Jill Farrant says that plants need to be much more plentiful in the coming decades to meet the food needs of the world. As the base of the food chain more and more plants will be required to meet the 9-10 billion people estimated to populate the earth in 2050. She cites a study that says 70 percent growth in food production is needed to meet global demand.
In her TED Talk, How we can make crops survive without water, Farrant discusses the work she's doing with resurrection plants and their ability to exist and thrive in a warmer and drier world. Her central idea is water and the ways that different plants require water to survive. Succulents conserve their water well but grow very slowly. Trees, bushes and shrubs manage their water in deep root systems. Annuals only bloom when water is present and stay dormant or turn into seeds when water is scarce.
Jill says that resurrection plants can lose up to 95 percent of their water, sit dormant for years, and then grow again when water is reintroduced. Only 135 species of plants have this characteristic, that she calls dessication tolerance.
This talk is full of big ideas about sustainability and biology as a means of production. The concepts of when and why we genetically modify a plant are interesting in the framework of wheat, rice and maize. There's a fantastic timelapse video showing several species of plant moving from dry and dormant to strong and thriving around the 6:00 mark in the video.
Jill Farrant does an incredible job of explaining her process of inserting resurrection plant characteristics into the genetic code of wheat, rice and maize. Her work with the University of Cape Town focuses on the molecular physiology of plant dessication tolerance, winning the L'Oreal UNESCO Award for Women in Science in 2012, and different talks she's given regarding famine and food production.