Professor Shimon Rachmilevitch

Ben-Gurion University of the Negev

Are you familiar with the Green Revolution, a movement to increase crop yield in the 1930s through the 1960s?  Do you know that there is now a second green revolution to identify ways to respond to food commodity prices and food scarcity? In fact, Bill Gates has been among the proponents of a second green revolution saying “Three quarters of the world's poorest people get their food and income by farming small plots of land...if we can make smallholder farming more productive and more profitable, we can have a massive impact on hunger and nutrition and poverty...the charge is clear—we have to develop crops that can grow in a drought; that can survive in a flood; that can resist pests and disease...we need higher yields on the same land in harsher weather." 

Professor Shimon Rachmilevitch, director of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev’s French Associates Institute for Agriculture and Biotechnology of Drylands and chair of the Israeli Society of Plant Science, about the research occurring in Israel’s Negev desert impacting the world. Discover how his research is identifying ways for plant adaptation and acclimation to stress with an emphasis on global change. As the director of the Root of the Matter, a new interdisciplinary center that includes 25 labs and over 12 companies in Israel created to advance modern agriculture through the root zone toward the second green revolution, Professor Rachmilevitch will share with us cutting-edge insight into Israeli agricultural advancements.