by Alejandra Borunda | National Geographic
The Corn Belt, which spreads across the middle of the United States from Indiana to Nebraska, is in many ways a marvel of modern agricultural science: It grows more than a third of the world’s corn, and produces 20 times more than it did in the 1880s on just about double the land area.
Historically, most of those gains in yield have been achieved through improved farming methods and selective breeding of corn. In recent decades, genetic engineering—which allows more precise tinkering with genes than conventional plant breeding—has been thought to have increased yields a lot. Most of the American crop is now genetically modified in one way or another.
But according to a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, over the past 15 years, the primary driver of growing corn yields has been another factor entirely: the longer growing seasons and mild weather promoted by climate change.
That is not necessarily good news, scientists hasten to add. As the world keeps warming, conditions in the Corn Belt may become less favorable to corn, endangering further gains.
More importantly, scientists have been counting on genetic engineering as a prime tool to help keep yields increasing in the future, a necessity for a world that must continue to produce enough food for a growing population. In the Corn Belt, the new study suggests, that tool hasn’t been as useful as they thought.
“We’re going to need to be really creative in order to keep yields up,” says Patricio Grassini, an agricultural scientist at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln who was one of the authors of the new study.
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