Feeding the World, Preserving the Planet: Insights from the 2024 ISRFG Conference

The 20th anniversary of the International Symposium on Rice Functional Genomics (2024 ISRFG) was celebrated during the 2024 conference in Little Rock/Stuttgart Arkansas from September 9-11, 2024. The conference sought to address the key question, “How can we feed our world without destroying our planet?" This conference brought together over 170 leading rice scientists and researchers who gave 12 keynote and plenary talks, 36 concurrent session talks, 16 workshop talks, 10 young scientist award talks. In the meantime, the meeting presented about 50 posters and two exhibits.

The topics covered almost all the Oryza research fields from traditional areas such as yield, biotic/abiotic stress, rice quality, to new technology developments such as gene editing, CRISPR, comparative genomics, genetic variation, bioinformatics, and large scale AI-assisted phenotyping. In addition to “Feeding the world”, the meeting also addressed “Not destroying our planet”. Many talks were about sustainability and climate change mitigation: how to lower water consumption, how to increase drought resistance, and how to reduce methane emission. The studies presented were inspiring and offered hope for the future of humanity. 

Doreen Ware, the USDA scientist at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, gave a talk titled “Plant genomes: understanding their past and managing their future”. In her talk, she summarized the 20 years’ history in genome research on rice and other crops, the progress in technology and science, and pointed out future directions and priorities. Sharon Wei, a member of the Ware lab, gave a workshop talk on “Catalyzing Genomic Discoveries: Leveraging rsIDs for Enhanced Trait-Driven Interoperability and Genomic Function Transfer,’ demonstrating the significance of standards and rsID in agriculture research, and showcased the functions of GrameneOryza website. Kapeel Chougule, also from the Ware lab, presented a poster about the Gramene platform, “GrameneOryza 2024: A Collaborative Pan-Genome Resource for Rice Diversity,  Knowledge Discovery, and Community Engagement.” Gramene also hosted a booth, with the Gramene banner, to advertise the resource.

Highlights of this symposium are the field trip to the farm and Dale-Bumper National Rice Research Center (DBNRRC) at Stuttgart, Arkansas. At this trip, meeting participants visited the Isbell Farm, a 3000 acre, 6 generation family farm growing SAKE rice. The owner Chris talked about collaboration with the DBNRRC and the adoption of AWD (alternate wet and dry) method that helps reduce the water usage and methane emission by 30-40% without compromising yield. The visits to DBNRRC and its experimental fields were eye opening and allowed the visitors to see many possibilities. 

The symposium ended with a banquet hosted in Phillips Community College of the University of Arkansas, in which Hallie Shoffner, the only female farmer of the region and CEO of DeltaHarvest, gave a touching speech on the challenges and hardship of farmers in the mid-Mississippi Delta region and emphasized the advantage of specialty crops in the commodity market. She ended her talk with the saying, “To answer the question of ‘How to feed the world without destroying our planet’, my answer is ‘together’! ”

Kapeel Chougule (Ware Lab), Jessica Walnut (Assmann Lab), Sally Assmann, Doreen Ware, Sharon Wei (Ware Lab) in the rice field of Isbell farm.

Jessica Walnut (Assmann Lab), who won the first place poster award, in front of her poster