News

Two SRC Members featured in APG Gleanings!

Join us for the 2026 Get Outta Town! Grad Student Tour on Aug 3rd! 

SRC's Seth Naeve leads team pitching soybean value in Vietnam amid search for new markets

Research by PhD student Alina Smolskaya will help farmers produce more with less.

You’ve passed them countless times — acres of green stretching to the horizon along Minnesota highways. But did you know those soybean fields help fuel cars, feed the world, build everyday products, and drive billions of dollars in economic value for Minnesota? Often called the “miracle bean,” soybeans are at the heart of one of the state’s most important industries—and the University of Minnesota has helped lead that story from the very beginning.

Another great Lightning talk event in the books!  

We once again had beautiful weather and interesting talks for our Soybean Research Center Field Day this year.  Talks in the fields were followed by a Divine Swine BBQ and UMN ice cream made right here on the St. Paul Campus.  It was a perfect night for the Gopher's opening game, too!  

The Soybean Research Center will host its 2nd Field Day this August 28, 2025! 

Spring 2024 Newsletter

Seth Naeve and Aaron Lorenz were two of the speakers at a Field Day event for Lallemand Plant Care which was hosted by the University.  

Despite a weird wet spring we have seedlings coming up in the research plots on the St. Paul campus! 

Planting out started in earnest yesterday with grad student soybean projects getting started in the morning and by the afternoon we were planting in the crossing blocks.  Today Sonia Bolvaran did some hand planting in the field during some exceptionally beautiful weather (seen here).  

Mjay Espina, PhD student, and Lucas Roberts, PhD student, were awarded the President's Student Leadership and Service Award which recognizes the accomplishments and contributions of outstanding student leaders at the University of Minnesota.  

Lucas Roberts, Ph.D. candidate in the Applied Plant Sciences (APS) program (advisor, Aaron Lorenz) and Carlos Sanchez, a master’s student in APS (advisor, Seth Naeve) gave talks at a luncheon describing their experiences as 2022 recipients of the C. Jerry Nelson International Fellowship.  They both worked at the Agricultural Research Institute (INIA Chile) near Santiago, Chile, for three weeks in 2023.  Lucas was researching virus pressure on beans and Carlos researched soybean development.

Mjay Espina, graduate student, won first place for her poster "Assembly, comparative analysis, and utilization of a single haplotype reference genome for soybean" at the 2024 Soybean Breeders Workshop in St. Louis, MO. 

The Soybean Research Center held a Lightning Talk and Networking event on January 26th, 2024, highlighting 7 researchers and their recent work...

In this special cross-over episode, CropCast hosts Dave Nicolai and Seth Naeve visit with three talented graduate students who work on Soybean Research Center related projects...

At the recent University of Minnesota Soybean Research Center Field Day, Pedro Urriola and his dedicated team of researchers unveiled the results of four significant projects, shedding light on the future of livestock nutrition, sustainability, and disease prevention. These studies promise to reshape our understanding of soybean utilization, livestock production, and environmental impact assessment.

Minnesota Invasive Terrestrial Plants and Pests Center featured two of our members, Bob Koch and Aaron Lorenz and the work they are doing to try to combat soybean pests from multiple angles. Read the article.