Dr. Mittler

Plant defense. For about 30 years Dr. Ron Mittler and his research team at the University of Missouri have been studying the effects of plant stress as a result of excessive heat and drought. They have learned that plants can develop a bio-defense system against such stressors and if given the time, may be able to protect themselves from drought and heat. I had a thought.

Your work makes the future look a little brighter for farmers. Speaker2: I hope so. I do work on drought, I do work on heat stress, and I also work, more importantly in my mind, on the combination, what happened when they occurred together in the field, and especially what happened when they occurred together in the field. During flowering and seeds, which are the most sensitive parts of the plant steps in the reproductive process of the plant are very sensitive for these stresses and that's where we have the yield loss. If you have drought or drought combined with heat or just even heat. So I'm well aware of that. I'm running right now a field experiment on soybean and we see the effects of this combination of stresses very clearly. It really is something that's occurring more and more than I wrote it in some other reviews of the frequency of drought and heat episodes. So you have a drought and then you have a heat wave. It's increasing and these are really devastating for crops. If you get it, when the plants are flowering your seeds, that will be much lower and you will have less seeds and less yield. So that's a big. Speaker1: Problem, but no problem too big for people such as Dr. Mettler.