As the planet warms, heat and drought are increasingly realistic conditions for agriculture. How can we protect crops?
I’ve been following the work of Motoaki Seki’s team at RIKEN in Japan. They are pre-treating the soil of plants with ethanol (a type of alcohol) to help them survive extreme heat and drought. Ethanol treatment is a relatively inexpensive way to protect crops.
The latest success in this line of research is making tomato plants more heat-resistant. Tomato plants that had a drink of ethanol were significantly more likely to survive than tomato plants that only had water. They also bore more tomatoes. The tomato study was recently published in Frontiers in Plant Science.
The RIKEN team has also fortified wheat, radishes, and lettuce with ethanol.