WRDA 2024 Unanimously Passed by Senate

Aug 05, 2024

Thursday, the Senate unanimously passed the Water Resources Development Act (WRDA) of 2024, also known as S. 4367. The Senate’s version of the bill, supported by Illinois Senators Richard Durbin and Tammy Duckworth, includes provisions for lock and dam improvement along the Mississippi and Illinois rivers. IL Corn thanks Sen. Durbin and Duckworth for their investment in the state’s waterways infrastructure.

The Senate WRDA 2024 bill (Section 109) permanently adjusted the inland waterways cost-share for construction and major rehabilitation projects to 75% general revenues/25% Inland Waterways Trust Fund (IWTF) (from 65%/35%). It also provided 100% full Federal funding for projects funded in the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), also known as the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. The funding will allow for continued improvements to be made on Lock and Dam 25, on the Illinois-Missouri border.

The House of Representatives passed its WRDA legislation on July 22, but the bill did not include any inland waterways provision. Now, the Senate EPW Committee and the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee will begin the conference process to resolve differences between the two bills.

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Video: Seeing the Whole Season: How Continuous Crop Modeling Is Changing Breeding

Plant breeding has long been shaped by snapshots. A walk through a plot. A single set of notes. A yield check at the end of the season. But crops do not grow in moments. They change every day.

In this conversation, Gary Nijak of AerialPLOT explains how continuous crop modeling is changing the way breeders see, measure, and select plants by capturing growth, stress, and recovery across the entire season, not just at isolated points in time.

Nijak breaks down why point-in-time observations can miss critical performance signals, how repeated, season-long data collection removes the human bottleneck in breeding, and what becomes possible when every plot is treated as a living data set. He also explores how continuous modeling allows breeding programs to move beyond vague descriptors and toward measurable, repeatable insights that connect directly to on-farm outcomes.

This conversation explores:

• What continuous crop modeling is and how it works

• Why traditional field observations fall short over a full growing season

• How scale and repeated measurement change breeding decisions

• What “digital twins” of plots mean for selection and performance

• Why data, not hardware, is driving the next shift in breeding innovation As data-driven breeding moves from research into real-world programs, this discussion offers a clear look at how seeing the whole season is reshaping value for breeders, seed companies, and farmers, and why this may be only the beginning.