February, 20 growers representing eight counties across New Jersey conducted a fruitful meeting with 10 Rutgers Cooperative Extension specialists and agents of the New Jersey Agricultural Experiment Station (NJAES). Held at Terhune Orchards in Princeton, NJ, the meeting was designed as a forum to discuss organic agriculture in New Jersey and to highlight the […]
How ‘organic’ are vegetables when they’re grown in hydroponic greenhouses?
How does a Vermonter, midwinter, find a ripe, organic tomato? It’s a trick question on several counts. The quest for an answer begins at a grocery store…The discussion of hydroponic-as-organic is an “almost-religious dispute,” because it traffics in hopes and fears, said Jack Rabin, the associate director of farm programs at Rutgers, N.J., Agricultural Experiment Station. In a recent email exchange, Rabin elaborated: “Some people have negative association of hydroponics with industrial farming. Yet, most future local and urban agriculture that becomes commercial will incorporate controlled environment practices due to land costs and protection,” he wrote.
