Crops at the The SoyFACE (Soybean Free Air Concentration Enrichment) facility.
As the world focuses on not only solving the climate crisis but also sustaining the world’s food supply, researchers need tools to evaluate how atmospheric pollutants affect crops. Over the past decade, the agriculture community has turned to solar-induced chlorophyll fluorescence (SIF) measurements to detect stresses on plants.
Plants absorb light from the sun to power photosynthesis, and the unused energy is emitted as heat and a tiny glow invisible to human eyes, termed fluorescence. Ever since the first global SIF map was generated in 2011, SIF has been used by researchers to investigate photosynthesis dynamics. For instance, it has been used to determine how high levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) or elevated temperature affect a plant’s properties.
Now a team from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and the USDA Agricultural Research Service (ARS) has used SIF to measure the effects of elevated ozone (O3) on soybean plants. The team published its findings in the Journal of Experimental Botany.
“Researchers have found SIF to be a faster, safer, and noninvasive way to study photosynthesis,” noted Genghong Wu, the work’s first author and the former Ph.D. student in the Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences, under the supervision of Associate Professor Kaiyu Guan, the senior author of the work. “That is why it has become so popular. The novelty of this study is that for the first time, SIF was used to measure elevated ozone stress on soybeans in the field.”
Ozone is a damaging air pollutant that is costly to farmers. The SoyFACE (Soybean Free Air Concentration Enrichment) facility provides a testbed for studying the effects of ozone pollution in the field. It is managed by USDA ARS Scientist Lisa Ainsworth. For the current study, she designed the elevated O3 experiment with four plots as a control, and other four plots with higher amounts of O3. The team used a portable spectroscopic system placed about half meter above the plant canopy to take its measurements on both control and elevated O3 plots.They found that increased O3 levels resulted in a decrease in SIF, by as much as 36 percent during the late growing season.
Other processes associated with photosynthesis, such as electron transport and leaf-gas exchange, were simultaneously measured along with SIF. “As we observed those levels decrease with higher ozone levels, it confirmed to us that a decrease in SIF is a sign of stress,” said Ainsworth, who is also an Adjunct Professor of Plant Biology.
Although SIF is directly related to photosynthesis — the process by which plants absorb light and turn it into chemical energy — it isn’t the only factor to influence SIF. But Wu notes that plant photosynthesis, combined with measures of the size of the plants, can give farmers a good estimate of yield.
One of the advantages of SIF is that it is scalable. Wu is currently studying in Germany with colleagues, who use aircraft flying 1 kilometer off the ground to evaluate SIF’s effects on an entire field. Alongside Guan, the Founding Director of the Agroecosystem Sustainability Center (ASC) and a fellow investigator on this study, Wu hopes to use the method to track photosynthesis in regions around the world from a satellite orbiting the Earth.
“We want to use SIF to estimate or to monitor the dynamics of photosynthesis on a regional or global scale,” Wu reiterated. “To do that, we need to also further understand the mechanistic relationship between SIF and photosynthesis.”
The experiments that these colleagues did at SoyFACE to link SIF to air pollution are helping build that mechanistic understanding.
Other authors on the recent paper included Duncan G. Martin (Plant Biology), Hyungsuk Kimm (NRES and Research Institute of Agriculture and Life Sciences, Seoul National University), and Xi Yang (Department of Environmental Sciences, University of Virginia).
Kaiyu Guan, Founding Director of the Agroecosystem Sustainability Center (ASC) and a Blue Waters Associate Professor of Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences, has received the prestigious James B. Macelwane Medal from the American Geophysical Union (AGU).
The award is given annually to three to five early career scientists in recognition of their significant contributions to Earth and space science. Honorees automatic distinction as AGU Fellows. The Macelwane Medal is named in honor of the former AGU president James B. Macelwane, who was renowned for his contributions to geophysics.
Guan joins other scientists, leaders, educators, journalists, and communicators from around the world who have made outstanding achievements and contributions by pushing forward the frontiers of science. According to the AGU, “Each recipient embodies the AGU’s community’s shared vision of a thriving, sustainable, and equitable future powered by discovery, innovation, and action.”
Guan founded and directs ASC, which has a mission to revolutionize agricultural systems through research, collaboration, and engagement, bridging science and practice for agricultural productivity and ecosystem sustainability.
He leads a research group focusing on the computational modeling and sensing of agricultural ecosystems under climate change. His work combines advanced domain knowledge with satellite data, supercomputing, process-based modeling, and machine learning.
In doing so, he addresses key questions on how climate and human management control productivity and ecosystem services for agricultural systems. He and his team have made significant breakthroughs towards quantifying the impact of environmental stresses and human activities on agricultural productivity and sustainability.
Guan earned a Ph.D. from Princeton University in 2013 and was a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford University. The AGU previously honored Guan with its Early Career Award in Global Environmental Change.
“I am very honored to receive the James B. Macelwane Medal and to be included alongside such distinguished previous recipients,” Guan said. “This is a shared honor to our whole team, including our students, researchers, collaborators, and mentors. I am truly grateful for all their great contributions. We are striving to build solutions to make our agricultural system both more productive and more sustainable. It is a very hard problem and requires a big team effort. I thank AGU for giving us this recognition in this uphill journey, and we know the hard work needs to continue and accelerate.”
AGU will formally recognize this year’s recipients at AGU23, which will convene more than 25,000 attendees from over 100 countries in San Francisco and online everywhere on Dec. 11-15.
About the American Geophysical Union: The American Geophysical Union (AGU) supports a global community of more than half a million professionals and advocates in the Earth and space sciences. Through broad and inclusive partnerships, AGU aims to advance discovery and solution science that accelerate knowledge and create solutions that are ethical, unbiased and respectful of communities and their values.
About the Agroecosystem Sustainability Center: ASC was established in 2021 to be a global leader in harmonizing sustainable food production with thriving ecosystems. The Center, made up of a cross-disciplinary set of faculty and researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, strives to revolutionize agricultural systems through research, collaboration, and engagement, bridging science and practice for agricultural productivity and ecosystem sustainability.
Applying ground-up silicate rock to Midwestern farm fields can capture significant amounts of carbon dioxide and prevent it from accumulating in the atmosphere, according to a new study that successfully quantified those climate benefits for the first time.
Working with Eion Corp., researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and the Leverhulme Centre for Climate Change Mitigation (LC3M) developed a new method to calculate the CO2-reduction potential of basalt rock amendments applied to cropland soil, a process known as enhanced weathering.
Traditional row-crop agriculture releases sizable amounts of soil-derived carbon to the atmosphere as CO2, a greenhouse gas that is a primary driver of climate change. With enhanced weathering, silicate rock is applied to farmland to capture that carbon before it reaches the atmosphere. As the rock weathers, calcium and magnesium are released and react with dissolved CO2 to produce bicarbonate, essentially locking up the gas and redirecting it harmlessly into groundwater.
Quantifying its carbon-capture potential, however, has been a challenge — until now. The Illinois team was able to calculate both the weathering rate and carbon dioxide reduction potential of the basalt rock amendments applied to maize and miscanthus fields. Those factors are critical for efforts to optimize carbon sequestration and for farmers hoping to earn carbon credits.
“In addition to reducing emissions, we desperately need effective ways to draw down atmospheric carbon dioxide. Our results suggest that basalt application to farms could be a win-win for farmers and for the planet, improving yields and drawing down CO2,” said study co-author Evan DeLucia, Director Emeritus at the Institute for Sustainability, Energy, and Environment (iSEE), G. William Arends Professor Emeritus of Plant Biology, and Co-Investigator at the Center for Advanced Bioenergy and Bioproducts Innovation (CABBI) at Illinois.
The breakthrough — the result of a five-year study at the Illinois Energy Farm — was published in Global Change Biology Bioenergy. The study was led by DeLucia and Ilsa Kantola, Research Scientist at iSEE and the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology (IGB).
The work is part of iSEE’s partnership with the Leverhulme Centre at the University of Sheffield in the United Kingdom, which is investigating enhanced weathering for carbon dioxide removal in field sites around the world: Malaysia, Australia, the U.K., and the United States.
In this case, researchers repeatedly applied finely-ground basalt on twin fields at the Energy Farm for four years — one field with a maize/soybean crop rotation and the other with Miscanthus x giganteus, a perennial grass that is emerging as a productive bioenergy crop to replace fossil fuels.
Grinding the basalt accelerates a natural weathering process that involves two chemical reactions. First, atmospheric CO2 dissolves in rainwater to create carbonic acid. Then, the acid reacts with the rock dust in the soil to form bicarbonate, a soluble compound that leaches with soil water; that redirects the CO2 from the atmosphere to the water cycle, where it can pass harmlessly into waterways and potentially help fight ocean acidification. Basalt contains both calcium and magnesium as well as phosphorus and minor nutrients that are released during weathering and benefit soil fertility.
The Illinois team calculated the CO2 reduction and weathering rate of the basalt by measuring the change in rare earth elements in the soil with the addition of basalt and comparing it to the calcium and magnesium in the system. The rare earth elements are “sticky,” building up in the soil in tiny amounts as more basalt is applied, and calcium and magnesium are released by weathering, with some taken up by the crops. The difference in rare earth elements indicates how much basalt, and therefore how much calcium and magnesium, has been applied; and the difference between the expected amount of calcium and magnesium and the actual amount in the soil tells researchers how much has been consumed by reactions in the soil.
The calculations showed that enhanced weathering reduced net carbon loss to the atmosphere by 42% in maize plots. Paired with conservation tillage or cover crops, the basalt application could turn maize into a net carbon sink. In miscanthus plots, which already stored more CO2 than they emitted before the addition of basalt, enhanced weathering more than doubled carbon storage. The finding adds to the potential climate benefits of this renewable bioenergy crop, one of three targeted by CABBI in its U.S. Department of Energy-funded work.
Carbon dioxide removal methods are a critical part of climate mitigation strategies, and as social and political efforts to reduce carbon emissions to the atmosphere are delayed, pressure is growing to implement these strategies soon.
Farmers, landowners, and others seeking carbon credits all want to know how much basalt rock to apply and how long the effect will last, both of which depend on the composition of the rock and the environmental conditions where it is applied.
“As we look for new ways to offset carbon emissions, we need to be able to quantify those carbon savings to better compare our options,” Kantola said.
Co-authors on the paper included Professor Carl Bernacchi of the Department of Plant Biology at Illinois, CABBI, and the USDA Agricultural Research Service; Illinois researchers Elena Blanc-Betes of iSEE and CABBI and Mike Masters of ISEE and Plant Biology; Elliot Chang, Alison Marklein, and Adam Wolf of Eion Corp; Caitlin Moore of the University of Western Australia and former CABBI postdoc; Adam von Haden of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and former CABBI postdoc; and Dimitar Epihov and Professor David Beerling of LC3M.
— Article by iSEE Communications Specialist Julie Wurth
This rain garden in Aurora, Ill., is another example of green infrastructure. A rain garden is a landscaped, shallow depression planted with native plants that captures, temporarily holds, and filters stormwater back into the ground. Credit: Brian Allan
The prevalence of mosquito-borne disease has plagued urban communities for decades, prompting scientists to look to stormwater infrastructure for sustainable solutions. Brian Allan, Professor of Entomology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, leads an iSEE-supported research project exploring the use of environmentally sustainable “green infrastructure” to eliminate standing water environments necessary for mosquito larvae survival.
Existing stormwater infrastructure is typical in many urban environments, designed to capture and retain stormwater and prevent flooding. However, from an ecological standpoint, these catch basins are prime environments for urban mosquitoes to lay their eggs, thrive, and promote vector-borne disease outbreaks.
“Not only are we creating a ton of mosquito habitat, but it’s all physically disjunct,” Allan said. “From a management perspective, if you want to try to control the mosquitoes developing in those habitats, you have to go from catch basin to catch basin and put pesticides for mosquitoes in them, and there are millions of these basins in a city like Chicago.”
Conventional stormwater infrastructure causes other issues, too: Pollutants from the urban environment, such as oil from cars, sit in the basins until rain flushes them into surface waters, contaminating rivers, lakes, and streams.
Green infrastructure is an engineering innovation designed to intercept the stormwater on-site. Unlike traditional catch basins, green infrastructure designs have permeable bottoms that allow the water to filter back into the soil.
Allan and his colleagues saw this existing sustainable solution as an opportunity to study how it might prevent mosquito growth — a potential “win-win” scenario. His team decided to investigate locations where green infrastructure was implemented to see if habitats for mosquito development decreased. Additionally, they were curious about the composition of the aquatic microbiome and how this impacted mosquito growth.
“We are very familiar with the microbiome inside our bodies,” Allan said. “Mosquitoes have a microbiome as well … there’s potential that the microbiome can be manipulated in some way that’s not beneficial to mosquitos.” The area around the basins could play a key role in altering the microbiome composition of the mosquitoes, as the leaves are dropped and washed into the stormwater catch basin. The microbes that break down these leaves are a food source for mosquitoes and may result in different mosquito microbiomes forming.
On the basis of this observation, Allan’s former Ph.D. student Allison Gardner introduced leaves from different plants into the basins. She found that leaves from non-native plants, like bush honeysuckle, a common invasive species in eastern North America, were ideal for mosquito development. However, blackberry, a native species, had the opposite effect. Blackberry leaves created what is known as an “ecological trap.” Female mosquitoes expect that aquatic habitats containing blackberry leaves have optimal conditions for their larvae’s growth, but when they lay eggs in these habitats, the microbial growth there is detrimental to larval survival. “It looked to be an organic form of mosquito control,” Allan said; blackberry leaves appear to be just as effective as larvicides.
The sustainability of green infrastructure and the mosquito control component are parallel functions.
“We’re looking to bring them together, particularly in the context of rain gardens, because rain gardens are one of the forms of green stormwater infrastructure that eliminates the aquatic habitat for larvae, but they’re also landscaped with various plants,” Allan said. His research team hopes to explore the potential for mosquito control through landscaping rain gardens with plant species, such as blackberries, that inhibit larval growth.
An infiltration catch basin in Aurora, Ill. This example of green infrastructure is a shallow impoundment that infiltrates stormwater into the soil. Credit: Brian Allan
As Allan describes it, prioritization of human health can be used as a tool in sustainability: “If you can do something that benefits people’s health, they’re much more likely to support an environmental solution than one that doesn’t benefit human health.”
One current aim of the project is to analyze the effects of rain barrels, a standard green infrastructure tool that might negatively impact human health. They are becoming popular green stormwater tools for homeowners, who buy these barrels, hook them up to a gutter system, and reuse the water that is collected. While a good idea for water conservation, the barrels can quickly become colonized by mosquitoes. An analysis of a residential rain barrel survey by current Ph.D. student Becky Cloud indicates that the main culprit is the debris screen that tops the barrels. Most homeowners find that the screen gets clogged and end up removing it early in their ownership. However, as the primary barrier between the water and mosquitoes, the screen’s removal is actually quite harmful. The simple solution is to clean the screen and reapply it.
This finding gave Allan and his team the motive to engage in community outreach to explain the science behind green infrastructure.
“I think that’s an example of where I feel, as a scientist, an obligation to communicate my findings to the public,” Allan said. “If I just publish that in a journal that only other scientists will read, that’s really not the most useful thing I could do.”
Educating the community about sustainability, green infrastructure, and mosquito-borne diseases is necessary to elicit change. The public is much more likely to support causes that are both sustainable and beneficial to human health, and discovering more of these “win-win” scenarios is an important motivating factor of research today. Inspiring the community through education can lead to collective action and a more harmonious co-existence between urban society and nature.
The Stormwater & Mosquito Control Project was funded by a seed grant from iSEE in 2015 and has since been extended with two major National Science Foundation awards and a U.S. Geological Survey grant.
— Article by Anjali Yedavalli, iSEE Communications Intern
Research Technician Michael Douglass and Postdoctoral Researcher Nan Li conducting deep soil coring for quantifying soil organic carbon stocks on a farm in Piatt County, Ill. Credit: Dan Schaefer
Earth’s soil contains large stocks of carbon — even more carbon than in the atmosphere. A significant portion of this soil carbon is in organic form (carbon bound to carbon), called soil organic carbon (SOC). However, SOC has historically been greatly diminished by agricultural activity, releasing that carbon into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide, contributing to climate change.
To monitor and sustainably manage SOC stocks under agricultural land use, an accurate way to measure SOC is essential. However, current methods of accurately estimating SOC are resource- and cost-intensive. In their new study, published in Geoderma, Agroecosystem Sustainability Center (ASC) researchers tested a new sampling method in hopes of improving the ability to estimate SOC stocks.
The team’s previous research suggested that readily available spatial information in public databases could improve the efficiency of SOC sampling in agricultural fields. This study, led by ASC’s Eric Potash, a Research Scientist in the Department of Natural Resource & Environmental Sciences (NRES) at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, tested that hypothesis in eight fields across Illinois and Nebraska.
Measuring SOC is challenging due to its variability. The SOC stock at two locations just a few feet apart can differ significantly. This means that many locations need to be sampled to estimate the total SOC stock, which translates to a lot of work in the lab and in the field.
“Past studies, including one that we did one year ago, proposed ways of reducing the number of samples needed,” Potash said. “But it was unknown just how much more efficient those methods were. We put those methods to the test using a new high-quality dataset our research team put together.”
The team found that SOC stocks in agricultural fields can be more efficiently measured by using a method called doubly balanced sampling, which accounts for auxiliary information available in elevation maps, satellite images, and previous surveys. Doubly balanced sampling is a modern strategy that improves on the classic method of stratified sampling by selecting locations that are more representative of the field in terms of this auxiliary information.
“Quantifying soil carbon stock through soil sampling is a hard and expensive task, but our approach was found to reduce the number of soil samples needed by a very promising 30 percent,” said Kaiyu Guan, project lead and coauthor, Founding Director of ASC, and NRES Associate Professor. “We believe this is a significant advancement for improving soil sampling efficiency and should be promoted in future practices by carbon project developers or researchers.”
The work is made possible by unique field-level, high-resolution soil samples collected by scientists from different projects.
“I am glad that our hard work and collected soil sampling data enables the development of this approach,” said DoKyoung Lee, another coauthor and a Professor of Crop Sciences at the U of I.
The team has made its methods and data publicly available so that the scientific community can benefit from, and collaborate on, further improving the understanding of SOC.
“I am especially excited that we are publicly sharing the data for this study,” Potash said. “I hope that this will foster increased collaboration to accelerate progress on soil carbon research.”
In addition to Potash, Guan, and Lee, co-authors on this publication include Andrew Margenot, Crop Sciences Associate Professor and ASC Associate Director; Arvid Boe, Professor of Agronomy, Horticulture & Plant Science at South Dakota State University; Michael Douglass, ASC and Crop Sciences Research Technician; Emily Heaton, Professor of Crop Sciences; Chunhwa Jang, Crop Sciences Postdoctoral Researcher; Virginia Jin, USDA-ARS Research Soil Scientist at University of Nebraska; Nan Li, ASC and Crop Sciences Postdoctoral Research Associate; Rob Mitchell, USDA Research Agronomist and Adjunct Professor of Agronomy at University of Nebraska; Nictor Namoi, ASC and Crop Sciences Graduate Research Assistant ; Marty Schmer, USDA-ARS Research Agronomist at University of Nebraska; Sheng Wang, ASC and NRES Research Assistant Professor; and Colleen Zumpf, Bioenergy and Ecosystem Services Specialist at Argonne National Laboratory.
A study led by researchers at the Agroecosystem Sustainability Center (ASC) at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign quantifies the soil organic carbon (SOC) benefits from cover crops in maize-soybean rotations in Midwestern U.S. agroecosystems.
The study, published in Global Change Biology, used ecosys, an advanced process-based ecosystem model, to assess the impacts of winter cover cropping on SOC accumulation under different environmental and management conditions. By understanding how SOC benefits can be achieved and optimized, farmers and policymakers will be able to enact management practices that support fertile fields that also sequester atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) into the soil.
Cover crops have been found to be effective in increasing soil organic carbon by sequestering atmospheric CO2 into the soil, and thus have large potential to mitigate climate change. An accessible method of measuring SOC benefits would help farmers, government agencies, and industries implement climate-smart cover cropping practices. However, an accurate and cost-efficient method of quantifying SOC benefits is still largely unavailable.
To help address this need, ASC researchers are taking an ecosystem modeling approach. Their study revealed that growing cover crops can increase SOC by an average of 0.33 megagrams of carbon per hectare per year (which is equivalent to 0.54 tons of atmospheric carbon dioxide per acre per year) in Illinois, and that SOC benefits can be improved through increasing cover crop biomass. The ecosys model not only helps quantify SOC benefits from cover crops, but also improves the scientific understanding of environmental factors that control on SOC benefits, including soil conditions, weather, and cover crop species.
Connecting with the team’s previous work, the researchers also found that there is a trade-off between SOC benefits from cover crops and cash crop yield. Specifically, if cover crops have larger growth windows, they grow larger biomass and thus have higher SOC benefits. However, under these circumstances, there is increased risk that the yield of cash crops is reduced due to the competition with cover crops for resources and nutrients including water, nitrogen, and oxygen in the soil; the work has been confirmed by a recent empirical study involving ASC members. Different lines of work collectively stress the need for careful cover crop management to avoid potential risks.
Comprehensive mechanistic modeling could help resolve this trade-off issue by simulating cover crop growth under different conditions. In U.S. Midwestern fields, management practices such as selecting specific cover crop types and regulating their growth window are major controlling factors of their SOC benefits. Through simulation, the modeling approach could help choose optimal management practices that maximize SOC benefits without compromising crop yield.
“Our study demonstrated that the ecosys model, with rigorous validation using field experiment data, can be an effective tool to guide the adaptive management of cover crops and quantify SOC benefits from cover crops,” said Ziqi Qin, lead author on the publication and graduate student in the U of I’s Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences (NRES). “This provides practical tools and insights for practitioners to better manage cover crop and for policymakers to better design agricultural policies.”
In addition to SOC benefits, the researchers also found that cover crops could benefit the soil environment in other ways. The ecosys simulations indicated that the amount of carbon stored in microbes in the soil increased when cover crops were present. This finding is consistent with previous empirical studies that have found increased soil fertility when using cover crops.
“The optimal practices to manage cover crops vary for each field,” said ASC Founding Director Kaiyu Guan, NRES Associate Professor and also the project lead on the newly published study. “Our work identified the trade-off between cover crops and cash crops, which further proves the necessity to develop management guidance and technical assistance to farmers to better take advantage of cover crops while also maintaining cash crop yield.”
Co-authors on this study include U of I researchers Wang Zhou, Bin Peng, Tongxi Hu, María B. Villamil, Evan DeLucia, Andrew J. Margenot, Zhangliang Chen, and Jonathan Coppess; Jinyun Tang from DOE Lawrence Berkeley National Lab; Zhenong Jin from the University of Minnesota; Robert Grant from the University of Alberta; and Mishra Umakant from DOE Sandia National Lab.
This research was funded by the Illinois Nutrient Research & Education Council, NSF CAREER Award, USDA NIFA Program, and Foundation for Food and Agriculture Research.
— News release by April Wendling, iSEE Communications Specialist
The Institute for Sustainability, Energy, and Environment (iSEE) is providing seed funding for two new research projects at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign that will use automation to enhance waste sorting for campus recycling efforts and reduce manual labor costs in small urban farming operations.
Both projects are funded through iSEE’s 2023 Campus as a Living Laboratory (CALL) program, which supports research teams that tackle interdisciplinary sustainability issues on campus or in neighboring communities. They focus on leveraging campus infrastructure and enhancing researchers’ capacity to address critical knowledge gaps and ultimately secure major federal, foundation, or private funding.
“U of I researchers are applying the latest advances in machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) technology to overcome environmental challenges confronting our communities and the world at large,” said Jeremy Guest, iSEE Associate Director for Research. “Through these grants, our engineers, scientists, and university staff will tackle the pervasive problem of municipal waste and help make sustainable farming more accessible to all, using our own facilities as a model.”
The U.S. EPA estimates that half of municipal solid waste ends up in landfills, contributing to significant methane emissions that harm our climate, and the problem is growing with the spread of urbanization. New refined resource recovery methods are needed to expand recycling and meet the demands of global recycling firms for higher-quality material. Robotic systems with mechanical arms and machine learning can sort waste more efficiently, reducing processing time and turning waste into treasure.
A new project led by Nishant Garg, Assistant Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, will use advances in computer vision to more efficiently classify the more than 5,000 tons of waste generated on campus each year, which is now sorted by hand for recycling. Using cameras installed at the Waste Transfer Station, a machine-learning model will classify waste on a conveyer belt into six categories: paper, plastic, food, metal, glass, and yard waste. It will feed that data into a live dashboard, to motivate the campus community to follow best practices for waste disposal and recycling and to help meet zero-waste goals in the Illinois Climate Action Plan (iCAP).
Another new project addresses the manual labor costs associated with high tunnels — curved metal structures covered with greenhouse plastic that are ideal for growing plants on small urban farms. Cost-effective and adaptable, these high tunnels can extend the growing season, protect against severe weather, increase crop yields, and improve the quality of fruits, vegetables, and cut flower. But they are labor-intensive, requiring an extra layer of management to ensure quality crops.
The Robot Integrated High Tunnels (RobInHighTs) project will use AI-powered robotics to automate operations for high tunnels at the Sustainable Student Farm – leading to improved crop yields, reduced manual labor costs, and higher profits. Led by Naveen Kumar Uppalapati, Research Scientist at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), the team will also evaluate the profitability of RobInHighTs and identify barriers to their use by urban and minority farmers. RobInHighTs can ultimately help transition amateur urban gardeners and growers into profitable long-term farmers, enabling efficient and fresh local food production and opening up new income streams for small and underserved communities.
Deep within our bodies, millions of microbes help digest our food and provide nutrients to keep us healthy.
It’s a symbiotic relationship that dates back millennia, when the first bacteria appeared on Earth 3.5 billion years ago. Ubiquitous in the soil and environment, these microbes tagged along as more complex plants and animals evolved and became an essential part of human function. In fact, the human microbiome contains more bacterial cells than actual human cells.
Dr. Japhia Ramkumar (left) and Dr. Davendra Ramkumar of the Carle Illinois College of Medicine are working with Basil’s Harvest on a human health nexus project seed-funded by IRAI. (Credit: Japhia Ramkumar)
“Even though they’re not part of our genetics, they exist in and on us,” said Dr. Davendra Ramkumar, a Champaign gastroenterologist and Associate Professor at the Carle Illinois College of Medicine (COM).
Ramkumar and his wife, Dr. Japhia Ramkumar, internist and Associate Professor at the Carle Illinois COM, have key roles in a project seed-funded by the Illinois Regenerative Agriculture Initiative (IRAI) to explore the microbiome connection from farm to food to human health. “Regenerative Agriculture and the Human Health Nexus in the Age of Climate Change” is an initiative of Basil’s Harvest, an Illinois nonprofit promoting regenerative ag and human health. The project will shed light on how regenerative farming practices lead to healthier soils and plants, which produce healthier food, which in turn influences gut health and, ultimately, overall human health. The collaboration, which includes researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, the Illinois Water Resources Center, and the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, has received a second year of IRAI seed funding.
“There’s a movement emerging that envisions transforming our agriculture systems in order to transform our health. Regenerative agriculture is a cornerstone in this movement,” the proposal states.
How does it all connect? Bacteria in our gut microbiome survive by extracting nutrients from what we eat. In return, they provide us with vitamins, help produce hormones, and modulate our immune system. A healthy microbiome leads to a healthy human.
One of the best food sources for the human microbiome is insoluble plant fiber — i.e., a high-fiber diet — which produces short-chain fatty acids that provide a crucial source of fuel, among other benefits.
Conversely, research shows that poor diets — heavy in ultra-processed foods, unhealthy fats, salt, sugar, and animal protein — disrupt the microbiome. That upsets the symbiotic balance and can cause diseases such as obesity, metabolic disorders, or a growing number of chronic intestinal conditions. Studies show there’s a clear difference in the microbiomes of healthy people compared to those affected by disease. And manipulating the microbiome, through diet or other means, can treat or prevent disease, Dave Ramkumar said.
“The way you feed it well is with a diverse, plant-based, whole food diet,” Japhia Ramkuma said. It’s a message we’ve all heard before, but “now we know why.”
Their theory is that maintaining a healthy diet is the simplest way to maintain a healthy microbiome, rather than taking supplements such as prepackaged prebiotics and probiotics. And getting healthy food relies on healthy, regenerative agricultural practices that prioritize soil health: things like minimizing soil disturbance, planting diverse crops, and using no-till cover crops. Though this research is still new, some studies show that produce grown through regenerative ag has higher vitamin and mineral content, and that minimizing hormones and antibiotics in animals leads to a healthier fat profile in meat.
The partners have established a Coalition of Regenerative Agriculture, Food and Health (CRAFH), which will build a community of stakeholders to promote these connections, increase research, and expand market opportunities so farmers will adopt regenerative agricultural practices.
The project came together through a combination of “serendipity and really good ideas,” said Japhia Ramkumar. As an internist, she had long focused on the health effects of climate change, working with her husband to raise awareness and incorporate those concepts into the medical curriculum. Dave Ramkumar has studied inflammatory bowel disease and Crohn’s disease and has used fecal transplants to successfully treat intestinal infections and restore a patient’s microbiome.
“As physicians, we are concerned about what we see as this plague that’s afflicting society: metabolic disease, obesity, chronic diseases. We were looking for ways to spread this word,” Japhia Ramkumar said.
In 2018 the Ramkumars applied for a grant to connect the idea of access to properly grown food and a healthy microbiome, with an educational component for local schools and public health clinics that emphasized healthy eating and reducing food waste. They didn’t get the grant but created a three-year curriculum for local middle schools.
Through the grant process they made connections with the Regenerate Illinois coalition, which is how they first met Erin Meyer, Founder and President of Basil’s Harvest and a dietitian, chef, and food systems expert. A few years later, in May 2021, Meyer reached out to Japhia Ramkumar to discuss an IRAI grant proposal connecting regenerative agriculture to food, farm, and health care systems. Meyer saw those systems as silos, and the microbiome as the connecting thread.
“That is exactly what we were trying to do, back in 2018 in a different way,” Japhia Ramkumar said. “We were the doctors in 2018 who didn’t have the agriculture or the food systems end of it to make it happen. Then here’s this person looking for the doctors to help make it happen.”
The Ramkumars joined Erin Meyer, President of Basil’s Harvest, left, for a “food as medicine” cooking class at the University of Illinois College of Medicine in Peoria. Carle Illinois Medical Student Conor Bloomer (back) helped teach the course. (Credit: Basil’s Harvest)
Basil’s Harvest had already put together a “white paper” about the connection between regenerative agriculture, soil, the microbiome, and human health, and Meyer wanted to bring researchers and other stakeholders together to connect the dots. She was interested in adding a health-care component, so Dave Ramkumar’s experience as a gastroenterologist and knowledge of the gut microbiome made him a perfect fit. They wrote the grant in two weeks, bringing in other Co-PIs: Yu-Feng Lin, Director of the Illinois Water Resources Center; Carl Rosier, Soil Microbial Ecologist with Basil’s Harvest; and Pratik Banerjee, Associate Professor of Food Safety at the U of I.
The research team, led by Dave Ramkumar, started with a literature review, gathering data on the role of the microbiome in diseases, the connection between regenerative agriculture and food quality, and the effects of pesticides and herbicides on the human microbiome. They are compiling that into a paper they hope to publish this year, and it will also serve as a basis for developing educational materials.
Their initial target audience is health care professionals: physicians, medical students/residents, and dietitians and dietetics students. They have already created an educational module on the microbiome for a “Cook Well, Eat Well” culinary medicine program developed by a separate Basil’s Harvest initiative, for family medicine residents at the University of Illinois College of Medicine and OSF HealthCare in Peoria. The course, focused on “food as medicine,” combines hands-on cooking with presentations on regenerative agriculture, nutrients, and the microbiome.
That module served as the foundation for a two-week elective for medical and dietetics students that focuses on sustainable/regenerative agriculture and food systems and the connection to the microbiome, which CRAFH hopes to pilot this year at the Carle Illinois College of Medicine and the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point.
“We want health care providers to not just look at food but think about, ‘How did you get this food, how is it produced, how is it grown?’ ” Japhia Ramkumar said.
CRAFH also developed a survey for dietitians, physicians, and students in those fields to find out what they know and still need to learn on these topics. The group hopes to launch it during the second year of the grant, and will also refine and develop surveys for other groups; recruit farmers, scientists, and physicians for CRAFH; and try to secure more permanent funding.
Eventually, the hope is to drive up demand for regeneratively produced food from doctors, patients, hospital systems, and the wider community, using these same educational efforts with other stakeholders — from farmers to food distributors to supermarkets to consumers.
Meyer said regenerative agriculture needs to be incorporated into all facets of agriculture: row crops like corn and soybeans as well as food crops. That will require looking at regional food systems and market demand, to ensure that “farmers are able to grow more food and be paid a fair price to get that to the market,” she said. That way, consumers can purchase whole foods grown locally to support human and environmental health.
Dave Ramkumar said row crops and commercial farming will continue to be essential to the economy, “but they can be run better. We just need more acreage for regenerative agriculture.”
The CRAFH project’s focus is on research and education, not the market side, but Basil’s Harvest has another initiative connecting farms directly to hospitals and other institutions to shorten the supply chain and provide healthy food. Through its “Regenerative Agriculture in the Heartland” farm-to-institution initiative, Basil’s Harvest connected OSF Hospital in Peoria to a local mill and farmers in East Central Illinois and Minnesota to supply organic oats for its kitchen.
Meyer, who is from the Peoria area, started Basil’s Harvest — named for her garden-loving dog Basil — with her husband and kids to sell home-grown organic items at the farmers market. They eventually partnered with local farmers to sell shares for weekly boxes of produce. Later, after a tornado destroyed the operation, she worked as director of a nonprofit that connected culinary professionals to diversified, sustainable farming operations for food. She resurrected Basil’s Harvest as a nonprofit to extend that idea to health care. Basil’s Harvest also has a research team collecting data on soil chemistry and biology from East Central Illinois farms to study the health of the soil microbiome.
Ultimately Meyer envisions transforming the system by changing the way we talk about growing, processing, delivering, and eating food. “Doctors learning how to prepare healthy, delicious meals that are simple and take this information to their patients — to me that’s a huge start,” she said.
In 2021, iSEE helped establish the I-FARM, securing seed-funding through the Campus as a Living Laboratory program. The project was later fully funded in 2022, thanks to a three-year, $3.9 million grant from USDA NIFA.
Naveen Uppalapati, a National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) Research Scientist on the I-FARM Operating Team offers answers to some Frequently Asked Questions about the I-FARM.
I-FARM researchers will begin to study the implementation and adoption of novel farm management practices enabled by a wide range of digital technologies developed at the University of Illinois. These technologies include autonomous robots and remote sensing powered by artificial intelligence. Before I-FARM technologies can be brought to production farming, researchers must evaluate their benefits in production settings and mitigate any costs or risks.
How can autonomous robots help farmers?
The I-FARM’s autonomous robots can aid in cover crop planting and spot reseeding, scout under the crop canopy, implement variable rate nutrient management, and perform mechanical weeding. Additionally, they can assist with pest monitoring, targeting spraying, and harvesting delicate crops such as berries.
I-FARM researchers envision that low-cost, compact, and intelligent agricultural robots will enable the large-scale adoption of sustainable farming practices. This research project aims to make robots more accessible and profitable for farmers.
What technology does the I-FARM use to collect data?
From satellite remote sensing to proximal soil moisture sensors, the I-FARM employs a large variety of data collection technology. Stationary trail cameras collect dense temporal data about canopy structure and leaf color, while drones capture images from above the field. Along with traditional data collection, I-FARM robots collect plant trait data and are equipped with cameras for the precision management of livestock.
How do researchers measure the success of I-FARM experiments?
For an I-FARM experiment to be successful, it should improve sustainability on the farm while remaining practical for farmers. This past year, researchers measured the impact of autonomous cover crop planting (cereal rye) before the harvest of the commodity crop (corn). The success of this experiment will be based on how well the cover crop emerges and reduces soil erosion compared to traditional planting on cover crops after the commodity crop is harvested.
In the long run, the I-FARM aims to develop a team of autonomous robots that a single person can operate simultaneously. This will increase the efficiency of using the robots for individual farmers.
What are the deliverables of the I-FARM project for farmers?
The I-FARM offers demonstration days for farmers to meet with researchers, engineers, economists, and farm managers who study our testbed. Farmers can interact with autonomous robots, advanced equipment, and computational systems. Demonstration days provide farmers with detailed information on how the technology works and how it integrates sustainability and profitability.
As part of I-FARM outreach efforts, researchers are developing a multi-faceted training program called I-FARM University. This program aims to familiarize farmers with AI-based digital agriculture technologies and increase their comfort with the testing and adoption of these technologies.
What are the deliverables of the I-FARM project for industry?
I-FARM researchers hope to commercialize the digital technologies developed on our testbed. The I-FARM testbed is open for collaboration with outside industries so those industries can utilize our team’s technology, equipment, space, and expertise.
What barriers exist to the adoption of I-FARM solutions?
A significant hurdle for the I-FARM team to overcome is the current cost of implementing these technological solutions. Much of the technology employed by the I-FARM is not produced in bulk or available commercially. If we can scale these technologies up, they will become more affordable for farmers.
The other complication is that the new technologies developed at the I-FARM testbed are constantly improving and evolving monthly (or even daily). Because of this, farmers looking to implement our solutions face a steep learning curve.
How do we incentivize people to adopt I-FARM solutions?
Many farmers understand the benefits of regenerative and sustainable farming practices but need assistance adopting novel digital technologies. More farmers will become comfortable with the new technology through I-FARM outreach and engagement.
Our technologies are also scale-neutral, meaning they are beneficial at both small scales and large scales. Therefore, farmers can try out the technology in a small portion of their farms first and then adopt it to more significant portions of their fields.
Additionally, the I-FARM plans to create a decision support system by providing fact sheets based on data collected from the I-FARM testbed. This system will explain regenerative practices’ long-term costs and benefits to encourage more farmers to implement them. The data will be available online and promoted at events attended by the I-FARM team.
How will I-FARM research impact conventional agriculture practices?
Our team hopes that conventional agriculture will be redefined so that environmental health — from soils to ecosystems — is as highly valued as crop yield. Hopefully, many more farmers will adopt digital technology to enhance regenerative farming practices.
What’s next for the I-FARM?
Thanks to the new NIFA grant, the I-FARM will incorporate more regenerative practices powered by digital agriculture on the testbed. Over the next two years, the team will collect reliable long-term data to fully evaluate the testbed experiments’ success. Researchers will focus on improving I-FARM technology, making it more robust and accessible to farmers.
I-FARM researchers hope to involve more industry and farm stakeholders in our experiments, and technology development, to implement sustainable management decisions, improve farm productivity, and enhance farm profitability.
Both projects are funded through iSEE’s 2023 Campus as a Living Laboratory (CALL) program, which supports research teams that tackle interdisciplinary sustainability issues on campus or in neighboring communities. They focus on leveraging campus infrastructure and enhancing researchers’ capacity to address critical knowledge gaps and ultimately secure major federal, foundation, or private funding.
Another new project addresses the manual labor costs associated with high tunnels — curved metal structures covered with greenhouse plastic that are ideal for growing plants on small urban farms. Cost-effective and adaptable, these high tunnels can extend the growing season, protect against severe weather, increase crop yields, and improve the quality of fruits, vegetables, and cut flower. But they are labor-intensive, requiring an extra layer of management to ensure quality crops.
