Welcome to my Grow Challenge page! I am raising funds to support the Danforth Center and I hope you'll join me. The Center is an independent, nonprofit plant science research institute based in St. Louis, working to improve food security and protect the environment worldwide.
Most people don't think about plant science until it affects them through shortages, price spikes, a harvest that fails somewhere it never used to. By then, the research that might have prevented any of it needed to have started years earlier.
In Nebraska, a recent severe drought has pushed farmers to consider sorghum as a substitute for corn, because sorghum can survive on a fraction of the water that corn requires. Danforth Center Principal Investigator Andrea Eveland is studying how sorghum's genes control its response to heat and drought, running field trials in Missouri and Arizona to find and breed traits that hold up under stress. She has warned that without crops built for conditions like these, we are headed for serious trouble within a few generations. Those consequences won't stay confined to farms in Nebraska. They will show in our grocery stores, in what's on the shelf and what it costs.
This wouldn't be the Center's first time turning this kind of research into something that reaches farms. A few years ago, insects were destroying entire bean harvests in Nigeria. A pest-resistant bean variety developed with the Center's support is now approved and reaching farmers there.
But these solutions don't come together quickly. The bean variety took years of trials before it reached a single farmer, and the sorghum project is still in its early research and field-testing phase. Developing crops that can survive pests, disease, or increasingly unpredictable weather routinely takes years, sometimes decades, from first discovery to a farmer's field. That's exactly why continued investment matters now.
I've watched my colleagues tackle problems most people never think to worry about, and I want to make sure this work continues, especially now, when federal funding is less certain than it used to be. If you'd like to help keep independent plant science like this alive, please consider a donation. Thank you for trusting me when I say this place and this research is worth investing in.