Drought-fighting plants

by Owen Roberts

The only thing you can really predict about climate change is more unpredictability. Scientists are divided on whether we’re headed for drier, wetter, warmer or cooler growing seasons. But for the most part, they no longer think we’re simply in a “normal” irregular pattern, one that may be a repeat of another that happened hundreds or thousands of years ago. Instead, it looks like we’re seeing something new, something extreme, something likely driven by human impact on the environment. Change is here.

University of Guelph professor Barry Smit, who holds the Canada Research Chair in Global Environmental Change at the university, urges people to stop throwing up their hands in despair, and deal with it. All’s not lost, he says. Smit and his colleagues claim that by managing climate change, some of its detrimental impacts can be moderated, or even avoided. No one can halt climate change immediately, but while big thinkers are working on ways to stop its progression (if possible), science can help producers manage it.

Case in point: Drought-resistant plants that don’t lose significant yield under water stress.

For decades, plant physiologists and breeders have been reaching for this brass ring. They can achieve the drought resistance all right – that can be done through conventional breeding and selection – but sustained yield has remained elusive.

Enter Performance Plants. This Kingston, Ontario-based company, which maintains a crop development centre in Saskatoon, has created drought-stress plant technology. After three years of trials, it says canola plants outfitted with its trademarked Yield Protection Technology (YPT), beat water-stressed controls by as much as 26 per cent in tests with a high-yielding Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada variety.

What’s striking, besides the yield potential, is the way this technology works. Company scientists have figured out a way to get plants to flip their own molecular switch when they sense drought, and keep growing despite a lack of water. They would normally stop yielding under such conditions. But the company found plants have enough “gas in the tank,” so to speak, to produce significantly more seed than they would normally allow themselves to do in a drought.

Looking globally – where drought and climate change is even more troublesome than it is in Canada – YPT could make a significant difference. Dr. David Dennis, President and CEO of the Performance Plants, says the company is now developing the technology in other crops such as cotton, corn and soybeans. He predicts producers could be using YPT by 2010.

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