|
|
|
|
Miracle Plants Withstand Flood and Drought |
| Section: NATURAL SCIENCE / AT THE EDGE |
| Author: Don Comis |
| Publication:
The World & I Online |
| Issue Date: 2/1/1998 |
| Size: 2,312 Words, 14,733 Characters |
|
It all started with the "Great Dig of 1995" on the Spaulding farm in Missouri. In September of that year, a group of scientists from around the country had gathered near a soybean field.
A backhoe had dug a trench seven feet deep by three feet wide at the edge of a 50-year-old patch of eastern gamagrass that extended into the soybean field. The scientists sought the secret of a grass that farmers reported had thrived during droughts--as well as during prolonged flooding in 1993.
The first clue they got was that the roots reached down to at least seven feet, easily passing through a clay layer that is impenetrable to most crop roots. And the roots of nearby soybeans seemed to go down deeper than the usual two feet, possibly because they were able to use the channels formed by previous eastern gamagrass roots.
The ability to penetrate the clay layer and explore deeper regions for soil water was one reason the grass could stay "green and nice when everything else was brown," says Richard Zobel. He is a plant geneticist with the U.S. Plant, Soil, and Nutrition Laboratory of the Agricultural Research Service (ARS) in Ithaca, New York.
Zobel squeezed some of the thick roots and found them squishy, something he had never seen in roots as healthy as these. But then Zobel had never felt the roots of eastern gamagrass.
One of this country's original prairie grasses that helped feed roving herds of bison, its population has declined under contin...
Read Full Article
...at the University of Georgia at Athens. They are field-testing wheat types with aerenchyma bred into them and expect to have commercial varieties in two years. Steiner says the breeding techniques Johnson is using with soft red winter wheat would apply to all other types of wheat.
FOOTNOTE: This article has been reprinted, with minor modifications, from Agricultural Research, August 1997.
(1,503 of 14,733 characters)
|
|
|
Publication Details
(The World & I Online) |
|
The World & I Online is a
comprehensive academic resource that encompasses a broad range of
articles by scholars and experts in the areas of Global Studies,
Liberal Arts, Fine & Applied Arts, General Science, and Spanish.
Originally published monthly in print as The World & I, our site
includes the complete contents since 1986 and continues to publish
a new issue online each month. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
