Agmates welcomes David Tribe, Land and Food Resources, University of Melbourne as our regular GM in Agriculture columnist.
Agmates strives to bring you totally independent news and comment and David is widely acknowledged as Australia’s leading commentator / blogger on Genetically Modified Crops (GM) - Visit Davids blog GMO Pundit - Here
Over to David (pictured below)
Keep the door open to drought tolerant crops
Recent media stories about wheat varieties giving up to 20% better yield performance when hit by drought are just the tip of the iceberg of a vast amount of modern plant science directed at understanding and better managing water stressed plants.
Yes, water stress, and plant responses to it are complicated topics.
And yes too, the idea of using modern genetic tricks to improve on nature as far as drought tolerance is concerned is a really big ask.
So why on earth should growers give any credence to these latest results, announced by Premier John Brumby and plant scientist German Spangenberg in Victoria just this last month?
Well for a start, the GM based insect protection trait Bt-protein already insulate US maize growers from drought damage. This practical experience of many US corn-growers with rootworm protected maize planted in the US for several seasons now is well documented. Root development and drought protection are intimately linked, worm damage to roots means, unsurprisingly, worse corn performance, and Bt stops that damage.
But many other benefits leading to drought protection have been obvious to the plant science community for since at least 1996, which was when Xu and colleagues reported good results from transformation of rice with HVA1 drought tolerance genes from barley.
There’s been a treasure trove of highly exciting plant science on the topic since them. By about 2004, plant scientists (e.g. Chaves and Oliviera) were saying that practical drought protection breakthroughs were almost certain.
It’s just taken about 5 years for scientific progress in the lab and greenhouse — to turn this basic science into field trials which are needed to demonstrate practical effectiveness of greenhouse discoveries in farming practice.

Perhaps the most exciting of these basic science discoveries some ten years back was identification of genetic switches controlling whole sets of genes, for instance genes turned on by water stress having a drought-responsive-element nicknamed by biologists DRE.
These discoveries of switches and water stress signaling system and the genes controlling them have given breeders ways of orchestrating whole sets of genes that are needed for drought protection with a only small number of genetic changes. It this that’s enabled German Spangenberg and his co-workers in Vic-DPI to be successful with wheat in Victoria.
With coordinated orchestration of plant stress management, deliberate breeding for drought tolerance has at last became achievable in practice. That’s exactly why GM-technology detractors in Australia are in full-on denial mode about these breakthroughs.
And now Drought-tolerance genes have been trialed successfully in several crops, including both wheat and corn, they are worth paying serious attention to as a future farmer’s option. If the climate change-doomsayers are right, these events will a Godsend for Ozzie growers.
The whole GM debate up till now has not been simply about getting GM canola varieties on the market. It’s been about keeping the door open to the numerous technological flow-ons that can only occur if there is a clear path to market for seed-company innovators.
If the GM canola bans had continued in the Southern States, Ozzie farmers would have seen drought-tolerant crops years, if not decades, after their competitors in North and South America had been growing them in their paddocks and earning good dollars from them. Now they’ve at least got an even break, provided that the keep their local political reps informed of how they feel about grower freedom to choose the best technology for themselves.
Agmates readers can help each other by working hard to keeping the door open for grower choice. They need to keep on pushing and shoving to preserve farmer choice about which seeds they can sow, and what types of technology they can try out.
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