URBANA, Ill. – A new University of Illinois program will train beginner specialty crop growers in every aspect of farm operation and management. The year-long Illinois Small Farm Apprenticeship Program offers new farmers opportunities to learn by doing and to deepen that experiential knowledge with lessons from faculty experts in soil science, pest management, and more.

University of Illinois, but now there’s another reason to head south of campus Oct. 2. Kids and families are invited to the first-ever Crop Sciences Harvest Open House to explore all things agriculture.  

For U.S. farmers, enormous GPS-guided equipment makes easier work of planting and harvesting thousands of acres each season. Now, thanks to a partnership between UIUC’s Center for Digital Agriculture,  a collaboration among the College of ACES, Grainger College of Engineering and NCSA, and robotics start-up EarthSense, some of the work is being assigned to machines of a much smaller scale.

URBANA, Ill. – Urban agriculture is booming, but there’s often a hidden danger lurking in city soils: lead. A recent University of Illinois study showed universally elevated lead levels in soils across Chicago, an urban ag hotspot.

URBANA, Ill. – For sixty-odd years, the University of Illinois held a single Agronomy Day at the end of August, inviting farmers and ag industry stakeholders to learn the latest advancements directly from researchers. The pandemic and other forces inspired a change this year, and today Agronomy Days events stretch across the entire season. In August, three events stand out.

URBANA, Ill. – With the rising cost of nitrogen fertilizer and its impacts on air and water quality, University of Illinois researchers want to help farmers make more informed fertilizer rate decisions. Their latest modeling effort aims to do that by examining the role of pre-growing season weather on soil nitrogen dynamics and end-of-season corn yield.

URBANA, Ill. – Although about 20% of Illinois cropping systems are planted to continuous corn, it’s nearly impossible to find fields planted this way for decades at a time. Yet long-term experiments like one at the University of Illinois, including over 40 years of continuous corn under different nitrogen fertilizer rates, provide incredible learning opportunities and soil management lessons for researchers and farmers alike. 

Yi-Cheng Wang, assistant professor in the Department of Food Science and Human Nutrition, received funding from the USDA’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) for a project to develop effective social media marketing strategies for small and medium-sized farms.

Urbana, Ill. — The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced today that it is funding a new collaboration between two institutes and a research center at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign that will create an integrated farm of the future in the U.S. Midwest.

URBANA, Ill. – Nitrogen fertilizer has major implications for crop yields and environmental health, specifically water quality in the Gulf of Mexico. Federal and state governments have shied away from regulating nitrogen fertilizer use, but voluntary and incentives-based programs have not been particularly successful; the oxygen-starved “dead zone” in the Gulf remains much larger than goals set by the federal-state Hypoxia Task Force.