Every time Fred Below and Connor Sible meet with Illinois farmers, they get the same question. “What’s the story with these biologicals? Do they work?” 

When most growers plant corn, they expect perfect, uniform rows and plump and pearly yellow kernels lining the cob. But a group of USDA Agricultural Research Service scientists intentionally plant the misfits — some gnarled and speckled, others sprouting tassels where ears should be — to perpetuate the wide array of genetic variation in the Midwest’s most economically important crop. 

Stephen Long, Ikenberry Endowed Chair Emeritus of Plant Biology and Crop Sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Drones can now detect subtle soybean canopy damage from dicamba at one ten-thousandth of the herbicide’s label rate — simulating vapor drift — eight days after application.

While the majority of Midwestern farmers rotate corn and soybeans, commodity prices and corn yield advantages compel some to plant corn year after year.

The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Agronomy Days series officially kicked off in May, provid

If you peek into a Turner Hall classroom at the end of the semester, you might see something unusual.

Laboratory and field experiments have repeatedly shown that modifying the process of photosynthesis or the physical characteristics of plants can make crops more resilient to hotter temperatures. Scientists can now alter the abundance or orientation of leaves, change leaf chemistry to improve heat tolerance and adjust key steps in the process of photosynthesis to overcome bottlenecks, researchers report in a new review in the journal Science.

Inside a large walk-in refrigerator on the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign campus, thousands of envelopes hold the fate of global food security, not to mention a significant portion of the world’s economy.

In a review in The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, Stephen Long, a professor of crop sciences and of plant biology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, describes research efforts to “future-proof” the crops that are essential to feeding a hungry world in a changing climate.