Beyond Moose and Mountains: Building Canada's Bio-based Economy

Performance Plants - Feeding and Fueling the World Through Weatherproofed Plants

THIS IS BIOTECH

Beyond Moose and Mountains: Building Canada's Bio-based Economy

Feeding and Fueling the World Through Weatherproofed Plants

Performance Plants, Kingston, Ontario

Despite local droughts and severe heat conditions, food still needs to be grown because every day, over six and half billion people need to eat.

In the next 40 years, it will be nine billion. That’s a lot of food, especially since more than one billion people are undernourished worldwide, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization’s 2009 report.

Getting more food on the world’s tables despite climactic changes thought to be associated with global warming is now in the hands of scientists and companies like Performance Plants Inc. of Kingston, Ontario, which develops plants with improved heat and drought tolerance.

Food production, as farmers have always known, is highly dependent upon the weather or the availability of irrigation water. With expected increases in drought and heat coupled with water shortages, the development of weatherproofed crops will be a boon to many farmers.

In spite of global warming, farmers must produce twice as much food and fibre on diminishing productive farmland which means that genetic improvements are becoming critical for global crop productivity.

Performance Plants looks for traits that give plants an improved capacity to tolerate periods of heat and drought, and then uses these genes to develop weatherproofed, highly productive crops. Using biotechnology to improve plant production is not new. In North America alone, 85% of soybean, 90% of cotton, 75% of corn and 80% of canola production are the result biotechnology crops.

This ability of crops to withstand lack of water and rising temperatures is one step towards overcoming environmental challenges. Field trials with Performance Plants drought tolerance trait, Yield Protection Technology (YPT), have shown to increase the yield of canola seeds up to 26%. What is more, the seed yield benefits of YPT can be combined with other traits to dramatically increase food production and reduce the chance of crop failure

Since sub-Saharan Africans are most vulnerable to malnutrition and severe droughts, we’ve signed a humanitarian agreement with Africa Harvest Biotech Foundation International to donate our drought and heat tolerance technologies to subsistence farmers.

Yet another application for the company’s biotechnology is producing renewable, clean bioenergy from inedible stems and leaves. These locally grown biofuels can replace non-renewable fuels like gasoline and coal to reduce carbon emissions and stimulate rural economies without competing with food production.

Performance Plants’ energy crops are non-food plants such as tall grasses and industrial hemp that can be inexpensively grown on less productive farmland. By genetically enhancing the productivity and quality of these crops, industrial end-users can cost-effectively switch from non-renewable fuels and feedstocks.

Indeed, Lafarge North America Inc., Canada’s largest cement manufacturer, has selected Performance Plants to provide locally-grown biomass as a clean energy source to reduce a portion of the 100,000 tonnes of coal used annually at their facility in Bath, Ontario. Local farmers and contractors will produce the biomass and with help from the Ontario Ministry of Environment, testing will be done to determine benefits relating to carbon and energy footprints and impacts – if any - on soil, air and wildlife.

For Performance Plants Inc., the challenge of improving the way the world feeds and fuels itself is all in a day’s work - one weatherproof plant trait at a time.