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    Advanced Crop Nutrition Forum (Illinois, August 2023)

    In This Edition: This past August, The Mosaic Company and the Crop Physiology Lab at the University of Illinois co-hosted their annual Advanced Crop Nutrition Forum. Bringing together academic researchers, Mosaic experts, and retailer clients, the event offered an opportunity to discuss recent innovations in crop nutrition and see first-hand some of the results that new products and practices are yielding. Sherry Koch, Senior Technical Sales Manager with The Mosaic Company, offers a video summary from the heart of the Corn Belt.

    Additional Resources:

    CropNutrition.com articles featuring University of Illinois researchers:
    “Unlocking Soybean Yield Potential with Crop Nutrition”
    “Dr. Fred Below’s Five Management Factors for a High-Yield Corn System”
    “Drop Fertigation: The Future of Higher Yields?”

    University of Illinois, Department of Crop Sciences:
    Crop Physiology Lab
    _____________________________________________________________________________________

    Video Highlights:

    “Mosaic’s brought in a great group here to interact with the University, and we’re going to talk about everything crop management, fertilizers, genetics, varieties, the interactions they have with each other, optimizing those synergies and just really kind of getting everyone excited about what can be done next on the farm to improve crop yields and management.”
    -Connor Sible, Ph.D., Postdoctoral Research Associate, University of Illinois

    “That’s what I love about this event — is that it’s a little bit of inside education, right? We can’t help [it], the University, give a little bit of education on some basic agronomy concepts. Then we’re going to come out to the field, because seeing is believing, right? And we want to look at some things, demonstrations, get people’s minds thinking about, what could we be doing next to improve crop yields, both with plot tours, demos, to name some examples out in the fields.”
    -Connor Sible, Ph.D., Postdoctoral Research Associate, University of Illinois

    “I think the takeaway [from the last couple of days] is, and this is important for everybody: no matter how long you’ve been in the business, there’s always something new to learn or something new to adapt or change. We’ve been working with the same product or practice for 10 years. There’s new ways to use those products and practices if we really think about it. To me, I think a big takeaway was just, there’s always something new to learn or adapt and change.”
    -Connor Sible, Ph.D., Postdoctoral Research Associate, University of Illinois

    “When I look forward, moving forward, where I see a lot of next questions and things to consider, we’re going to be using a lot more nutrients than we used to just because we’re growing more crops, whether it’s cover crop, double crop in that scenario, and understanding where those nutrients go. How many are leaving the field, out with the grain trucks? How much is still in the residues that go out the other end of the combine? If it is in those residues, how available is it?”
    -Connor Sible, Ph.D., Postdoctoral Research Associate, University of Illinois

    “How do we feed these modified cropping systems, whatever they might look like in the future? We feel that we have some tools that are really versatile that can help across the wide range of planting dates and crops and species and all those different components. A big part of our R&D program moving forward will be around how we marry biological crop nutrition with balanced crop nutrition… In the case of the Corn Belt, which is where we are, in the next 60 to 90 days, there’s going to be a lot of fertilizer going into the ground. I think that in order to maximize the impact of crop nutrition, we shouldn’t think about balanced crop nutrition and some of the biological tools or solutions as separate components. We should be thinking about them as a holistic approach to managing crop nutrition. I think it would be prudent for growers, as we head into this fall time period, to be thinking about how we can build a system that brings together best-in-class balanced crop nutrition sources, and at the same time, be thinking about the biological tools that we’ll use to help complement and extract the maximum value out of that fertilizer investment.”
    -Ross Bender, Ph.D., Director, New Product Development, The Mosaic Company