Water Stress: “We Need to Teach Crops How to Save Water”

Water scarcity poses a significant challenge for crop cultivation. The ability to combat water stress and enhance crop yields during periods of insufficient water resources is a game-changer and will increasingly become a problem in the coming years due to global warming and climate change.  

Elicit Plant‘s innovative product, BEST-a Maize, has emerged as a powerful solution to address this pressing issue. According to the company, the field results are remarkable, as they allow for a gain of 10 to 12% in corn yield in case of drought. The company has also launched the same product for soybean crops.

We spoke with one of the co-founders, Aymeric Molin, an agronomist and farmer. He said:

“We wanted to understand how a plant naturally adapts to challenging conditions like water scarcity. What signals does it activate? What physiological adaptations does it undergo? And we tried to replicate those processes in advance. The issue with plants is that they lack consciousness, so they adapt when they face adversity. When you plant corn, it doesn’t think, “In two months, it will be dry; maybe I should conserve water.” That’s something humans do. So, the idea is to send the plant the natural signal it would receive when it senses water scarcity before it actually experiences the shortage, so it adapts and conserves water. We’re essentially teaching corn to conserve water as it naturally would when it receives the “I’m running low on water” signal.”

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