We need a diversity of crops to adapt to Earth’s changing climate.
“Solving the food-and-climate crisis will require going back to basics, finding ways to make our mix of crops broader rather than even narrower. “We need to think about how domestication worked in general, thousands of years ago,” Lippman says. Back then, early forms of modern crops could be taken out of their original geographical range and grown in new places because farmers and breeders selected mutations that allowed those adaptations to occur. We can do that again, adding overlooked crops to the mainstream food supply and working to broaden the agricultural gene pool after centuries of going the other way. That adjustment will help ensure that farmers will have crops suitable for the extreme growing conditions they are likely to encounter in the coming decades.
“We haven’t done a very good job of maximizing diversity,” Lippman says. “And diversity is what you need to win the battle of climate change.”
