Dandelions to replace rubber in the US. Are alternative crops realistic?

Katrina Cornish spends her days in the crop of dandelions and desert bushes. Harvest the stretchy rubber substances they produce and use special machines to turn them into condoms, medical gloves, and parts for tracheal tubes. And he believes that these products could forever alter the landscape of agriculture in USA.

Cornish, professor of the Ohio State University who studies alternatives to rubber, is not the only one investing energy in alternative crops like guayule—a desert shrub—or the rubber dandelions that bloom with yellow petals in the greenhouse where she works.

Also in Arizona, the guayule thrives in the midst of drought, with its blue-green leaves pulled away from the dry soil on a research and development farm operated by the tire company Bridgestone. And in Nebraska and other parts of central USA green sorghum grasses sprout and wave with clusters of reddish grains.

They are not the corn, soybeans, wheat or cotton that have predominated in those areas for decades. Rather, they are crops that many companies, philanthropic organizations, and national and international entities promote as promising alternatives to confront climate change.

But while some researchers and farmers are optimistic about the potential of these crops—many of which are more water-efficient and important in certain parts of the world for fighting hunger—they also say they would need to occur. drastic changes in markets and processing before we can ever see fields full of these unconventional plants, or many products in stores made with them, especially in USA.

Most rubber processing is done abroad, and USA is not prepared to process it in the country. But Cornish explains that disease threats, climate change and international trade tensions also mean that working on growing and processing domestic alternatives would be a smart investment.

Since sorghum is grown for human consumption as well as farm animals and even pet food, expanded processing would be necessary, said Nate Blum, executive director of Sorghum United, an international nongovernmental organization focused on raising awareness about sorghum. .

Although USA The world’s largest producer of sorghum, it still represents only a small fraction of planted hectares compared to staple crops such as corn and soybeans. And although corn and soybeans are strongly encouraged in the country, Blum is hopeful that consumer demand will encourage greater investment in the sorghum and millet sector.

However, farmers are more likely to grow any crop that receives subsidies, said James Gerber, a leading scientist at Project Drawdown, a nonprofit organization specializing in climate solutions. Gerber, who recently published an article in the scientific journal Nature Food about what crops will experience yield growth and which could stagnate in the coming years, he said that comparing sorghum production in India with that of USA illustrates this principle. India has invested heavily to improve sorghum yields there, but USA I do not add.

Still, Blum believes there are real benefits to continuing work with sorghum, and perhaps more pressing benefits in other parts of the world than in USA.

After last year the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) stated that it would focus on millets, including sorghum, Blum believes there is still much more to do.

“The end of the international year is not the end. “It’s really just the beginning,” she said.

As climate change affects agriculture around the world, the need for crops that can withstand extreme weather conditions, such as persistent droughts, is especially important in parts of sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, where smallholder farmers rely on only a few hectares of land. Some of the improvement programs for these crops are carried out in USAbut they are much less frequently included in the American diet or lifestyle.

That’s why specialty markets will be critical if these crops are to have any hope of increasing their popularity here, Cornish explained. She thinks that, just as Tesla opened up the possibility of electric cars going mainstream by first marketing the product as a luxury good, premium goods like condoms, tracheal tube parts, and radiation-resistant surgical gloves They should be made from dandelion and guayule to inspire farmers to plant more significant quantities of those crops.

“You can’t do it without going down that path because you don’t have economies of scale, and you don’t have enough to get into markets that require a lot of it,” Cornish explained.

Guayule is “clearly a specialty crop and probably always will be” in terms of cultivated hectares, said Bill Niaura, executive director of sustainable innovation at Bridgestone. He said Bridgestone’s work with guayule has been strictly in the realm of research and development for about the past ten years, and only in the last two years has the company transitioned to exploring it as a business.

“You are trying to develop a new industry for the American continent that currently does not exist,” he added.

Meanwhile, the farmers of USA They rely on an agricultural economy built at scale, so they grow the crops that give them options on where to sell, said Curt Covington, senior director of institutional business at AgAmerica Lending, an investment manager and private lender focused on agricultural land.

He added that, often, the bankers who finance these farmers They don’t want to risk a complete switch to a crop that has no established markets. That, he declared, could be a problem for the country in the future, as climate change exacerbates threats to crops like cotton and alfalfa, which require a lot of water and are grown in the Southwest.

Arizona farmers have already had to leave land fallow, stop planting altogether, and sometimes struggle or outright abandon their family businesses as a result of Colorado River water shutoffs. Although guayule only uses half the water of cotton and alfalfa, if the economy doesn’t support it, that doesn’t do much good for most farmers.

“Ultimately what you end up with is the potential for, honestly, a lot of fallow land, and for that same crop to be imported into this country from other countries,” Covington says. “So, to me, that creates a security risk for this country.”

That’s something Cornish believes can be avoided, he says, by reinventing USA not as a land dominated by waves of grain, but also as a dominant producer of natural rubber.

“My work won’t be done until this is a permanent feature of the landscape,” he added.