CPSC

Agronomy Days at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign continues on with events scheduled into September, providing farmers, academics, and locals with a season-long series providing opportunities to discover the latest agronomic breakthroughs.

Every time Fred Below and Connor Sible meet with Illinois farmers, they get the same question. “What’s the story with these biologicals? Do they work?” 

When most growers plant corn, they expect perfect, uniform rows and plump and pearly yellow kernels lining the cob. But a group of USDA Agricultural Research Service scientists intentionally plant the misfits — some gnarled and speckled, others sprouting tassels where ears should be — to perpetuate the wide array of genetic variation in the Midwest’s most economically important crop. 

Stephen Long, Ikenberry Endowed Chair Emeritus of Plant Biology and Crop Sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, has been selected as a 2025 Top Agri-food Pioneer (TAP) by the World Food Prize Foundation. The honor recognizes trailblazers who are driving change in agriculture and global food security.

Drones can now detect subtle soybean canopy damage from dicamba at one ten-thousandth of the herbicide’s label rate — simulating vapor drift — eight days after application. This advancement in remote sensing from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign provides a science-based tool to accurately detect and report crop damage at the field scale, reducing human error and bias. 

While the majority of Midwestern farmers rotate corn and soybeans, commodity prices and corn yield advantages compel some to plant corn year after year. Although foundational research on the benefits of corn-soybean rotation goes back decades, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign scientists are working to address remaining holistic questions about crop yield, environmental impacts, and economic returns under various crop rotation scenarios. 

The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Agronomy Days series officially kicked off in May, providing Illinois farmers with the opportunity to discover the latest agronomic breakthroughs.

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

“It’s when you plant one thing, then another, then–”
“Crop rotation!”
“Correct. Next. Um… you have lots of places to live. But they’re all broken up.”
“Landscape mosaic?”
“No, close, you want them to be together–”
“Habitat connectivity!”

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.

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.

The National Soybean Germplasm Collection, maintained by a small but mighty USDA Agricultural Research Service team, is the country’s only public soybean seed bank, encompassing nearly the whole of the crop’s genetic diversity and impacting nearly every soybean product grown today — not just in the U.S., but across the world.