Every day for the past 18 years, Natasha Lapointe has been showing up for work at the Dairy Unit at Macdonald Campus Farm at 5 am. Luckily, she has a short commute.
“We live on campus (on the farm site) just a two-minute walk from the dairy barn,” says Lapointe, this year’s winner of the Principal’s Award for Administrative and Support Staff in the Technical, Library Assistants and Nurses Category.
Macdonald Campus is beautiful year-round, but is truly spectacular in the fall. Neale McDevitt, the Editor of the McGill Reporter, took a stroll through Mac Campus this past weekend and took the following pictures.
View photos in the McGill Reporter.
L'Épicerie recently featured Rosemarie Allen (B.Sc.(AgEnvSc)’12) and Jacob Morin (FMT’11) of Ferme Le Paysan Gourmand in Saint-Félix-de-Kingsey who participate in an on-farm program to reduce food waste. The episode follows Meilleur Après volunteers who harvest produce that would have remained in the field. Produce harvested is then shared between the participants, the producer and Meilleur Après – who in turn redistribute the produce to organizations in the region or transform it into products that are then sold to finance operations.
Congratulations to Luce Daigneault BScAgr’82, MSc’85, Gibson (Gib) Patterson BScAgr’60, Isabelle Lam BSc(NutrSc)’19 and Jamie Lee BSc(NutrSc)’19 who will receive Macdonald Distinguished Alumni Awards at the Homecoming Lunch on Saturday.
Hydroponic strawberry growers and Co-founders of Vertité, Ophelia Sarakinis (FMT’19) and Phillip Rosenbaum (B.Sc.(AgEnvSc)’19, MSc.’21) and their partners have just won the first phase of the Homegrown Innovation Challenge, a “six-year, $33-million initiative from the Weston Family Foundation to future-proof food production in Canada.”
On September 29th, James McGill Professor Joann Whalen, Natural Resource Sciences, testified as an expert before Canada’s Standing Senate Committee on Agriculture and Forestry on the topic of “Review and report on the status of soil health in Canada”.
Watch her testimony on ParlVu (09:43:59)
"People think that the colder fall temperatures trigger the colour change, but it’s actually the photoperiod," explains Plant Science Faculty Lecturer David Wees. However, some regions of Quebec are luckier when it comes to fall colours than others: those with a lot of deciduous trees like maples, oaks or even birches. On the other hand, areas that have more conifers will see fewer transformations to their landscape.”
When an Indigenous patient receiving treatment at the MUHC refused to eat, McGill MScA candidate Manveen Sethi was enlisted to find an authentic recipe for Bannock bread, a traditional Indigenous snack. Through research and with the help of Indigenous patients who taste-tested recipes, Sethi found a recipe that will now be permanently available on the MUHC menu and hopefully offer a little comfort to Indigenous patients being treated at the facility.
McGill students have proven time and time again that they are some of the most creative, versatile and adaptive people in their approach to solving problems, and they’re using knowledge acquired in and outside of the classroom to generate innovative solutions to the world’s most pressing issues.
Former Dean of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences and Associate Vice-Principal of McGill University’s Macdonald Campus, 1996-2005, and founding Dean of the McGill School of Environment, 2008, Dr. Deborah Buszard has been appointed to Interim Vice-President and Chancellor at the University of British Columbia.
Read more in the UBC Broadcast
School of Human Nutrition alumni Bianca Loge, BSc(NutrSc)’20, Kristen Sunstrum, BSc(NutrSc)’21, and Zoey Li, BSc(NutrSc)’17, reminisce about the unique extracurricular opportunities made possible by the Student Experience Enhancement Fund, and the host of real-world skills they acquired that they’ve since gone on to apply to their blossoming careers.
Read more in Focus on Macdonald
In August, documentary filmmaker Alex Pritz, BSc(AgEnvSc)’13 – BSE has released his award-winning National Geographic documentary The Territory which “provides an immersive on-the-ground look at the tireless fight of the Indigenous Uru-eu-wau-wau people against the encroaching deforestation brought by farmers and illegal settlers in the Brazilian Amazon.”
Learn more in Focus on Macdonald
Focus on Macdonald sat down with alum Jennifer Dumoulin, BSc(AgEnvSc)’11 Environmental Biology, to ask a few questions about her student experiences that led to a successful career as an environmental manager.
Read more in Focus on Macdonald
In the 1960s, only about three percent of the land in Quebec was suitable for cultivation. The Province’s population and need for food outstripped the yield from Quebec farms. More than half of Quebec’s most fertile lands required improved water management – either better drainage or supplemental irrigation to maximize productivity and yield. Over more than four decades, Emeritus Professor Robert Broughton’s work would revolutionize soil drainage in Quebec, leading to increased food production and capacity in Quebec’s irrigation and drainage industry.
