20 of America's leading research universities have cooperative extension programs in 16 states across the nation that offer farmers, ranchers, and communities new research-based vital, practical information to help address their needs, face challenges, and improve practices.
Through these state extension programs, land-grant colleges and universities offer their resources to farmers by bringing new evidence-based science, business operations ideas, and modern technologies that can help them do better. To serve their needs, extension works closely with farmers and ranchers who in turn help identify new emerging research questions for universities to explore that might further improve agricultural producers' success.
With local county extension offices in over 950 counties nationwide, America's leading research universities help farmers, ranchers, and rural communities do better by operating extension programs in Texas, Georgia, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Indiana, New Jersey, Arizona, California, Florida, Illinois, Maryland, Minnesota, Missouri, Wisconsin, and New York.
A few recent examples of the ways that America's leading research universities are making discoveries to help American farmers do better include:
Researchers at Michigan State University want to be able to help farmers grow crops with genes that give their plants the best chance to withstand threats such as drought and disease, but they face limits since we don't yet know what every one of a plant's genes do. So university plant biologists have teamed up with artificial intelligence researchers to harness the power of machine learning to make informed predictions about what particular plant genes with unknown functions do and then help guide scientists in designing experiments to test those predictions. One researcher said there could be thousands of genes important to stress responses --for instance how a plant responds to heat stress-- but the machine learning model can help predict which genes are the most important for that. This pioneering approach, if it works, could accelerate future agricultural science breakthroughs that would more rapidly offer farmers crops that are increasingly resilient to extreme weather or disease.
Engineers at the University of California San Diego have developed nanoparticles, fashioned from plant viruses, that can deliver pesticide molecules to soil depths that were previously unreachable. This would help farmers who, in order to reach the root level where root-damaging nematodes wreak havoc, often have to resort to applying larger amounts of pesticide as well as water to wash it down, potentially contaminating additional soil and groundwater. This advance could potentially help farmers more effectively target parasitic nematodes that plague the root zones of crops, all while minimizing their costs, pesticide use and environmental toxicity.
While crop rotation and other farming practices have long reflected the benefits of a mix of different plants, researchers at the University of Kansas uncovered a potentially important reason why. Microorgansms that eat a specific plant species thrived in low-diversity plant fields and thus suppressed yields. Planting different crops rather than just one plant species actually helped control the number of harmful pathogens in the soil, and increased yield as a result, a finding with possible new implications for crop rotation, polyculture farming methods, and pathogen management..
After a new fungal disease –previously unknown in the U.S.-- started showing up in farm crops in Indiana in 2015, researchers at Purdue University leapt into action to attack the problem – known as “tar spot” – from every angle possible. They've developed ways to detect the disease early in the crop cycle, learned more about when fungicides could be most effectively and efficiently applied to affected crops, and offer their expertise in helping local farmers diagnose potential cases and protecting the state’s corn crop yields.
Researchers at Michigan State University have created a remote sensing system aimed at helping farmers determine optimal crop water patterns, offering them better information to decide when crops need water and in what amounts. The technology uses multiple affordable sensors to monitor in-field soil and environmental conditions and then uses algorithms to enable precise irrigation. Information is accessible to farmers via an app on their cell phones. While increased crop yield with reduced water consumption is the biggest advantage, the system has proven an excellent tool for improving the overall health of crops since it allows farmers to determine the best application times for spray chemicals like fungicides.
Researchers have installed 80 of these systems on farms across Michigan by late 2023, and in on-farm consultations and demonstrations involving over 50,000 acres in 2022 alone, the researchers helped farmers reduce water use by up to nearly 15 billion gallons while maintaining yields.
Satellite-based remote sensing allows us to see much more than we can see when standing on the ground. Soybean farmers fighting aphids traditionally determine when and where to apply insecticides by walking through fields and counting aphids on individual plants-- a laborious, time-consuming task. Researchers at the University of Minnesota have found that, when combined with artificial intelligence, remote satellite sensing could dramatically improve management of soybean aphid, an invasive pest that negatively impacts soybean yield and quality. This breakthrough combination will allow farmers to more quickly and efficiently determine exactly which fields have high enough levels of infestation to require insecticide applications in order to protect the yields.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture's National Institute for Food and Agriculture (NIFA) funds applied research in a range of high-priority areas such as food security, climate variability and change, water, sustainable bioenergy, childhood obesity prevention, food safety and more.
Banner Image Credit: Integrative Biology, Crop Science, and Biophysics and Quantitative Biology students at University of Illinois measure levels of photosynthesis in corn plants being grown at the Morrow Plots, the oldest experimental agricultural field in America.
