The Spring 2022 ME415 Capstone Project group with their portable research chamber prototype. Photo courtesy of Iowa State University.
AMES, IOWA, US — Agronomists are working with engineering students at Iowa State University to create a research chamber to study soybeans’ responses in the field to current and future climate conditions.
The students created a portable field deployable research chamber that is essentially a mini greenhouse. It can be used to control conditions for plant testing in the field. Asheesh “Danny” Singh, professor of agronomy at Iowa State, worked with seniors in Mechanical Engineering 415 Capstone Design classes.
“Field testing of plants under future climate scenarios outside of the lab are vital but really difficult to conduct,” Singh said. “We need more capacity to test in-field interactions of soil health, moisture and temperature with plant vigor and health to better examine plant responses to the environmental stresses happening now and expected to escalate.”
Liza Van der Laan, an agronomy PhD student in Singh’s lab whose area of research is heat stress in soybeans, helped devise a general idea for the portable, mini-greenhouse project. Then, she worked with ME 415 teams in fall 2021 and spring 2022 to create a prototype. Their engineering challenges included creating something that would be low-cost, easy to move, durable and ideally solar-powered. The greenhouse also needed to be able to provide proper air flow and to maintain steady temperatures, especially at night.
The students developed a working model, which was displayed during the 2022 National Association of Plant Breeders annual meeting in early August.
Van der Laan expects at least one more semester of work will be needed with another ME 415 team to refine the model for use in research experiments.
Support has come from the USDA National Institute of Agriculture through the AI Institute for Resilient Agriculture grant and the National Science Foundation, with initial funding from Iowa State, including through the R.F. Baker Center for Plant Breeding and the Plant Sciences Institute. The partnership with the capstone students started in 2014-15 school year through the ISU’s Presidential Interdisciplinary Research Initiative support to develop mobile phenotyping units. Over the years, this association of Singh’s Soynomics team with ME 415 students has contributed to several successful grants from federal agencies.
In 2022-23, the International Grains Council’s July report anticipates worldwide wheat production to reach 770 million tonnes, down from 781 million tonnes in 2021-22, with 195 million tonnes available for trade.
Most wheat production comes from a handful of countries and even fewer are major exporters, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations. Here’s a look at the top 10 wheat-producing countries worldwide, based on total yield in tonnes from 2000-2020 with 2022-23 production and consumption projections.
CHICAGO, ILLINOIS, US — Representatives of the grain and milling industries recently gathered July 10-13 at McCormick Place in Chicago, Illinois, US, for IFT FIRST, the Institute of Food Technologists annual event and expo.