Fried foods are popular with consumers, but their high fat content can contribute to health challenges like obesity and hypertension. If the food industry can offer lower-fat options of similar quality, people can more easily make health-conscious food choices.

When Steve Ericson walked into the Illinois State Fair as a young exhibitor in 1974, he couldn’t have imagined that one day he’d return, not to show livestock, but to help connect Illinois-grown food to families in need. Now, as Executive Director of Feeding Illinois, Ericson turns his lifelong connection to agriculture into a mission to fight hunger across the state.

In a world where increasing demands for food security and energy strain existing resources, scientists are looking for new ways to maximize both. One potential option, agrivoltaics, integrates solar photovoltaics with crops. A new study examines the agricultural and economic trade-offs that come with installing solar arrays on working farms across the Midwest.

Few pests eat away at farm profitability as much as soybean cyst nematode (SCN). Causing at least $1.5 billion in yield losses annually, it’s soybean’s single biggest threat. Unfortunately, soybean’s most effective tool, genetic resistance, is starting to fail. 

A new accounting of nitrogen pollution in the Mississippi-Atchafalaya River Basin (MARB) reveals a significant decline in recent decades, suggesting positive momentum for water quality goals in local watersheds and the Gulf.

Plastic products are ubiquitous in our food supply chain, shedding microplastics into every part of the human ecosystem. As they degrade, microplastics break down into even smaller fragments called nanoplastics — tiny particles that can affect biological molecules in ways not fully understood.

Dr. Salah Issa’s career in agricultural safety began in an unexpected way. Starting out at a graduate program in Ecological Sciences and Engineering at Purdue University as a self-described “city kid”, he was unaware that agricultural engineering was even a career option. It wasn’t until he took a course in agrosecurity that the world of agriculture, and its hazards, opened up to him. 

Researchers at Tezpur University in Assam, India, working with scientists at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Plants may look inert and harmless, but, at any given moment, they’re waging chemical warfare against attackers, preparing tissues to withstand freezing temperatures, or synthesizing compounds that become medicines for humans. These leafy biochemists produce over a million chemicals, or metabolites, to help them survive their rooted existence.