For the first time since the 1980s, University of California, Davis, researchers have released new varieties of wine grapes. The five new varieties, three red and two white, are highly resistant to Pierce’s disease, which costs California grape growers more than $100 million a year. The new, traditionally bred varieties also produce high-quality fruit and wine.

University of California, Davis, scientists will lead a collaborative effort to study grapevine red blotch disease, which threatens the $162 billion U.S. grape industry. The virus causes red veins and blotches on grape leaves. The fruit on diseased plants is smaller, ripens more slowly, and its sugars and colors are muted.

In California, fermented foods and beverages are especially trending with young people, and food safety specialist Erin DiCaprio said information is in demand.

“I get calls every day from people asking things like, ‘There’s a white film on top of my sauerkraut. Is it still safe to eat?’” DiCaprio said.

The game is simple. On a brown digital grassland with a single tree, tiny goats mill back and forth. When you decide how many of those goats to buy or sell and how many to insure, clouds float across the screen and one of two things happens: the clouds stop and rain falls, roughly doubling the goats and producing milk for sale, or the clouds move steadily across the screen and half your herd is wiped out.

Do you know why it’s called iceberg lettuce? In 1926, Bruce Church—University of California graduate, farmer and founder of Fresh Express—developed a way to get his head lettuce from Salinas to the East Coast by loading the freshly-harvested crop in train cars and covering it with ice. As the lettuce-laden cars rolled into stations, folks would call out, “The icebergs are coming, the icebergs are coming.”

Strawberry growers now have a free smart phone application tool to predict spray coverage to combat such pests as two-spotted spider mites, lygus bugs and leafrollers, thanks to a three-year collaborative project involving UC Davis agricultural entomologist Christian Nansen and several UC Davis computer science majors.

More than half of child deaths worldwide stem from preventable causes, such as adverse effects from malnutrition. A new study led by researchers at the University of California, Davis, finds that child mortality significantly drops when children receive nutritional supplements rich in vitamins, minerals and essential fatty acids.

The Smithsonian Institution, in building a showcase on the history of brewing, came calling on Professor Emeritus Michael J. Lewis.

This article originally appeared in The Washington Post.

They say a farmer’s work starts before dawn, but in Cambodia’s Battambang province farmers work together late into the night to prepare their vegetable harvest for the overnight bus ride to the capital city’s markets.

Steam rises from the top of towering piles of compost at a landfill in western Placer County, California. The jaws of an excavator rake up and churn the heaps, unleashing a stench of decomposing food.  

Some of the food in these piles has only recently arrived from nearby restaurants, supermarkets and food processors. Sweet potatoes, oranges, butternut squash and red onions look as if they were edible when they were tossed into the garbage.