Using spray drones in agriculture

It's a familiar sight for many—a ground sprayer slowly making rounds in a field, applying pesticides to row crops to give producers the best chance of protecting crops from pests and seeing high yields at harvest. These ...

Prairie strips transform farmland conservation

Modern agriculture's large monoculture fields grow a lot of corn and soybeans, planted annually. The outputs from row crops can be measured both in dollars paid in the market and also in non-market costs, known as externalities. ...

Clover-corn combo benefits corn, soil, business

Living mulch functions like mulch on any farm or garden except—it's alive. No, it's not out of the latest horror movie; living mulch is a system farmers can use to benefit both profits and the soil. While the system has ...

Trees and shrubs offer new food crops to diversify the farm

What if we could design a landscape that would provide a variety of nutritious foods, high-quality habitat, and ecosystem services, while also delivering a healthy profit to the landowner? According to University of Illinois ...

Lower nitrogen losses with perennial biofuel crops

Perennial biofuel crops such as miscanthus, whose high yields have led them to be considered an eventual alternative to corn in producing ethanol, are now shown to have another beneficial characteristic–the ability to reduce ...

Combating USDA's top-ranked invasive insect

First detected in the United States a decade ago, the brown marmorated stink bug (BMSB) is now in at least 39 states, is wreaking havoc in homes and gardens, and is a major economic threat to orchard fruits, garden vegetables ...

Corn could help farmers fight devastating weed

Versatile and responsive to management, corn is grown throughout the world for everything from food to animal feed to fuel. A new use for corn could soon join that list, as researchers in China investigate the crop's ability ...

page 1 from 3