"Virtually every major crop in the U.S. and around the world is at significant risk to climate change, and cotton is no exception to that," Geoffrey Von Maltzahn said.
Von Maltzahn and his team at a startup called Indigo say they've developed a breakthrough: drought-resistant seeds.
"Water stress and drought in cotton is the most important stress in agriculture that has almost no solutions today," Von Maltzahn said. "Remarkably, nature has found a whole bunch of solutions to that in the microbiome."