Award Data

Commercial producers of nursery crops, plant seed, and food crops all require assurance of healthy planting stock. To address this need, laboratories, institutions and agencies, worldwide, use a variety of methods to examine plant materials and demonstrate that seeds, cuttings, and plants test free of pathogens. Such tests provide crops a passport to travel and give the grower confidence that a he ...

The long term goal of this project is to eliminate insect pests from the US food and feed supply with a sensor device, minimize exposure of humans and animals to residual chemicals or insecticides, and reduce financial losses due to grain damage. The lesser grain borer (LGB) is a devastating, long-lived pest of stored wheat, corn and other cereal grains in the US and other parts of the world. Adul ...

Shading vegetables and fruits can reduce temperatures resulting in improved fruit set, increase fruit size and quality, and reduce water consumption. Shading materials for reducing light intensity or transmission have been used extensively in the nursery industry as well as with large commercial growers of high value fruits and vegetables for many years. The physiological processes of plants have ...

Obesity is a growing epidemic that continues to threaten the health of both adults and children around the world. Additionally, challenging economic times and increasing food costs puts pressure on consumers to purchase lower priced meals. While there are many ingredients available that can lower fat and calorie contents of foods, their usage is somewhat limited because either their quality is not ...

The Formosan subterranean termite (Coptotermes formosanus, FST), an exotic, cryptic pest, causes about $1 billion damage in the US annually (Lax and Osbrink). Unlike native species, this aggressive termite attacks living trees, potentially threatening southern forests and the urban/forest interface. Potential forest damage is twofold: direct damage or death to trees and indirect disruption or disp ...

USDA secretary, Tom Vilsack recently urged the Forest Service to "develop new markets" for forest by-products, which encourage healthy timber management. Small-diameter round timber is an abundant by-product of healthy timber management and could serve emerging green commercial markets if technical barriers, specifically round timber "connections", can be solved. Whole Trees Architecture and Const ...

Algae are one of the most, if not the most, productive biomass crops known and have a photosynthetic efficiency almost twice that of the most productive terrestrial crop, sugarcane. However, algae are not without disadvantages relative to terrestrial crops, and do require their own novel technical solutions. Characteristically, microalgae are aquatic, very small (1 to 10 micron diameter), very dil ...

The Illinois Soybean Association and the USDA initiated and supported the original research project that produced the prototype Global Food in 3?D and underlies the proposed new product, Global Feed in 3?D. The expected user groups were small and mid?sized farmer leaders and allied analysts and stakeholders as a result of the research's original design and goals. The research outcome of this ...

This project addresses priority areas of 1) Animal Productivity (in both conventional and alternative production systems), 2) Animal Health and Well-Being, and 3) Food Safety and Environmental Mitigation, as described in the NIFA Program Announcement for Phase I SBIR applications. 1) Productivity: Intramammary infection (a.k.a., mastitis) is the largest attributable cause of lost productivity, dis ...

Through previous grant awards from IES, researchers developed Graspable Math, a tablet-based intervention where middle and high school students create and manipulate complex expressions for basic operations as well as equations and equations systems and inequalities. In this project, the team will develop a prototype of Graspable Math Activities, an app with novel kinds of algebra practice and ass ...