Research Brief: Meeting India’s Appetite for Food, Water and Energy

Apr 10, 2024

With roughly one-sixth of the world’s population, India’s increasing needs for food, water and energy are crucial for its sustainable development. Recent CCEE graduate student Aditya Keskar (Ph.D. 2023) responded to this pressing challenge by dedicating his doctoral research to the betterment of his homeland. He focused on solar water pumps, which offer irrigation to farms while avoiding the greenhouse gas emissions and air pollution caused by diesel pumps.

This technology uses standalone solar photovoltaic panels coupled with water pumps. India’s ambition to deploy nearly three million solar water pumps would greatly impact its food, energy, and water systems, making successful implementation crucial. With his advisor, CCEE Associate Professor Jeremiah Johnson, and partners at the National Institute of Technology, Raipur, he secured funding from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, University of Nebraska Omaha, and the U.S. State Department to evaluate the performance and environmental advantages of deploying distributed solar water pumps, tackling this multifaceted challenge.

To offer new insights into the deployment of these pumps to date, the binational research team conducted farmer surveys and collected extensive operational data across Chhattisgarh, a central Indian state. Farmers reported increased revenues and extended growing seasons as a result of their solar water pumping systems. However, the study highlighted significant untapped potential within these systems. An estimated 300 to 400 kilowatt-hours per month of solar energy per pumping system remained unused, representing as much as 95% of potential generation. The excess, unused solar energy can have alternative uses beyond pumping, indicating a pathway for harnessing solar energy more effectively for non-pumping purposes.

The study also found a wide range of usage rates for the pumps. When assessing their environmental benefits, highly utilized solar pumps reduced overall greenhouse gas emissions by 93% compared to diesel alternatives. Pumping systems with minimal usage, however, did not realize those environmental benefits. This study highlights important opportunities for India’s sustainable development, emphasizing the key role of innovative technologies like solar water pumps in meeting the escalating demands for food, water and energy while advancing environmental sustainability.

The project team reflected on the challenges and immense benefits they experienced working in a binational team at a panel Institute of International Education’s workshop on Best Practices in U.S. India Higher Education Collaborations. The research findings were published as part of the Environmental Science & Technology special issue “Accelerating Environmental Research to Achieve Sustainable Development Goals.”

Source : ncsu.edu

Video: Why Your Food Future Could be Trapped in a Seed Morgue

In a world of PowerPoint overload, Rex Bernardo stands out. No bullet points. No charts. No jargon. Just stories and photographs. At this year’s National Association for Plant Breeding conference on the Big Island of Hawaii, he stood before a room of peers — all experts in the science of seeds — and did something radical: he showed them images. He told them stories. And he asked them to remember not what they saw, but how they felt.

Bernardo, recipient of the 2025 Lifetime Achievement Award, has spent his career searching for the genetic treasures tucked inside what plant breeders call exotic germplasm — ancient, often wild genetic lines that hold secrets to resilience, taste, and traits we've forgotten to value.

But Bernardo didn’t always think this way.

“I worked in private industry for nearly a decade,” he recalls. “I remember one breeder saying, ‘We’re making new hybrids, but they’re basically the same genetics.’ That stuck with me. Where is the new diversity going to come from?”

For Bernardo, part of the answer lies in the world’s gene banks — vast vaults of seed samples collected from every corner of the globe. Yet, he says, many of these vaults have quietly become “seed morgues.” “Something goes in, but it never comes out,” he explains. “We need to start treating these collections like living investments, not museums of dead potential.”

That potential — and the barriers to unlocking it — are deeply personal for Bernardo. He’s wrestled with international policies that prevent access to valuable lines (like North Korean corn) and with the slow, painstaking science of transferring useful traits from wild relatives into elite lines that farmers can actually grow. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t. But he’s convinced that success starts not in the lab, but in the way we communicate.

“The fact sheet model isn’t cutting it anymore,” he says. “We hand out a paper about a new variety and think that’s enough. But stories? Plants you can see and touch? That’s what stays with people.”

Bernardo practices what he preaches. At the University of Minnesota, he helped launch a student-led breeding program that’s working to adapt leafy African vegetables for the Twin Cities’ African diaspora. The goal? Culturally relevant crops that mature in Minnesota’s shorter growing season — and can be regrown year after year.

“That’s real impact,” he says. “Helping people grow food that’s meaningful to them, not just what's commercially viable.”

He’s also brewed plant breeding into something more relatable — literally. Coffee and beer have become unexpected tools in his mission to make science accessible. His undergraduate course on coffee, for instance, connects the dots between genetics, geography, and culture. “Everyone drinks coffee,” he says. “It’s a conversation starter. It’s a gateway into plant science.”