The Cheery line of cherries has been developed to do well even if temperatures rise. BLOOM FRESH
Agricultural adaptation to a changing climate has caught our attention frequently with regard to wine grapes. Thanks to Kim Severson for this look at other fruits and vegetables:
Hot-weather cherries, drought-resistant melons and six other crops in the works that could change how we eat in a fast-warming world.
The Cosmic Crisp was bred at the University of Washington with a changing climate in mind. Credit…Ines Hanrahan/Washington Tree Fruit Research Commission
Plant breeders, by nature, are patient people. It can take them years or even decades to perfect a new variety of fruit or vegetable that tastes better, grows faster or stays fresh longer.
But their work has taken on a new urgency in the face of an increasingly erratic climate. Recent floods left more than a third of California’s table grapes rotting on the vine. Too much sunlight is burning apple crops. Pests that farmers never used to worry about are marching through lettuce fields.
Breeding new crops that can thrive under these assaults is a long game. Solutions are likely to come from an array of research fronts that stretch from molecular gene-editing technology to mining the vast global collections of seeds that have been conserved for centuries.
And, of course, the new fruits and vegetables have to taste good. “You can use these technical solves to find climate solutions, but they won’t be useful if it’s not what people want to eat,” said Michael Kantar, an associate professor at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa who studies wild relatives of existing crops.
Read the whole article here.
Organikos 