Affiliated Programs

Healthy Yards for Clear Streams

The Healthy Yards for Clear Streams program is an educational effort to help landowners and businesses become more environmentally responsible with lawn and landscape practices. Our goal is to promote lawn care practices that creating beautiful lawns and gardens while reducing unnecessary use of pesticides and fertilizers that may run off and contaminate local streams.

Missouri Seed Improvement Association

The Missouri Crop Improvement Association (MCIA) is an independent, not-for-profit organization providing unbiased, third-party services in the areas of seed certification, quality assurance (QA), identity preserved (IP), source identified and organic inspections. In addition, MCIA operates a full service laboratory providing testing and analysis services for seed & grain products.

MU Agricultural Experiment Stations

The Missouri Agricultural Experiment Station (AES) conducts research in agriculture, forestry, animal science and natural resources that benefits the citizens of Missouri. This research is geared to making the most effective use possible of the state's natural resource base, including its people resources, in an increasingly global economy.

MU Center of Agroforestry

Agroforestry practices help landowners to diversify products, markets and farm income; improve soil and water quality; sequester carbon, and reduce erosion, non-point source pollution and damage due to flooding; and mitigate climate change.

MU Interdisciplinary Plant Group

IPG seeks to encourage interdisciplinary cooperation between scientists engaged in plant molecular biology, physiology, biochemistry, genetics, biotechnology, evolution, ecology, and computer science. Their aim in integrating these disciplines is to stimulate joint research projects that will enhance our understanding of how plants grow and develop in changing environments.

National Center for Soybean Biotechnology

The NCSB is a collaborative program among scientists at the University of Missouri, the USDA-ARS Plant Genetics Unit in Columbia, and the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center in St. Louis, MO. There are currently more than 40 researchers working together that have expertise in diverse fields including agronomy, microbiology and plant pathology, chemistry, biochemistry, animal science, food science, molecular biology, engineering, computer science, and agricultural economics.

Plant Root Genomics Consortium

The aim of this consortium is to develop an understanding of the molecular mechanisms used by plant roots to acquire water and minerals from the soil, to elucidate the role roots play in adaptation to drought conditions, and to transfer this knowledge to crop improvement through biotechnology.

Soybean Cyst Nematode Phenotyping

Soybean cyst nematode (SCN) is the most devastating and yield limiting pest of soybean in the United States. The nematodes attack and destroy soybean roots resulting in over one billion dollars in crop losses each year. There are several different varieties or races of the nematodes making it more difficult to find resistant varieties. A soybean variety might be resistant to one variety, but not another. Our laboratory is conducting research to find soybean varieties that are resistant to several or all of the nematode races.

Thomas Jefferson Agricultural Institute

The Thomas Jefferson Agricultural Institute is a nonprofit agriculture education and research center based in Columbia, MO. Jefferson Institute staff conduct a variety of agriculture education and research programs.

USDA Biological Control of Insects Research Lab

The mission of BCIRL (Biological Control of Insects Research Laboratory) is to discover, develop and refine principles and methods to effectively use biological control agents for the management of pest populations of insects and weeds. Specifically included in this mission are evaluation and enhancement of the activity, safety and production of effective beneficial pathogens, parasitoids and predators for biological control. BCIRL objectives are part of a larger ARS initiative to integrate the use of biological control agents into sustainable pest management systems.

USDA Cropping Systems and Water Quality Research Unit

Anticipate needs, develop knowledge, and provide technological solutions to optimize agricultural production systems, at the sub-field to watershed scale, for both economic and environmental sustainability.

USDA Plant Genectics Research Unit

The mission of the Plant Genetics Research Unit at Columbia, MO, is to develop new knowledge that expands our understanding of the fundamental processes controlling increased production, improved quality, and enhanced uses of corn, soybeans, and wheat; and to utilize this knowledge to develop germplasm and crop management schemes that lead to increased farm profitability and sustainability of the nation's resource base.