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Michael Mullany's avatar

I just submitted my MSc thesis studying crop treatments for drought resilience. Plant breeding for drought tolerance has been hit or miss. Some real success in barley (deeper, stronger root systems), but in general, plants need an irreducibly similar amount of water in their growth phase, and the optimal breeding strategy has been to optimize for yield in well-watered conditions, because this also increases yield under water stress. A lot of things that you think would improve drought tolerance actually decrease yield because they accelerate lifecycle or divert growth at the expense of yield. Transgenic approaches have been a notable failure, even Monsanto Droughtgard for Maize - which appears to only protect against water stress during a very specific part of the Maize lifecycle. Its an extremely complex problem and there doesn't seem to be any popular science content that explains it well - I had to read like 300 papers to get the landscape.

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Yaw's avatar

I wonder what new things could be done to boost yields in Africa. With the exception of South Africa and Egypt,

Farm yields for most cereals on the continent are terrible.

Vast majority of African farmers are subistent farmers with low fertilizer use, irrigation systems, or mechanization. We have seen USAID, African VC backed agri firms and government led domestic policies try to improve yields but average yields per hectare is still abysmal. I wonder if it is a soil quality issue..

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cereal-yield

https://open.substack.com/pub/yawboadu/p/east-asia-vs-african-development-05a?r=garki&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

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