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Federal funding restored for K-State lab that helps create drought-resistant crops

A research lab at Kansas State University is continuing to develop drought resistant crops to help double the world’s food supply by 2050.

Tim Dalton is the interim director of the Climate Resilient Cereals Innovation lab and says the facility recently had its federal funding restored. “We’re scrambling right now and we’re scrambling with fewer personnel than we had before the shutdown. We had to recruit people, and so there’s a lot of heavy work that’s been going on with fewer people to get these projects started and the experiments in place before the cropping seasons start.”

The lab focuses on developing heat and disease resistant crops of sorghum, millet, wheat and rice in Senegal, Bangladesh and Ethiopia.

Dalton tells Brownfield his team could have lost an entire cropping season’s worth of data due to the near 3-month shutdown. “In some situations, there was enough funding that could roll forward. In other cases, it meant the scrapping of entire experiments and that’s the tragic thing, because agriculture in many places you have one season per year or two seasons.”

He says researchers may have to wait until November for planting season to begin to start new trials and data collection.

Seventeen food innovation labs were supported by USAID before the agency lost funding and the K-State facility  is the only one to have it restored by the federal government.

Tim Dalton: