Agriculture

URBANA, Ill. – A University of Illinois research team, led by Agricultural and Consumer Economics Professor David Bullock, received a $4 million award from the USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) to implement on-farm conservation practices.

URBANA, Ill. – What exactly is the relationship between soil nitrogen, corn yield, and nitrogen loss? Most farmers would be forgiven for assuming a straightforward linear relationship: more nitrogen, more grain yield, and maybe, more loss. That’s the assumption many nitrogen management models are based on, but it turns out there’s very little published science to back up that assumption.

URBANA, Ill. – As the climate trends warmer and drier, global food security increasingly hinges on crops’ ability to withstand drought. But are scientists and producers focusing on the right metric when measuring crop-relevant drought? Not exactly, according to new research from University of Illinois scientists, who urge the scientific community to redefine the term.

URBANA, Ill. – The Soybean Innovation Lab (SIL) at the University of Illinois has been selected by United States Agency for International Development (USAID) to lead a new $1 million project — Innovation to Impact (i2i), as part of Feed the Future, the U.S. Government’s global hunger and food security initiative.

CHICAGO — The Discovery Partners Institute (DPI) and The Grainger College of Engineering are expanding the City Scholars program to now include the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) and the Illinois Institute of Technology (Illinois Tech).

City Scholars also will pilot a food and agriculture-focused track in Spring 2021.

URBANA, Ill. – The Soybean Innovation Lab (SIL) at the University of Illinois has been selected by United States Agency for International Development (USAID) to lead a new $1 million project — Innovation to Impact (i2i), as part of Feed the Future, the U.S. Government’s global hunger and food security initiative. Efficient technology delivery for commercial uptake and economic sustainability requires a demand-driven industrial research framework.

URBANA, Ill. – The University of Illinois has been awarded $4.5 million from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) through its “Systems for Monitoring and Analytics for Renewable Transportation Fuels from Agricultural Resources and Management” (SMARTFARM) program. The funding will be used to calculate farm-scale carbon credits, allowing individual farmers to understand the value of their land and practices towards carbon trading markets.

CHICAGO, Ill. -- The Discovery Partners Institute (DPI) is launching eight world-class research teams from the University of Illinois System and partner universities with more than $1 million in seed funding.

The goal is to develop these multi-disciplinary teams into international centers of excellence that will achieve significant economic and societal impact. Each nascent team is receiving $125,000 as well as administrative and grant-writing support, access to corporate partners and DPI’s downtown Chicago office. 

URBANA, Ill. -- Biofuel and bioenergy systems are integral to scenarios for displacing fossil fuel use and producing negative emissions through carbon capture and storage. But the net greenhouse gas mitigation benefit of these systems has been controversial, due to concerns around carbon losses from changes in land use and foregone sequestration benefits from alternative land uses.

URBANA, Ill. – Representing some of the most troublesome agricultural weeds, waterhemp, smooth pigweed, and Palmer amaranth impact crop production systems across the U.S. and elsewhere with ripple effects felt by economies worldwide. In a landmark study, scientists have published the most comprehensive genome information to date for all three species, marking a new era of scientific discovery toward potential solutions.