America’s oldest test plots prepare for their next chapter.
Story and Photos by Katie Knapp
“No sir we don’t mess around, our library’s underground. ‘Cause you can’t throw shade on the corn.”
These words finish the chorus of the University of Illinois a cappella group The Other Guys’ famous song about a corn field in the center of campus.
It’s no ordinary corn field next to no ordinary library building.
Legend has it that the library was built underground in the 1960s to not shade out the field. University documents suggest it was for aesthetics, but mission accomplished either way.
The design has preserved the most important one-acre corn field in the western hemisphere.
The Morrow Plots were started 150 years ago as a five-acre research field near the agricultural buildings. The section remaining today has one plot with corn grown continuously each year since then, another in a corn/soybean rotation, and a third in a small grains/soybean/corn rotation.
The Morrow Plots’ longevity is second only to that at Rothamsted Research in England where winter wheat has been studied consistently since 1843.
”If I could go back and talk to the researchers who started the Morrow Plots in 1876, I’d first thank them,” says Crop Sciences Department Head Dr. Adam Davis. ”They were asking decadal questions, questions fundamental to crop production in Illinois.”
”One of the big lessons from the Morrow Plots is that you have to take care of your soil. If you mine your soil, you end up with corn cobs about that big,” he says picking up an ear from last year’s harvest dwarfed by his hand and with only a few yellow kernels. ”If you feed your soil, you can end up with really good yields and sustainable crop production.”
Presumably this was the original hypothesis.
On the original agriculture building dedicated in 1901, just steps from the field, the words of then University President Andrew Sloan Draper are etched along the entrance: ”The wealth of Illinois is in her soil and her strength lies in its intelligent development.”
Davis calls the field a living monument. And the University is rightfully celebrating it, now protected as a National Historic Landmark, this fall.
First thing’s first, though. They must take care of a squirrel problem.