URBANA, Ill. – Pumpkin growers dread the tiny tan scabs that form on their fruit, each lesion a telltale sign of bacterial spot disease. The specks don’t just mar the fruit’s flesh, they provide entry points for rot-inducing fungus and other pathogens that can destroy pumpkins and other cucurbits from the inside out. Either way, farmers pay the price, with marketable yields reduced by as much as 90%.

URBANA, Ill.  – Each year, more than 20 agricultural workers in the U.S. die in grain bin accidents, and the number of fatalities is increasing. Stand Up 4 Grain Safety Week is an annual event that promotes awareness, education, and training on grain bin safety.

URBANA, Ill. – Corn didn’t start out as the powerhouse crop it is today. No, for most of the thousands of years it was undergoing domestication and improvement, corn grew humbly within the limits of what the environment and smallholder farmers could provide.

URBANA, Ill. -- Agricultural scientists who study climate change often focus on how increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide levels will affect crop yields. But rising temperatures are likely to complicate the picture, researchers report in a new review of the topic.

URBANA, Ill. ­– For Will, Clayton, and Dallas Glazik, making spirits from Illinois-grown heirloom corn is a labor of love. The brothers own and operate Silver Tree Beer & Spirits from their fifth-generation family farm in Paxton.

“We grew up on a certified organic farm, and we wanted to get back into farming and figure out a way that we could bring something of value to the farm,” says Will Glazik, the oldest brother and Silver Tree director of sales.

Urbana, Ill. —  The new Illinois Regenerative Agriculture Initiative (IRAI) is inviting interested farmers, researchers, nonprofit groups, and others with a stake in resilient agriculture and food production to join its second public meeting on April 9.

Lurking in more than 99% of soybean fields across the Midwest is a worm capable of feeding on and damaging entire crops. Millions of dollars have been spent trying to combat these destructive pests through the development of resistant soybean plants, but after decades of successful use, those solutions have begun to fail. Once again, soybean production is in trouble, and researchers are being forced back to the drawing board, but this time they are looking to attack the nematode from within.

Researchers at the Center for Advanced Bioenergy and Bioproducts Innovation (CABBI) found that transitioning land enrolled in the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) to bioenergy agriculture can be ad­­­vantageous for American landowners, the government, and the environment.

URBANA, Ill. -- As most of us learned in school, plants use sunlight to synthesize carbon dioxide (CO₂) and water into carbohydrates in a process called photosynthesis. But nature’s “factories” don’t just provide us with food — they also generate insights into how ecosystems will react to a changing climate and carbon-filled atmosphere.

URBANA, Ill. – From flooded spring fields to summer hailstorms and drought, farmers are well aware the weather is changing. It often means spring planting can’t happen on time or has to happen twice to make up for catastrophic losses of young seedlings.