Massive heat waves and droughts are already posing a threat to farmers: Over the next three decades, California’s San Joaquin Valley alone could lose up to 535,000 acres of arable land as a result of dwindling water supplies.

Jennifer Brophy wants to help solve that problem. She’s an assistant professor of bioengineering at Stanford, and is working on methods she hopes will be used to alter commercial plant species so they survive harsh conditions.

“Climate variables are changing more rapidly than natural selection can keep up,” she says. “If we can engineer crops that are more drought tolerant, for example, maybe we can produce the same things with fewer resources.”

Brophy notes that engineering crops in the future may not just involve modifying plants – it may also involve genetically modifying soil bacteria.

Instead of farmers spraying chemical signals on their crops to instigate a response, it may be possible to alter microbes that exist nearby, and program them to be tiny plant helpers. As the bacteria’s surroundings change, they could potentially send out chemical signals that tell nearby plants to shift their growth accordingly.

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Brophy says that dealing with climate change is going to take all the creative solutions humans can find.

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