Sandesh Poudel and Abichal Poudel (no relation), doctoral students in the College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, have received 2025 Foundation for Food and Agriculture Research (FFAR) fellowships. 

While the majority of Midwestern farmers rotate corn and soybeans, commodity prices and corn yield advantages compel some to plant corn year after year. Although foundational research on the benefits of corn-soybean rotation goes back decades, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign scientists are working to address remaining holistic questions about crop yield, environmental impacts, and economic returns under various crop rotation scenarios. 

The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Agronomy Days series officially kicked off in May, providing Illinois farmers with the opportunity to discover the latest agronomic breakthroughs.

As a rising senior with an animal and veterinary science major at Tuskegee University — home of the Golden Tigers — Kyeaira Faustin does not call the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign her everyday campus. But becoming a temporary Illini during last year’s Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) at the Center for Digital Agriculture (CDA) revealed new passions that Faustin is now pursuing back at home.

The global food system faces growing risks from climate change, even as farmers seek to adapt, according to a June 18 study in Nature.

In contrast to previous studies suggesting that warming could increase global food production, the researchers estimate that every additional degree Celsius of global warming on average will drag down the world’s ability to produce food by 120 calories per person per day, or 4.4% of current daily consumption. 

In a study of newborn piglets, infection with influenza A was associated with disruptions in the piglets’ nasal and gut microbiomes and with potentially detrimental changes in gene activity in the hippocampus, a brain structure that plays a central role in learning and memory. Maternal vaccination against the virus during pregnancy appeared to offer some protection from those changes in the piglets.

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

“It’s when you plant one thing, then another, then–”
“Crop rotation!”
“Correct. Next. Um… you have lots of places to live. But they’re all broken up.”
“Landscape mosaic?”
“No, close, you want them to be together–”
“Habitat connectivity!”

Faculty from the College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences are teaming up with the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation (Embrapa) on groundbreaking projects to tackle climate change and drive the future of the bioeconomy.  

The three selected projects from a competitive open call for proposals are: 

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.