Hundreds of scientists and agricultural researchers from across the country converged on HudsonAlpha from June 13-16 for a biotechnology conference hosted by the HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology and the University of Georgia’s College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences.

HudsonAlpha’s fourth annual CROPS conference marked the return to in-person meetings, with this year’s theme focusing on the reduction of the environmental impact of agriculture through increased sustainability and plant-based solutions to climate change.

20220613 174731 The conference was organized by Jane Grimwood and Jeremy Schmutz of HudsonAlpha, Scott Allen Jackson of Bayer Crop Science, and Peggy Ozias-Akins of the University of Georgia and featured a variety of activities, including workshops, paper and poster presentations, exhibits, and tech/sponsor talks.

The first day featured a keynote address on the future of perennial crops, while the third day’s keynote speech, held at the U.S. Space & Rocket Center’s Davidson Center, covered the topic of plant space biology and how plants inform and enable human space exploration. The final day featured a roundtable discussion on increasing the diversity of scientists in plant and crop science.

The event wasn’t all work and no play, however–the attendees also enjoyed planned social events such as “Hops on the Helix,” a visit to the U.S. Space and Rocket Center, a Trash Pandas game, and visits to Lowe Mill ARTS & Entertainment, the Huntsville Museum of Art, and the downtown Secret Art Trail.

According to Jeremy Schmutz, the CROPS meetings are designed to bring plant researchers together from a variety of academic focuses in order to better understand how plants work and how they interact with the environment, as well as to improve the ways in which humans use plants.

“We try to pick a different theme every time, so the theme this year is on climate and agriculture and how we can improve the interface between crops and how we grow things and their impact on the environment…crops are a major impact primarily because of the large amount of nitrogen used as fertilizer,” Schmutz explained.

Schmutz noted that two percent of the world’s power is used for making fertilizer and most of that energy comes from areas that use a lot of cheap fossil fuels such as coal. In addition, the fertilizers have to be shipped long distance.

The main goals of this year’s conference were to focus on how to make crops more climate friendly, not only by making farming more eco friendly and sustainable, but also by using plants in new ways. An example of this, Schmutz explained, is the use of low carbon plants such as perennial grass systems to produce not only chemicals and fuel, but also building materials and plant-based plastics.

“The climate part of this meeting is very interesting because plants are part of the problem but they’re also part of the solution, and how we manage our land use and how we decide what we’re growing and how we’re growing it and what impact it has is very important because of the plant impact, but also because the opportunities for us to be able to start to supplant some fossil fuel uses,” Schmutz said.

CROPS attendees cool off from the heat during the “Hops for Helix” event outside of the Jackson Center on HudsonAlpha’s campus

Schmutz noted that another goal of the event is to foster discussions and collaboration between researchers from different disciplines within the field–building connections and the ability to work with a lot of different scientists.

“That’s the only way to kind of do it in science. It’s been hard the past couple of years–people haven’t been able to get together, haven’t been able to share ideas…it’s great if you have an existing collaboration but if you don’t it’s very difficult to start anything up in science right now.”

Schmutz emphasized the uniqueness of HudsonAlpha and the value of the institution and programs such as CROPS.

“It’s an unusual place,” he said. “It’s not like anyplace else. I think it’s pretty exciting to have all of these folks, some of whom I work with, some of whom I’ve never met, show up here and talk about the things they’re doing with the goal being how we either improve the planet with plants, how we improve the agriculture, or how to mitigate the changes in the climate through agriculture, or how to use plants in new ways we’re not currently using now for a better climate in the future.”

Schmutz also stressed the importance of science as a collaborative undertaking.

“You can’t do anything by yourself now. There’s no personal science. If you want to make impacts you need to build large collaborative groups to work on the problems because otherwise you can’t make progress anymore. It’s very different from how science used to be. It’s a different world now.”

For more information, please visit https://www.hudsonalpha.org/crops/