The Drought Defying Fungus: Adapting agriculture with geothermal habitats.
by Raquel Ganino
Wild Turkey tail fungus captured by Symbiont team member, Annick Saralegui
For those who follow agriculture’s progress, is it no kept secret that increases in heat and drought lead to damaged crops yields in almost any scenario. As the human population rises, the challenge to increase food security has caught the attention of not only farmers, but scientist, politicians and students who are worried about the future of agriculture.
The World Research Institute estimates there will be “3 billion more mouths to feed by 2050.” The increased demand for the big four (corn, wheat, rice and soy) are compounded when you add an increasing economic status that demands more resource-intensive products like meat or processed goods. The past tells us that the answers to these problems have been an increase in chemical usage and agriculture acreage to keep up grain yield standards. The world can no longer accept these answers while climate change looms above our heat like a heater, slowly warming our atmosphere. There is a global cry to cut greenhouse gases in agriculture and find solutions to naturally increase yield on the land already in use.
Agriculture has always been a problems-solving industry but recently it seems as if the problems growing due to climate change with an increasing population need bigger solutions than plowing more of the rainforest to plant corn. This is where microbiologist have come in to see if natural occurrences in nature, such as heat or drought tolerance, can be implemented on a larger scale. This practice is called biomimicry, and there are hopes that it will unlock the answers to fighting climate change in agriculture. In the podcast Overheard at National Geographic, Host Peter Gwin interviews Rusty Rodriguez, a microbiologist, for the episode titled A Spore of Hope. Rodriguez, who has been working on concentrating symbiotic relationship between fungus and plants, has found an interesting relationship in the desert of Yellow Stone National Park. Rodriguez and his team started out with a not-so-simple question, “How do environmental stresses such as temperature or drought, influence the genetic diversity of microscopic fungi?.” In the 1990’s, Rodriguez and his team of biologist collected samples of plants in the National Park, where “the geothermal soils can get really hot” he explains in his National Geographic interview. Normally, this type of heat observed would stress grasses and plants, leading to death. What Rodriguez found was that his grass samples were not alone, they were populated by a special fungus.
In a yearlong experiment, the microbiologist planted the same sample, one with the fungi and one without, and when they came back he found that the sample plated in Yellow Stone without the fungi was ‘as dead as a doornail’, while the sample with the fungi was ‘thriving’ he admits. He concluded that the plants and fungus alone couldn’t handle heat over 100 degrees but together, their symbiosis created a heat tolerant microecosystem for temperatures above 160 degrees.
So, how does this discovering help fight food security? The possibilities of these findings were exciting, Rodriguez explains, but they didn’t become possibly life altering until he realized the fungi could be isolated and paired with your normal garden crops. In the lab, his team experimented with the fungi and found that when it was sprayed on crop seedlings such as tomatoes, watermelons, rice, wheat and corn, those seeds became heat tolerant too. Now, many are taken aback by this finding, being wary of putting a fungus in the garden which intuitively seems like a disaster. Not all fungi are harmful though. Similarly to the new wave of awareness about the microbiome in our guts, which leads us to eat yogurt and drink kombucha, there are good and bad microorganisms in nature that we can’t live without. Being able to control the beneficial fungus to use as an adaption to climate change can be one answer to the question of feeding 10 billion people by 2050, utilizing the skills nature has practices for 450 million years.
As of now, Rodriguez and his wife Regina Redman have created Symbiogenics, a company that celebrated the unique symbiotic structures found in nature to combat problems we have in the built world. His lab has come out with seeds that are currently being tested on millions of acres. Through the United States and part of India, the scientists say, ‘the results are promising’ and ‘appear to be helping crop yields’. In 2016, Symbiogenics claims that their treated seeds see an 85% increase in yield during drought seasons and a 7% increase in yield at normal weather standards. As seen in India, Rodriguez boast that there is a possibility that, if sprayed on all seeds throughout the country, there can be a 29% increase in yields which would lead to 75 million more people being feed each year.
The research is still in the beginning stages but the possibility for worldwide food security within the bounds of the natural world, should catch the attention of any interested viewer.
For more information on Rusty Rodriquez and his heat fighting fungus, research http://www.symbiogenics.org/about-us.html or check out his Ted Talk Unlocking the Power of Symbiosis in a Warming World for the whole story of this phenomenal discovery.
References
Gwin, Peter. “The Spore of Hope.” Overheard at National Geographic, National Geographic, July 14, 2020, https://www.nationalgeographic.com/podcasts/overheard/season-3/episode-5-spore-hope/.
Ranganathan, J., Waite, R., Searchinger, T., & Hanson, C. (2019, July 16). How to Sustainably Feed 10 Billion People by 2050, in 21 Charts. Retrieved August 04, 2020, from https://www.wri.org/blog/2018/12/how-sustainably-feed-10-billion-people-2050-21-charts
TedxTalks. “Unlocking the Power of Symbiosis in A Warming World.” YouTube, 01 Feb. 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJslxcgo-Gg