b'Moving Towards Sustainable AgricultureThe 2021 Corteva Agricultural Sciences Symposium highlighted cutting-edge innovations helping to improve farming systems. Marc ZienkiewiczSPONSORED BY CORTEVA AGRISCIENCEandDiscovering the Potential of Droneshosted by the University of Guelph, the Corteva AgriculturalKevin FalkSciences Symposium was held in November and broughtIntegrated Field Sciences Research together experts to talk current trends in plant sciences, suchScientist, Corteva Agriscienceas handling big data, machine learning, and using cutting-edgeFalk has made a name for himself as an technology. Heres some of the cool things these researchers areup-and-coming star of the seed sector, up to and why it matters. having made Seed Worlds Top 10 Next Gen Leaders list in 2020. He is currently exploring the use of Making Corn a Perennial Crop technology likes drones to unlock the potential of crops like corn Seth Murray and soybean. He said improving the throughput and accuracy of Corn breeder, Texas A&M University plant phenotyping is core to the continued advances in breed-Murray has discovered that individualing to ensure genetic gain and to meet global food demand. genes dont predict corn yield very well, soManual phenotyping requires enormous investments in time, he began to look at the physical cost and labor, as quantitative values are required for thousands qualities of corn instead. Using imagesof varieties across different environments, which presents a taken by drones, he and his team members looked at the huge hurdle to scalability. Low-cost drones have great potential phenomic traits of corn to predict which plants would yield bestfor collecting these phenotypic traits.and how breeding and selection could be improved. Murray is also working to create perennial corn varieties that couldSniffing out Diseasechange corn production as we know it. Sindhuja SankaranAssociate Professor, Washington State Investigating Delta-Yield UniversityJohn Sulik How can we use remote sending to study Assistant Professor, University of Gulph the interaction between crops, genetics Sulik uses using the remote sensing dataand environment to produce sustain-to create information for making betterable food, fiber and fuels? This is what Sankaran specializes farming management decisions. Onein. She utilizes opto-electronic, biological and chemical sen-recent project of his involves evaluatingsors for non-invasive, rapid and continuous monitoring of plant data aggregation approaches for delta-yield nitrogen fertil- responses to environmental stress, helping create a faster and ity on-farm trial data. Delta-yield is an economic assessment ofbetter understanding of how our food crops react to a changing farmer nitrogen fertilizer rate decisions, notes Grain Farmers ofenvironment. One of her recent projects? Using olfactory sens-Ontario. It estimates the economically optimal nitrogen rate soing systems to sniff out plant diseases before symptoms even a farmer can compare their chosen nitrogen rate to the optimal.appear.SWThe study will help create an important foundation for future on-farm research aimed at improving environmental/economic performance of fertilizer nitrogen in corn.38/ SEEDWORLD.COMJANUARY 2022'