Professor of plant genetics, Louisiana State University
Prasanta Subudhi grew up near India’s Bay of Bengal, in a village surrounded by rice fields. From a young age, the crop fascinated him. He considered careers in medicine and engineering, but rejected them both in favor of rice genetics.
Prasanta came to the United States to do research at Texas Tech University in Lubbock. In 2001 he joined the faculty at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. Here, he’s been trying to answer a big question: How do we keep growing rice and feeding a hungry world even as the environment changes?
Professor of plant genetics, Louisiana State University
The key, he says, is developing crops that can tolerate both drought and heat. It might also include developing salt-tolerant crops. Worldwide, “3 percent of the water is fresh water,” he notes. “Ninety-seven percent is in the ocean.” As global warming melts glaciers, fresh water will grow even scarcer. “We have to develop water use-efficient varieties. Or another solution is brackish water or salt water, how we can use it for growing rice or other crops.”
In 2023, Prasanta became the lead investigator for a $10 million grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to create rice that thrives in harsher environments. The Climate Resilient Innovations for Sustainable Production of Rice (CRISP-Rice) project encompasses scientists from institutions in Louisiana, Texas, Arkansas, Mississippi, and South Carolina. CRISP-Rice uses tools like breeding, genetics, genomics, digital agriculture, and artificial intelligence. But it also has a sociology component. “Rice farmers in the U.S., they are not still receptive to genetic engineering,” Prasanta says. “So that is why we want to do research also: What are the barriers for adoption of those climate-smart varieties or climate-smart practices?”
On long-term climate disturbances:
“That is going to continue. That is not a future problem anymore. It is now happening. We have to be vigilant and we have to develop varieties.
“In Louisiana and other rice-growing states, the major issues in the future—and also now, I will emphasize—are heat and drought. And as you know, the Intergovernmental Panel has already told us that we should limit our temperature rise within this century to 1.5 degrees Centigrade. But at present policy, it says that it will be around 2.8. So that is too much.
“When the global temperature rises, it will exacerbate other things. Drought will increase. Flooding will increase. Precipitation will be imbalanced. All sorts of troubles will come.
“Particularly in Louisiana, there is indiscriminate use of water. Some of the wells are already dry; we are no longer able to pump water. So that problem is already experienced here and it will be more severe in the future.
“And we have to be very careful because rice is not just a major crop consumed here. We are also exporting a lot of rice, and it needs to be good quality rice. Because of heat stress, now the rice quality is also going down. That is not accepted by the importers. They will not give a premium for those things. So heat tolerance and drought tolerance, that should be the major focus area for rice research in Louisiana.”
“Rice is a water guzzler, where 30 percent of the fresh water in the world is used for rice consumption. If you want to make rice farming sustainable, we have to research innovative areas like water-efficient rice varieties.”
On public acceptance of genetic modifications:
“There is hope that people will accept. But they are very late in acceptance, particularly the U.S. and Europe also. They are dead against all these types of technologies. But GMOs: You will see that the South Asian countries, China, all these, they have already accepted those things.
“But here, all the cereals you are eating, all are GMOs. People have no concept about this. Cotton, all GMOs. Soybean, all GMOs. But they don’t have any problem. Rice is a problem.”
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Credits:
Interview and text: Barry Yeoman
Photos: John Noltner
Editing and production: summer interns Kate West, Sawyer Garrison, and Kaitlin Imai
Audio engineering: Razik Saifullah