Going against the grain to reap good harvests

Farmers in Asia and Australia are beating heatwaves with new varieties of crops

- Azril Annuar

Crops have always been at the mercy of the weather. But climate change is making farming even more of a lottery, with increasingly extreme weather damaging crops, cutting yields and slashing farmers' incomes.

And increasingly hot and dry weather is especially harmful, affecting the ability of crops such as wheat to grow.

Global agricultural productivity is 20 per cent lower today than what it could have been without man-made climate change, according to Associate Professor Ariel Ortiz-Bobea from the Cornell Atkinson Centre for Sustainability in the United States, in a report published in January.

Prof Ortiz-Bobea and colleagues from the Environmental Defence Fund and Kansas State University studied 39 years of data from nearly 7,000 Kansas farms. They found that for every one deg Celsius of warming, yields of major crops such as corn, soya beans and wheat fell by 16 per cent to 20 per cent, gross farm income fell by 7 per cent, and net farm income plummeted 66 per cent.

CLIMATE-RESILIENT CROPS

A key way to limit losses is by developing varieties that are higher yielding and climate-resilient.

And this is something Indian and Australian scientists have had success with, focusing on crops such as wheat.

For the 2023-24 winter cropping season in India that runs from November to April, wheat growers in Punjab and Haryana planted more than 80 per cent of their cultivation area with climate-resilient varieties, including PBW 826, developed by Punjab Agricultural University (PAU) and released commercially in 2023.

This variety has traits such as a "stay green habit" that enables the plant to retain its chlorophyll content under heat stress, making photosynthesis possible despite higher temperatures and allowing the plant to mobilise nutrients from the soil.