Explore How Starting at the Soil Can Strengthen Production at Dudley Smith Farm Field Day

May 13, 2024

By Jenna Braasch

Soil health and quality play a significant role in the nutritional value of pastures and cover crops, determining grazing strategies and sustainability. Attending the University of Illinois Extension Dudley Smith Farm Field Day this summer will help producers break down soil components impacting quality, explore research findings, and leave with options to employ better soil health changes in their cattle, pasture, and farming operations.

Dudley Smith Farm is where tradition drives sustainable agriculture practice into the future through hands-on research opportunities. Attendees can look forward to hearing industry updates and application examples on-site at the upcoming field day beginning at 9:30 a.m. on Thursday, June 20, at the research center at 2200 E. 600 North Rd., off Route 29 between Taylorville and Pana in Christian County. A free lunch is provided.

Field day presentation topics include:

•    Explore management programs to reduce N and P runoff in cropping plans.
•    Discover cover crops in livestock and cropping programs.
•    Updates on P and K recommendations for field crops in Illinois.
•    Look at the history of soil testing results for Illinois.
•    Transition from a family farm to a farm-to-plate operation.
•    Explore grazing strategies for beef producers.
•    Discuss related crop sciences research findings from University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

There is also the opportunity for a farm tour of field cropping systems and the beef paddocks to conclude the day. There is no cost to attend the field day. Advance registration by June 17 is required to receive lunch. Check out the full agenda, speakers, and registration at go.illinois.edu/DSFFieldDay24.

Source : illinois.edu

Video: From Students to Solutions | On The Brink: Season 2, Episode 14

Ask Canada’s most decorated soybean breeder his favourite part of the job and he doesn’t name a single variety. He names the students.

Istvan Rajcan is a professor of soybean breeding and genetics in the Department of Plant Agriculture at the University of Guelph, where he has run the soybean breeding program for 28 and a half years. In that time he has developed 87 soybean cultivars, published 140 refereed papers and trained 51 graduate students. In 2025 he received the Public Sector Impact Award from the National Association for Plant Breeding.

He is also worried. In this episode he says Canada is at a crossroads, pointing to recent government cuts to plant breeding programs and to the facilities that support them. His prescription is structural. "Plant breeding funding formula has to be a long-term one," he says.

The formula he is defending is the public-private matching arrangement his program runs on. Private seed companies fund the work, provincial or federal money matches it, and the combined pool stretches each dollar further than either source could alone. At the National Association for Plant Breeding annual meeting in June, he says American public breeders were often surprised at how well that collaboration works in Canada.

He also describes how the people entering plant breeding have changed. His early graduate students came mostly from farms. More recently they include, in his words, "city kids who just became excited about genetics."

Topics covered:

Why public-private plant breeding funding in Canada needs a long-term

commitment rather than a larger one

How matching private seed company investment with provincial and federal

dollars multiplies research capacity

How the graduate student pipeline into plant breeding has shifted from

farm kids to city kids