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The Climate Resilience Consortium (CRC) aims to build the resilience of farmers to the ever-changing climatic conditions and seasonal climatic variability. Some of the projects in this consortium include cultivar trial evaluations, agronomy trials, maize breeding, planting window trials, etc. The cultivar (maize, sorghum, soybean) evaluation trials aim to find the most adaptable maize for a particular area since cultivars are environment specific. The cultivar trials are conducted annually to release information on the best-performing cultivars in a particular area, enabling farmers to make informed decisions. Another example of timely and accurate information is the information shared with farmers at the roadshow about the El Niño cycle expected to be experienced in 2024. As a result, a farmer will not plant soybean if his farm is drought prone.
The Open Top Chamber Facility for Elevated CO2 Research based at Rhodes University will be used for the investigation on how plants respond to the elevated carbon dioxide condition of the near future. The facility was built from funding from the DST Global Change Grand Challenges Research Plan, the NRF National Equipment Fund, Working for Water and the Applied Centre for Climate and Earth Systems Science (Access) and Sandisa Imbewu. The initial project will research the response of South African maize varieties to severe drought, C4 plant response to drought with the aim of informing crop models about important interactions of drought and elevated CO2. This will help annual yield predictions of the maize crop more robust.