Mutant Rice To Help Japanese Farmers Recover From Tsunami Damage? Future ++

Hacking the Good Lord out of rice. That’s what some wunder-brains are up to, and this good ole Thwarting Of God’s Plan may help Japanese farmers recover from the damage of last year’s disaster.

io9:

Japan is still struggling to recover from the devastation caused by the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami that hit the country last March. One of the long-term problems is reclaiming farmland ravaged by the tsunami. And mutant rice might be the solution.

The tsunami deposited huge quantities of saltwater over the agricultural land of northeast Japan. All that saltwater has severely damaged the otherwise arable land, making it difficult for farmers to grow rice in the affected areas. Typically, the recovery time for an agricultural disaster like this would be about ten years, as farmers would need to develop entirely new strains of crops that could handle growing in the salt-drenched land.

Now, thanks to some specially mutated rice, researchers in Japan and the United Kingdom can cut the waiting time down from ten years to just two. They have already identified seven salt-tolerant strains, and these simply have to be crossbred with the original rice strains to create usable crops.

Warm, warm, within the deep bosom of Progress.