CPSC

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. 

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.

Summer is back, which means the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign will return with its Agronomy Days series, where Illinois growers can learn more about the latest productivity, profitability, and sustainability breakthroughs developed by experts.

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:

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.

Switchgrass has gripped Midwestern soils for millions of years, but soon, the earthbound prairie grass could fly. New studies from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign identify economic and environmental considerations that make switchgrass a candidate for sustainable aviation fuel.  

Scientists developed a machine-learning tool that can teach itself, with minimal external guidance, to differentiate between aerial images of flowering and nonflowering grasses — an advance that will greatly increase the pace of agricultural field research, they say. The work was conducted using images of thousands of varieties of Miscanthus grasses, each of which has its own flowering traits and timing.