Syrian seeds could save US wheat from climate menace

[Blue Bianchi 77]

 

Inside a Kansas greenhouse, a buzzing horde of flies set about laying waste to 20,000 seedlings. But as researchers watched, there was one species of growth that remained untouched – an ancient Syrian grass known as Aegilops tauschii.

 

Now those Syrian seeds, once stored in a vault outside of Aleppo, could end up saving US wheat from the menaces of climate change.

From 2000 to 2015, average temperatures in the US midwest rose from 1 to 2 degrees fahrenheit above the 20th-century average. Periods of time between rainfalls are lengthening, according to a 2016 assessment by the Environmental Protection Agency. In other words, conditions in some areas of the midwest are starting to resemble conditions in the Middle East.

 

Rising temperatures are already leading to drops in midwestern crop yields, and threaten further reductions of as much as 4% per year. In the heart of US cereal and grain country, new pests and diseases are following the hot and dry conditions northward – and frequently overwhelming the ability of agricultural chemicals to battle them off. In response, scientists are seeking sources of natural resistance – and finding them in Syria, in the heart of the Fertile Crescent, the birthplace of domesticated agriculture.

 

One of the world’s most important seed banks used to be located about 25 miles west of Aleppo in the town of Tal Hadya, and was run by the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (Icarda). That UN-affiliated centre specialises in preserving and researching seeds in hot, dry areas – conditions now being faced by many of the Earth’s food-growing regions.

 

It’s also the place of origin of today’s domesticated wheat, and the seeds that were stored there benefit from genes embedded with survival strategies evolved over thousands of years. Now diseases and pests such as the Hessian fly, long familiar to Middle and Near Eastern farmers, are moving north from the southern US and Mexico and surging across Kansas and surrounding states – Oklahoma, Texas, Colorado and Nebraska and in some instances up to Illinois and the Dakotas.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jul/06/syrian-seeds-could-save-us-wheat-from-climate-menace

[Rob and Cheryl 56]

Thanks.