Australia: Heat is coming for our crops, we have to make them ready

Published 2024년 5월 9일

Tridge summary

Australia's agriculture sector is facing significant challenges due to climate change, which is expected to exacerbate droughts and floods, leading to reduced farm profits and potential synchronized crop failures of key food sources like wheat, rice, and corn. To address these challenges, the article suggests genetic modification of crops to make them more heat-tolerant, focusing on strengthening heat-sensing genes and heat-shock proteins in plants. Despite the success of genetically modified soybeans, the modification of wheat, a crucial staple crop, has not been widely accepted due to community resistance. The article emphasizes the necessity of overcoming this resistance to ensure food production can meet the needs of a growing population in a hotter world.

Disclaimer:The above summary was generated by Tridge's proprietary AI model for informational purposes.

Original content

Australia's vital agriculture sector will be hit hard by steadily rising global temperatures. Our climate is already prone to droughts and floods. Climate change is expected to supercharge this, causing sudden flash droughts, changing rainfall patterns and intense flooding rains. Farm profits fell 23% in the 20 years to 2020, and the trend is expected to continue.Unchecked, climate change will make it harder to produce food on a large scale. We get over 40% of our calories from just three plants: wheat, rice and corn. Climate change poses very real risks to these plants, with recent research suggesting the potential for synchronized crop failures.While we have long modified our crops to repel pests or increase yields, until now, no commercial crop has been designed to tolerate heat. We are working on this problem by trying to make soybean plants able to tolerate the extreme weather of a hotter world.By 2050, food production must increase by 60% in order to feed the 9.8 billion ...

Source: Phys