Agronomy

 

Our Mission: 

The Agronomy lab at Kentucky State University is dedicated to enhancing crop productivity, profitability and sustainability. We focus on developing improved crop cultivation and soil management practices and identifying site-specific best cropping system and crop management practices. We also strive to improve the quality of grains and end use products, while advancing our understanding of seed growth and composition dynamics under varying environmental conditions, source sink manipulations and input availability. In addition, our work also aims to optimize aerial phenotyping sensors, indices and timing to effectively monitor crop growth, physiology and yield prediction.

What We Do:

Our lab is currently working to improve soybean seed protein concentrations to address the problem of declining soybean seed protein concentrations in modern high yielding soybean cultivars. We are optimizing late season N fertilizations dose and timing and evaluating alternatives approaches such as soil amendment and planting dates to improve soybean seed protein concentration. We are also working to optimize planting dates for different maturity groups soybean cultivars in Kentucky. We are also investigating soybean seed growth and compositional dynamics under different planting dates, nutrient applications and source and sink manipulations to identify opportunities for improving soybean productivity and seed quality. In addition, we are integrating drone based aerial and manual phenotyping with the main goal of identifying optimal aerial phenotyping sensors, indices and timing to measure plant growth, physiological parameters and yield predictions.

Learn More

 

Anuj Chiluwal, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor of Agronomy
Academic Affairs
College of Agriculture, Health, and Natural Resources

Atwood Research Facility
Suite 123, Lab 205B
400 East Main St.
Frankfort, KY 40601

Contact:

Phone: (502) 597-5993
Email: anuj.chiluwal@kysu.edu