A new home for rubber-producing plants after their work in Parlier is done

As Dr. Gary Banuelos was wrapping up a study of guayule (“why-yoo-lee”), a natural rubber producing crop, growing in soils contaminated with selenium and/or boron, he received an unexpected call from a professor at Caltech, Julia Kornfield. Banuelos is a U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) scientist who made a career of figuring out which crops grow best in some of the world’s worst soils. Kornfield wanted to know if he had any mature guayule plants to spare. In September 2024 a research center devoted to domestically grown natural rubber crops was launched by the U.S. National Science Foundation as part of its network of Engineering Research Centers. Kornfield wanted to get the research off to a fast start, but it takes two years for guayule plants to become large enough to harvest for rubber.

Bañuelos had just taken the final harvest of his 2020 plantings of guayule, including a group of uncontaminated plants suitable for the new NSF ERC for Transformation of American Rubber through Domestic Innovation for Supply Security (TARDISS). He agreed to give the four-year-olds up for adoption by Caltech, one of seven TARDISS universities. On December 14, 2024, Kornfield and graduate student Siddharth Premnath drove a cargo van from Caltech in Pasadena to the USDA San Joaquin Valley Agricultural Sciences Center in Parlier. They worked closely with Mr. Baudelio Perez, Biological Sciences Technician, identifying which individuals to transplant, digging them up, providing them with a bed of their familiar sandy loam to ease transplantation and collecting tissue samples to compare with their growth after one year in Pasadena. Getting the plants out of the ground was a challenge, requiring Perez to marshal the backhoe. Getting the plants in the cargo van was also a challenge, benefiting from Perez mobilizing the front-end loader with Dr. Banuelos and Director Beto Perez de Leon pitching in to dance the guayule off the scoop and into the van. The 3.5 hour drive back to Pasadena was the easy part!

This material is based upon work supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation under Cooperative Agreement No. 2330145. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the U.S. National Science Foundation.