Crop Diversification for Improved Agricultural Resilience During Rapid Climatic Change

Modern agriculture in nations with the most advanced economies has focused on just a handful of major crop species for food and feed production.  Crops like maize, rice, wheat, potato and soybean have been greatly improved by intense research and development investments over the last several decades.  This has led to both a narrowing of germplasm within these crops and the near-abandonment of most of the crop species that contributed to world food production as little as a century ago.  These “orphan” crops are often better suited to stressful environments than are the major crops, and they also provide tremendous potential for yield improvement with relatively minor research and breeding investments.  I will describe aspects of our research with several millets (finger, fonio, foxtail, tef) and date palm that target simple genetic changes with the potential to yield dramatic improvements in these under-studied species.