2025 NREC Funded Research Projects – Project Objectives
2025 NREC Funded Research Projects_v2
In 2025, NREC is funding eight new and unique projects with 26 continuing multi-year activities. The funding for these projects comes from an assessment of 75 cents per ton of fertilizer sold in Illinois. Additional funds have been earmarked for communications and outreach projects to ensure that farmers and fertilizer industry professionals are receiving timely updates from the research projects. Council-funded projects fall into three main categories with an emphasis on the 4R’s – applying the right source of fertilizer, at the right rate, right time, and right place, looking at ways to capture nutrients within the field using cover crops, and finally exploring methods of capturing nutrients before they are lost in a way that could potentially impact the environment. The last category focuses on methods such as buffer strips, woodchip bioreactors, and wetlands.
| Project Title | Institution | Principal Investigator | 2025 Project Budget |
|---|---|---|---|
| Economic Analysis of NREC Projects Involving Farm Management Practices: From Trial Plots to Commercial-scale Adoption | UI | Paulson | |
| Optimizing cover crops and wheat to reduce nitrogen and phosphorus surface run-off losses in southern Illinois | UI | Margenot | |
| Using On-farm Precision Experiments in a Data-intensive Approach to Systems Management of Cover Crops and Nitrogen Fertilizer | UI | Jones | |
| Next Generation Cover Cropping in Corn-Soybean Rotation to Improve Farm Benefits and Decrease Environmental Losses in South and Central Illinois: Phase II | SIU | Sadeghpour | |
| Evaluating the effectiveness of streambank stabilization for nutrient loss reductions: Over 20 years of Illinois evidence | UI | Rhoads | |
| Scaling up conservation agriculture by growing cover crops ahead of soybean and moving fall fertilizer nitrogen application to spring | UI | Yu | |
| On-farm and farmer-led: an expanded tile monitoring network for informing nutrient loss reduction practices and outcomes in north-central Illinois | UI | Margenot | |
| Weather extremes and nutrient loss in Illinois: synthesis and modeling | UI | Bhattarai |