When Chris Mujjabi found an envelope marked ‘Kitale Synthetic’ in a cold storage room at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, the corn breeder knew he had stumbled on something special.

 The U.S. has traditionally been an agricultural powerhouse with a healthy trade surplus. But global dynamics are changing due to a confluence of political and economic factors. U.S. agricultural imports now exceed exports, and the trade deficit is projected to worsen in the coming years.

The ripple effects of increased tariffs under President Trump could extend to the $117 billion U.S. beer market, according to new research from a University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign agricultural economist who studies food supply chains.

This year, Champaign County 4-H’er Austin Ater celebrated his 14th birthday in an extraordinary way — by giving back.

If you ate, filled your gas tank, took medicine, or did laundry today, you likely participated in the bioeconomy. That’s the part of the economy that taps as its source material living, growing things.

Darin Joos, Crop Sciences Research Agronomist, has been named a 2025 Chancellor’s Staff Excellence Award recipient.

Joos began his Illinois career in 1994 as a graduate student and went on to lead the state’s crop variety testing program, which evaluated commercial varieties of corn, wheat, and soybean at 14 sites across Illinois. After nearly three decades in that role, he now manages the Crop Sciences Research and Education Center farms in Champaign.

With a strategic location in the Indian Ocean and a tropical climate that allows for year-round cultivation of diverse crops, the island country of Sri Lanka provides valuable opportunities for University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign students to learn, compare, and collaborate on topics of food and agribusiness management.

The College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences at the  University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign ann