Nancy Tarnai
907-474-5042
8/3/10

When Fritz Wozniak retired after 30 years as a heavy equipment mechanic he was determined to stay active, so he immediately leaped into farming.

“ I went from 10-hour days to 14 to 18-hour days,” Wozniak said, shaking his head. He loves the turn his life has taken and at 58, he hopes to live to be 100 without spending much time in a recliner.

Farming was already in his blood, as he comes from a third-generation farm family in Nebraska. Until the eighth grade he helped raise cattle, but when his father got a job as postmaster the family moved to town. Wozniak and his brother worked as hired hands on nearby farms all through high school. “We never took a summer off,” Wozniak said.

Then he worked in construction for Coors Brewery in Colorado until the pipeline lured him to Alaska. Upon retirement in Fairbanks four years ago, a friend, Jim Huffman, needed a partner to help with his cattle and Wozniak jumped right in. They have over 200 Black Angus cattle, along with hogs and sheep, off of Chena Hot Springs Road. Their other operation is growing hay, oats and barley near Eielson Farm Road.

Due to increasing consumer interest in natural beef, Wozniak wants to “get a good beef market going here.” While the farm does use some fertilizers to produce grain the animals never receive hormones or antibiotics and they are free to graze in pastures, not confined to feedlots. “We’re as close as you can get to being organic,” Wozniak said.

He also believes in treating the animals respectfully. When Wozniak rolls out hay in the field, the cattle come running; he doesn’t mind being engulfed by cows, calves and even mammoth bulls. “They’re gentle animals,” he said. “We are breeding toward that.” By selecting cows with good temperaments to become mothers, the farmers can develop a gentler herd. “We don’t like the wild ones,” Wozniak said.

“People praise our beef,” he said. The meat is sold at the Tanana Valley Farmers’ Market or customers can buy a half or quarter side of beef directly from the farm. Wozniak likes it on his plate too.

“The meat is really good; I’ll put it up against any grocer store meat. It’s nicely marbled and tender.” Ribeye steaks and prime rib are his favorite cuts. He hasn’t bought meat in a store for years and the family also raises laying hens for eggs, milks their own cows and grows a huge garden. “To have good tasting meals that are fresh is one of the main benefits of what I do,” he said.

Farming suits Wozniak because he gets to be his own boss and work outdoors. “I work at my terms and conditions,” he said.

The downside is fighting the weather. Last year the hay didn’t make because it was too hot and dry and this year there has been so much rain there hasn’t been a good opportunity for harvesting. “The hay crop is always in the hands of the good Lord,” he said.

Another thing Wozniak finds difficult is the rare occasion when a calf dies during birth. “I don’t like that,” he said.

The competitive market is another challenge. “We want to produce affordable beef and keep a steady supply for our clientele.”

Homegrown Agriculture is provided as a public service by the UAF School of Natural Resources and Agricultural Sciences.

Brian Keenan
907-474-5229
8/3/10

Permafrost warming continues throughout a wide swath of the Northern Hemisphere, according to a team of scientists assembled during the recent International Polar Year.

Their extensive findings, published in the April-June 2010 edition of Permafrost and Periglacial Processes, describe the thermal state of high-latitude permafrost during the International Polar Year, 2007-2009. Vladimir Romanovsky, a professor with the snow, ice and permafrost group at the University of Alaska Fairbanks Geophysical Institute, is the lead author of the paper, which also details the significant expansion of Northern Hemisphere permafrost monitoring.

“This paper is actually pretty unique,” Romanovsky said, “because it’s the first time such a large geographical area has been involved in one paper.”

During the International Polar Year, Romanovsky and his colleagues launched a field campaign to improve the existing permafrost-monitoring network. The permafrost thermal state is monitored with borehole sensors, which gather data from holes drilled deep into the permafrost. The researchers established nearly 300 borehole sites that serve as permafrost observatories across the polar and sub-polar regions in the Northern Hemisphere. Their work more than doubled the size of the previously existing network

“The heart of monitoring is the measuring of temperatures in boreholes,” Romanovsky said. “For permafrost temperatures, you have to be there. You have to establish boreholes.”

Having data from across the circumpolar North allows scientists to analyze trends affecting permafrost. The article notes that permafrost temperatures have warmed as much as two degrees Celsius from 20 to 30 years ago. They also found that permafrost near zero degrees Celsius warmed more slowly than colder permafrost. According to Romanovsky, this trend is an example of the large-scale analysis possible using data from the expanded network.

The enlarged and revamped observatory network is meant to be a building block for further research. It also has the potential to foster better modeling of future conditions and act as an early warning system of the negative consequences of climate change in permafrost regions. That could, in turn, help policymakers and the public plan for a future with warmer permafrost.

Romanovsky, whose specialty is Russian and North American permafrost conditions, plans to keep building on the legacy of the International Polar Year. With help from a five-year National Science Foundation grant, he continues his collaboration with American and international colleagues, establishing new borehole sites in undersampled areas and analyzing trends evidenced by the newly available data.

The Fourth International Polar Year was a two-year event that began in March of 2007 and focused the attention of the international research community on the Earth’s polar regions. UAF researchers were heavily involved in IPY projects and are still analyzing data from those projects.

ADDITIONAL CONTACTS: Vladimir Romanovsky, UAF professor of geophysics, at 907-474-7459 or via e-mail at [email protected].

ADDITIONAL INFO: http://permafrost.gi.alaska.edu/users/vovaroma

BK/8-2-10/016-11

Marmian Grimes
907-474-7902
7/30/10

The University of Alaska Fairbanks will host the summer’s second Really Free Market Saturday, Aug. 14 in the Nenana parking lot on the UAF campus. Free parking is available nearby.

People can drop off items for the market from 8 to 10 a.m. The market is open from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. There is no bartering or selling. All items are free. For more information, visit www.uaf.edu/summer or call 907-474-7021.

MEDIA CONTACT: Marmian Grimes, UAF public information officer, at 907-474-7902 or via e-mail at [email protected].

ON THE WEB: www.uaf.edu/summer/special-events/really-free-market/

EF/7-30-10/015psa-11

Ned Rozell

474-7468

posted 7/28/10

Rain. At this point in the brief Alaska summer, you may not be its greatest fan, especially if you live in Eagle, where rain has twice within a month eaten your road connection to the rest of North America. And rain may have annoyed you if you were playing softball during the record hour last week when 1.15 inches fell at Fairbanks International Airport. And you may have cursed the sky if you were installing a roof in Anchorage on the August day in 1997 when almost three inches of rain fell.

Perhaps we judge liquid precipitation a bit harshly at times. Rain is, after all, the free distribution of a substance infinitely more valuable than gold. And, even in the Southeast’s Little Port Walter — where residents endure 80 days each year with precipitation amounts greater than one inch, most of it in the form of rain — we still don’t have it too bad.

Consider Mount Waialeale in Hawaii, where it rains more than an inch every single day. Or Cherrapunji, India, which experienced more than 1,000 inches of rain from August 1860 to August 1861. As for daily deluges, it’s hard to beat Reunion Island, located in the Indian Ocean east of Madagascar. During the 24 hours from March 15 to 16, 1952, the black sands of the island absorbed 74 inches of rain. And it was impossible to keep the picnic lunches dry in Unionville, Maryland, during the minute on July 4, 1956 when 1.23 inches of rain burst from the sky.

Alaska doesn’t come close to those extremes, but Barrow stands out for the opposite. In 1934, weather observers there recorded 1.4 inches of precipitation for the entire year. That’s nothing compared to the 14 consecutive years without a raindrop in Arica, Chile, or the 767 days from 1912 to 1914 between rainfalls in Bagdad, California. But Barrow’s dry year is similar to a typical year in Death Valley, which explains why umbrella sales are sluggish in both Barrow and Badwater.

A bit of research reveals that it is poor form for Alaskans to shake a fist at the sky during the few months the air is warm enough for rain to exist here. The wet phenomenon is more miracle than nuisance. As Jerry Dennis explains in his book, “It’s Raining Frogs and Fishes,” rain is about the closest thing we have to constancy on Earth: “Chances are good that the drop of rain that splashes on your forehead is made of molecules that were here long before the first humans looked up in wonder at a cloudy sky, long before the first leafy plants stretched their roots into the soil, long before the first single-celled organisms took the critical step of dividing in half to reproduce.”

Droplets splattering on tarps that may or may not be protecting our leaky roofs have fallen before, perhaps cooling the slaves who shoved giant stone blocks into pyramids in Egypt, or soaking the soldiers who were already knee-deep in muck and mosquitoes as they built the Alaska Highway.

As in every Alaska summer, this recycled, liquid air freshener has captured billions of soot and dust particles, pulling them from the sky and slamming them quietly to the ground. Rain is also the only substance known to quench our wildfires, and it humidifies the air to the point where our noses become receptive to the delightful musk of the earth. Further, this falling liquid water is, as far as we know, unique to our home planet.

This rarity highlights a most fortuitous fact: Earth orbits the sun at about 93 millions miles, a favorable distance for a species that for its comfort depends on both air conditioning and down jackets. We live far enough away from the sun to keep our flood-swollen rivers from boiling away, yet close enough to keep all this precious moisture from being locked up, unusable, in a hard shell of ice.

This column is provided as a public service by the Geophysical Institute,
University of Alaska Fairbanks, in cooperation with the UAF research
community. Ned Rozell is a science writer at the institute.

Marmian Grimes
907-474-7902
7/28/10

Pianists Etsuko Kimura Pederson and Paul Krejci will use music to highlight the connections between cultures and universities during a piano recital Aug. 7 on the University of Alaska Fairbanks campus.

Pederson and Krejci, both students in the music department at UAF, will perform original modern music for two pianos. The recital will echo a May performance held at Japan’s Tohoku University to honor the 15-year anniversary of the partnership between Tohoku and UAF.

The free recital will begin at 7 p.m. Saturday, Aug. 7 in the Davis Concert Hall.

“The piano recital is an opportunity to share what we’ve learned in part from our studies here,” Pederson said. “There has been little opportunity for music students to represent UAF in Asia and we are proud to do that.”

Both Krejci and Pederson have master’s degrees in musical performance from UAF. After receiving his degree, Krejci began working on completion of an interdisciplinary doctorate degree in ethnomusicology. He also teaches Alaska Native music at UAF and was born and raised in Fairbanks.

Since graduating, Pederson has continued to study music at UAF. She is native to Sendai, Japan, and has lived in Fairbanks since her marriage.

ADDITIONAL CONTACTS: Michelle Bartlett, Summer Sessions & Lifelong Learning director, at 907-474-6624, 907-474-7021 or via e-mail at [email protected].

ON THE WEB: www.uaf.edu/summer/special-events/concerts/

EF/7-28-10/014-11

Dozens of staff and faculty members, students, alumni and friends of UAF gathered in downtown Fairbanks last weekend for the annual Golden Days parade. As the parade traveled through town, the UAF Pep Band played and volunteers handed out beads and other UAF trinkets to the crowds. This slideshow and video from UAF photographer Todd Paris offers a snapshot of the morning’s festivities.

Gretchen Gordon
907-474-1891
7/22/10

Fairbanks residents searching for duct tape this weekend may find it in short supply as KUAC holds its 14th annual Red Green Regatta on Sunday, July 25 starting at 11 a.m. The regatta begins at the Graehl Park boat launch and ends at Pioneer Park with awards presented by U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski. The public can view the regatta from the Wendell Street and Cushman Street bridges and along First Avenue.

Celebrity judges will score this year’s watercraft based on innovative use of the handyman’s secret weapon (duct tape), imagination and integration of the Red Green theme. Entrants vie for water-worthy prizes supplied by Paddler’s Cove Outfitters & Compeau’s. Winners and special awards, including “Best Viewed at a Distance,” “Harold’s Debacle” and “Most Un‘fathom’able,” will be announced at 1 p.m. at the Pioneer Park boat launch.

The regatta is a celebration of “The Red Green Show,” a comedy series that airs Saturday nights at 8 p.m. on AlaskaOne.

This year’s regatta will also offer the Interior’s first chance to pledge for tickets to Red Green’s One Man Show. Steve Smith, aka Red Green, will be coming to Fairbanks on Sunday, Nov. 7 and performing his one-man show in support of KUAC/AlaskaOne public television. The only way to receive tickets for this performance is to make a pledge in support of KUAC/AlaskaOne. The first chance to make a pledge for tickets will be at the end of the regatta between 1-2 p.m. A separate pledge table will be set up near Paddler’s Cove at the Pioneer Park boat launch following the awards ceremony.

This year’s judges include lead sponsor Bettisworth North’s CB Bettisworth and Tracy Vanairsdale, Denali State Bank’s Jo Heckman, Fairbanks Daily News Miner’s Dermot Cole, Graphic North’s Wayne Clark, Larry Katkin of Paddler’s Cove, KUAC Community Advisory Council member Ellen Ganley of Information Insights, longtime KUAC devotee and KUAC Leadership Council member Patty Kastelic, Dr. Phyllis Pendergrast, KUAC general manager Keith Martin and judges’ boat captain Chuck Lemke.

Registration for the event will be taken online and by phone until Friday, July 23 at noon and then again on the day of the event between 10 a.m. and 11 a.m. at the Graehl Park boat launch in downtown Fairbanks. The regatta kicks off at 11 a.m. as University of Alaska Fairbanks Chancellor Brian Rogers fires the starter pistol. The registration fee is $30 per vessel, which includes an official T-shirt designed by local graphic artist Sue Sprinkle. Additional T-shirts are available at the regatta for $20 each or two for $35.

Official rules, prize information and registration forms are available at www.kuac.org. For more information call 907-474-2673.

ON THE WEB: www.kuac.org

GG/7-22-10/011-11

By Ned Rozell

474-7469

7/21/10

From the more-you-look-the-more-you-see file, I present the willow rose.

The willow rose is lovely, green and unexpected, its whirled petals gracing the top of Alaska willows like the most delicate blossom in the cooler of a flower shop. But this rose is cultivated by an insect that manipulates the poor willow for both food and shelter, often at a price to the bug that seems worse than death.

Willow roses often appear on Barclay willows, one of 33 species of Alaska’s most numerous trees. The Barclay, named for an English botanist who sailed the west coast of America in 1835-1841, is a common willow on riverbanks from the Yukon River southward in Alaska.

Because it’s hard to tell one willow from another, the presence of willow roses helps botanists know they are looking at a Barclay. A fly about the size and shape of a small mosquito is responsible for altering the willow to its liking to create the willow rose.

In springtime, after the snow is gone but before willow buds burst, a female willow gall midge lays an egg at the tip of a willow branch. That egg hatches into a wormy little grub, which then burrows into the bud. The bud, containing compressed new leaves that are awaiting the flush of moisture, is the waxy cap at the end of a willow branch that formed late the previous summer.

The tiny orange grub augers into the new plant cells that were to become the willow’s summer leaves. Nestled within, the little worm starts munching on the same source of energy that has sustained moose all winter. This action halts the growth of the willow stem. Instead of the leaves forming in an orderly spiral long a new stem of the willow, they bloom in a pattern called, for obvious reasons, a rosette. This rosette becomes the grub’s apartment, in which other insects sometimes crash. Slice a willow rose in half and you will see the tiny orange grub at its heart. Within the protected chamber, many grubs then mature over several seasons to become flies. But a good number of them do not.

Some orange midge grubs suffer a fate you wouldn’t wish on any organism but a mosquito a creature implanted within the grub’s guts eats it from the inside out. The actor in this midge tragedy is a species of metallic green and purple wasp. In July and August, people sometimes see these wasps hovering over willow roses. The wasps land, and appear to sting the rose, depositing their eggs beside the grub in the chamber. This isn’t good news for the grub. The wasp eggs hatch and a tiny translucent larva slimes over to the grub and bores its way into the grub’s skin.

Over a few months that can’t be much fun for the orange midge grub, the wasp larva consumes it from within and kills it. Given its miniscule brain, the grub of the willow midge probably never ponders a grisly irony the beauty it creates with the willow rose may also attract its angel of death.

This column is provided as a public service by the Geophysical Institute,
University of Alaska Fairbanks, in cooperation with the UAF research
community. Ned Rozell is a science writer at the institute.

Nancy Tarnai
907-474-5042
7/19/10

Although the peak peony season has passed in Fairbanks, the flowers will be the sole focus of a conference July 21-24 at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

Experts in floriculture, specialty cut flowers, high tunnels, nutrition, soils, plant diseases, breeding and post-harvest care will attend from universities and businesses across the nation.

On the first day, participants will tour the Georgeson Botanical Garden, Polar Peonies, Basically Basil, Spinach Creek Farm and Lilyvale Farm. The second day will be a symposium in the Elvey Auditorium on the UAF campus. Topics will include an overview of specialty cut flowers, the peony industry, research needs, marketing, field production, pest management, breeding and more. Registration for the Wednesday tour or the Thursday symposium is $50 a day or $75 for both days. Call 907-474-5651 for details and to register.

“This is Flowers 101,” said Patricia Holloway, a horticulture professor at UAF and director of the Georgeson Botanical Garden. “This will give people a good background on peonies.”

Holloway considers peony blossoms the most economically valuable plant in Alaska.

“It’s the first agricultural export with a huge potential,” she said. “I am getting calls from London for peonies.”

Currently, 41 producers grow peonies in the state, from Fairbanks to Homer, and more are joining the ranks each year. Of those, 13 have 500 or more peony plants.

To conclude the conference activities, experts and growers will brainstorm ideas to help prepare a proposal for a USDA specialty crop research grant. The goal is to discover exactly what is necessary to market peonies, extend the seasons and explore cut flower opportunities. The conference was funded by UAF Center for Research Services and hosted by the Georgeson Botanical Garden and the Alaska Peony Growers Association.

ADDITIONAL CONTACTS: Marmian Grimes, UAF public information officer, at 907-474-7902 or via e-mail at [email protected].

ON THE WEB: www.uaf.edu/snras/gbg

NT/7-19-10/010-11

Ned Rozell

474-7468

July 15, 2010

Could ancient mammoth hunters have warmed the planet? A trio of scientists presents the idea in a new study.

The far north landscape was changing about 15,000 years ago. Trees and shrubs were invading the great grasslands that hosted woolly mammoths and horses. Around that time, the mammoths, horses and other grass-eating animals disappeared. In a recent study published in the Geophysical Research Letters, three scientists wrote that a great increase in birch shrubs at the time was because of a lack of mammoths to browse them down, caused by hunters that wiped out the mammoth.

This increase in woody plants changed the color of the landscape, darkening it to absorb more heat.  ”The basic idea is that a small number of humans with primitive technology could have had a detectable impact on climate,” said Chris Field, head of the Department of Global Ecology at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Stanford, California. Field is one of the authors of the paper. Chris Doughty, formerly a graduate student at the Carnegie Institution, was the lead author on the paper.

It was Doughty’s idea to propose the notion that  (despite the fact that some people today believe that 6 billion of us have no effect on climate) even a small group of hunters could have made the planet warmer.

Since writing the paper, Doughty has moved on to Oxford University in London.  ”When elephants are removed from African ecosystems, there is a large increase in tree cover,” Doughty said via email. “We wondered if the same was true when mammoths were removed from Siberia and further wondered what impact on climate this might have had.” Doughty noted how modern-day elephants clear out trees by both stripping them of leaves and knocking them over to get at leaves they can’t reach.

The fall of the mammoths and their possible destructive effect on trees may have led to the spread of birch, Doughty said. He and his colleagues looked at ancient records of pollen from far-north lakes and saw that birch pollen seemed to rise around the time mammoth populations dropped off.

A researcher who disagrees with the theory of ancient hunters causing a spiral toward global warming is Dale Guthrie, a professor emeritus at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. He is an expert on mammoths and the author of several books, including Frozen Fauna of the Mammoth Steppe: The Story of Blue Babe. Guthrie thinks that the climate changed before the demise of the mammoth, with warmer temperatures favoring shrubs over the grasses and forbs that the mammoth loved. “I think the evidence is pretty overwhelming that the distribution of birch is climatically controlled rather than herbivore-controlled,” Guthrie said. “And birch has a fantastic defense against herbivores.”

Birch trees and shrubs of the far north feature crystals of a sticky, bitter resin on saplings and the lower branches of trees. The resins, not found on stems far above the ground, probably serve as a deterrent to hares and moose that might like to eat birch. Moose instead eat mostly the stems and leaves of willow, though hares relish the moment a birch tree falls and the top stems become available for them to eat. Also, there’s little evidence mammoths ate lots of birch, Guthrie said.  ”I don’t think birch is present in any significant amount in any (fossilized) mammoth feces anyone has looked at,” Guthrie said. “And their teeth illustrate that they were primarily a grazer on forbs and grasses.”

This column is provided as a public service by the Geophysical Institute, University of Alaska Fairbanks, in cooperation with the UAF research community. Ned Rozell is a science writer at the institute.