CMR FAC | Research, Outreach, and Working Together

From the Land Grant University in Urbana Champaign, Illinois, this is a special edition of the closing market report presentations from the twenty twenty five farm assets conference, research, outreach, and working together. I'm University of Illinois Extension's Todd Gleason. You know the future of Illinois agriculture is in the hands of some very capable leaders. At the Farm Assets Conference, key figures from the University of Illinois College of ACES and the Illinois Corn Growers Association sat down to discuss the evolving landscape of agricultural research, extension services, and industry collaboration. From navigating shifts in federal funding priorities to pioneering AI applications and farming, These leaders are bridging the gap between campus innovation and Muddy Boots field application.

Join us as we hear from Matthew Vann, the new Director of Extension at the University of Illinois. Rodney Weinser, a longtime leader at the Illinois Corn Growers Association, and Rod Johnson, associate dean of research at the College of ACES.

I thought I would start by just kinda talking a bit about what it's been like in year 2025. It started out incredibly disruptive, as we went to the new administration and the shift in priorities from from the new administration and deemphasizing things related to climate change and DEI, maybe environmental justice, had a big impact on some colleges to a lesser extent to to ACEs. I would say after we went kinda through this shock and awe phase, at the end of that in the College of ACES we had really just two major grants, active grants that were influenced by the shift in priorities. One you've probably heard of, the Soybean Innovation Lab that was funded by USAID, Pete Goldsmith's group. Very successful active program, so that was really a difficult period to go through.

They've had a nice pivot though and seem to be doing okay. And then we had a significant grant that was focused on climate smart agriculture that was also canceled. So that compared to other colleges across the University of Illinois that was actually pretty good. We had a number of active grants that were suspended pending a review, some keyword searches for like climate change or things of that nature. And oftentimes those suspended grants just required a small amendment to make sure it was in line with the new priorities and then those grants were reinstated and moved on.

In fiscal year twenty twenty four, the College of ACEs had research expenditures in excess of $78,000,000 and in FY '25 despite the disruption, we had research expenditures that exceeded $88,000,000. So that puts us second among the 13 colleges at our campus, second only to Granger College of Engineering. So we have a very robust program and I think we had disruption but now I would say I see reason for being optimistic. What we do is always been important and is going to be important going forward. It's about food and agriculture, it's energy, it's the environment, water quality, it's communities, it's health, that's never going to fall out of favor.

And I think that's reflected by the enrollment that we're seeing in the college. So we have record undergraduate enrollment, 3,080 undergraduates in our program which is a testament to the importance of what we do in the college and how our faculty in different departments have reacted to these changes. We see, you know, our campus is is known for being interdisciplinary, so we collaborate with everybody that we can. It's not just within the College of ACES where we have seven academic units. There's a lot of collaboration there, but we have collaboration all over campus and probably one of the most exciting ones relates to how we're working with the Granger College of Engineering, establishing the Center for Digital Agriculture, which has major support coming from the National Science Foundation and USDA looking at application of AI to all aspects of agriculture both on the crop side but also on the livestock side.

So those are some of the things that I get excited about and I'll stop there.

Okay. We'll have more questions for you and if you've got questions go ahead and raise your hand, we'll get those asked. Matthew Van, you're the new director of extension. You've been on the job since the fall, roughly roughly speaking. Tell me about where you came from and your impressions.

What your expected impressions of campus might be and how they differ since you've been here for a while now.

I don't know who's counting, but two and a half months is is how long I've been here now. So it it's been a good two and a half months. And, in some ways, it feels like it's been two and a half days, and then others, maybe two and a half years. But, overall we've got a lot of net positives so you know to take the first question my background is coming from academics professionally coming from North Carolina State University where I was an extension faculty member for about ten years I had a 70% extension 30% research appointment in the department of crop and soil sciences so really again the whole professional outlook I had was really as a faculty member looking for ways to serve the stakeholders and citizens of North Carolina and being in the crop sciences agronomy discipline you know I had a pretty focused stakeholder group working through our network of extension agents and us really partnering day to day to figure out what problems and needs there were among our community and then develop applied research that we could generate knowledge from and extend back out to them. So I spent between graduate school and being a faculty member spent about thirteen years, actually sixteen years total, in North Carolina.

One of my final kind of duties as assigned I guess would be the right term. The last three months I was at NC State, I was the interim associate director for NC State Extension. So, a little bit about NC State Extension. About 1,700 personnel are in the system, so it's the second largest cooperative extension system in the country. So, that gave me a pretty unique perspective to see a large and dynamic extension force in action.

Prior to that, prior to my professional life, I grew up in rural North Central Florida and grew up on a small family farm but my father was our county extension agent so I got to see from a personal side what extension can do for a rural farming community that obviously had a lot of specific needs specifically with the diversity of crops we produce so I've been able to see both sides of that coin as a son of a county agent and then trying to lead an extension program of my own. So, again, at each stop of the way, Todd, there's been these little experiences and big experiences, I think, that kind of set me up to have somewhat of a vision for what University of Illinois Extension might be. Now, coming in I sort of had this vision, you understand extension, you understand what we do. But as our program leader for community and economic development likes to say, if you've seen one extension system you've seen one. So coming here I've been able to see a different extension system and you know one of the major differences is when we look at the makeup of Illinois Extension and the way we have our units or multi county clusters kind of put together throughout the state that's a little bit different than I'm accustomed to.

And in that I'm cognizant that there have been some growing pains and struggles as we went through a reorganization about fifteen years ago and things that I think we're trying to kind of get back into doing from what our mission is going back to the passing of the Smith Lever Act in 1914 and even the Morrill Act in 1862. So, again that was a little bit different just to kind of be on the backside of that reorg by maybe ten or fifteen years and still see that we've got some work to do in that area to get back into some of our communities and to partner with some folks that maybe we haven't been as closely aligned with since the reorg happened. Other things that I've seen and these are conversations that Rod and I have rather frequently are ways to better partner and better align things that are happening in his office, which is just down the hall from mine. So the research office and then what we do within extension and to really make sure that our extension faculty that are conducting the applied research are really working in tandem and in lockstep with our field staff that are again conducting some of their own applied research but are really the boots on the ground and the eyes and ears for what we have throughout our state.

So again, lot to unpack there but, you know, partnerships that we're trying to to work together, to fulfill and succeed with on campus.

Yeah, just just to clarify. So the extension faculty that he would be talking about, and then the staff in the in in extension that would be, doing some of the, research, the muddy boots kind of people are. So you heard extension faculty today. Gary Schnitke is extension faculty, John Jones, and crop sciences. Nick is extension faculty.

Boris Camilletti who is not here, he's at the he's at the by state. Oh, yeah. At the beef house, which is an annual event that takes place, making presentations there. He's a plant pathologist. And of course, Aaron Hager, weed scientist.

And and a few others as well on campus. They lead the research and then those who are in the field, the extension folks in this case in commercial agriculture would be the muddy boots kind of on the ground that are doing a lot of plot work and a lot of the research that's feeding back into them. Now, I wonder how it is over the and you've been how long have you been with the Illinois corn growers at this point, Rodney?

Thirty seven years.

Okay. So Rodney and I are we both started roughly in the same time. I've got thirty seven years in or will by the time we get to April. So we've both been around a long time at this point. How have, what's the goods and the bads over the thirty seven years kind of as it relates to working with research organizations like the University of Illinois?

So maybe just a little bit about organization first. So I work for two different boards of directors. None of the board members serve on both boards. Work for the Illinois Corn Marketing Board which is the check off board. Then I also work for the Illinois Corn Growers Association and we had some staff earlier in the day up here.

One thing that's a little bit unique relative to corn from a check off standpoint, specifically Illinois, is by statute we cannot fund production research. We cannot fund research that increases yield. Okay? So we spend all our time focused on demand, new products. You heard about IBRL, iFAB, other work going on.

We do a lot of work with the farm doc team around policy evaluation within the farm bill, crop insurance. Those are places that we work. But as far as trying to increase yield by statute, we can't. We're the only state in the nation that has that. Now, that might sound kind of weird, but I would say over the last almost one hundred years, there's been about seven years that we haven't raised enough corn in this country for the market.

Six of them were droughts. And so our problem in the corn sector is create demand, create demand, create demand. And so that's always been our focus. And so if you see us out there, that's where we focus and we put a lot of resources in those particular areas. So working with the universities, before I had this job, I was a county extension agent.

So I know what extension used to be a long time ago. I know that it's changed a lot and I really appreciate having someone new here that's going to focus and maybe build back what I think is important for farmers in Illinois is to have an unbiased group of experts that can help farmers navigate some of the issues that maybe we run into if we're just dealing with only industry representatives. So I think having that neutral party using university information as a basis for that information and knowledge is super important to the industry even though there's fewer and fewer farmers all the time. I'm very much looking forward to what that looks like going forward. One thing that we're really focusing on, there's a lot of discussion by Vijay saying earlier, we really see an opportunity for value added corn products down the line.

Most people probably don't know this, but corn as a feedstock dextrose is like the cheapest feedstock in the world to feed a biochemical platform. It's about $04 a pound. That is cheaper than any other sugar out there. And so as those products go, corn will be the feedstock of choice economically unless there's something in the policy side that's trying to constrain that. So I think even more down the road with IBRL and IFAB, we probably just learned here about a year ago, the University of Illinois is the only school that has a wet milling component in there as a land grant.

That's it, one. And so we have a lot of wet mill capacity in Illinois. It's a very important part of the corn usage portfolio. Feedstock of dextrose is going to come from wet mills. So we're going to be investing more heavily into that part just for no other reason to make sure that that segment of industry has access to people that they need from a career standpoint going forward.

So that is a place that we're going to put a lot more resources in. And Illinois, besides IFAB, have two other great assets in that space. The USDA lab in Peoria, the name in there of that lab is utilization. So they also have a fermentation platform from a federal standpoint and then at Edwardsville is the National Corn and Ethanol Research Center, which there's nothing like that in The United States. So Illinois is uniquely positioned to take advantage of just the tools that we have to capitalize on that going forward.

Todd, can I comment on that? I think this is a really important example of of collaborating with our industry stakeholders. You know, I started out talking about the, research expenditures, and most of that's coming from federal agencies. But some of the stuff that Rod is talking about isn't likely to be funded necessarily through traditional grants that our PIs are used to obtaining. And so having this type of relationship, we have we invest a lot in the infrastructure to allow, different commodity groups to come in and leverage that investment, working with our faculty, and do bigger and better things that we couldn't do alone.

And and I would say they couldn't do it either without the investment made at the university level. So we really value those partnerships. And I would say just like you've I didn't know you started out as an extension. And I think that, you know, Matthew mentioned, you know, the, you know, the the moral act and and the the Hatch Act in 1892 that established the Agricultural Experiment Station at the University of Illinois and every other land grant institution. Thirty years later, it's the Smith Lever Act that established cooperative extension.

And these things were all intended to kind of work collaboratively. And my sense is that it's not universal across all aspects, but in many ways we've got this disconnect between the ag experiment station and extension. And there's really a lot of opportunity to kind of narrow that gap. And Matthew and I have been having great discussions as he said about, okay, we we're we're not gonna fix everything, but let's pick three, four, five ways that we can work together this year and say that we're and narrowing the gap between what happens in the experiment station and what happens with extension.

I put up on on your table a survey that some extension folks asked me to have you take. This is on your preferences as it's related to some renewable energy. If you could fill that out, just leave it on the table. I would appreciate it. If you've got questions, hold your hand up and we can ask them of these folks.

So I'm about the delivery systems that you all envision going forward as it's related to agricultural content coming from campus and how it will continue to be delivered to producers and others that might need and want to use it. Sometimes it's train the trainer. Sometimes it's on the Internet. Sometimes it's meetings like this. And Matthew, you can say all of the above, but do you have thoughts on in agriculture exactly what might be a good option or that you will be exploring?

Well, Todd, I'll I'll go to the default. You said it, you know, it is all of the above. You know, when we look at what we might consider to be traditional extension engagement it is this right here it's a lot of the face to face engagement interaction and even at maybe more of a granular level there's opportunities for one on one you know doing doing farm visits and those kind of things Those are great I think that's our bread and butter that's really our core culture and we can never replace the face to face value again I think that's the most valuable component that we can bring to the table. Now that being said you know it's certainly easy to come and be here today the roads are clear but you probably aren't getting a tractor in the field and not going to do that for a while that's not the case you know once we get into field season and we want to be mindful of that again whether there's opportunities to have these kind of events or you know just heard some great information from Nick you know if he's seeing something of interest and finally gets one of those field sites where he's got a lot of insects and something worth seeing you know obviously that's a great opportunity to bring folks in and talk about something unique but when it comes down again to those busy times of planting and management harvest season I know what it's like to get in at midnight and you you may have a burning question and we've got the resources and the technology today to have recorded webinars or short podcast series or short YouTube series that we can put online, newsletters, bulletins, etcetera that you can access at your leisure.

Todd, maybe one specific example of something I've thought about and really this idea sort of came about as I was trying to learn more about our extension system in preparation for interviewing for this job. I found that we have a lot of information extension portals and our extension websites it's just not always the easiest to find and certainly again if it's midnight you're tired and got this burning question you don't want to spend a lot of time trying to find the exact answer that you need at that exact moment and if there might be a way to put some kind of chat bot on our website that can help a user navigate and find that information a little bit easier and faster we think there's ways to do that and there's still opportunities on the backside of that where you have a transcript of what was discussed with a chat bot and if you got a question related to soil management then somebody like John may get a notice that hey this person engaged with the chat bot asked these questions and it gives them a chance to verify that the information the user got was correct and provide an opportunity for follow-up so I think there's some new innovative ways that we can get information out to folks a little bit faster and again maybe tailor it to things and platforms that they want and I think again surveys like this that can answer some of those questions for exactly what our stakeholders want that's the direction we really want to go.

For what it's worth I like radio it's kind of

an

old

timey thing. Hey, that's another good one. Okay. Hey, look, I have listened to more radio since I've been in Champaign now that there's a decent country music station. Oh, there you go.

Dang. Yeah. They're laughing big. Well, he's gone from there. Laughing because my competitor is on that scene.

Well Not my competitor.

I'm I'm strictly in the music business, folks. How about that? And coming from Raleigh where we didn't have one. Yeah.

Go on, I know you have

something I'll to be careful here because well maybe all the PharmDoc team left. That's good. The PharmDoc team and what they put out is in our mind as an organization is excellent and is better than anybody else in the land grant system in the ag econ space. But it takes a lot of manpower to put out an article every day. But that's what got them there.

And from an ag econ and especially an ag policy standpoint, I don't know if you know this, there are now only two land grants that are doing work on ag policy. Two, Purdue and Iowa State no longer have an ag policy group. It is the University of Illinois and Texas A and M. That's it. And if you get into all the policy stuff like we do, there is literally a battle going on between those two land grants on information out there.

And it's I just think doing something like that, I know crop sciences has worked on something, but in the extension days I remember the insect bulletin and the different bulletins that came out weekly and they were the most read documents that extension did. Now if there's a way to electronically be able to do that, but it takes a lot of manpower to do an article every day. But to me, that is something that would really be helpful. You still need that person out in the field to help where you maybe have disagreements going on between an ag retailer or a farmer or to get that university based information out there. But there are ways to the comment here that there's ways to do that without having to have meetings all the time, especially when times that there's not time to be able to go to meetings.

As the research associate, how would you like the research to be delivered out to those that might be able to use it?

Yeah. So this again kind of comes back to something that we can do a better job of with working with extension. We have a science writer that is part of our team in the office of research that puts out press releases about different projects that have been published and trying to translate it into something that is understandable Hard

to do

a and lot useful. Right. One of and then we have a started a practice. There's a it's called the Land Grant Impacts Database that is accessed by policy makers in DC oftentimes, and we are submitting summaries of our research that's coming out of the Ag Experiment Station to two projects per month. We're adding to that impact database so that information can be readily pulled by anybody can go to it, but, you know, I think policy makers probably use it more than than producers do.

But I think one of the things that happened in the last two months, we had a couple of articles that our science writer wrote that had to do with water management. And and it was like these it looks really important to to communities, you know, municipalities, and we don't really have a good mechanism to make sure that that even gets to extension right now. So we need to do a better job of like making sure that we have seamless communication. So when these articles, this research gets out, that it's getting into the right hand. I I'm thinking back to Vijay Singh's presentation.

You remember the gap between Yeah.

There's always a

gap. What happens early that at the university level and the paper gets published and then the other end of that graph was the application piece and there's that big gap in the middle. And so how we we need to make sure things don't stop with the publication and that the appropriate material gets out to the to the extension staff.

Any final word from each of you? I think we'll we'll talk about that. A last comment of sorts?

I'll just make one, and it's really an opportunity to kind of thank thank our stakeholder groups. One of the disruptive factors this last year was the threat of relocating the, soybean germplasm bank, to another state that frankly didn't want it nor did they have the facilities to manage it. But that was a plan to relocate that out of Illinois. And I would you know, our director of government affairs, Steve Wald, worked closely with the Soybean Association. And ultimately, I just saw the most amazing letter that went to the secretary of ag that was signed by all of the soybean state organizations in the North Central Region.

And I think that had a big impact and it was really great to see how those stakeholders came to support the university at a at a time that we really needed that support. And and to reciprocate, we wanna be there to support our stakeholders too.

Rod Johnson is the associate dean of research for the College of Agricultural Consumer and Environmental Sciences at the University of Illinois. He was joined by Matthew Vann, the director of extension for U of I, and Rodney Weinserl, the executive director of the Illinois Corn Growers Association during the twenty twenty five Farm Assets Conference. You may find more about it on our website at willag.org. That's willag.org or by searching out Farm Assets Conference. I'm University of Illinois Extension's Todd Gleeson.