URBANA, Ill. — This time of year, a visit to the test plots at the University of Illinois is as much fun for farmers as a county fair is for kids.
It’s a season for field days highlighting a year’s worth of crop research at university farms.
Nick Seiter, University of Illinois entomologist and Extension specialist, offered a preview of some of the research that will be highlighted at various field days this summer.
Any Urbana-Champaign crop research tour must include an update from a team member of corn and soybean high-yield guru Fred Below, a professor well known for his “Seven Wonders of the Corn Yield World.”
“This is his 39th crop,” Connor Sible, a member of Below’s team, says of Below’s long research career.
The team routinely gets corn yields with 300 bu./acre averages.
Crop scientist Connor Sible is part of professor Fred Below’s research team focusing on how to get sustainably high corn and soybean yields.
This year his seven graduate students are following up on last year’s theme of “More Yield, Yes Please” with “Second Helpings” at the Aug. 2 field day, says Sible, a crop scientist who specializes in biological products and how they can improve fertilizer use efficiency and increase yields.
Residue management is a key to future success, says Sible, who has worked with Below for a decade as an undergrad, graduate and post-doctorate student. Reduce, reuse and recycle are the themes for managing residue, which Sible calls “nature’s biological.” The team studies fields with cover crops, double crops, and high-yield corn stover.
Because early planting has shown consistently higher yields for soybeans, Sible says the Below team will also talk about making adjustments to optimize the early crops.
Seiter, as an entomologist, is looking at one of the big yield robbers — corn rootworm. A lot of his research this year is one-off evaluations of trait and insecticide combinations and their impact on the rootworm population.
“Conditions are not a challenge to rootworms this year,” said Seiter, who doesn’t expect the weather to reduce rootworm populations despite the dry conditions in east central Illinois.
Some years, corn rootworm causes lodging damage. This year was so dry at the Urbana test plots at the end of June that corn fell over because of cracks in the soil, not rootworm damage.
Nearby, sorghum and corn grow side by side. The research here is looking at sorghum as a rotational alternative to corn which might reduce rootworm populations. Sorghum is not a good host for adult rootworm beetles, and it tolerates drought conditions better.
Areas of continuous corn with livestock in Iowa and northern Illinois are particularly prone to corn rootworm issues, he says.
The failure of traits resistant to corn rootworm has been slow and steady the last few years, Seiter says. This year everyone is watching RNAi technology “to see how well it works,” he says. Ribonucleic acid interference technology acts on corn rootworms as they feed on corn roots by turning off functions the pest needs to develop.
In a high tunnel, researcher Kacie Athey is excited to see parasitoid wasps eating aphids on a tomato leaf at the Sustainable Student Farm. The natural predator is doing the pest control job intended.
One of Athey’s research projects focuses on seeing if cut flowers growing near a crop — tomatoes, in this instance — helps or hurts with pest control. So far similar work has been inconclusive. The theory is that the farmer could sell the flowers as well as the specialty crop at farm stands or online to improve their profitability, she says, walking among the lupines, sunflowers, zinnias and other flowers.
Researcher and entomologist Kacie Athey is studying how growing cut flowers with tomatoes may affect pests.
Similar experiments are also being conducted at Murphysboro and Dixon Springs locations.
“We do tend to see different pests and pressures,” she says. “The flowers have an influence on pests. The results are mixed.”
In her observations and pest counts in the high tunnel, she found a sizable number of thrips, another natural predator of pests she wants to control. She is not certain yet if this winged insect, used in biocontrol, is a carryover from introducing them in experiments last year or is a result of the flowers this year.
“It’s complicated,” she says of the relationship between the various pests.
The organically managed but not Organic Certified crops grown in the greenhouse are a commercial business run by students as well as fodder for Athey’s research.
The next big project here this year concerns robotics in the high tunnels. The robots will detect specific insects and send out a concentrated spray of natural predators to control them. The two teams at the university are already working together, and a robot may be in the greenhouses on the Sustainable Student Farm Field Day Aug.7. This project is expected to be up and running next year.
Researcher Juan Arbelaez is looking at a different kind of intercropping in nearby fields growing oats and peas together as a drone, documenting the research, flies overhead.
Researcher and Extension specialist Juan Arbelaez explains intercropping studies of oats and peas at test plots at the University of Illinois.
Here, 40 varieties of spring oats and 12 varieties of spring peas are grown in plots to study the logistics, planting dates, costs and other factors of intercropping the legumes, says Arbelaez, assistant professor of international plant breeding.
The carefully documented work will look at the most efficient way to grow the crops and determine which varieties work best today. Some oats and peas appear to be harvestable at about the same time, others are not. Some have tall oat stands, others have taller peas. Some peas have many tendrils that seem to be clumping while other heavily tendriled peas seem to be effective, Arbelaez points out on the plot tour.
He is studying both the general and the specific mixability of the two crops to discover which varieties work best together.
“The theory is similar to developing a corn hybrid,” says the Extension specialist.
Next, he will also be doing similar trials with peas and triticale (a hybrid of wheat and rye). It is all part of looking at sustainable ways to introduce more diversity into cropping systems, he says.
