Rising temperatures, droughts and higher CO2 levels pose threats to the world’s food supply. Grains like wheat and rice have been bred for centuries for productivity but are not well suited to a changing climate.
Scientists in the U.S. and elsewhere are conducting experiments with crossbreeding of food crops with hardy weed relatives. In general, weeds represent one of the biggest impediments to the yield of crops around the world. But on the other hand, they also have traits that are useful to plant growth. As the saying goes, they grow like weeds.
Researchers at a Department of Agriculture lab near Washington, DC are studying a wild plant called red rice. Red rice can adapt to increased heat and carbon dioxide by producing more stems and grain. The plant on its own is not useful as a crop because its seeds shatter when harvested. But it would be great if cross breeding it with domestic rice could give the domestic crop some of its positive weedy traits.
Similar work is going on with wheat breeding. Wheat producers are already developing heat and drought-resistant varieties of the grain using some of the many wild relatives in the wheat genome.
Climate scientists predict increasingly unfavorable conditions for food crops by the year 2050 when there will be 2.6 billion more hungry people in the world. Weeds may turn out to be part of the solution. In the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson: “A weed is a plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered.”
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How Weeds Could Help Feed Billions in a Warming World
Photo, posted February 16, 2012, courtesy of Nupur Das Gupta via Flickr.
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Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio.