URBANA, Ill. — For the past 60 or more years the United States Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) National Soybean Germplasm collection has been maintained under the care of the University of Illinois Department of Crop Sciences in Champaign-Urbana, Ill. That will change under a directive from the USDA to relocate the important collection, which is utilized by researchers the world over, to Columbia, Mo. 

“There are seedbanks and germplasm collections for many different economically important crops in the U.S.,” said Brian Diers, professor emeritus of the U of I Crop Sciences Department. “The USDA is in charge of obtaining the seed and also conducting collections, then they make the seed available to researchers worldwide.”

At the root of the move: funding for all USDA Agricultural Research Service (ARS) labs located at the U of I in Urbana has been zeroed out for fiscal year 2026 by the Trump administration. Consequently, the labs will be closed and consolidated, including the National Soybean Research Center at the U of I, where the soybean germplasm collection is housed.

Many of the shuttered labs will be leaving the state. 

USDA-ARS’s National Plant Germplasm System includes 27 specialized federal, state and private institution sites, including the U of I. According to Diers, sites and locations have historically been strategically chosen based on where the crops under study are predominately grown. He feels the USDA’s uprooting of the soybean lab and research stands in contradiction with the ARS’ original intent to locate its labs in the most beneficial locations. 

“The soybean germplasm lab has been in Illinois since it was established 60 or 70 years ago. We have trained people here who know how to maintain the collection and the facilities here, so moving it to Missouri means moving where there are untrained people and no facilities,” said Diers. “Central Illinois is a great place to grow soybeans that range all the way from being adaptive to Canada, to being adaptive in the southern U.S. In Missouri, they are going to be more limited in what they can grow. I don’t think they can grow these very early maturity varieties that can be grown in Canada, and it just doesn’t make sense for maintaining all these soybean types.”

In order to better study soybean varieties more suited for deep south or tropical cultivation, the National Soybean Research Center currently contracts with Central American growers and researchers, according to Diers, who added that moving the soybean germplasm and research labs from the U of I would “have to take a while” because USDA would have to construct new facilities worth millions of dollars. In addition, a USDA research center in Mississippi is ideal for field trials examining southern-grown soybean varieties, he said. 

Diers also worries about the integrity and continuity of the soybean germplasm collection if it were to be uprooted and moved from its longtime location on the U of I campus. “The collection needs to be maintained for researchers, and the important thing is that there is a vast collection of germplasms from around the world. There are over 20,000 soybean types in this collection, which is important to be maintained in order for researchers to battle new diseases,” Diers said.

“There is also at the U of I the Maize Genetic Stocks collection, which is a collection of seed that has various mutations. This collection is also very important for researchers, and it is also under threat in that the federal government wants to move it to Missouri. Again, they don’t have any facilities for the collection there, so it would be disruptive to move it there.”

The consolidations are a likely result of the USDA’s $23 billion request for discretionary budget authority from Congress to fund programs and operating expenses in 2026, which is $6.7 billion below the 2025 Enacted Continuing Resolution levels.

“We have the facilities, and we have the people who can maintain it here in Illinois,” said Diers. “It’s been well-managed here, and it’s hard to understand why (USDA) would want to spend many millions of dollars to (construct) facilities in Missouri.”

The U of I and Illinois Soybean Association have been actively engaging with Congress and the USDA to ensure that the National Soybean Research Center and the USDA-ARS labs stay in Illinois. Diers said he was not aware of a proposed timetable for the moves.