Agriculture

It's midday at the Seed to Table summer camp in the Jackie Joyner-Kersee Food, Agriculture, Nutrition Innovation Center (JJK FAN) in East St. Louis, Ill. The kids have spent the morning learning how to plant, tend to and, yes, even weed a vegetable garden. Now the campers are pivoting into the kitchen to make healthy produce-based snacks with Grace Margherio, a 4-H youth development educator with University of Illinois Extension. "After Seed to Table," Margherio says, "they can visualize how their food grows on plants and want to be more involved in growing and cooking it."

As climate change increases the frequency of drought, excessive rainfall, and other extreme weather events, farmers face growing uncertainty about crop production. Understanding how farmers perceive and respond to that uncertainty can help improve agricultural policy and climate adaptation strategies.

With summer just around the corner, Agronomy Days will soon return to the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. The season-long series teaches Illinois growers the latest breakthroughs in productivity, profitability, and sustainability.

The livestock industry is changing quickly. Pig populations are increasing, farmers are decreasing, and tools are needed to address the widening gap.

Tile drainage is common in U.S. Midwest agricultural fields, helping to remove excess water and aerate the soil. While the practice enhances crop productivity, it can cause phosphorus to leak into nearby waterways, where it contributes to harmful algal blooms. Directing tile-drain runoff through a structure filled with biochar – a form of charcoal produced from organic waste – provides a potential remedy for phosphorus pollution, but the method is novel and not fully explored.

Larry Dallas’ farm in Central Illinois’ Douglas County is as flat as it gets. That’s a good thing for planting straight rows and maneuvering farm equipment in the field, but there’s a major downside, too.

“Heavier rain is hard for us to deal with because of the poorly drained soils and the lack of any roll to the ground. It's hard for the water to get away when the rain starts,” Dallas said. “We have installed a lot of drainage tile trying to mitigate that.”

Precision agriculture first gained traction in the 1990s, when GPS technology made it possible for farm equipment to map and manage fields with a level of detail that was not possible before. Farmers could accurately apply fertilizer or seed at different rates across a field, responding to variations in field conditions.

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. Surprisingly, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign-led study doesn’t credit the change to reduced fertilizer application, but instead to cleaner air and more efficient nitrogen uptake by modern corn hybrids.