Kaley Fech is senior correspondent and assistant bureau chief for Capital News Service for fall 2018. She primary serves Traverse City Record Eagle, Cadillac News, Leelanau Enterprise, Lansing City Pulse, Oceana Herald-Journal, Harbor Light and Alcona County Review.
EAST LANSING, Mich. – Over 12 percent of Michigan State University students are international, according to the Office for International Students and Scholars. The students come from over 140 countries for both undergraduate and graduate programs.
Moving to a new country with a different culture can be challenging. Add school to that equation, and it takes getting used to. “I have never lived away from family,” Fateh Mohammed said.
When you’re traveling on the Great Lakes in the winter, it’s not just the cold temperatures that cause problems with ice. The wind, too, wreaks havoc. “In 2014, I was on an icebreaker on Lake Superior in March and the ice was very thick,” said George Leshkevich, a physical scientist with the Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory in Ann Arbor. “We were opening up the ship track for the opening of the shipping season and it took us a day just to get through Whitefish Bay. “We started making our way from Whitefish Point over to the Keweenaw,” he said.
LANSING — Very little is known about the smallest tributaries that flow into Lake Superior. Several researchers at Michigan Technological University in Houghton are starting to change that. Their recent paper in the Journal of the American Water Resources Association asks how these small streams impact the ecology and biochemistry of Lake Superior. “This is a paper that was very much intended to ask questions,” said Amy Marcarelli, the lead researcher and an ecosystem ecologist at Michigan Tech. “We wanted to throw questions out there to get people interested.”
LANSING — Michigan produces the third most Christmas trees in the nation and no state grows more varieties, according to tree experts. “Any farm here in Michigan may produce eight to 10 different types of trees,” said Bert Cregg, an associate professor in Michigan State University’s Departments of Horticulture and Forestry. That’s good for Michigan growers as more and more millennials opt for real Christmas trees, growers say. “Young people that want to have that wholesome experience of looking for a tree are moving towards real Christmas trees,” said Amy Start, the executive director of the Michigan Christmas Tree Association based in Durand. Tree farmer Mel Koelling also has noticed a growing number of younger people out on his Mason farm looking for that perfect tree.
LANSING — After years of battling what they see as unfair trade practices, Michigan’s tart cherry growers got a win last month. President Donald Trump revoked Turkey’s duty-free status for cherry juice, which means there is now a tariff on juice imported from Turkey. “We were very happy that the Trump administration had signed an order revoking Turkey’s duty-free status on tart cherries,” said Ben LaCross, a second-generation cherry farmer from Cedar in Leelanau County. In recent years, the state’s growers had trouble competing with cheap imports from other countries, especially Turkey. “That’s been a big issue for us,” LaCross said.
LANSING — Tired driving is as dangerous as drunken driving. “If a person who wakes up at 8 a.m. is driving at 2 a.m., they’re essentially driving with the same impairments as someone who is legally intoxicated,” said Kimberly Fenn, the director of Michigan State University’s Sleep and Learning Lab. In 2017, drivers who were fatigued or asleep were involved in 3,428 Michigan accidents, according to the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute. In 2016, they were involved in 3,277 accidents. Sleep deprivation has a very strong effect on driving ability, Fenn said.
LANSING — Snow is flying, and Michigan’s snowmobilers are gearing up to hit the trails. Traffic on the trails took a nosedive during the recession but was up last year. Bill Manson, the executive director of the Michigan Snowmobile Association, is optimistic the uptick will continue. “We had a good year last year,” he said. “We actually had about 11,000 more snowmobile permits sold last year than the year before.”
And he said this year, preseason sales of trail permits are up substantially.
LANSING — Data from dead deer in Wisconsin and applied to living ones in Virginia could help detect disease earlier in herds in the Great Lakes states and elsewhere. A group of wildlife agencies has developed a new statistical approach for detecting chronic wasting disease in white-tailed deer. That’s important because the neurological disease, often referred to as CWD, has spread to 25 states, is contagious and always fatal. “Chronic wasting disease is an important and big problem for white-tailed deer, elk and mule deer in this country, and we need to continue to look for new techniques to manage this disease,” said Jenny Powers, acting chief for the Wildlife Health Branch of the National Park Service. “It’s going to be with us for a long time.”
Researchers from the National Park Service, the U.S. Geological Survey, the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, Princeton University and the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources developed the new way to more efficiently sample a deer population to determine if chronic wasting disease has spread.
LANSING – Michigan is one of the nation’s top milk-producing states. In 2016, Michigan’s dairy cows produced 10.9 billion pounds of milk, worth $1.64 billion, according to the Department of Agriculture and Rural Development. Nationally, Michigan ranks 5th in production, with California in 1st place. Four other Great Lakes States — Wisconsin, New York, Pennsylvania and Minnesota — are also in the top 10. But Michigan lacks the facilities to process all of that milk.
LANSING — When Tom Bailey was just 17 years old, he flew to Washington, D.C., and testified before the Senate Interior Committee on wilderness policy for Isle Royale. Bailey had learned that a proposal by the National Park Service would exclude large areas of Isle Royale National Park from designation as wilderness. He became a member of the Michigan Student Environmental Coalition and worked with others to create an alternative that included the entire island. That was in 1972. Four years later the proposal was approved and signed into law.
