Secure & Sustainable Agriculture | Institute for Sustainability, Energy, and Environment | Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research and Innovation

New International Research Platform to Cut Agricultural Emissions by Improving Nitrogen Use

A combine harvester moves through a golden wheat field, cutting grain and kicking up dust under a bright blue sky.

Researchers from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign are playing a key role in a new international research effort to reduce agricultural emissions and improve nitrogen management in farming systems. Launching this year, the international research platform Agricultural Nitrogen Use Efficiency Platform, or AgNUE, will work over the next five years to transform how nitrogen is managed in agriculture. The overarching goal is to reduce environmental losses without compromising crop productivity. To reach this goal, the platform will collect comprehensive data from intensively monitored field sites to improve the accuracy of models that simulate and predict nitrogen dynamics, and to assess how different practices affect nitrogen emissions, agricultural productivity, and the environment.

Nitrogen fertilizer is essential for global food security, but when mismanaged, it contributes to significant environmental impacts, including greenhouse gas emissions, air and water pollution, as well as ecosystem degradation.

Despite decades of research, the proportion of applied nitrogen fertilizer that is actually taken up by crops remains below 50% in many crops. This means that more than half of the nitrogen applied to fields is lost, creating a cascade of environmental and economic costs.

One key reason is that many of today’s models used to estimate how fertilizer moves through soil and how much is lost to air and water rely on data of suboptimal quality. Such data do not fully reflect how nitrogen behaves in real fields under changing weather, soil conditions, and management practices. Improving these models is crucial, as they help bridge the gap between scientific understanding of nitrogen cycling and the implementation of policies designed to mitigate nitrogen pollution.

AgNUE addresses this challenge by creating the first international network dedicated to measuring and understanding how nitrogen moves through agricultural fields. Spanning Europe and the United States, the initiative brings together leading research institutions to collect comparable, high-quality field data under different soil types, climates, and farming systems.

Wendy Yang standing in sunflower field — Wendy Yang.

“If we want to reduce nitrogen losses at scale, we need models that reflect what actually happens in the field,” says Diego Abalos, professor and PI of the project, Aarhus University. “AgNUE is designed to close the gap between measurements, models, and real-world decision-making.”

Illinois professors Wendy Yang and Kaiyu Guan, with support from the Institute for Sustainability, Energy, and Environment, will contribute to AgNUE through field-based research and advanced modeling. At the field level, Yang, a professor in plant biology, will lead the Illinois field research site in central Illinois, which represents the highly productive corn-soybean systems of the U.S. Midwest. According to Yang, the project’s strength lies in its comprehensive approach, which brings together field measurements, experiments to understand underlying processes, microbiology, and modeling to better characterize the system as a whole and improve predictive accuracy.

“Nitrogen moves through agricultural systems via complex interactions among crops, soil microbes, and their environment. The comprehensive approach of AgNUE is a game-changer for understanding how the systems behave and evaluating practices aimed at improving fertilizer use by crops,” said Yang.

Kaiyu Guan in a light blue button-down shirt stands in front of tall green crop plants in warm sunlight. — Kaiyu Guan.

Yang also serves as co-lead for soil microbiology, helping the broader team better understand how soil microbes influence nitrogen cycling, nitrous oxide emissions, and nitrogen use efficiency. That work will help connect field measurements to the biological processes driving emissions and strengthen the scientific foundation for mitigation strategies.

Guan, a professor in the Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences, co-leads work focused on explainable AI to identify the key factors driving nitrous oxide fluxes and improve the accuracy of process-based models. He also leads the development of AI-enabled model-data fusion tools to quantify and reduce uncertainty in emissions predictions across diverse agricultural systems.

“Illinois is at the forefront of using advanced models to capture the complex biogeochemical processes governing nitrogen in crops and soils. The rich, high-resolution dataset generated by AgNUE across diverse agricultural systems will be transformative. Not only will it enhance our ability to track nutrient fates through the environment after it leaves the field, but it will enable us to provide valuable tools and guidance to farmers,” said Guan.

A new benchmark for nitrogen research

At the core of AgNUE is a network of twelve intensively monitored field sites, known as “supersites,” including one located at the Crop Sciences and Education Center near the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign campus. Across all sites, nitrogen inputs, transformations, and losses are measured continuously and in much greater detail than before. These measurements are combined with advanced isotopic techniques and microbial studies to better understand what drives nitrogen losses.

For the first time, results from coordinated nitrogen balance experiments will be stored in an open, central data repository with harmonized quality assurance procedures, creating a unique benchmark dataset for testing and improving a wide range of models.

“Better data is the foundation for better models,” says Alex Woodley, Associate Professor and Co-PI at North Carolina State University. “By working across countries and production systems, AgNUE will significantly improve our ability to predict nitrogen losses and evaluate mitigation strategies under real conditions.”

From science to policy and practice

The Illinois team also plans to work closely with farmers and other stakeholders to better understand the practices most relevant to the region and help ensure the research addresses real-world needs. Together, these contributions position Illinois as a key partner in translating detailed field and microbial data into scalable, decision-ready tools that can support better nitrogen management in the U.S., Europe, and beyond.

“Agriculture is a significant contributor to global greenhouse gas emissions because of its use of nitrogen fertilizer. At the same time, agriculture is increasingly exposed to the consequences of climate change — including those driven by its own emissions. I am confident that the tools developed through the AgNUE platform can help mitigate climate change globally without compromising crop productivity and food security,” says Claus Felby, Vice President for Agriculture and Food, Novo Nordisk Foundation.

By combining multi-scale modeling, model ensembles, and AI-driven model–data fusion, AgNUE aims to significantly reduce uncertainty in nitrogen balances and losses. This strengthened modeling capacity responds directly to the growing need for robust and verifiable reporting of agricultural emissions in national and European climate strategies.

International collaboration

Hosted by Aarhus University (Denmark), AgNUE brings together universities and research organizations specializing in soil biogeochemistry, agroecosystem modeling, microbiology, meteorology, and sustainable agronomy. The platform is supported by $27.2 million in funds from the Novo Nordisk Foundation and $7.5 million from the Foundation for Food & Agriculture Research (FFAR).

Partners are brought together across Europe and the United States: North Carolina State University (USA), University of Illinois (USA), Wageningen University & Research (Netherlands), University of Basilicata (Italy), Karlsruhe Institute of Technology

(Germany), Danish Technological Institute (Denmark), Colorado State University (USA), Technical University of Madrid (Spain), Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (Sweden), Norwegian University of Life Sciences (Norway), University of Helsinki (Finland), and INRAE – the French National Institute for Agriculture, Food, and Environment (France).

Together, the consortium will establish a long-term research platform designed to accelerate the development, testing, and adoption of nitrogen loss mitigation strategies. The initiative is expected to deliver co-benefits for climate mitigation, ecosystem health, public health, and economic resilience in agriculture.

Illinois Team Tests the Costs, Benefits of Agrivoltaics across the Midwest

New AI Method Advances Prediction of Brazil’s National Soybean Yield

URBANA, Ill. — A new AI-based system can generate high-resolution soybean yield maps across Brazil using only limited local data, improving yield estimates for this key agricultural region and potentially providing strategic benefits to global soybean markets.

Soybeans at the South Farms. Credit: Brian Stauffer/University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

The newly published work by researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign demonstrates an innovative approach that enables high-performance national yield estimates for Brazilian soybeans, even in areas where directly reported local yield data are very limited.

By leveraging knowledge learned from earlier U.S.-based work through so-called “AI transfer learning,” the research team was able to make detailed yield predictions at the municipal level using Brazil’s state-level soybean yield data. It’s one of the first successful nationwide applications of cross-scale AI yield predictions for Brazilian agriculture.

The findings are outlined in a new study published in the International Journal of Applied Earth Observations and Geoinformation.

Addressing a critical global data gap

Although Brazil is currently the world’s largest soybean producer and a major global food exporter, high-resolution yield data for Brazilian soybeans remain largely unavailable. These data are essential for precision agriculture, risk management, and sustainability planning, and the data scarcity has hampered scientific understanding of this important agricultural region. Previous crop yield modeling — which relies on coarse state-level data to model finer predictions at the municipal or field level — has demonstrated limited performance nationally.

The Illinois research team developed a new framework to predict national soybean yields at a finer level by integrating satellite observations, climate data, and state-level yield statistics, leveraging AI transfer learning techniques with the knowledge learned from their U.S. based models.

Remarkably, the model for Brazilian soybean achieved strong predictive performance without using any municipal-level yield data. The explained variance (R²), a key measure of effectiveness, doubled in the new model compared to conventional cross-scale studies. When municipal data were included, performance improved further (R² of 0.57), comparable to the best existing approaches that rely on much more abundant data.

The power of transfer learning

A key innovation of the study is the use of AI transfer learning, which allows scientists to reuse existing models rather than starting from scratch in each region. This makes it possible to generate detailed agricultural information in areas where collecting large amounts of local data would be costly, slow, or impractical.

Spatial maps of the yield data show the harvested-area-weighted average soybean yield across all valid years for each municipality (left); and the standard deviation across all valid years in each municipality. Credit: Paper in the *International Journal of Applied Earth Observations and Geoinformation*.

For this work, knowledge from an advanced model that was trained to predict soybean yield in the U.S. was adapted to Brazilian growing conditions. By fine-tuning the U.S. model using only state-level data or sparse municipal-level data from Brazil, the researchers were able to account for differences in climate, crop phenology, and management practices between the two countries.

First author Jiaying Zhang explained, “This approach boosted the effectiveness of cross-scale yield prediction from 50 percent to 78 percent of the theoretical upper limit, which we defined as the best performance achieved by models trained with highly detailed local yield data. The results demonstrate that AI-driven transfer learning can overcome both data scarcity and scalability challenges in agricultural modeling.”

Implications for yield predictions worldwide

The findings arrive at a pivotal moment for global soybean markets.

In 2018, Brazil surpassed the United States to become the world’s largest soybean producer for the first time. The ability to monitor and forecast production in detail is essential for understanding global soybean supply as well as the environmental impacts of large-scale agriculture in Brazil. Enhanced predictability of soybean yield will enable more accurate assessments of supply-demand relationships, land-use change, and soil health impacts at scale for more informed decision-making.

“The ability to monitor and anticipate crop production regionally and globally with high fidelity is strategically important for market analysis, trade forecasting, and risk assessment for U.S. soybean producers,” said the project lead and senior author Kaiyu Guan, Levenick Endowed Professor and Director of the Agroecosystem Sustainability Center at Illinois.

The study provides a pathway for applying advanced yield modeling in regions of the world with limited data, supporting food security planning, climate risk management, and evidence-based agricultural policy. By leveraging models trained in data-rich regions and adapting them to areas where data are scarce, the approach opens new opportunities for cost-effective, global-scale agricultural intelligence.

The study is titled “Transfer learning for improved crop yield predictions in a cross-scale pathway: a case study for Brazilian national soybean” (DOI: 10.1016/j.jag.2025.104981).

The work was supported by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

About the Agroecosystem Sustainability Center

The Agroecosystem Sustainability Center (ASC) advances research that strengthens agricultural productivity while sustaining the ecosystems that support food systems by connecting science with real-world application. ASC is a joint initiative of the Institute for Sustainability, Energy, and Environment (iSEE), the College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences, and the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research and Innovation at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

For more information, contact:

Professor Kaiyu Guan
Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
kaiyug@illinois.edu

Pesticides, Pollinators, and Sustainable Agriculture: A Q&A with Scott McArt

Pesticide use is integral to modern-day farming, but it has carried unintended consequences. Research shows pesticides have caused steep declines in the populations of bees and other pollinators vital to agriculture, as well as possible links to cancer and other diseases.

The 2026 iSEE Critical Conversation, “Balancing the Intended and Unintended Effects of Managing Pests,” is scheduled for March 5-6 at the Illini Center in Chicago. The two-day event will bring together scientists, farmers, beekeepers, and industry and nonprofit leaders to encourage dialogue and find solutions to this complex challenge.

The public portion of the event is a March 5 keynote address by Scott McArt, Associate Professor of Pollinator Health at Cornell University.

McArt started his career as a chemical ecologist, studying the chemistry that influences interactions among different organisms – in his case, the natural toxins in plants that make them inedible to predators. About 15 years ago, he shifted his work to explore the impact of unnatural toxins – pesticides – on organisms and how that contributes to biodiversity loss. While other toxicologists had documented their harmful effects, McArt wanted to know exactly which pesticides bees and other pollinators are being exposed to, and at what levels, to better understand the risks and pinpoint solutions. Through his appointment with Cornell Cooperative Extension, McArt also works directly with beekeepers, farmers, and regulatory agencies to improve pollinator conservation and health.

In this Q&A, McArt explains the challenges posed by pesticides and the work he and others have done to address them. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

This year’s iSEE Critical Conversation will focus on the effects of pesticide use. Why is this a timely topic right now?

I would say the reason we are talking about this is that we’re in a global biodiversity crisis. There are species that are being impacted by the things that we do. And agriculture happens to be one of those major things, and pesticides happen to be one of the stresses in agriculture that is contributing to biodiversity loss.

How do you benefit people but also benefit the environment? There is a constant tension between those two things as the global population gets to the point where we’re having significant impacts on the land and the various animals that live on that land.

Pesticides are used to improve yields by controlling pests that are harmful to crops. Are their benefits overstated?

With current agricultural practices, how we set up modern farming, we are absolutely reliant on pesticides. If we didn’t have pesticides, we would experience yield losses, there’s no question about that. But maybe we’re not doing agriculture in a way that is actually sustainable. Maybe we’re doing agriculture in a way that is overly reliant on pesticides.

I will be talking about some examples where, in certain contexts, we can show very conclusively that we are overusing some pesticides. The risks outweigh the benefits. In other application contexts, we can’t show that. The benefits are really clear, and there might be risks, but then the issue becomes: If we are going to get rid of something, we’re going to lose a major benefit, even though we might be harming wildlife in the process. That becomes less of a biological question and more of a social question or even an economic question. That’s why I think this interdisciplinary workshop is really necessary for this particular topic.

What are the unintended effects of pesticide use on pollinators and other wildlife? What are the biggest risks they pose? Are some of those difficult to measure?

Our lab does a lot of risk assessment for pollinators. There’s no perfect way of doing risk assessment, but what we can say is that there are problems with pesticides. They are directly linked to declines of many species in our country, including pollinators – that’s not just bees, but butterflies, moths, and other species of pollinators. And it’s not just pollinators – it’s a lot of other things, especially insects, but frogs and other species as well. We know pesticides have a long-term negative impact on many of these species, and they are a contributor to biodiversity loss. So clearly we are using pesticides in a way that, if the goal of the risk assessment and pesticide registration process is to minimize those nontarget effects, well, we’re failing.

Can you give an example of the specific impact, especially on bees?

McArt examines a bee colony with undergraduates in a summer research program in 2019. Credit: Delanie Sickler

Last year, honeybee colony losses in the United States were at 56%. That is the highest honeybee colony loss rate in recorded history. This year, some of the early reports we’re getting from commercial beekeepers are just as troubling. So will it be 56% again? I don’t know, but that is unsustainable. Beekeepers are going out of business because they can’t sustain that level of losses year after year.

Are pesticides driving all of those losses? Absolutely not. There are other factors that also play a role. But pesticides are definitely playing a role.

For wild pollinators, based on the most recent science, we know that the use of two types of pesticides in particular, neonicotinoids and pyrethroids, are the strongest predictor of wild bee declines in the United States. This was from a Nature paper last year, which put lots of different factors into a really impressive analysis. Over and over, for the past decade or so now that we’re starting to get large-scale studies like this, we’re seeing that pesticides are, if not the major driver, one of the major drivers of insect declines in the U.S., and globally.

Why is it important for growers to consider these unintended effects? What are the costs to our environment, the agricultural economy, and our food supply?

If you’re an environmentalist, any loss of species is disheartening to you. But not everybody is an environmentalist. Other people might say, OK, if using pesticides is necessary for my livelihood, what’s the problem with losing a species or two? Or, more likely, they may have no idea that pesticides are causing large-scale environmental problems. I think that’s again a social issue that needs to be navigated.

From an economic perspective, we know a lot of insects play major roles not only in the functioning of natural systems, but also in the functioning of farms. So if you’re in pollination agriculture, and you have half the number of bees in your orchard, you have half the amount of pollination occurring; therefore, yield may go down in those crops. If you’re in corn and soybeans, yield might not actually change all that much – maybe in soybeans because they’re pollination-dependent to some extent, but corn pretty much is wind-pollinated.

What about all the soil microorganisms – all of the beetles and the various things that live in the soil? If you wipe them out, nutrient cycling goes away. Soil fertility declines. Alternatively, if we wipe out the predators of the pests, there might actually be a pest outbreak.

The other axis is probably the one that resonates with most people: human health effects. A recent study from Iowa shows cancer rates going up quite a bit in that state, and it seems to be tracking with pesticide use. So is that the driver? We don’t really know. But if more and more pesticides are being used, and you’re getting more cancers, more Alzheimer’s, and other human diseases, it could potentially be playing a role. I would say that’s much less abstract to most people. Some people may like bees, while others may have absolutely no idea what a pollinator is. But every single person understands cancer in their own child or in themselves.

What specific topics will you be addressing in your keynote?

I’m a biologist, and I do a lot of risk assessment. In the past 10 years or so I’ve become sort of a closet sociologist, because no progress can be made on this topic by only considering biology. I also collaborate with economists in almost every single thing that we do now, because when people are making decisions about pesticides, oftentimes economics has to be considered. Navigating that complex biological, social, and economic landscape to try and figure out how we make these agricultural systems sustainable, how we define sustainability and then also come to some agreement to make things sustainable – it’s not easy, as you might expect.

I’ll be giving a few different stories of ways that we have been successful in navigating things. One is with a new law restricting pesticides that’s now been implemented in New York, as a direct result of the work we’ve done – not just me, but a lot of other people who contributed as well.

Another story I’ll talk about is something that’s been much more industry-driven: how a commercial apple company initiated a successful reduced-spray pesticide program. It is not only benefiting pollinators but looks like it’s benefiting the growers as well – something that’s not the heavy hand of government but is driven by private industry, the sellers of the apples that are grown by farmers.

The third story I’ll share is something that is actually driven by the stakeholders themselves: beekeepers who want to understand how pesticides are playing a role in colony losses throughout the United States. Bees are exposed to myriad pesticides in the environment, which isn’t good of course. But beekeepers also use pesticides to control parasites in their colonies. One of the major issues the beekeeping industry is facing right now is that they themselves are overusing one particular pesticide. When they do that, the parasites evolve resistance to the pesticide, and unfortunately, they end up doing more harm than good. So we’ve worked with many beekeepers to stop using that pesticide exclusively, to instead use cultural controls, rotations with other pesticides, and other integrated pest management tactics. The parasites don’t develop resistance as quickly, and the beekeepers are able to control them more effectively.

Can you say more about the effort to pass the 2025 New York law that restricts the use of neonicotinoid-treated seeds and its impact?

McArt testifies to the New York State Assembly about proposed pesticide legislation in September 2021. Credit: Julie Suarez

We have this new law in New York state because, honestly, we did a lot of background work to try and get all these groups together, similar to what you’re doing with iSEE. There’s now a new law in Vermont that mimics the New York law; Massachusetts is considering it, Pennsylvania is considering it, and Colorado is considering it. And I was just out in Minnesota, our first Midwestern state, where we had a full day-long workshop that is very similar to what iSEE is putting together. Minnesota is now considering trying to mimic what we’ve done here in New York. The only way to make that successful is to have these really difficult conversations with a lot of different stakeholders at the table, and people with various expertise. There was a lot of enthusiasm, even from the pesticide companies and seed distributors, after that discussion, because everyone felt heard.

People have very strong opinions on the topic of pesticides. And often you’re not going to change anyone’s mind. But you can facilitate a conversation, and you can make people feel heard. In the places that I’ve gone, oftentimes that’s the first step to going a bit further.

Do you see shifting attitudes toward pesticides among farmers and others in the agricultural community as a result of your work?

I’ve been working with apple growers for about 10 years now. No farmer wants to kill bees, and all the growers that I interact with are very receptive to learning more about pesticides, because they want to have good pollination. But they also want to have good pest control. So it’s a constant balance they have to navigate: good pest control, but not overdoing it and killing all the bees, because then they won’t have apples.

More recently, the topic of neonic seed treatments has been at the forefront. That involves talking to corn and soybean growers. There are almost zero corn and soybean growers who feel like they rely on pollinators, so the dynamic and knowledge base is different from that of apple growers. A lot of people just have absolutely no idea that these seed treatments are harming pollinators. That said, I think we’ve seen a major cultural change in New York. Seven years ago, I think it’s safe to say that most field crop farmers did not appreciate me bringing up this topic. Now, not only do we have a new law banning the seed treatments because of the impact on pollinators, but a lot of farmers are buying into it. Perhaps more importantly, they had no idea there were almost no economic benefits from using seed treatments.

Do your studies show that neonic seed treatments don’t do much good? Are the benefits oversold?

In that particular application context, which happens to be the major use of neonicotinoid insecticides in the entire world, including in Illinois, they have extremely infrequent benefits. We estimate that somewhere between 93 to 94 percent of farmers are losing money from using them.

The reason why seed treatments were thought to be so good is that they let you greatly reduce the amount of pesticide that’s applied on a field. Instead of blanket spraying, you can put just a little bit of pesticide on a seed, and then the seeds are protected. So on a field-by-field basis, it could be considered a good thing. But the problem is overuse. We suspect that somewhere between 90 and 100 percent of corn fields in the United States and the majority of soybeans are planted with neonicotinoid seed treatments.

Neonics are also by far the most toxic insecticides to most insects – about an order of magnitude more toxic than any other insecticide. So even though we’ve been using about the same amount of insecticides over the past 20 years on a pound-by-pound basis in the U.S., by using more and more neonics, we’ve made the environment about 10 times more toxic to insects – which is probably why we’re noticing that direct relationship between neonic use and declines in pollinators.

One reason farmers use neonics is that they consider them inexpensive crop insurance. They might only have pests 5 to 6 percent of the time, but the seed treatments provide protection in that very rare chance of a major pest outbreak. But when every single person does that, it becomes the tragedy of the commons.

How can researchers work with farmers/growers to help them understand the impact of pesticide use and maybe change their management practices?

Number one, listen. Researchers and scientists are very good at talking, but we’re not as good at listening. If you’re a scientist who’s reading this, listen to farmers. You might just learn something.

Also, be a service, be a resource for that person.

And third, just be humble. I see a lot of interactions with farmers where maybe the scientist has listened, maybe they’ve provided some data, but they’re not really humble. They kind of come off as some egghead from an ivory tower. That’s a great way to lose a productive dialogue, to lose trust. If we’re going to work together to solve big issues – and sustainable pesticide use in agriculture is absolutely a big, complex issue – well, it turns out working together requires trust. So be humble and earn that trust. Those are my three keys.

– Article by iSEE Communications Specialist Julie Wurth

Levenick Professorships Honor Guan and Guest for Advancing Global Sustainability

The Institute for Sustainability, Energy, and Environment (iSEE), College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences (ACES), and The Grainger College of Engineering celebrated the investiture of two campus researchers for their leadership in advancing resilient food systems, clean energy transitions, and shaping global sustainability technologies.

“What we’re celebrating is momentum,” said iSEE Director Madhu Khanna. “The Levenicks’ commitment to sustainability is inspiring a new generation of leaders who are tackling our most pressing global challenges.”

Professors Kaiyu Guan, as the Levenick Professor of Sustainability, and Jeremy Guest, as the Levenick Professor and Director of the Levenick Center for a Climate-Smart Circular Bioeconomy, were honored on October 9 at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

“This investiture honors not only a remarkable record but a mindset: clarity of purpose, intellectual rigor, and a conviction that science should serve people and invite students to see themselves shaping the future,” said College of ACES Dean Germán Bollero.

Their appointments were made possible through the generosity of Stuart L. and Nancy J. Levenick, longtime supporters of the University of Illinois, whose philanthropy has helped establish endowed professorships, student scholarships, and sustainability programs that drive real-world change.

“With this dual investiture, we recognize the contributions of these two outstanding faculty members,” said Grainger College of Engineering Executive Associate Dean Philippe Geubelle. “We also celebrate a model for how the University of Illinois can address pressing societal challenges through collaboration, partnership, and shared vision.”

Kaiyu Guan is an internationally recognized scientist whose work integrates computational modeling, satellite remote sensing, field observation, and artificial intelligence to understand how climate and human activity shape agriculture and ecosystems. A professor in the Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences in the College of ACES, Guan has produced more than 160 highly cited publications and has received over $22 million in competitive support from NASA, NSF, USDA, and DOE. His recognitions range from the NSF CAREER and NASA New Investigator awards to the AGU James B. Macelwane Medal and the FoodShot Global GroundBreaker Prize. As the founding director of the Agroecosystem Sustainability Center and chief scientist for the NASA Acres Program, his research advances food and water security while promoting sustainable agricultural systems worldwide.

Jeremy Guest, professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering in Grainger Engineering, also serves as associate director for research at iSEE and as deputy theme lead for sustainability for the Center for Advanced Bioenergy and Bioproducts Innovation (CABBI). He is the recipient of an NSF CAREER Award, the Paul L. Busch Award for innovation in applied water quality research from the Water Research Foundation, and the James J. Morgan Environmental Science & Technology Early Career Award for creativity and leadership in his field. With more than 100 peer-reviewed publications, his work focuses on advancing technologies that recover resources and convert plants into products, food, and fuels.

About Stuart L. and Nancy J. Levenick

Stuart Levenick retired as group president from Caterpillar Inc., where he held a variety of executive roles, and he currently holds board positions with several international corporations. He also serves as a member of the board of directors and the development committee chair for the University of Illinois Foundation, and is a member of the Department of Intercollegiate Athletics Campaign Planning Committee. Stuart Levenick graduated from the College of ACES with a bachelor’s degree in forestry and furthered his education as a Sloan Fellow, earning a master’s degree in management from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was awarded the University of Illinois Varsity “I” Lifetime Achievement Award in 2014 and the College of ACES Career Achievement Award in 2018.

Nancy Levenick graduated from the University of Toronto, Faculty of Education, and taught high school English in Toronto before the couple embarked on an eight-move, global career, including assignments in Canada, Singapore, Russia, and Japan, returning to Peoria in 2004. Since then, Nancy Levenick has been an active member of the Children’s Hospital of Illinois Advocacy Board and a board member of WTVP and the Peoria Ballet. Both Stuart and Nancy have been active members of the Heart of Illinois United Way.

New Solar and Geothermal Installations Power Energy Farm

Tim Mies posing next to the 15kW solar array panels at the Energy Farm. Mies, along with his diligent team, maintains the many research operations at the Energy Farm. Credit: Anjali Yedavalli

Among the University of Illinois’ most impressive living laboratories is the Energy Farm, a 320-acre farm plot on the South Farms supporting sustainability research. The farm is a testbed for a broad range of renewable energy sources; researchers across many disciplines are studying how to scale up and improve the effectiveness of these renewables, hoping to revolutionize sustainable energy production. Two recent research installations – an underground geothermal “battery” and an agrivoltaic solar array – are providing energy for the farm.

The Energy Farm was founded in 2007 as part of the Energy Biosciences Institute. Tim Mies, Director of Energy Farm Operations, explained that the original focus of the farm was analyzing second-generation biofuel crops and perennial grasses as a fuel source, which eventually expanded to renewable energy research as a whole. This bioenergy research has continued under the CABBI grant, funded by the Department of Energy.

By layering complementary energy technologies on top of each other, the farm generates much of its own energy. It features underground geothermal installations, bioenergy crops growing on the surface, and solar arrays sitting above the ground.

The Energy Farm’s UTB was installed in April 2023. Credit: Julie Wurth

In late 2022, the Illinois Green Fund supported a geothermal research collaboration between the University of Illinois and the Oak Ridge National Lab, which led to the installation of an underground geothermal battery (UTB) at the Energy Farm. This novel geothermal system features a water reservoir buried 20 feet underground that is tied in a geothermal loop. The UTB has a large thermal capacity and uses the ground’s stable temperature to provide a heat source or heat sink that is hotter or colder than the ambient air. Using a heat pump, this geothermal system can heat or cool a building. The key innovation of the UTB is that it can store thermal energy for later use, allowing it to accommodate the fluctuating thermal demands of a building.

The exchange of energy within this system is controlled and automated, which makes the installation very efficient. Andrew Stumpf, geologist and principal investigator at the Prairie Research Institute, described what makes this system unique.

“With this advanced installation, we can store thermal energy during times of lower demand and recover it as demand increases again. Through this mechanism you optimize the system’s efficiency,” said Stumpf.

The geothermal system at the Energy Farm, which began operation in May 2024, had immediate effects. Mies said he felt cooling almost instantly.

The primary purpose of the UTB is to provide heating and cooling, but the researchers also use this installation to study whether this new type of geothermal system can become mainstream. Although the farm’s office space is regulated by the geothermal installation, the adjacent laboratory space is heated by a propane furnace and cooled by electric-powered . An auxiliary part of this research project is to compare the efficiency of both systems. The hope is that geothermal technology can contribute to long-term sustainability goals on the farm. While the upfront cost of installing a geothermal system is higher than other renewable energy systems, the reduction in energy use is significant, so the cost recovery is expected to be quick.

Meanwhile, the Energy Farm’s main greenhouse is heated by a biomass boiler, which uses dried miscanthus as the fuel source. Instead of burning propane, this boiler turns the prairie grasses grown and harvested at the farm for research into heating.

In addition to these green installations, the Energy Farm is also home to a new 15kW solar array. The energy it generates is used by the farm, and excess energy is sold to the grid.

This array, with panels recycled from a campus building, is part of the SCAPES Agrivoltaics project, supported by a grant from the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture. SCAPES (Sustainably Co-locating Agricultural and Photovoltaic Electricity Systems) examines the capability of agrivoltaics, a practice that integrates and co-locates typical agricultural practices with solar electricity generation. Carl Bernacchi, Professor of Crop Sciences and Plant Biology at the University of Illinois and a principal investigator on the SCAPES project, provided insight into the environmental and ecological impacts of agrivoltaics research.

Because of its inherent constraints, agrivoltaics is an ideal framework for understanding crop responses to the environment, Bernacchi said. For example, the panels affect how much light reaches the crops. They also compete for space and slightly alter the temperature and humidity in the surrounding environments, making this a unique integration of the agriculture and energy sectors.

Full view of 15kW solar array at the Energy Farm. Bernacchi lightheartedly refers to the project as “Hortivoltaics” due to the presence of smaller, high-value crops located below the panels. Credit: Anjali Yedavalli

The array at the Energy Farm is layered on top of a plot of high-value crops. “I call it ‘hortivoltaics’ because it’s focused on horticultural crops like tomatoes and kale,” Bernacchi said. “It adds a whole dynamic level of diversity to the type of systems that we can study.”

In addition to this existing solar installation, SCAPES is building an 88kW array at the Energy Farm for the 2025 field research . This new, larger array will help researchers study agrivoltaics at a more realistic scale, paving the way for the commercial adoption of this practice.

All of the projects and initiatives at the Energy Farm represent the modern-day cross-disciplinary nature of sustainability research. Engineers are working with economists, educators, and biologists to make the technology of tomorrow happen today.

The Energy Farm employs two full-time staff who support the research being undertaken by undergraduate and graduate students, as well as their collaborative researchers. Students have played a key role in the success of these projects.

Regarding the geothermal research at the Energy Farm, Stumpf said, “Having a DOE National Laboratory and students involved creates a learning environment capable of providing numerous opportunities for collaboration and learning. We want this to be a living laboratory for students and faculty to use and benefit from.”

To Mies, running the Energy Farm is a team effort. “Our job is to work with researchers to bring concepts to reality,” he said. “When they say, can we do this? What do we need to do this? What’s it going to take? That’s where we come in.”

Energy use and generation on the farm can be monitored in real time from the Energy Farm Solar Dashboard >>>

— Article by iSEE Communications Intern Anjali Yedavalli

First-Ever Conceptual Model Explains Variations in Farm N2O Emissions

A rainbow rises over three autochambers collecting data in a Central Illinois field. This data informed the creation of the new conceptual “cannon model.” Photo Credit: Will Eddy

Nitrous oxide (N₂O) has long been agriculture’s sustainability Achilles heel. While only making up 6% of U.S. greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, N₂O has 300 times the heat-trapping ability of carbon dioxide (CO₂) and stays in the atmosphere for about 100 years.

This greenhouse gas is produced by soil microbes whose activity depends on highly variable soil conditions. This variability makes it difficult to accurately measure annual N₂O emissions at the field scale, complicating scientists’ ability to reduce those emissions using climate-smart agricultural practices.

“N₂O emissions are notoriously variable in both time and space,” said Wendy Yang, Professor of Plant Biology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. “If you measure emissions today and you go back out to the field tomorrow, you could get something very, very different. If you take a measurement in one spot then take three steps to the right, you could get very different results.”

Yang, Associate Director of the Agroecosystem Sustainability Center (ASC) in the Institute for Sustainability, Energy, and Environment (iSEE) at Illinois, co-authored a recent paper published in Communications Earth and Environment addressing this very issue.

The study proposed the first conceptual model — the “cannon model” — that explains N₂O’s extreme spatial variations within agricultural fields that appear to have quite homogenous soil conditions. It is one of the latest papers from SMARTFARM Phase II, an ASC project supported by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) program that developed an innovative system-of-systems modeling approach to monitoring, reporting, and verification(MRV) of greenhouse gas emissions.

Read the full ASC news release >>>

High Tunnels, Lowering Barriers

An iSEE seed-funded research project that uses robotics and artificial intelligence to autonomously manage “high tunnel” food production is entering its second year at the University of Illinois Sustainable Student Farm.

U. of I.’s Robot Integrated High Tunnels (RobInHighTs) team received a $975,000 USDA NIFA (National Institute of Food and Agriculture) grant in 2023 in addition to an iSEE Campus as a Living Lab (CALL) seed funding that same year.

A RobInHighTs robot uses its camera (orange attachment on left side) to look for signs of pest damage on tomato plants at the Sustainable Student Farm.

High tunnels are metal frames covered in a heavy plastic often used in urban agriculture. Their main benefit is expanding the season that crops can be grown: they can be planted earlier in the spring and harvested later in the fall. In climates like the Midwest, where our ability to grow fresh produce year-round is hindered by the cold weather, this promises to be a huge advantage for local farmers. Additionally, high tunnels often increase crop yields by protecting the plants from severe weather and animals.

“We have seen a lot of interest from local farmers and community gardens to invest in high tunnels to grow specialty crops, but there are a few barriers to entry, like the initial cost of the tunnel and the amount of labor required to maintain the produce while it’s growing,” said Naveen Uppalapati, RobInHighTs’ primary investigator and a research scientist at the Center for Digital Agriculture within the National Center for Supercomputing Applications.

The hope is that RobInHighTs will reduce the amount of labor required, helping local farmers overcome one of those barriers.

The first challenge for the team was ensuring the robots could autonomously navigate between rows of crops. That technology already existed for corn and soybean fields but needed to be adapted for the smaller rows in high tunnels.

Using cameras, the robots monitor parts of the plant looking for signs of pest damage and indications that the plant is ready for harvest.

“Currently, we’re working on detecting pests and making sure that the robot can communicate which plants in the tunnel have signs of pest damage,” Uppalapati said. “That way, the farmer can treat only the plants that need it rather than the whole tunnel, reducing the amount of pesticide used.”

Team members also hope this will have economic benefits by filling in when there are labor shortages. Often, when fruits are mass produced, they all are ready for harvest at one time, and a labor shortage can mean huge amounts of waste simply because they weren’t harvested in time. Shadi Atallah, an associate professor of Agricultural and Consumer Economics, is collaborating with RobInHighTs to measure how many robots would be the equivalent of the amount of work one human can do.

The project’s USDA funding is set to continue through 2026 and has allowed team members to expand their areas of research and collaborate with similar research at Tuskegee University. The goal of that collaboration is to overcome barriers facing minority farmers, and Tuskegee is creating educational modules for this program. The project initially only included one robot to do data collection but now expanded to multiple robots that also do pest detection.

“Our goal for this year is to nail down all of the individual parts: row navigation, pest detection, and harvesting. In the next two years we aim to put them all together and have a robot that can do all that monitoring and send that information to the farmer,” Uppalapati said.

— Article and photos by Erin Minor, iSEE Communications Intern

‘My Agrivoltaic Farm’ Game: Learning, Fun, and Sustainability — All in One

Imagine a lesson on agriculture and sustainability packaged in vibrant colors, pixelated fields, and charming animations. Creators of the new educational agrivoltaics app, My Agrivoltaic Farm, available for download on iOS and Android, have accomplished just that.

The Sustainably Colocating Agricultural and Photovoltaic Electricity Systems (SCAPES) Project sports an interdisciplinary team of experts in agriculture and engineering who explore the use of cropland as a source of both solar energy and food production. The “agrivoltaics” project, led by iSEE Director Madhu Khanna, ACES DIstinguished Professor of Agricultural and Consumer Economics at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, aims to increase the amount of sustainable energy and crops produced in these fields.

To complement this real-world research, the SCAPES Education Team set out to create an app that teaches players of all ages about the interconnectedness of agriculture and sustainability.

When players step into the charming, pixelated landscape of My Agrivoltaic Farm, they are greeted with a field of opportunities. Starting in their small grid-like Arizona farm, players gradually expand their plot into a full-fledged agrivoltaic farm, complete with solar panels, tractors, sprinklers, other technologies, and a variety of crops. With a shop available for every necessary piece of equipment and crop they would need — and a list of quests that unlock valuable rewards — the world of My Agrivoltaic Farm will keep players coming back for more.

Games like FarmVille, Harvest Moon, and Stardew Valley are known for their relaxing gameplay and aesthetics, drawing a wide audience into gamified farming. For many players, these games are entertaining because they are strategy-focused, using realistic simulations of weather patterns and agriculture to encourage the player to explore — and to fail. SCAPES educational researchers and game developers at Balance Studios collaborated to uphold this pivotal theme in My Agrivoltaic Farm.

“We want people to experiment and learn about the range of impacts adding solar panels to farmland can have. And sometimes that means making sub-optimal decisions,” said H. Chad Lane, the SCAPES educational research lead and Associate Professor of Computer Science and Educational Psychology at the U of I. “Some kids go full tilt with just one crop because they think it’s fun. Some are like, ‘What if I stopped doing crops and only did solar panels?’ They realize that it works, but someone who’s doing both is progressing way faster in the game than you are, and they are learning which crops love the additional shade and how the solar panels benefit from the cooling effects of the crops underneath.”

An additional goal for the app’s creators is to reinvent the perception of farmers and agriculture for audiences.

“I don’t know what your mental image of a farmer is, but in reality, it’s not what we were taught as kids growing up,” said Scott Tuinstra, Associate Creative Director from Balance Studios who collaborated on developing the app. “Farmers are using drones, they’re using AI, they’re using robotics. They’re taking a lot of measurements to see how crops are responding to different things.”

The SCAPES Education Team prioritized a healthy balance between the science of the gameplay and its effectiveness in teaching audiences about agrivoltaics.

“I’ve seen scientists committed to precision and accuracy, so they make it as realistic as possible, but that doesn’t always make sense educationally,” Lane said. “For example, soil quality is a huge deal in agriculture. But we don’t model that in the game because we needed to put our limited resources into the most educationally important features, such as teaching the relationship between solar panels and crops.”

However, the developers pushed for certain details to be included, especially if they pertained to important themes in agrivoltaics.

“The weather patterns in the game, for example, are all geographically realistic,” Lane said. “They cover a wide range, and they affect the underlying simulation that drives the game. If it’s cloudy, the solar panels don’t do as well. If it rains, you don’t have to water your crops as often. You might water and then it rains, and then you’ve overwatered. So all of these things affect the results and make the game more engaging at the same time.”

Although the game does not simulate soil composition, it does simulate soil moisture. Players can watch the soil turn different hues as they water crops. Once their plot gets large enough, they can even purchase a sprinkler system to increase efficiency.

“I love watching the sprinkler work. You have to work hard to unlock that feature, and it is extremely satisfying to watch,” Lane said. “I smile every time I see it go off.”

A list of unique features makes My Agrivoltaic Farm stand out in a sea of educational games. For example, the art style of the app, akin to its simulation gameplay predecessors, such as FarmVille and Clash of Clans, is a favorite for the developers.

“I like the art style,” said Heidi Klessig, Vice President of Client Relations at Balance Studios. “I think that the look and feel of the crops are fun and engaging, and there’s enough detail to be interesting. I think that the visual look and feel of it resonates with the age that we’re trying to hit,”

The SCAPES team is conducting educational research on the app, testing kids’ knowledge of agrivoltaics concepts in conjunction with the time they spend playing the game.

“We’re conducting research with this game on how to design effective educational technologies,” Lane said. “We want to know about the experience that it creates for someone, what ideas it evokes for them, what questions they have. That’s exciting to me. There are not many high-quality educational games like this out there.”

My Agrivoltaic Farm is available for download on iOS and Android! You can learn more about the features of the app on the SCAPES website.

— Article by iSEE Communications Intern Anjali Yedavalli