A biotechnology dream: nitrogen-fixing cereal crops
news.mit.edu
news.mit.edu
Keep in mind that the two are going to require very different planting, cultivation and harvesting timing and technique, so having narrow strips of one alongside the other is going to be a monumental pain in the butt for the farmer (in comparison to having a whole field of one in one year and a whole field of the other in another year).
No one is going to do the "plant alongside" thing unless there are massive gains to be had.
Honestly, while a nice idea I agree it wont really work at the scale we need. I think some genetic engineering would be more useful. Ideally a crop that also is not encumbered by patents like other enhanced crops.
The downside is you can't automate harvest, but the money is there to be made (massive gains in the form of greater yields and more crops to sell). More importantly you are acting symbiotically with the land instead of parasitically. If the US was still made up of legacy family farms, it would be a no-brainer to do this because there is a long term interest in the health of the land. Now that most agricultural land is centralized in the hands of a few corporations, they will act for short-term gain unless the government mandates that they do otherwise.
So who are you planning to put to work as agricultural stoop-labor peasants? Are you volunteering? I mean, we used to harvest all our crops that way. The people who did it were generally...not volunteers.
As far as higher yields go, I don't believe you. See:
https://www.agry.purdue.edu/ext/corn/news/timeless/images/Co...
I find it strange how we have cell phones and solar power and other these other wonders, and yet arguments always goes straight to slavery anytime the specter of higher labor costs comes up. One would think innovation, especially on this forum. The obvious, immediate way would be to fix the immigration laws and enforcement to allow in as much guest labor as needed. If the economics are an issue, then selective use of farm subsidies are appropriate given the positive value being added to the land in terms of increased productivity and soil quality. Eventually innovation will bring the costs down.
> As far as higher yields go, I don't believe you.
Another silly comparison to the past - agricultural science has advanced multiple times in the last 80 years. No one would argue that modern, chemistry-based farming isn't productive, simply that it's less productive (and far, FAR more detrimental to the soil) than what modern science around restorative agriculture can produce.
Restorative Ag 101: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUmIdq0D6-A
For what it's worth, I also think Corn yields are probably impacted by how heavily subsidized it is. That's a policy that started with the New Deal in 1933, so it makes sense that the graphic would start to increase there.
Wait, what? If the farmer’s asset is getting more valuable how is that an argument for public subsidies?
Besides which, I don't see any danger in Americans starving. We export enormous quantities of food and many food crops are, when you get right down to it, substitutes.
I see zero reason to continue subsiding agriculture--big, small, cash crop, heirloom vegetable, dairy, or anything else. Whether through cash, subsidized insurance, water policy, protectionist measures, or anything else.
Let the chips fall where they may.
It's not "strange" at all. Either the crops are cultivated and harvested by machinery, or they're cultivated and harvested by back-breaking human labor. You can either pay those laborers subsistence peasant wages, or you can raise the price of food dramatically (which of course means that other poor people can't afford food).
Your choice, dude.
> The obvious, immediate way would be to fix the immigration laws and enforcement to allow in as much guest labor as needed.
Oh, I see. You'll import people from other countries to work as peasants. Because that's what they're good for, right?
Bah.
> than what modern science around restorative agriculture can produce.
Demonstrate that this can work at scale, without raising the price of food, and without creating or importing a new peasant class.
Until then, it's just a fantasy.
It’s time to start changing how we grow food.
"Generating more jobs" is putting the cart before the horse - the point of a job is the utility gain from performing it. If it involves more jobs to keep the status quo that is a bad thing.
Creating new jobs is important in ‘new Ag’ because it would be increasingly technical and need STEM expertise. Right now..basically it’s running because we can get poor people desperate enough to work on minimum wage.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Sisters_(agriculture)
The only fix is to legally mandate (or incentivize by subsidies) that soil gets to regenerate. The problem is that this will reduce the amount of usable agrarian fields by a massive amount and so prices will rise - which governments want to avoid like the plague. What they ignore: if we continue down that path the soil is fucked beyond repair in decades...
We have to make farms smaller and smarter. And start training agronomists and farmers to start becoming STEM friendly with their methods otherwise they are never going to comfortable transitioning from tractor to robot.
This is the factually correct answer, but unfortunately without government incentives / orders this will not happen due to the mechanisms of capitalism. The system rewards the farmer who exploits the soil much greater than the farmer who properly maintains the soil health - classic short term optimization.
"Modern" agro-capitalism will utterly wreck fertile soil over the next decades and I'm not sure if it will ever recover.
And it's not just the soil that suffers. In prior small-scale farm times, there were lots of "patches", especially at farm borders, that were left free for flowers, bushes and the likes - providing food for bees and birds and shelter for small animals. With land consolidation all of this went away.
Two errors in one sentence. It's the "Haber-Bosch process", and it transforms nitrogen gas into ammonia.
There's an overhead cost to plants that can fix nitrogen. It's good to have that capability, though; it's useful for areas with lots of arable land and sun but no good fertilizer source.
You would be right to assume that engineering the bacteria would be easier. There are already companies that work to provide specialized nitrogen-fixing bacteria strains for agricultural use. However governmental regulations for using a genetically modified bacteria vs a genetically modified plant for widespread agriculture use are different.
Anyone got a good counter argument besides the generic "classical breeding isn't acually safer", which I don't buy without further detailing? The reason I'm asking is that over the years, I was often sceptical about his opinions and the way he presented them, but in the end Taleb always turned out to be right on the few predictions he did make, which is no small feat. If GMOs really are a global systemic risk, this would be an important science fact to get right, and I want to hear all sides. I figured there should be some competent people on HN.
In many crops the seeds planted are hybrids, which don't breed true either. That non-issue has been there since before you, and possibly your parents, were born.
What keeps the (gasp! shudder!) corporate ownership of these things from sinking us into a dystopian hellscape? Competition. You don't like one kind of hybrid? Buy a different kind. The seed makers compete fiercely for farmers' business. The same is true of GMOs.
That doesn't mean that they are a good idea.
> In many crops the seeds planted are hybrids, which don't breed true either.
And in many other crops Monsanto sues the hell out of farmers who replant the non-hybrid seeds.
> Competition.
Are there actually seed makers that would not sue their customers for replanting?
Monsanto had a contract with farmers to not replant the seeds. The farmers were free to not use the seeds and not sign the contract. Enforcement of contractual obligations is a vital glue that holds society together; why are you against it in this case?
In all this, I detect entitled selfishness on your part: you want (or you think the farmers should have) the benefits of these improvements, without having to respect the mechanisms that allow the improvements to be made.
As for how patents (and other intellectual property rights) correlate with innovation, that is debated. Here's a random article I picked out of a web search: https://www.knowablemagazine.org/article/society/2018/do-pat...
For whatever it's worth, the research we're discussing here is being done not at a for-profit seed maker but at a non-profit university. Universities are good at getting government grants, for example, for innovations that would benefit everyone, like improved seeds.
As for patents: while patents in general have dubious applications, plant patents in particular are not dubious at all. Patents are absolutely essential here, because the cost of manufacturing is extremely low (just grow the plant!) If plants that breed true could not be patented then developing them would be worthless. The cost of development could not be recouped after the first sale.
Also, the whole "plant patents date back to 1930" line is literally out of Monsanto's talking points.
Yes, the 1930s plant patents are a bit different. But they are still corporations owning IP in plants. It didn't end the world then, it's nothing but a source of faux outrage now.
The original one is still there for all to use.
That being said, it’s unlikely that GMO crops will stop being popular anytime soon. The best we can hope for is that labs get really good and fast at producing GM crops so that when the disease eventually hits, the lab/company can quickly produce a disease resistant variety.
The population of the world is growing rapidly. We absolutely do need highest yielding food crops if we are to not cut down every forest to just feed everyone.
That's more or less how we started down the GMO path in the first place, back in the 60s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheat_leaf_rust https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Borlaug
Obviously a hugely loaded subject, but also worth thinking about.
Do we really need GMO for this though? The EU is more or less self-sufficient[0] without GMO production. It is true it relies on GM imports (soy, rice) but it also exports a ton of other stuff.
I am not against GM crops, but I'm not unconvinced they are the only option.
Africa is (was? I'm not up to date) a net food importer, but it has crop yields 5 times lower then US/EU/Asia, which could also be improved by other means such as better land management.
[0] http://register.consilium.europa.eu/doc/srv?l=EN&f=ST%201336...
The point of GMO is to engineer organisms for artificial environment under human supervision, and humans aren't going to protect harmful plants. Eg. nitrogen fixing may sound "obvious" but it takes energy, and empirically in most environments such plants were outcompeted by those that didn't spend energy this way. It's only net cheaper for humans, because the cost of manufacturing, transporting etc the fertilizer has to be included.
It's the same story for everything. It's going to take a really, really long time before human genetic engineering can hope to beat evolution on its own turf. By a rough estimate, at any second on Earth there's close to 2^105 ribosomes manufacturing proteins from RNA, only once simulation capabilities start to come close genetically engineered organisms start to become a systemic risk.
Funny story that confirms this view: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-49660-6 >However, it is clear from the data in Garziera et al.6 that the effectiveness of the release program began to break down after about 18 months, i.e., the population which had been greatly suppressed rebounded to nearly pre-release levels.
Ultimately, it was just a fun, harmless experiment, and as a bonus anyone arrogant enough to expect current human genetic engineering to beat evolution got a lesson in humility.
Dont be so sure. It seems like nitrogen fixing plants could get out of control, and evolution hasn't produced them yet.
Sexual reproduction allows improvements from diverging lineages to combine in a single offspring. But only if they haven't diverged too far. Genetic engineering may bring beneficial feature from vary different species, or in this case kingdoms.
If a nitrogen fixing plant took over the world an obvious way to target it would be to aim at the nitrogen pathway, but then we might kill most of the bacteria our food supply depends on.
Having said that I think this work is a good idea, but if I can conceive of a way for it to go wrong I'm sure nature could come up with many more.
As stated elsewhere, gene transfer also happens cross-kingdom by way of virus.
what about legumes? What's the difference between "built-in" nitrogen fixing and symbiotic nitrogen fixing that would make the former much more dangerous?
Is that the case when plants are now living in an unnatural environment,e.g with co2 at elevated levels compared to the levels that today's plants evolved in?
The game today is entirely new, and who's to say what sort of things will thrive in these new conditions.
Why is is any more "trying to beat evolution" than, say, using antibiotics? In a 18 month timespan, there is not much useful mutation (afaik!). The problem was that there was already a variant that could survive the attack.
How can we quantify the risk a given attack will fail/calculate how many such interventions would be needed?
If you're looking for Talebian disaster, it has already happened. Seriously: Most of earth's arable land is dominated by a tiny handful of species in the order Poales, with much of the rest dominated by other invasive species brought in for grazing a few animal species. The point of genetic engineering is to help maximize yield and resilience of our intensively worked land so that we have some chance of saving what little is left of the natural world, whatever mistakes we commit now would not be materially worse than what we've already done, and we need every trick in the book to try to preserve what is left.
(I should note: I have no love of Monsanto nor wish to defend them/apologize for them.)
My summary is that there are "economical" (farming failing due to blight, etc) and "health" (whatever the hell they talk about proteins in chemical pathways).
I'm not particularly worried about the economical effects, in part because I am reasonably confident that we don't have to "solve gravity" because we can't grow wheat.
Health concerns, of course, are legitimate. It's getting more and more clear that glyphosate is a carcinogen, and all deliberate efforts by big botany to suppress this research should be condemned. But to say the "proteins" in your diet are harmful to you is a stretch. There might be some effects, but that's not a given.
Ingested proteins typically do not directly participate in any chemical pathways that don't involve their degradation (exceptions exist like prions). We are gaining more insight into how our immune systems can indeed be reprogrammed by some proteins in our diet but that's still a stretch that one new modification in one of ten thousand proteins in a plant you eat is gonna screw your body.
Also remember mad cow disease? That was caused purely by shitty factory farming, no GMO needed. Most (not all) worries about GMO is just misplaced fear mongering, and it only serves to squash any legitimate conversation about it lest a sane individual gets grouped with insane posse. What do you think of this argument?
Is it unequivocal? No. But whatever I've read seems to indicate a smoking fire, at least a small one.
Yeah, the bond prepayment crisis of 2005 was terrible.
The science is good, I just don't think the people using it care enough about good science for that to matter, they will still pump it full of just as much nitrogen before except now they get like .005% higher yield. So they can give their corporate administrators a bonus for utilizing the work and efforts of others and we get jack shit because their object is producing money, not making as much food as possible with the least amount of resources.
They care about money.
> they will still pump it full of just as much nitrogen before except now they get like .005% higher yield.
Why on earth would they do that? Fertilizer is expensive, dude.
In Europe we have an utter abundance of fertilizer - we have so many cattle and pigs concentrated in megafarms that we cannot spread their manure any more and have to cart it through half of Europe.
Legumes do fine and farmers could use less fertilizer if things like wheat could just grab nitrogen out of the air that is 78% nitrogen.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/corn-future-hu...
really mind-blowing stuff.
Where animals are made of protein, plants are made of carbohydrates. They're a different form of life.
Don't be fooled by the Whole Foods post claiming "yes, plants have protein". ( https://www.wholefoodsmarket.com/blog/whole-story/yes-plants... ) They proudly tell you that broccoli has more protein per calorie than steak. That's true. Broccoli also has about 10% the protein content of steak by mass. Steak is an efficient food with a lot of calories. Broccoli is a plant.
But plants are made of cells too and cells need amino acids for all the machinery of life. So how do they get away with so much less than animal cells?
This is basically just a repeat of my earlier comment, because I don't really understand what you're asking about. I don't see why it's a mystery that an organism which uses a lot of protein needs to produce much more protein than another organism which uses very little protein.
The bulk of an animal's structure is made of things like hair, and skin, and muscle, and cartilage, which are made largely of proteins, which in turn contain a lot of nitrogen.
The bulk of a plant's structure is made of things like cellulose and lignin, which contain no nitrogen.
- Isn't part of the reason that plant cells contain so much less protein by mass because plant cells are larger and a large portion of their mass is a vacuole for storing carbohydrates and water?
- How much lower is the protein content per cell in plant cells vs animal cells?
- What organelles or increased concentration of organelles cause animal cells to contain more protein than plant cells if it isn't just that vacuoles skew the results?
- If it isn't a difference in the cells, is it just a difference in organ structure between plants and animals?
Note: Not trying to be snarky, legitimately interested in this as I have always has a passing fascination in cellular biology.
I'm not trying to be snarky either, if you are more than passingly interested, go get a textbook and read through it. It'll answer questions you have yet to think to ask.
Just like it's more efficient to get money by robbing a bank than by sneaking into houses to steal tooth fairy payouts.
If a fraction of that money went towards research of alternative agricultural practices, we wouldn’t have to worry about how to produce more nitrogen while simultaneously dealing with the detrimental effects of nitrogen pollution, as we are currently
Would be an even better comparison if we account for the externalities, like soil erosion and ecocide from pesticide/fertilizer run-off.
Externalities are a /way/ larger issue than just monoculture or even modern pesticides and fertilizer though.
When was the last famine in the United States? When was the last famine anywhere on the planet that wasn't due to some kind of fucked-up government?
Drawing down savings to pay the mortgage works just fine too, until they run out. There being no obvious alternatives doesn't mean you won't end up homeless.
Poly cropping almost certainly ends up being more labor intensive, and even requiring some knowledge on the ground. The trend is very much so improving profit by reducing labor.