DISCOVER
Volume 1 | Issue 1
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS COLLEGE OF AGRICULTURAL, CONSUMER AND ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES
Agricu lt d&
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WHAT WE DO + WHY IT MATTERS
Simply put, researchers in the College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences are changing lives. With expertise in food and agriculture, environment and water, family and communities, health and wellness, and computing and data, their reach is both broad and deep. But uniting them is a commitment to solving real-world problems that affect people and places in central Illinois, the United States, and the globe. Here, we showcase a fraction of our world-class research in the area of food and agriculture, demonstrating tangible improvements to food security, agroecosystem health, sustainable livestock and crop production, and consumer behaviors.
HACKING PHOTOSYNTHESIS: THE RIPE PROJECT With current predictions putting the global population at 9.8 billion by 2050, it is urgent to dramatically improve yields of staple crops. Scientists with the Realizing Increased Photosynthetic Efficiency (RIPE) project are engineering plants to photosynthesize more efficiently, with successes in the lab, greenhouse, and field already showing up to 40 percent increases in productivity. The RIPE team is now translating these successes to staple food crops, such as soybean, cassava, cowpea, and rice to evaluate their impact on food yield. Ultimately, the team is helping to feed the world with higher-yielding crops that will also increase farmers’ income and opportunities.
$83M $25 million: Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (2012) $45 million: Gates Foundation; FFAR; UK DID (2017) $13 million: Gates Foundation (2018)
OUTSMARTING AGRICULTURAL WEEDS Agricultural weeds represent a major cost to farmers, both in terms of chemical control and yield losses when control efforts fail. And failure is becoming more common in waterhemp, an important corn and soybean weed that has evolved resistance to multiple herbicides. By examining historical records from over 100 farms, Illinois crop scientists discovered management can make all the difference: Farmers tank-mixing multiple herbicides were 83 times less likely to battle resistant waterhemp than those rotating herbicides year-to-year. The scientists also demonstrated that farmers could knock down resistance with farm-to-farm coordination. Although it’s too soon to see a major reduction in resistance, many farmers are taking the new approach. * Hausman et al. 2016. Weed Technology
Potential yield loss in Illinois from waterhemp*
40%
70%