URBANA – Soybean growers from around the state stopped by the University of Illinois on Tuesday for an overview of current research being done on everything from soybean pests to fungal diseases.

The Illinois Soybean Association holds the annual tour so farmers can see how their checkoff money is being spent. At harvest time, farmers pay a checkoff that funds various soybean research projects, as well as marketing and education campaigns.

"It's a great opportunity to see what (researchers) are doing first-hand," and then apply the lessons learned from the researchers to the fields, said Shirley-area soybean farmer Matt Hughes, who chairs the Illinois Soybean Association committee that oversees the funding of research.

"Public universities are asking themselves what they're about today," said Bob Hauser, interim dean of the UI's College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences. As funding gets tight, higher education administrators are asking what is the appropriate role for the public state research university, he said.

"Here's a good example of what should be done," he said about the day's event.

Among the things a public research university should be doing is conducting research that is relevant to the state, in demand and not being done by the private sector. And its researchers need to do outreach, he said.

"What we do can't be relevant to ourselves. Things like this keep us in line," Hauser said.

Interim Urbana campus Chancellor Robert Easter, who pointed out that the university raised tuition by 9.5 percent for this coming academic year and that the state owes the university over $200 million from last year's appropriation, thanked the soybean association for its funding of research projects over the years.

Last year, the Illinois Soybean Association funded about $4 million in soybean research.

On Tuesday, farmers listened to presentations at the seed house on the South Farms, visited a research plot planted with soybean varieties from throughout the previous decades, toured the National Soybean Research Laboratory and the Institute for Genomic Biology before heading south to Southern Illinois University.

While in Urbana, they were informed about factors affecting soybean yields, developments in livestock genomics, managing white mold in soybeans, glyphosate-resistant weeds, carbon nanotubes and soybeans, wide hybridization and much more.

UI entomologist Mike Gray passed out fliers about bugs new to Illinois that could damage the state's soybean crop as the insects make their way north from the southern U.S.

The Red Banded Stink Bug and the Brown Marmorated Stink Bug are invasive pests of soybeans, he said. They're attracted to soybean blooms and can damage the pods by piercing through them and sucking on them, ultimately reducing yields, he said.

Producers in the southern states, particularly Louisiana, have had to make repeated applications of pesticides to control the bugs, he said.

"We need to be alert for these new stink bugs," he said.

Farmers also were briefed about the 2010 yield challenge, in which about 50 teams are competing around the state to see how high they can take their soybean yields this year. The average soybean yields in the state in recent years have leveled off.

"We want to find out what is it that's really making a difference in yield," said Jim Nelson, a consultant working with UI crop sciences Professor Vince Davis on the project. "How can we capture information and what are the keys we need to be exploring to increase yields," he said.

Davis said he will be sharing the results from the challenge at agricultural meetings this winter.

Among the projects UI soybean breeder Brian Diers spoke about on Tuesday was the germplasm and breeding project, which aims to improve soybeans by using the soybean germplasm collection at the UI, which is 19,000-strong. Researchers are working on identifying, mapping and cloning genes and licensing the technology to seed companies.