PHOTO BY MAYUMI ACOSTA PHOTOGRAPHYHaving grown up on a farm in France, Amélie Gaudin says it’s little wonder she ended up working with crops. “I’ve been interested in agriculture for a long time,” she says. “So I’ve been following my passion.” But it was her experience studying the effects of drought in the early 2000s at the International Potato Center in Lima that gave Gaudin the impetus to pursue this passion academically.
“We farm under the assumption that resources will always be available,” she says. But seeing resources under threat from climate change in Peru, “that’s when it began to make sense to me that we need to start thinking about farming in a different way.”
Keen to explore these ideas, Gaudin joined crop researcher Manish Raizada’s lab at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada, as a master’s student in 2007. There, she undertook a detailed study of the mechanisms underlying responses to low-nitrogen conditions in maize roots. “Phenotyping roots, especially roots of a large plant like maize, is very difficult,” says Raizada. So Gaudin proposed an unconventional technique: aeroponics, which grows plants in air misted with nutrient solution. “I didn’t know what aeroponics was,” Raizada ...
