A life passion
A farmer's daughter, Farrant recalls stumbling across a resurrection plant as a 9-year-old and being amazed at its seemingly immortal properties.
"I wrote in my diary about a plant that had died and came back after the rain," she said.
She returned to the subject professionally in 1994, and has since become the world's leading expert in her field.
Environmentalists fear that more and more of Africa will be reduced to a dust bowl by global warming, with higher temperatures, reduced water supplies and population growth threatening to trigger worsening famines.
Climate change could reduce maize yields across southern Africa by as much as 30% by 2030, according to the UN Environment Programme.
Ahead of the United Nations conference in Paris at the end of November, countries are facing growing pressure to keep global warming below two degrees Celsius, above pre-Industrial Revolution levels by weaning their carbon-hungry societies off fossil fuels.
But, scientists say it is just as important to adapt to the new reality.
"Soil, cropping systems, farming systems - they all must have the capacity to recover from a drastic change in climate," said Rattan Lal, professor of soil science at Ohio State University.
"We should make agriculture part of the solution to our issues... the climate change problem is so huge everything should be on the table."
If successful, Farrant will follow in the venerable footsteps of earlier scientists who have saved crops from devastation by exploiting plants with specific strengths.
In the 1970s, US maize was rescued from southern leaf blight disease by incorporating resistant genes found in other varieties of maize.
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