Searing heat. Scorching sun. Relentless drought. Utah agriculture has felt it in recent years, as historically dry winters and record-breaking warmth strain farms and ranches.
But native desert plants just shrug those conditions off. They’ve evolved over eons not just to handle hot, dry weather but to thrive in it. Researchers hope transferring some of those resilient tricks to the crops we eat could help agriculture adapt to a warming climate.
One research team is looking to Death Valley — the hottest, driest place in North America — to search for clues in a small desert shrub that goes by the scientific name Tidestromia oblongifolia.
“The plant can survive and thrive in very high temperatures,” said Karine Prado, plant biology research specialist at Michigan State University. “But the real mechanism is still something mysterious.”
So, Prado and her colleagues built a lab in Michigan that mimics Death Valley conditions to study how the shrub’s biology allows it to flourish.
What makes the shrub so extraordinary, she said, is that it grows even better at 47 degrees Celsius — nearly 117 degrees Fahrenheit — than it does at the cooler temperatures plants usually love.
“I didn't find another plant who can mimic this thermal optimal of photosynthesis,” Prado said. “It doesn't exist.”
Transferring a protein from the shrub’s genome might give crops greater tolerance for high temps, she said. Her team is testing this approach on spinach, quinoa and sugar beets to see how they respond. Corn or fruit could be next.
Even if most farms never reach Death Valley’s extremes, she said, agriculture will need crops that can withstand more heat than we see today.
“If you keep the plants we have now — and if we keep this tendency of increasing temperature in the next decades — most plants will not survive,” Prado said.
If you talk with farmers, they’ll say modern heat waves are weakening crops more than they did even a decade or two ago, said Milena Oliveira, an assistant professor and extension specialist with Utah State University.
“Heat stress doesn't come alone,” she said. “It always comes together with a decrease in soil moisture, which is drought stress.”
Heat stress during pollination and flowering can kill the chances for a harvest, she said, and temperatures above 95 degrees trigger many plants to shut down to protect themselves. Scientists expect global temperatures to rise at least 1.5 degrees Celsius (or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) in the coming decades. It could increase even more if humans don’t quickly cut the fossil fuel emissions driving climate change.
A few degrees of change might not sound like much, Oliveira said, but that small step may cross a threshold between some crops living or dying. It’s like the difference between your child having an uncomfortable fever or an emergency, she said. At 100 degrees, they might be fussy. At 105, you need to go to the hospital.
Recent research from the University of Reading in England indicates that climate change will continue to fan droughts in the western U.S., even in areas that see increased precipitation. That’s because the heat is expected to dry out farm soil faster than rain can replenish it.
Utah scientists are looking at potential solutions, too. And some may not require genetic engineering at all.
Amita Kaundal’s lab at USU is studying how desert plants’ microbiomes — the tiny organisms that live near their roots — could help crops become more drought-tolerant.
Just like how good gut bacteria help keep a person healthy, she said a plant’s microbiome acts as a natural fertilizer against stress. Her team has seen promising results in their tests, which took bacteria from the soil surrounding native shrubs, such as snowbrush and buffaloberry, and transferred it to wheat, watermelon and tomatoes.
“Utah is rich in all these native plants, which are very resilient — they can survive all these poor soil, arid conditions,” Kaundal said.
Wheat is the crop most impacted by heat stress, she said. It’s also the second-most grown crop in Utah behind alfalfa hay, with nearly 100,000 dedicated acres, and much of it is grown in southeast Utah without irrigation.
The next steps in her research are microbiome tests on corn and testing specifically for bacteria that can help with heat stress. Her team is also working to map corn’s genome to look for ways to make it more tolerant of salty soil, another challenge for Utah farms.
It’ll likely be a while before this research can help farmers, though. Crop varieties farmers planted this year may have taken a decade to develop, Oliveira said.
Grafting one plant onto the roots of another could be a different, faster way to transfer some drought-tolerant qualities between species. Oliveira has seen success in her research grafting watermelons onto squash roots.
At the same time climate change impacts are accelerating, politics threaten to delay research on protecting future food supplies.
President Donald Trump has targeted federal funding for science nationwide since returning to office last year. Oliveira said her team has had a tough time getting the money it needs.
“The scenario is pretty bad right now. Research is not a priority,” Oliveira said. “In order to do this work and find strategies, we need time, effort, money — those three components.”
With grants cut, she added a donation link to her lab’s website in hopes that the public might help her team carry on.
