Sparenberg School of Agriculture

09/15/2024

gricultural advances have made farming and our foods safer and more abundant than at any other time in history. Everyone wants safe food and sustainable

09/10/2024

08/24/2024

New data from the Illinois Society of Professional Farm Managers and Rural Appraisers offers a look at the 10 biggest absentee landowners in Illinois. Top of the list: the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

07/21/2024

By Stacy Zuber, Ph.D., Research Data Scientist, Illinois Soybean Association

06/17/2024

Heat is tough on chickens. Feathers are great insulation from the cold but no help in the hot summer. Provide heat relief so your flock doesn't suffer.

06/06/2024

Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats technology has many potential applications that facilitate sustainability, animal welfare, and efficiency.

01/20/2024

Did you know that the food you eat impacts your immune health? A healthful diet may be able to help your body fight off infections and recover from illness faster. Remember that USDA recommends we eat 2 cups of fruit, 2.5 cups of vegetables, and get about 6 ounces of lean protein each day in addition to other food groups. Everything you eat plays an important role in your short and long term health!

10/30/2023

Here is a fun lesson for teaching some critical thinking skills.

We are drowning in misinformation. From wellness influencers making wildly inaccurate and baseless nutrition claims to fringe medical “professionals” selling pseudoscientific “treatments” online to conspiracy theorists enticing followers down the rabbit hole on YouTube, it’s nearly impossi...

06/27/2023

Ruminants are amazing creatures, but what does being a ruminant mean? Ruminants are ungulates (2-toed) animals that chew a regurgitated cud. In order to chew their cud, they must have a specific type of stomach -- a rumen. Our domesticated ruminants have 1 stomach with 4 awesome compartments.
1. Rumen - The 1st chamber is the biggest and can be bigger than 30 gallons in a mature cow! The rumen has a "shaggy" carpet feel/look with papillae that flow back and forth (think seaweed moving in the ocean). The rumen is filled with "bugs" and has its own ecosystem of bacteria and yeast to break down forages.
2. Reticulum -- This 2nd chamber is a smaller outcropping of the rumen and has "cups" like a honeycomb pattern to catch the food for digestion.
3. Omasum - The 3rd part is a tight basketball shaped compartment in adult cattle with many "pages" of a book. The food weaves back and forth, absorbing water and drying out the ingesta.
4. Abomasum - The 4th compartment is like our human stomach. The ingesta is rehydrated with acid for the final digestion before the intestines.
Check out what they look like!

05/28/2022

Welcome to the official Food Chain Chats page! If you’re looking for a podcast that turns the subjects that matter most to the food chain into topics of lively, thought-provoking conversation, you better hit that like button. Our experts share fascinating perspectives on a wide variety of topics about technologies that are creating positive change for animal and food production systems around the world. Check it out at foodchainchats.com and subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts.

05/02/2022