Allison Floyd wrote an interesting story in Growing Georgia this week about research underway at the University of Georgia to find a more drought-resistant strain of sorghum, which already does well in dry conditions. She reports:
“When University of Georgia plant geneticist Andrew Paterson started to look for lines of sorghum that might survive in some of the most parched places in the world, he didn’t plant trials in the desert. He started out by researching which plants could survive a winter in Georgia.
“We don’t see a lot of correlation between surviving cold and surviving drought,” Paterson said. But when sorghum that could withstand a Georgia winter was planted half a world away, the results were stunning: 48 percent survived eight months without rain in the north African nation of Mali.”
You can read more about Paterson’s research here.
