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FARM & RANCH
THE NORTH PLATTE TELEGRAPH
DECEMBER 2021
farmers, and producers worldwide, as they work to boost the food supply to meet demand from a population estimated to reach 10 billion by 2050. “Increasing efficiency is one of the very few po- tential win-win-wins in agriculture,” said James Schnable, Charles O. Gardner professor of agronomy. “Crops that use nitrogen more effi- ciently make it possible to sustain or increase crop yields while reduc- ing the environmental footprint of agriculture, and increase farmer profits per acre at the same time. At current prices for anhydrous ammonia, lots of farm- ers in Nebraska will have to spend more than $100 per acre on nitro- CROPS from Page F5
HudsonAlpha contin- gents to share their expertise in digital and precision agriculture, particularly the use of drones and other high- tech instruments, such as robots, cameras and laser scanners, to assess the physical character- istics of plants. They will collaborate with Alabama A&M’s Ernst Cebert and Xianyan Kuang to bolster that in- stitution’s capacity for drone-based automat- ed phenotyping, the adoption of which is a priority for Alabama A&M.
land-grant university, reflects the Nebraska Center for Plant Science Innovation’s priority of strengthening col- laboration between and students. The NSF funding will support Alabama A&M under- graduates to conduct research at Nebraska and HudsonAlpha the university and HBCU researchers during the summer, di- versifying the pipeline of future graduate stu- dents and researchers in the agrisciences. The collabora- tion will also enable the Nebraska and
In my field trials, a cer- tain treatment may have corn looking sickly and yellow, but the un- trained eye wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between the sorghum plots with or without fertilizer before the har- vest. While the focus of this project is figuring out how sorghum han- dles adapting to soils with little nitrogen, my hope is that results we generate will serve as a roadmap for making corn more efficient, as well.” The partnership with Alabama A&M, a historically Black,
and the subtropical con- ditions of Alabama. Throughout the season, they will collect data on sorghum traits as- sociated with yield by using manual measure- ments, high-throughput phenotyping measure- ments and drone-based automated phenotyping. Those measurements will be used to identify genes and gene regulato- ry networks associated with how well different sorghum lines can toler- ate or thrive in different situations. “We started working with sorghum back in 2018 for two reasons,” Schnable said. “The first is that it can grow on marginal crop land where crops like corn wouldn’t have enough water to thrive. But sor- ghum is also much more resilient to shortages of nitrogen than corn.
gen fertilizer next year.” He leads the Nebraska team, which also in- cludes Tom Clemente, Eugene W. Price dis- tinguished professor of biotechnology; Yufeng Ge, Harold W. Eberhard distinguished professor of biological systems en- gineering; and Jinliang Yang, assistant profes- sor of agronomy and horticulture. During the next phase of the project, the team will shift its focus from studying the gene reg- ulatory networks of a sorghum line known as Tx430 to conducting field tests using a set of 406 sorghum varieties assembled from around the world. The research- ers will grow the lines under nitrogen-suf- ficient and deficient conditions, planting in both Nebraska’s tem- perate environments
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