TIDE lecture 2 - Climate smart agriculture
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Welcome to the second lecture in this course on climate change and agriculture.
So in this second lecture, I'm hopefully going to put to you some solutions to some
of the challenges for crop production and food security that we talked about in
lecture 1.
In this lecture, we're going to talk about climate smart agriculture. Is it the
solution? So I'm going to talk about some examples and very briefly run through some
of the concepts around climate smart agriculture.
so the three objectives of climate-smart agriculture -
CSA.
Sustainably increase agricultural productivity and incomes. So the key word is sustainable.
So minimizing water use fertiliser use, energy use, sustainable practices....
adapt and build resilience to climate change.
And remove greenhouse gases emissions where possible. So we want to mitigate climate
change and adapt to it. So CSA is an integrated approach. That's what's really important
for transforming and re-orientate in agricultural development under the new realities
of climate change and the climate crisis. And the impacts I talk to you about in
lecture 1.. we're changing
rainfall patterns. change in temperatures .increasing extreme events...
So climate smart agriculture.
The question is ...is it the solution?
So Myanmar actually has a climate smart strategy and action plan for the years
2017 to 2030. And if you have a look at the action plan and the strategy document
you'll see that there's six key sectors on it and one of them is called climate
smart
agriculture, fisheries and livestock for food security. So food security is actually
mentioned in the Myanmar climate change strategy.
And the aim is to maintain food and livelihood security and Myanmar to adopt in
climate-resilient responses in agriculture. So this is a direct quote from this
strategy and action plan. So they don't mention just agriculture. They talk about
fisheries, livestocks and in with that promotion of
resource efficient and low carb and practices. So minimizing the use of
fertilizers, pesticides, water, so  be resource efficient in our food production.
And the outcome that's outlined in this strategy document is the climate resilience
productivity and climate responses in agriculture, fisheries, and livestock sectors
to support food security and livelihood strategies while also promoting resource,
efficient and carbon low practices.
So they aim for climate-resilient responses.
Which will result in climates smart resources and climate smart agriculture. So in
this lecture, I'm going to be talking about climate smart agriculture.
So the consequences of all the changes that are outlined to you in lecture 1, and 
more of which I'm sure you know about already, we will need major changes and how
we eat, how we farm, what we eat and how we produce it. So we need completely different
diets. Maybe there's food that we eat at the moment that's culturally
but not in the future. Our local farmers will not be able to grow to the
changes in climate, the rising temperatures and the changing rainfall patterns. It
might be at the moment rhey grow a crop that requires high levels of irrigation
and high levels of water.. and then the low rainfall patterns in that area in the
future will mean that they won't be able to provide that water. So
maybe we're going to be able to produce different crops than we eat then we are very
much used to and then maybe the areas that are growing crops like Maize, rice, wheat
won't be able to grow those particular crops in the future.
But another area might become more suitable. Remember we talked about the heterogeneity
of the rainfall patterns. Some will be more drought in some areas and some areas
will be even flooded. So we will need the optimization of farming, will mean that
we would have to maybe move our farms.
So that they all  shift into areas that are more suitable for that crop.
We're going to have to have new ways of using and managing our resources... managing
the water. the energy we need to maintain our food supplies and also alongside this
farming activity we would need to restore our farmlands, the farmlands now that
are on the maybe semi arid environments will maybe in the future become arid environments
and become degraded.
And the soil become degraded. So we need to restore our farmlands, improve the soil
fertility and alongside that also our natural environments like our wetlands and our
forests because it's all interconnected.
So adaptation is going to be the key to food Security in the future.
There are obviously many ideas that are being proposed at the moment. Maybe farmers
will have to switch to varieties tolerant to heat, drought and salinity.
And remember in activity 1 we actually looked at the possibility of switching
cultivars of rice. So you can maximize the nutritional quality of your grain, but
you might switch to varieties that are more tolerant to salinity. If you live in
an area where it's very often flooded by sea water you would be advised to maybe
grow a cultivar that's more tolerant to salty 
soils. And we want to optimize irrigation. So I keep coming back to this, its is going
to be one of the key factors  to maximize growth. We're going to optimize 
irrigation and not so much depend on rain-fed agriculture in many areas... because very
often the rain is just not going to be there. And as I mentioned previously managing
soils, nutrients and
soil erosion so we can maintain fertile soils.
Another is variety change... and will involve maybe using varieties that you can plant
at different times or even just using a different planting strategy. So this slide
shows a diagram where simple adaptation strategies could really offset crop yield,
changes caused by climate change. So here we're not talking about necessarily high
tech.
It's so if we have a 1 to 2 degrees increase in temperature under RCP 4.5 in the future,
and we carry on as we are at the moment the decreases, depending on the crop you're
talking about and the area, could decrease by up to ten fifteen twenty percent in
some areas with some crops. So we need to change the way
we farm.
And that might mean changing the variety as I mentioned before and also changing
the planting times. There's already evidence that farming practices are changing
in terms of their planting times. Farmers around the world are often planting earlier
and earlier in the year as the seasons warm up and spring arrives earlier and earlier.
So we are
already seeing some changes in farming practices, reflecting the climate change future.
And just changing your variety not even the crop. Just choosing a different variety
of rice and adapting your planting regime. So maybe you can avoid the hot summers
by planting just a bit earlier and maximizing spring warmth. You can avoid some
of these decreases in yield predicted.
So using different crop cultivars, even different species and sourcing maybe new
crops ...looking for new genetic material from wild relatives to the current crops
and reintroducing those traits into our present farming practices and our present
crop varieties that we use in might be the solution that we're looking for.
Modern breeding has bred out a lot of the resilience in our crops over the centuries.
And scientists are now interested in looking back at ancestral wild varieties and
bringing those traits back in to our new varieties that were using in the present
day.
So as I said before efficient irrigation and water use is going to be really key.
So we want to use less water but produce the same amount of yield and there's very
much a big area of research looking at this particular area and there's are ideas
around drip feeding where you just drip the water irrigation water rather than spraying
all over the field and losing
alot of your water through evaporation and wastage. Whereas in drip-feeding you're feeding
very small drops directly to the bottom of each plant and they'll use the idea
as well of using waste water. Why use clean water on your fields? We're not talking
about contaminated water, of course, but what we're talking about is gray water,
maybe water that has maybe
some cleaning happened on it.
But it's still useful for using on our farms. And other practices that people have
tried include flooding lowland rice fields and then allowing them to dry out. So
thats avoiding long-term irrigation. So you've got a cycle of wetting and drying,
so you're minimizing the water use that you use
Another option, which is again becoming much, much more to the front and focus of
interest, is precision data-driven agriculture. Precision agriculture. So you might
have heard of precision medicine where the drug is designed specifically for that
person and their situation?  Here we're talking about precision agriculture. So using
all the technology that we have.
I mean from AI, Big Data apps on our phones to maximize our digital development
of farming. And on this slide I show you a picture of a phone, a mobile phone and
the use of a mobile phone has really opened up a whole range of opportunities for
improving agriculture.
There's apps where farmers are given direct information of weather changes, our predictions
going into the next few months. They can
use farm data can help them plan their planting regime and plan what they're
going to do for that year. So it's mobile data given directly to the hands of the
farmers.
We've got sensors that are now available, very often on drones. So the Drone will
go across the field look at water levels and how dry or wet the soil is and so you
can just water and irrigate just one small part of the field. So you don't have to
water the whole field. You can just precision irrigate. You can have sensors for
looking at plant health.
And again that will help farmers direct where they need to fertilize or not... or even
use a pesticide or not. So here we're talking about Precision Agriculture and this
paper here in 2019 goes into a lot of details and talks about these ideas that are
available at the moment.
Another possible climate smart strategy could be crop diversification.
So very often
farms have developed into almost monocultures, you'll have a farm grown wheat or
a farm grown rice, farm growing beans and that makes it very vulnerable to any changes
in any extreme weather because if it doesn't suit that particular crop, you would lose
the whole crop.
So this is now much more emphasis on community programs to introduce and encourage
crop mixing and other techniques. So you prevent the catastrophic crop losses that
could be as a result of extreme weather. So here you've got farm growing rice, a farm
growing beans, maybe mixed culture is another way. Another way of
crop production is agroforestry where you mix a trees with a low-lying crop
like Maize and you grow them in rows. So the trees provide shade for your crop, but
the trees might be a fruit crop or the trees might be a legume that puts nutrients
into the soil that t your maize crop can utilize.
So there's lots and lots of ideas of how to produce climate-smart agriculture.
As I mentioned briefly earlier this particularly, for me, is an area I'm interested
in as a plant scientist is actually looking at neglected or under utilized species
to maximize crop Production... to look at plant genetic resources
that maybe we've even forgotten about. To look at semi domesticated species historic
species or wild species of the crops that we produce now, looking back as I mentioned,
looking back for traits.
I see some really interesting examples already coming out here. We have Andean grains,
millets, Quinoa and amaranth and millets. That people are now looking back to
these neglected species in many areas and saying well maybe these are the species
we should bring back and maybe even include more of these in our diet because they
are more efficient to grow
in a future of the climate change, that talked about in lecture 1 very often. 
A lot of these millets and these grains can survive in higher temperatures than
maybe some of our more traditional crops.
And even people are looking at aromatic plants such as Oregono or mint to diversify
what people grow on their farms.
There's been a calculated benefit for these different crop management adaptations.
So the IPCC in 2014 produced a report. And in this report, they try to calculate
the benefit for all these different options of climate-smart Agriculture. So they've
got here....
cultivar adjustment,
planting day adjustment, 
put both together-cv planting day and cultivar- irrigation optimization, fertilizer ,
optimization and some other ones that people have or have tried as well and
the percent benefit is here. So for cultivar adjustment, they calculated a 23% benefit.
- the difference between the yield change from the baseline to the adapted cases - so
you can see cultivar adjustment could be just the one thing that a farmer might
need to bring in and think about and it could make dramatic difference to their
productivity. The other big one is if you put the two together sometimes planting
date will improve crops.
So farmers can the ideas,  is to have farming communities that will collectives
that will work together... work out what's best and change practices into the future.
So is climate-smart agriculture already here?
This is a news article on 'Irrwadywaddy Paddy Farmers Step Up productivity with smart
farming methods'. So Myanmar is the world's sixth largest rice producing country.
And its rice is the most important crop.
But as I said in lecture 1, there's long-term floodings, increased salinity.
So Myanmar is to look at using some of these climate-smart adaptations that
we're talking about to try and maximize an offset some of the climate change impacts
that are predicted into the future.
So one of the examples I want to talk to you in a bit more is climate-smart rice.
There's a lot of work being done on Rice... there's lots and lots of potential for
developing lots of different varieties that have a lot of characteristics will make
that will make them resilient to Future climate change. There's heat tolerant rice
varieties, salt tolerant rice varieties, flooding rice varieties.
And the international rice Research Institute has worked on producing a lot of these
different rice varieties. And then many of these new varieties are now available
to Farmers around the world.
So this one's drought tolerant here. We've got salt tolerant here on the left. You
can see the rice variety that is tolerant to salt and this is the old variety that
was killed off by flooding.
So the flood tolerant rice was one of the first ones that produced so this is a
farmer with his Rice Field flooded... and normally if you'd grown the old variety of
rice that would be the end of its crop. But because he put planted the new climate-smart
rice variety that was resilient to
flooding three months later. He's got a crop. So now he can carry on Farming and
feeding his family and all he's done is switched to a flood tolerant rice.
So it can cope with more extreme weather events, and it can cope with the average
sea level rises that are predicting in Asia into the future of one to three millimeters
a year, which would result in increases in flood in a saltwater.
So this is a submergent rice that's been developed.
Called SUB1 and I want to talk briefly about it because I think it really encapsulates
a lot of what I've been talking about. So in the 1950s Farmers notice the local
rice variety that was tolerant up to two weeks of complete submergence. Now, we're
not talking about saltwater here. We're talking about a freshwater flooding and
they noticed that this particular area of rice... It's survived. Where a lot of the
other areas
slightly different type of rice usually died. And so the scientist got involved
in this project and found out about this local rice and they matched the tolerance
trait and they called it submergent tolerance one in other words SUB1. So it
was a quantitative trait locus, or section of the DNA, was associated with this phenotype.
I want to show you here is a very short video of the two types of rice, the SUB1
rice, which is tolerant to two weeks flooding and the other variety of rice that
doesn't tolerate
flooding and doesn't have the SUB1 trait in it.
Okay, so it's very brief. So you have to watch carefully.
So on the left is the one with the SUB1 gene in it and then one on the right not.
So they've mapped these quantitative traits associated with the submergent tolerance
and it was mapped to chromosome 9 so they did that in 1995.
And in 2006 the major Gene responsible for that tolerance of flooding that I showed
you in the video was reported in the media and also in the the science literature.
And they could incorporate this SUB1 trait into tolerant varieties. So this
diagram picture on the right hand side. This is the normal variety of rice the Swarna
and then you've got here SUB1, and when you put the SUB1 tray into Swarna it
can now tolerate flooding and this is what it looks like after flooding with SUB1
and without SUB1.
So you can see you can dramatically increase your production by this climate smart
rice, but it took 60 years and we don't have 60 years into the future before a lot
of these climate impacts will be really having a devastating effect on our farming
and our food production, especially if the temperatures rise to 4 degrees...
which some climate models predict... a lot of our crops will not be able to survive
a four degree increase in temperature! So here we have the timeline from the 1950s
when those local farmers first spotted that area of farm that could survive flooding
-freshwater flooding- right the way to 2010 when varieties of SUB1
were released to India, the Philippines, Indonesia and Bangladesh, and they given out
free to these areas. So it will mean these Farmers, that maybe frequently suffer
about two weeks of flooding, will now be able to survive. If it's flooding for longer
than two weeks the SUB1 varieties will still reduce yield, just like any
any other rice. They can only survive around about two weeks
of flooding. So there's lots and lots of molecular tool kits for maximizing crop yields.
We're going to start using some of our toolkits to really optimize our crops.
I'm not going to go into this diagram here in detail, but we've got synthetic biology
techniques, marker-assisted breeding techniques, and trans and sis genic techniques
and gene editing and CRIPR... all these new technologies. We can optimize our crops,
optimize our photosynthesis, efficient use of plants, produce plants that
require less irrigation.
Plants that can root quickly and be more efficient at taking up nitrogen.
So we need to use all the tools in our tool kit for maximizing crop yields for future.
So one of the targets for improving crop productivity are photosynthetic targets.
And I'm, as a plant scientist, very particularly interested in this and one of the
targets is this particular structure in leaves. Don't know whether you recognize
it?
It's a chloroplast. Here you have the structures within the chloroplast. So this
is where photosynthesis takes place. So if we want to improve photosynthesis, maybe
we can improve the structure and manipulate the structure of these chloroplasts
to maximize photosynthesis.
In chloroplasts is where you find Rubisco. So there are scientists working on optimizing
the efficiency of the rubisco protein, the rubisco enzyme. Can we make it more efficient?
Because I don't know whether you know, the rubisco protein is quite sluggish and
inn it's activity. So there's real activity around research in this area of improving
photosynthesis.
And how about this idea, and this is people are really trying this at the moment.
We have three types of photosynthesis C3,
C4 and CAM.
So CAM plants are like your pineapple, C4 like your Maize and C3 is your rice
and other plants like that. Now C4 plants are very good at dealing with high temperatures.
So wouldn't it be great if we could have some of our very important food crops, like
rice and wheat, to behave much more likes plants that have C4 photosynthesis? 
And CAM plants here, very traditionally your plants grow in hot deserts. So they're
very, very, water efficient. So wouldn't it be great if we could take some of the
pathways from C4 and CAM and put them into C3 plants to make them more tolerant to
high temperatures and more water efficient.
I know this sounds really science fiction, but in fact this research is taking place
as we speak!
Another really interesting idea is looking at our seed banks. Now, there's seed
banks all around the world, nearly all countries have a seed bank
of sorts... it might be a big National one or might be a small community
one where farmers get together to swap seeds. So seed banks are really important
as a genetic bank that we can look in for traits.
So the one that I really want to go and see is this one Svalbard Global
seed bank.
It's on my bucket list! It's an amazing place. It's atomic bomb proof. It's supposed
to last forever. The actual structure is built within this big mountain and
this is the entrance here, the door here, so you can get an idea of how tiny this is by
looking at this little Bridge. So it's a huge structure.
And seed banks from around the world send their seeds here for
protecting in perpetuity. There's also the international rice Gene bank, which is
a seed bank and that actually has a hundred and twenty thousand rice accessions.
So how many possibilities are there in these collected seeds from the past that
we could then use to improve our crops for the future?
So I want to leave you with this final slide. At the in the beginning this lecture
we talked about farming practices and climate-smart agriculture, which will improve
food security under a climate crisis. Talked about some of the things that farmers
can bring in to help them maintain their crop yields and cope with the changing
rainfall, the change in temperatures, that are predicted into the
future.
But I'm a plant scientist and one of the things that's motivated me through my career
is this ''plant science for a better world''... that we can work together to try and produce
food to feed the world and I think rice is a really good example of a success. More
than 10 million farmers
around the world have been given access to 16 different  climate-smart rice
varieties and that numbers going up all the time. So this is enabling these Farmers
to stay on their farms and manage their farms successfully... to feed their families
without having to move to another area or lose their farms all together.
These new rice varieties can improve yields, they can withstand flooding, like SUB1,
they can survive drought, they can survive salty soil. So farmers can look to catalogs
 and choose the variety that will suit the conditions that they're having to
deal with on their farm.
So thank you for listening and I'll leave you with this quote. ''Swarna SUB1 has changed
my life'' said Mr. Parisa, a farmer in Odisha, India. And that's what it's all about.
...changing lives...