Agriculture & Horticulture

Biography

Biography: Raveendra H Patil

Abstract

Indian national food security is not only challenged by the ever growing population, it’s fast changing food diets and consumption patterns but also by the expected adverse impacts of climate change. Global food production needs to be doubled by 2050 from the current levels to feed some nine billion people and most of it needs to be met by cereals. This suggests that the productivity of cereals needs not only be enhanced from the current level but maintained under future adverse climates. In India, Sorghum is one of the important coarse cereal crops grown mostly in semi-arid climates where high temperatures and moisture stress during crop growing period severely affect yield levels. This would be further adversely affected by projected rise in temperatures and changing rainfall patterns. Therefore, our currently ruling and newly released Sorghum cultivars need to be tested for their performance under future climates to know if they are good enough under future climates. This would help us identify traits which need to be targeted in crop improvement programs to design required ideotype for a given location for mid of this century. In this study, DSSAT model was used to assess both the potential yield and impacts of climate change on currently popular and newly released Sorghum cultivars. This study also identifies and suggests ideal traits required to be targeted by the Sorghum breeders to enhance and maintain higher yields under future climates.