Year Awarded 2020
FFAR award amount $796,878
Total award amount $1,593,756
Location Ithaca, NY
Program Seeding Solutions
Matching Funders BASF, Limagrain, Virginia Crop Improvement Association
Grantee Institution Cornell University
Climate change is creating increasingly unstable farming environments, leading to unpredictable yields and quality. Crop breeding programs aim to develop crops that can thrive despite climate instability; however, breeding programs face their own challenges in predicting how the climate will change and how crops will respond. One specific challenge to breeding programs is the lack of information about how plant genomes and growing conditions interact, and how that interaction impacts agronomic traits such as yield. Cornell University researchers are studying how different plant genomes respond to environment conditions throughout the entire growing season, with the goal of improving crops’ climate resiliency.