(Forbes) The Next Green Revolution: Climate-Resilient Crops

In a new article, Forbes looks at how scientists are engineering crops to be climate-resilient as increasingly volatile weather reshapes what farmers need from a growing season. Erin Sparks, Principal Investigator at the Danforth Center and Bond Life Sciences Investigator at the University of Missouri, speaks to crop lodging, the bending or breaking of corn during storms. It's a failure mode she says breeding programs often overlook, since it only shows up when a bad storm actually hits, meaning a variety that would fail can move forward simply because a storm never came along to test it.

Sparks, who came to agriculture from a background in biomedical engineering, found that wind-resistant short-stature corn owes its resilience not just to height but to a more flexible root system, a finding she describes in terms borrowed from her original field: "We kind of equate this to earthquake engineering. If you have a rigid base, you're fragile, but if you have a more flexible base, you can actually withstand winds better."