URBANA, Ill. – For the first time, the University of Illinois’ annual Agronomy Day will take place in-person in multiple locations around the state throughout summer 2021. And, like last year’s virtual event, presentations will be made available online to those unable to travel or safely attend in-person events. The adjustments extend the event’s practical, science-based content to more participants than ever.

URBANA, Ill. – With a growing number of states legalizing the sale and personal cultivation of cannabis, including medical and recreational marijuana and hemp, farmers and home growers need to know the ins and outs of the crop. Now, enthusiasts and full-scale producers alike can learn to classify and manage cannabis production in an online course through the University of Illinois.

URBANA, Ill. – Alex Pate is on a mission to make sure fellow Chicagoans have access to healthy, locally grown foods. As a farm manager with City Farm, the oldest sustainable urban farm in the city, Pate collaborates with mutual aid organizations to get free produce in the hands of those who need it.

URBANA, Ill. – Sweet corn growers and processors could be bringing in more profits by exploiting natural density tolerance traits in certain hybrids. That’s according to 2019 research from USDA Agricultural Research Service (ARS) and University of Illinois scientists.

URBANA, Ill. -- New studies from the Center for Advanced Bioenergy and Bioproducts Innovation (CABBI) shed more light on the economic and environmental costs of mandates in the Renewable Fuels Standard (RFS), a federal program to expand the nation’s biofuels sector.

Illinois is undergoing a rapid change in weather patterns that already has started to transform the state and could affect the future of farming, a major new scientific assessment by The Nature Conservancy in Illinois reveals.

URBANA, Ill. – Australian pineapple, Danish trout, and Midwestern U.S. corn farmers are not often lumped together under the same agricultural umbrella. But they and many others who raise crops and animals face a common problem: excess nitrogen in drainage water. Whether it flows out to the Great Barrier Reef or the Gulf of Mexico, the nutrient contributes to harmful algal blooms that starve fish and other organisms of oxygen.

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. – 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.