Agriculture

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign corn breeders know profitability is about more than yield.

Bathed in an otherworldly purple glow, James Santiago points to a curled leaf at the base of a spinach plant. “This is an issue we saw all the time at the vertical farm where I worked in Virginia. We don't know exactly what's going on, but I think it has something to do with water stress, which is weird because the plants are growing in water.”

The energy that plants capture from sunlight through photosynthesis provides the source of nearly all of humanity’s food. Yet the process of photosynthesis has inefficiencies that limit crop productivity, especially in a rapidly changing world. A new review by University of Illinois scientists and collaborators reflects on how improving photosynthesis can bring us closer to food security.

The U.S. is largely self-sufficient in agricultural food production, supported by a well-developed storage and interstate trade system. However, extreme weather events put increasing pressure on agriculture, potentially impacting the country’s ability to provide food for its growing population and underscoring the importance of maintaining a resilient food supply chain. 

Cover crops improve soil health and water quality, prevent nutrient loss, and reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but they’re only grown on about 5% of U.S. agricultural lands. That’s despite billions in annual federal investments, primarily in the form of cost-share and incentive payments to farmers who adopt conservation practices.   

A new study from the Agroecosystem Sustainability Center (ASC) of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign provides one of the most comprehensive explanations to date of how tile drainage, a common agricultural practice, enhances the functioning of agricultural landscapes. Although tile drainage has been widely studied as an important form of agricultural infrastructure, the new study built a comprehensive framework to explain why tile drainage is so effective across a wide range of outcomes.

Farmers plant or preserve riparian buffers for various reasons, such as improving water quality, controlling erosion, or maintaining hunting habitat. Now, a new study from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign underscores the benefits of riparian buffers to terrestrial biodiversity, finding that for every 10% increase in forest cover, an additional species is present. 

Developing a thriving soybean market in Africa doesn’t just represent a new crop in the rotation for smallholder farmers — it builds an entire ecosystem of seed companies, processors, and trade partners ready to enter the global soybean market.

Agricultural producers and manufacturers often need information about crop attributes, from nutrient content to chemical composition, to make management decisions. In recent years, multispectral imaging has emerged as a useful tool for product analysis, but the required equipment is expensive. Standard RGB cameras are much more affordable, but their images show only visible attributes.

 The U.S. has traditionally been an agricultural powerhouse with a healthy trade surplus. But global dynamics are changing due to a confluence of political and economic factors. U.S. agricultural imports now exceed exports, and the trade deficit is projected to worsen in the coming years.