Maximum Yield USA April 2018 | Page 24

max facts Science Discovers How Plants Vary Response to Heat Stress Scientists have solved a 79-year- old mystery by discovering how plants vary their response to heat stress depending on the time of day. This understanding could help with breeding commercial crops to produce higher yields in hotter climates as predicted under climate change. Heat stress is a major issue in agriculture and can significantly reduce crop yield. Even small increases in temperature can affect plant growth and development. Understanding how plants respond to heat stress is crucial for developing crops that can withstand rising average temperatures and more frequent heat waves under climate change. As a result, many people have been working for years to try to understand how plants sense temperature, and then how they use this information to activate chemical pathways to protect themselves by, amongst other things, manufacturing protective heat shock proteins (HSP). But the signalling involved in telling the plant when to activate genes to manufacture heat shock proteins remained a mystery. Researchers at Cambridge University found light-induced chloroplast signalling triggers the heat stress response and that plants respond better to heat stress in the daylight. —sciencedaily.com Kimbal Musk Predicts Millennial Workers Fleeing Desk Jobs for Farms Kimbal Musk (brother of Elon) runs a chain of local food-focused restaurants called The Kitchen, as well as Big Green, a national non-profit that builds educational gardens in public schools. He expects a growing number of young Americans to join him in the local farming movement. When asked to name a big food trend through 2018, Musk said he sees millennials flocking to careers in agriculture rather than office jobs. “For the past 20 years, I think technology has been a wonderful benefit for us in so many ways, but it’s not a very connected life. But we see urban farmers sell direct-to-consumer and be a part of their community,” he told Business Insider. For only the second time in the last century, the number of farmers age 25-34 is increasing, according to the US Department of Agriculture. In some states, including California, Nebraska, and South Dakota, the number of new farmers has grown by 20 per cent or more since 2007. —uk.businessinsider.com 24 tapped in