The U.S. Department of Energy Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) has announced $5 million in funding to the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and partner institutions to develop a new variety of corn called NSave that will reduce nitrogen fertilizer use and greenhouse gas emissions while maintaining crop yield.
Read the full release at aces.illinois.edu/news...
Last month, the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) published their 2024 Water Affordability Needs Assessment Report. Research from professor Diego Cardoso played a pivotal role in shaping the EPA's Water Affordability Needs Assessment report to Congress, which found that 12.1-19.2 million U.S. households lack affordable water access. The EPA incorporated novel methods for household-level affordability analysis developed by Diego Cardoso and Casey Wichman as well as their published dataset and procedures for matching water rates to census demographic data.
Researchers analyzed the financial and environmental costs and benefits of four biofuels crops used to produce sustainable aviation fuels in the U.S. They found that each feedstock — corn stover, energy sorghum, miscanthus or switchgrass — performed best in a specific region of the rainfed United States. Their study will help growers and policymakers select the feedstocks most suited to meeting goals like reducing production costs, lowering greenhouse gas emissions and building soil carbon stocks.
Read more at Illinois News Bureau...
Organic farming can support soil microorganisms that promote plant defenses and reduce insect pests. But not all organic practices are equally beneficial for soil microbes, and it’s important to understand farmer motivations in order to encourage the adoption of microbiome-supportive efforts. A new study from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and Cornell University looks at how organic farmers’ beliefs about the microbiome influence their soil management practices.
Read the full release at aces.illinois.edu/news...
Farms have a promising opportunity to fight climate change using a simple but plentiful asset: soil. Soil has the capacity to store carbon in amounts that can meaningfully offset greenhouse gas emissions through retaining carbon (otherwise called carbon sequestration).
The private sector has established corporate goals for reducing contributions to climate change by offsetting emissions, with one method being carbon sequestration on agricultural lands. The incentivized, voluntary markets for agricultural soil carbon sequestration are a potential opportunity for farmers to meet these corporate goals.
