Collaboration to explore impact of cover crops
Christopher Topp, Ph.D., member and principal Investigator of the Danforth Plant Science Center, St. Louis, Missouri, and his lab members Marcus Griffiths, Ph.D. and Kong Wong, Ph.D., have teamed up with colleagues at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Kaiyu Guan, Ph.D., Bin Peng, Ph.D., and Sheng Wang, Ph.D., to explore the impact of cover crops on soil health and corn production to improve agriculture sustainability.
The research findings will be used to develop tools to help farmers make decisions about when, where and what type of cover crops could be beneficial. A $650,000 award grant from the National Institutes for Food and Agriculture will support the research project.
The research team will conduct multi-year field trials of 12 cover crop species that integrate with corn production and use root phenomics, cutting-edge sensing technologies and machine learning-enabled agroecosystem modeling to gain an improved understanding of the variation for root traits that exists among diverse cover crop species and their influence on soil and cash crops.
