CropWatch is a central resource for University of Nebraska–Lincoln Extension information on crop production and pest management. It is written by Extension Educators and Specialists and produced by IANR Media in the UNL Institute of Agriculture and Natural Resources.

Information is organized into two key areas, each of which offers thousands of crop-specific articles for Nebraska producers and crop consultants:

The CropWatch newsletter, which includes timely articles published to the site's home page. New issues are published weekly during the heart of the crop production season and generally biweekly during the remainder of the year. Older articles are archived for later review.

CropWatch also includes:

- Calendar of ag events and programs
- Daily news and updates via Twitter at UNL_CropWatch (also displayed on the home page)
- Ag decision-aid tools and resources from UNL Extension
- Content tags at the end of individual stories to help you located related articles released since April 2016.
- Use the Search box in the top right of every page or the Archives to locate additional articles.
- Crop-specific production and pest management sections, with additional sites for whole farm and production systems. Use the top red-bar navigation to access specific crop, management and related topics.

One in four jobs in Nebraska are related to agriculture. With one of our main industries being agronomic crops, crop scouting is important to learn. This lesson will test the students' knowledge of all things pests and challenge them to identify the problem in a field. 

There are over one million species of insects in the world. Although we feel like we see millions of insects in one day in the summer, there are only 1,000 major insect species that are pests to crops. This lesson will teach students about the taxonomy of insects and have them investigate some of the biggest threats in our area.

This resource is a video abstract of a research paper created by Research Square on behalf of its authors. It provides a synopsis that's easy to understand, and can be used to introduce the topics it covers to students, researchers, and the general public. The video's transcript is also provided in full, with a portion provided below for preview:

"Tropical maize hybrid, a single cross of flint and dent inbred lines, is an important crop throughout the Americas and Africa. Crop yield, however, is highly dependent on nitrogen availability, and fertilizers are therefore often necessary to increase production. Developing more nitrogen-efficient maize would not only cut costs for farmers, it would also increase crop yield and reduce environmental impacts. But how do you make a plant more nitrogen efficient? The performance and production of crops can be improved by selectively crossing individuals with desired traits. When such plants are crossed, they produce hybrids that are often bigger, stronger, and more vigorous than either of the parent plants. By carefully choosing which individuals are used in creating these hybrids, specific traits, such as nitrogen efficiency, can be selected for..."

The rest of the transcript, along with a link to the research itself, is available on the resource itself.

This task was developed by high school and postsecondary mathematics and agriculture sciences educators, and validated by content experts in the Common Core State Standards in mathematics and the National Career Clusters Knowledge & Skills Statements. It was developed with the purpose of demonstrating how the Common Core and CTE Knowledge & Skills Statements can be integrated into classroom learning - and to provide classroom teachers with a truly authentic task for either mathematics or CTE courses.

Students will learn to calculate time required for corn to progress from one development stage to another based on the amount of heat accumulated.

A large part of CDEs is identification. In this lesson, students help make the quiz slides and then have a weekly quiz on plants. This can be used for animal breeds, veterinary science tools and parasites as well!

This resource is a video abstract of a research paper created by Research Square on behalf of its authors. It provides a synopsis that's easy to understand, and can be used to introduce the topics it covers to students, researchers, and the general public. The video's transcript is also provided in full, with a portion provided below for preview:

"With the world’s population expected to grow to over 9 billion by 2050, food is a major concern. Much of our increased food needs could be met by improving the yield of agricultural crops. A recent study examined one aspect of plant health: the plant microbiome, which plays a critical role in host health and productivity. Researchers focused on oilseed rape (OSR), the third most cultivated crop in the UK and a major source of vegetable oil. Field experiments have indicated that OSR yield declines proportionally with how often it is grown in rotation and while this has been associated with changes to the rhizosphere microbiome, it is unknown which microbes negatively affect plant yield. Comparing rhizosphere soil and bulk soil samples from 37 farms across the UK, they found that protists, bacteria, and fungi were influenced differently. Fungi were more widely influenced by the rotation frequency, but specific bacteria and protist species were also affected..."

The rest of the transcript, along with a link to the research itself, is available on the resource itself.

This course gives an overview of integrated pest management focusing on corn and soybeans and introducing the basics of scouting, plant pathology, management of insects, diseases, and weeds, and discusses pesticides and human and environmental topics related to their use.

This text has been compiled to provide an overview of how plant breeders develop cultivars of plant species. The methods that breeders use depend directly on the type of cultivar used to produce a commercial crop. The four most common types of cultivars are (a) clonal cultivars (b) synthetic cultivars (c) pure-line cultivars and (d) hybrid cultivars. These types of cultivars will be discussed throughout the book, alongside review questions for self-study.

Welcome to the REACCH Secondary Agronomy & Climate Science Curriculum! Units in the curriculum provide material for introducing Science and Agriculture students in Grades 9-12 to agriculture, climate change, related issues such as soils, water, carbon, and nitrogen cycling, and STEM careers. Please read the Getting Started section below and explore individual units for more information.

Getting Started
Each unit includes a PowerPoint for guiding classroom discussion, lab activities, and a series of readings.

Each PowerPoint includes hidden slides with embedded Microsoft Word Documents. These documents provide the additional resources needed to deliver the unit. Lab activities are embedded on the last slide.
Teacher notes are included on most slides to help guide classroom discussion.
Readings associated with each unit are in a separate zipped PDF file. A variety of readings are included so teachers can select those most appropriate for their classrooms.
A standards document is provided with Next Generation Science Standards, Common Core State Standards for Math and ELA, and Agriculture, Food, & Natural Resources Standards. Teachers can decide to what level they want to augment the provided instruction in relation to these standards.

This series of resources includes a lecture and activities to define what makes a plant a weed, classify weeds according to life cycles and as monocotyledons or dicotyledons, compare morphological characteristics and functions of different types of leaves, and identify local major weeds.

Students in this lesson will investigate the different aspects of agronomy through different videos and puzzles.  They will define what agronomy is, provide examples of the industry and describe what agronomic sciences entail.