Two leaders from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign’s College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences — Dean Germán Bollero and Kaiyu Guan, director of the Agroecosystem Sustainability Center — have been honored with awards from agInnovation North Central, recognizing their contributions to advancing ag

Determining, analyzing, or predicting how crops will grow in the field takes time and labor. The interactions between genetics, environment and agricultural practices are challenging to measure. The newly published results of a five-year study on maize (or corn) demonstrate that autonomous ground robots can accurately and reliably capture this information.

Through a partnership among the College of ACES, the Illinois Department of Agriculture, and Feeding Illinois, student-raised livestock from the Illinois State Fair Sale of Champions is being transformed into meaningful support for local food banks — helping nourish neighbors and fight food insecurity.

When piglets don’t get enough milk in the first weeks of life, the chances of them thriving dramatically decline. In the U.S. pork production system, piglets with limited access to their mothers’ milk are typically “cross-fostered” with other sows. But in the E.U., a different solution is gaining ground. In certain circumstances, underfed piglets are artificially reared with milk replacer, mimicking feeding setups used in biomedical research.

In February, the USAID-funded Feed the Future Soybean Innovation Lab at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign was told to stop work, bringing an abrupt end to 12 years of progress toward developing a global soybean value chain supporting Sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Australia.

Summer at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign means it’s time to welcome future Illini to campus for ACES Family Academies, a beloved three-day experience where fun meets discovery. Hosted by the College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences, this interactive program runs July 9–11, 2025, and is open to kids ages 8–13 and their ACES alumni relatives.

The Interdisciplinary Health Sciences Institute has announced their 2025 Community-Academic Scholars. The program offers University of Illinois undergraduate students the opportunity to pursue community-based research projects in Urbana-Champaign over the summer.

Switchgrass has gripped Midwestern soils for millions of years, but soon, the earthbound prairie grass could fly. New studies from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign identify economic and environmental considerations that make switchgrass a candidate for sustainable aviation fuel.  

Scientists developed a machine-learning tool that can teach itself, with minimal external guidance, to differentiate between aerial images of flowering and nonflowering grasses — an advance that will greatly increase the pace of agricultural field research, they say. The work was conducted using images of thousands of varieties of Miscanthus grasses, each of which has its own flowering traits and timing.