Your Daily Dose of Climate Hope: March 14, 2025
Low-methane rice!
A research team has developed a high-yielding cultivar of low-methane rice!
Tell Congress to support low-methane rice in the next Farm Bill!
Touch or scan the QR code below to take today’s action in the app and earn trees!
Or take action on the Internet – no app required!
Reasons For Hope
A new study in the journal Molecular Plant has found that newly crossbred rice cultivar SUSIBA2, developed by Chinese and Swedish scientists, reduces methane emissions from rice cultivation by up to 70% while delivering yields at 8.96 tons per hectare, nearly twice the global average. Rice paddies can emit climate-warming methane (about 12% of human civilization’s total!) due to methanogenic microbes feeding off compounds released by traditional rice plants, and this new cultivar could scale up to be a big emissions reducer while improving yields!
The potential to deploy this promising new agricultural innovation in the United States — or create an even better version — is immense. According to the USDA, the U.S. produces hundreds of millions of hundredweight of rice per year in growing regions from the Mississippi Delta to the Sacramento Valley. It’s a major export crop!
As this is a brand-new technology, now is the ideal moment for proactive citizens to get a “foot in the door” and help ensure future support for low-methane rice from the U.S. government. You’ve probably heard already that Congress is still discussing1 the upcoming Farm Bill, a huge investment in American agriculture (the U.S. spends an average of $648 billion per year on Farm Bill programs) that’s up for renewal for the first time since 2018. As with our previous Farm Bill-related policy actions on climate-resilient crops, methane-reducing vaccines for cattle, methane-eating microbes, phytomining, electro-agriculture, decentralized clean ammonia production, steam seed treatment, and AI-accelerated crop breeding, low-methane rice is a brand-new invention and not really on the political radar screen yet. That means there’s a really great opportunity here to tell Congress to use the Farm Bill to help promote its deployment!