Our Food Supply Is in Crisis. Here's a Solution: Melinda yerka of Yerka Seeds - Founders Live Conversations

In a recent Founders Live Conversations session, Nick Hughes, CEO of Founders Live, interviewed Melinda Yerka, founder and CEO of Yerka Seeds and the winner of the inaugural Founders Live Reno competition.

Yerka, a plant breeder with a PhD in plant breeding and genetics, shared her unique journey from working in corn fields at age 12 to becoming an associate professor at the University of Nevada, Reno. She explained that Yerka Seeds was born out of necessity, as she found herself the only plant breeder in Nevada and needed a commercialization arm for the new, climate-smart sorghum varieties she was developing in her lab. These new sorghum varieties are designed to replace other grain crops like wheat, barley, and even corn, offering increased heat and drought tolerance, higher protein content, and better digestibility.

Yerka emphasized the critical importance of her work in a changing climate, where traditional crop regions are becoming unviable. Her company focuses on rapidly adapting new plant species to new locations with minimal infrastructure, utilizing a comprehensive data framework that merges plant genetics, data science, physiology, and biology. Yerka Seeds is actively collaborating with the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) in Nairobi, Kenya, to distribute and characterize their sorghum varieties for sub-Saharan Africa, aiming to combat human and animal malnutrition. She advised aspiring founders to tap into their local entrepreneurial communities, get comfortable talking about their ideas, and embrace a "fearless" mindset to overcome challenges and open doors.