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Corn after soy: New study quantifies rotation benefits and trade-offs

While the majority of Midwestern farmers rotate corn and soybeans, commodity prices and corn yield advantages compel some to plant corn year after year.

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Fifteen years of excellence in agricultural ecology education

If you peek into a Turner Hall classroom at the end of the semester, you might see something unusual.

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Review: Heat-resilient crops are within reach — given enough time and money

Laboratory and field experiments have repeatedly shown that modifying the process of photosynthesis or the physical characteristics of plants can make crops more resilient to hotter temperatures. Scientists can now alter the abundance or orientation of leaves, change leaf chemistry to improve heat tolerance and adjust key steps in the process of photosynthesis to overcome bottlenecks, researchers report in a new review in the journal Science.

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Safeguarding soybeans: Preserving genetic diversity for a resilient future

Inside a large walk-in refrigerator on the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign campus, thousands of envelopes hold the fate of global food security, not to mention a significant portion of the world’s economy.

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Report: ‘Future-proofing’ crops will require urgent, consistent effort

In a review in The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, Stephen Long, a professor of crop sciences and of plant biology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, describes research efforts to “future-proof” the crops that are essential to feeding a hungry world in a changing climate.

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Four ACES faculty receive Campus Awards for Excellence in Instruction

The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign each year presents Campus Awards for Excellence in Instruction to exceptional faculty and staff members, graduate teaching assistants and advisers campuswide. This year’s recipients, four of which are from the College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences, were honored at a ceremony on April 15.

2025 ACES award recipients include:

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Breaking the phenotype bottleneck with autonomous robots

Determining, analyzing, or predicting how crops will grow in the field takes time and labor. The interactions between genetics, environment and agricultural practices are challenging to measure. The newly published results of a five-year study on maize (or corn) demonstrate that autonomous ground robots can accurately and reliably capture this information.

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