UI to receive part of $20 million grant for corn research

URBANA – The University of Illinois' Urbana campus will share in a $20 million USDA grant to study how to grow corn in a changing climate.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture's National Institute of Food and Agriculture has awarded a $20 million grant to nine Midwestern land-grant universities and two USDA Agricultural Research Service institutions.

About $680,000 goes to the UI, said Jennifer Shike, a communications specialist with the UI's College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences.

Iowa State University will be serving as the lead investigator. Collaborators also include Ohio State University, the University of Wisconsin, Purdue University, the University of Missouri, Lincoln University of Missouri, Michigan State University, the University of Minnesota, South Dakota State University and USDA facilities in Columbus and Coshocton, Ohio.

UI Department of Crop Science faculty members Emerson Nafziger and Maria Villamil will lead the UI's research efforts to collect and analyze data over the next five years.

The federal government has established long-term goals to reduce the use of energy, nitrogen and water by 10 percent and increase carbon sequestration by 15 percent through resilient agriculture and forest production systems.

Villamil said she couldn't predict that outcome but said her team will model future scenarios on outcomes such as global warming that could leave Illinois with a climate like that of Texas today.

Midwestern weather could "get a little complicated, with more extreme events and more frequent extreme weather events," she said.

Nafziger has been collecting such data for several years. His data will be used along with data from the other institutions.

Researchers will begin collecting data on carbon, nitrogen and water movement this spring from 21 research sites in eight states.

"We'll be creating a network to do multilevel, multi-institutional studies on older data and new to create scenarios based on change in climate, in order to create systems with less environmental impact, like greenhouse gases," Villamil said.

The region including the member institutions produces 8 billion bushels of corn, 64 percent of the annual harvest in the United States.

Special equipment will be used to monitor greenhouse gas emissions at many of the sites. The team will integrate field and climate data to create models and evaluate crop management practices, a press release noted.

"With this funding, we will be able to measure some things that we couldn't measure before," Nafziger said in a news release. He was out of town and unavailable for comment.

(Source: http://www.news-gazette.com/news/agriculture/2011-02-18/ui-receive-part-20-million-grant-corn-research.html)