Donald Ort - Improving Photosynthetic Efficiency for Improved Crop Yield

April 28, 2018 - Increasing demands for global food production due to global economic and population growth over the next several decades in combination with globally shrinking cropland represents a huge challenge to agriculture and the research enterprise that underpins it. UN FAO and others forecast that increasing agricultural productivity by as much as 60-120% over 2005 levels will be needed to meet agricultural demand. This near doubling of food production will have to be accomplished on globally declining acreage and during a time in which there will be ever increasing demand on cultivated lands for the production of bioenergy crops, while in the face of a changing global environment that has already resulted in decreasing global yield of some of the world’s most important food crops. Multiple new strategies will be needed to meet this daunting challenge. There are good reasons to believe that improving photosynthetic efficiency of crop plants could make a large contribution toward meeting this food security imperative. Ort represents Class VI.