Meet John Jones, the new University of Illinois Extension agronomist. Jones is a crop sciences professor, assistant professor of agronomy and fertility Extension specialist for the state of Illinois. Jones will be following in the footsteps of previous Extension agronomist Emerson Nafziger, who retired in 2017.

Here, he talks with Prairie Farmer about his new position:

What will your responsibilities be? “That’ll include a three-way combination of research, Extension outreach, and then I will teach a nutrient management, soil fertility and plant nutrition course. My research and Extension responsibilities really lie in applied research that can be used by farmers around the state.

What’s your agricultural background? I grew up on a farm in south-central Wisconsin. I did my undergraduate at Kansas State University, and then my master’s and Ph.D. at Iowa State University in soil fertility. I’m a big fan of Midwestern land grants!

Definitely! Why Illinois? To be honest, I was really drawn by the people — the agronomists and farmers that I knew from the state, the university faculty members as well. But really, just the ag community as a whole was something that I really enjoyed. I got to be on the periphery of Illinois in graduate school and previous positions. The opportunity came up to work in one of the most important states in the country in terms of a region in the world for crop production, and I couldn’t pass that up.

You just joined the university in August, but can you share what your research will look like? It includes quite a bit of work that expands around the state of Illinois. We think about research conducted at the university research and education centers, but it really includes a lot of on-farm work. That research would incorporate systems that farmers are already using. We’ll leverage our resources to help them learn, whether it’s increasing production levels or reducing environmental impacts, specifically around nutrient management.

What’s the goal of your nitrogen trials? We’ve got a really nice working relationship with Emerson Nafziger and Dan Schaefer (Nutrient Research and Education Council). The goal is to take that system and expand it to include a lot of the farm-, soil- and cropping-system-specific information. Then we can dial down and have a more regional calibration of nitrogen recommendations.

No doubt looking at long-term N trends? One of the things I really value is the ability to look at long-term trends, because we see really big variation in response to fertility management. And so right now, I’ve been setting up several long-term trials around the state that will look at nitrogen management, tillage components, use of cover crops, different timings and placements of nutrients like nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium. And, calibrating soil tests and phosphorus and potassium tests around the state. Those studies will go on for a decade or more, but then we can also interpret them with annual trials. So it’ll be a nice pair of long-term and annual trial data.

Illinois has been without an Extension agronomist since 2017. What does it mean for you to pick up that baton? I keep getting asked who I’m replacing, but it’s some of Emerson’s work, some of what Bob Hoeft and Fabian Fernandez worked on as well. It’s exciting because there’s a rich history in Illinois of industry and farmer-organization-led research. But also because my position really hasn’t been occupied for quite a while, I get to start fresh and see where, what, how can we redesign for interpreting whole fertility research for farmers. So that’s what I’m really excited about — starting from the ground up.

What’s your first step in building from the ground up? Because I’m early in my career at Illinois, I really want to get a nice network of stakeholders, farmers, agronomists and industry professionals who I can get information from. That way we can have a dialogue as the research is planned. Not just, “Here’s my research results; what’s your response?” So what I’m really looking forward to is putting together regional advisory committees around the state for my work, to bounce ideas off of. We can come with discussions of what new idea we should look at on the research side.

That could be exciting, especially on the nutrient side. One of the things that I’m really excited about is redefining how we look at nutrient changes and transformations and systems. If you think of a textbook nutrient cycle, you’ve got a lot of boxes and arrows. We manage the boxes. But we don’t know what the arrows are very well. That’s something I really want to attack — the underlying science of what we’re doing on fertility and nutrient management.

How do you look at decision-making for farmers, when there are so many long-term trials, but no crop year is the same? Avoiding making decisions on short-term memory has benefits because we can get skewed based off of our current experiences. We will be implementing a lot of long-term trials to help look at those trends over time so that we can go back and say, “Well, what did we do after these six dry years that we had?” Historical data can bolster the information we provide to farmers.

However, if we’re coming towards harvest and we know we’ve had a really bad drought, we’re wanting to catch kind of soil conditions going into winter and spring. I want to do some on-farm research and quick demonstration trials or just exploratory trials to see what we can learn, all over the state. It’s not necessarily a formal research study, but I think that really helps to get information in a timely manner.

At the end of the day, we have a very short window in farming to make decisions. Fieldwork days are at a premium. Making sure we have the tools to answer questions promptly will be really critical.

And if a farmer would like to talk with you? I’m always open to emails, calls or texts at 920-306-9629 on any agronomic question. I’m excited to get around the state and meet with everyone.