RNA breakthrough creates crops that can grow 50 percent more potatoes, rice
sciencedaily.com
sciencedaily.com
Sure, rotation of cultures is already common in farming, but this implies we'd move further away from organic farming rather than closer to it with the need to re-fertilize the soil to an even bigger extent (and deeper).
Or, it would make us move to other currently unexploited land, thus worsening the global situation we are in.
Basically, there is a potential in this, but I was never under the impression that any part of human population is starving because of us being unable to produce enough food (rather, it's waste and inequality, to name the likely top two).
The undomesticated cultivars which evolved over time evolved to work in their niche. Potatoes largely come from the Andes in Peru/Chile, where the soil is thin, rocky and the terrain is very mountainous.
So potatoes evolved to develop in poor quality mountainous soil.
What we do as humans in domesticating these cultivars is important because we grow potatoes in very different situations, and we develop new potato cultivar that are adapted to our new environments.
So you see, it's not "an evolutionary reason plants don't grow big", it's "they evolved to fill a niche". When we change the niche, we change the pressures on them, and we create an opportunity for us to adapt the new plant even better.
I don't think there is as much worry about fertilizer as you think. When growing crops we are long past the time when you rely on natural fertilizer. Nearly every atom in those plants that isn't Carbon was added to the soil explicitly to grow that plant. So, to grow bigger potato, you will need more fertilizer.
With regards to climate, being able to grow more rice per acre is valuable because climate change will destroy breadbasket regions and likely reduce total land available to agriculture. Thus maintaining total output levels against decreasing land total will be important.
I don't know that this is solid reasoning. Certainly there is some limit eventually imposed by soil nutrient content but there could also be other reasons plants don't grow large fruit. A big one being that plants which grow their fruit to spread seeds reach efficiency when there is enough fruit to attract a spreading organism and no more.
In fact, basically all the plants we consume were already unusually large even before the green revolution. Humans had selected or hybridized the popular cultivars to an extreme already.
Again, I'm not saying it's impossible that this size of plant crosses some threshold for the soil, it's just not safe to assume it does either.
Guessing it's a bit of both.
As for non-mineral things like nitrogen, isn't the soil supposed to have an ecosystem that replenishes these things? In healthy soil, there are bacteria, fungus, earthworms, ants etc to make the soil conducive for plant growth.
Nature doesn't add artificial chemicals for fertilizer yet left to its own devices, plants thrive in natural soil. The activity of growing plants per se doesn't deplete soil. Maybe it's the use of pesticides and herbicides that kills the soil by killing the things living in it.
Carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and hydrogen which represents the bulk of organic mater is available from air and water, but phosphorus for example gets depleted. Nitrogen fertilizer is something of a special case as extracting it from the atmosphere takes a lot of energy. However, nitrogen fixing bacteria will return it to soil if given time to do so.
The specifics of course get more complicated, sod for example is physically removing layers of soil.
Iowa farmers grow corn for money, and Soybeans to replenish the nitrogen. They have discovered enough uses for the "waste" soybeans that sometimes it is worth more than corn, but the original reason soybeans were planted was for the cheap nitrogen.
For the most extreme example see seedless grapes.
There are some plans that need an animal to digest the seed covering, but not all plants have that as part of their reproduction cycle. (I'm not sure what pea's natural cycle was)
All farmers of all types already have to replenish the nutrient content, specifically NPK, because they are depleted by farming. This has always been true. There is almost an unlimited amount of N in the atmosphere. P and K are currently mined, but many farmers are getting more efficient at using manure which are renewable resources for these. Micronutrients are small enough that it's almost a non-issue. In other words, there is no nutrient crisis for farming.
>Basically, as others have said, there is an evolutionary reason plants do not naturally grow this big (they'd kill themselves off in a few generations).
This is teleological thinking. Don't add reason to evolution. There are many very very large plants that have done well. There are many small plants that do well. Their survival strategy all depends on the resources and stresses in the environment.
In the case of a domesticated plant, there really is no limit because humans can provide all the necessary resources. It is just a matter of pushing the plants genetics towards higher yield, which is something we have done for thousands of years.
>but this implies we'd move further away from organic farming
Organic farming is a marketing term to appeal to upper class shoppers. It simply trades inputs. It trades technology for higher labor costs to create a similar product.
>Or, it would make us move to other currently unexploited land, thus worsening the global situation we are in.
Why would increasing the yield of current farmland cause people to have to create more? Higher yield means doing more with less.
>I was never under the impression that any part of human population is starving
The solution to hunger isn't to make food more expensive by limiting our ability to produce. One of the greatest things America ever did was make food cheap. It led to the obesity epidemic, but I'd rather have fat people than hungry people. The way forward is to continue to use all the technology we have to increase farming efficiency
Modern farmers are keenly aware of soil quality and spend a lot of time and money to keep their farms running at top efficiency. The thing that worries me the most about modern farming is the use of petrochemicals for fuel and fertilizers as well as runoff into water sources.
It isn't. There is such a thing as too much. Inputs that wash off in the rain is wasted money. Inputs beyond what the plant needs are best sit around (or wash off - see above), but sometimes will make the plant grow taller instead of grow more food - or worse will kill the plant from too much.
There is a lot of room though. Today we can target small areas of land with different amounts of each input. 100 years ago you tried to give each field the same amount of every input since you didn't know what it really needed, and didn't have the ability to do anything about it even if you did.
You sure about that? When I was ARS, sure there were 3-4 farmers I met who took SOC and and soil health seriously; individuals who wanted to think about their soil as an ecosystem and grow their soils as they did their crops. Then there were the other 96-97 farmers you would meet who could give two wiffs of stinky piss about doing anything other than extracting as much value off their land as quickly as possible. This was typically done with high degrees of tillage, large quantities of fertilizer, and significant doses of herbicide. If there SOC levels dropped below 5%, they would just buy in lime and lime the shit out of the fields. Rinse, wash hands, repeat.
Its purely anecdotal, but the *vast* majority of farmers I had the opportunity were not good farmers and not interested in any kind of longer term relationship with their soils. Most seems like they were trying to extract maybe 5-15 more years of growth out of their soils before they were completely depleted of SOC and basically not usable as farm-able land. We're talking about a region that prior to cultivation had SOC levels in the 30-40s; most of the soils there now are down at below 10%, many as low as 5%, which is borderline being able to grow anything at all.
Unclear what they expect to happen next.
I can see why farmers are extracting every bit of profit from the soil that they absolutely can. The machine demands it of them. Farms are huge operations nowadays, and from what I can tell, small family-owned and run corn and beans farms are half a century in the past at this point. The soil is just one more casualty of growthism.
It is purely anecdotal. It greatly depends on the location and the generational age of the farmer the extent to which they are concerned with soil conservation. Cultural practices in farming tend to have wide adoption swings, (neighbors see what their neighbors are doing, etc) Entire counties will be using conventional methods and within a few seasons swap to lower disturbance methods.
Conservation tillage practices—including no-till, strip-till, and mulch-till—vary widely across crops and regions[0]:
• Conservation tillage was used on roughly 70 percent of soybean (2012), 65 percent of corn (2016), 67 percent of wheat (2017), and 40 percent of cotton (2015) acres.
• The share of total conservation tillage that is no-till also varied from 67 percent (45 percent of total acreage) in wheat (2017) and 56 percent (40 percent of total acreage) in soybeans (2012) to 44 percent (18 percent of total acreage) in cotton (2015) and 42 percent (27 percent of total acreage) in corn (2016).
• For individual crops, the rate of no-till varies by region. The likelihood of no-till corn, for example, is relatively high in the Northern Great Plains (50 percent of conservation tillage in corn, 34 percent of total corn acreage), Prairie Gateway (69 percent of conservation tillage, 49 percent of corn), and the South (the Eastern Uplands, Southern Seaboard, and Mississippi Portal combined) (67 percent of conservation tillage, 53 percent of corn).
• Almost 50 percent of corn, soybean, wheat, and cotton acreage was in no-till or strip-till at some time over a 4-year period (including the survey and 3 previous years), but only about 20 percent of these acres were in no-till or strip-till all 4 years.
I find your identification of 96-97% of farmers as short-term profiteers rude and borderline offensive.
[0]: Tillage Intensity and Conservation Cropping in the United States, USDA 2018
It could be right. The smaller the farmer the less likely they are to realize how much the investment in better farming is worth it. The very large farmers have the numbers showing the investment is worth it, they control a lot of land, but are only a minority of farmers.
I'm still with you that > 90% is a bad estimate, but it isn't as bad as you make it out.
The 20+ year trend in farm size is unmistakeable across the signficant economic classes, btw. Farms are increasing in size and the number of farms is decreasing.
In the long run farmers are care about soil health make more money than those that don't. The rule of thumb is it takes 7 years before no-til is more profitable than conventional tillage. Once you get no-till going though it uses a lot less fuel (pulling a plow through soil uses a lot of energy).
Farmers have also caught onto the fact that modern computers and equipment allow you to see what parts of the field you doing what. When you sell the farm they will make it worth while to build up your soil as farms that yield better are worth more than farms that yield poorly.
In the end you are right - far too many farmers are not caring for their soil as they should. All the big ones are though as they have figured out the long term investment is worth it.
We run a little market garden. I follow all sorts of agronomy feeds and information and then read and watch what other growers are doing. Even the most "regenerative" and "ecological" growers don't seem to get it... There's no free lunch. I've read analysis which points out that there is not even enough manure produced on the planet to fertilize our farm fields without chemical additions, and don't even think about compost, it's not even close... and all the soil retention and cover cropping one does will only slow down, not reverse, top soil loss. If you're not losing carbon in your soils, it's because you're bringing it in from somewhere else, and it's lost there.
So many permaculture types trying to imply that what works for them in their backyard city gardens works on a large scale. It does not. I learned the hard way.
I see "no till" market garden growers whose solution is basically to dump 100 cubic yards of compost on their beds each year and plant into that instead of tilling. This is the Richard Perkins etc. method, and it's intellectual dishonesty. All that compost comes from somewhere and that place now in turn has a carbon deficit.
At least, this is all the case until we can find a way to efficiently extract CO2 from the atmosphere and turn it into solid soil ammendment. Trees and cover crops can't do it fast enough.
Yes, atmospheric nitrogen is fixed by bacteria, but it's not just on legumes, they are simply the most known and prominent.
If your comment was true, fertile soil would never have developed in the first place. Read posts where people are gaining about an inch of topsoil per year (in good conditions). They are not trucking it in. Even on depleted soil there is a natural succession that slowly develops fertile soil (not in all conditions, but again, not trucked in, just needs moisture, wind not blowing it off etc).
> If you're not losing carbon in your soils, it's because you're bringing it in from somewhere else, and it's lost there.
Heralding imported soil as soil regeneration is flawed, but so is your premise.
Carbon consumption happens through soil disturbance but also by natural oxidation and microbial processes in the soil. And some of the carbon in the plant matter is from the soil, as well.
The permaculturists are right that natural spaces are mostly self-regenerative systems. The problem is they don't feed people. At least not beyond hunter gatherer type densities.
Then add on top of that that most market garden type places are consuming quantities of unrenewable peat (potting mixes for transplant or nursery growing) and plastic (silage tarps and landscape fabric for occlusion, nursery pots, greenhouse poly, etc.) and fossil fuels... And large scale cash crop farms have their own rather drastic inputs as well.
Growing crops is extractive. We can fiddle with the parameters of how extractive, but farming needs inputs. So we need to think about where those inputs come from.
> Every bit of plant matter we ship off our farms in the form of food is carbon and nitrogen that is no longer in our soils.
Do you concede this¹ is false?
To be clear, I completely agree the vast majority of agriculture is extractive. What I think we're discussing is whether (or how much) growing crops must necessarily be extractive.
As I think I've said, I agree it's dishonest accounting to include imported plant matter in regenerative farming². Either way, it only reflects on current practices, as do comments about peat. Your experiences and failures, or those of your neighbors only speak of the inadequacies of specific methods. Comments about oil and plastic bear no sway in the topic at hand.
I specifically take issue with the claim that carbon is a soil resource that must be depleted when growing substantial amounts of food. Yes, when taking away crops, we (necessarily) remove nutrients, and some may necessarily require replenishing, but they are not carbon (or even nitrogen).
Carbon it is in fact one of few resources that comes from thin air, and plants can absorb (fix) it by themselves. Forests show that plants can fix CO₂, in substantial quantities. Conversely, forest mining shows carbon is released when you destroy the soil.
When farming, carbon is the one resource that is not industrially added to the soil³. Most of the carbon is in fact burned, either biologically or physically and cannot be returned.
As specific counter-example, in a discussion of soil regeneration, I've read claims of an inch of topsoil growth per year. Whatever they were doing or supplementing, I don't think they⁴ trucked in an inch of carbon/topsoil per year. Are you claiming it's impossible?
¹ As in, it was not present in soil, as your original claim seems to be.
² Imported matter does seem a good and legitimate way to quicken the process of soil regeneration, if it then becomes net-producing.
³ Carbon is only added in small, non-replenishing quantities, or small areas, not materially changing the carbon balance by itself.
⁴ I'm aware there are those that do repeatedly truck-in an inch of topsoil.
I suppose I don’t know the chemical compound that constitute “solid soil amendment” though. If it includes functionally free nitrogen/ammonia and proper management of land or equipment, is this still not possible?
In addition, plain sand and clay is very poor at retaining nutrients and moisture. Organic matter tends to soak up nutrients like a sponge. This is why media based hydroponics uses porous material like volcanic rock and pumice.
Not an expert, but read the Omnivore's dilemma which kinda runs through how modern farming works on a high level. Basically you figure out what the chemical building blocks are for what you're trying to grow, and fertilize the soil with that. The plant then pulls that out to actually construct the corn or whatever it is you're trying to grow.
Of course it might not be as delicious and nutritious as what you might be able to grow at home or at a well managed organic farm, but the goal is quantity here.
Source: https://heise.de/-6180853 (German)
That could be said of current crops. They are the result of years of artificial selection
There is already more than enough nutrients in the ground or applied as fertilizer. In fact most of the nutrients from fertilizer are lost and wash away.
This will allow plants to capture more applied ferilizer. Mostly though these plants will be pulling more carbon from the atmosphere.
Plants or otherwise: when you force the balance to tilt one way, you have to be extremely careful not to reach a breaking point.
Just want to add that I think the technology could be really beneficial though. For instance, if you planted less high-yield potatoes in smaller area than previously, you could then afford space for alternate crops and then move potatoes to a different location and counter balance with other crops the next season. This could possibly allow for increased production while still preserving nutrients, increasing overall yield efficiency.
The above happens all the time. It doesn't happen on the most productive land, it happens on the marginal land.
Pesticides aee higly dependent on crop and really have nothing to do with this conversation.
You don't eat "the vitamins" you eat the chicken, you don't eat the fertilizer, you eat the plant
Because... fertilizer is mercury!
So there are at least 3 studies performed by different teams in this article that indicates you're incorrect in your assertions as applied in practice.
Also, the article suggests that the studies themselves are comparing current data to data generated 20-50 years earlier. Comparing two modern day experiments to each other can be quite difficult, as even small differences can have huge ramifications in the results, even if the protocols are supposedly the same (I personally saw this play a few times in grad school). For example, quality differences in the filter paper used can result in a much higher retention of mass in one experiment compared to another. Without a body of research measuring the comparability of the compared results (please link if you find it), the comparisons cited in the article are not very convincing.
Actually, if you can find the original studies cited in the article, I'd love to see them. The ideal way of measuring this would be to take a heritage strain, and grow it along side a modern strain the the same soil. That would at least help figure out if modern crops really have selected against nutrition.
Several factors come immediately to mind, is the plant reaching a threshold wherein micronutrients are at "unity" and so uptake is reduced and thus reaches a plateau (or saturation), and so distribution into fruit is proportionally diminished as volume increases? Is there some natural law that is prohibitive, something like the square-cube law? Or are the plants locally depleting the nutrients, and then relying on natural diffusion? Is there a "long-range dependency" that is opaque? All else failing, I would suggest that it's highly probable that the nutrient disparities that are evident in these studies could reflect that maintenance of the proportion of nutrients to that of volume might leave the plants fated to death, and so our selection process is predetermined to either volume or nutrient content. Which begs the question, at what intersection do we find the highest degree of efficacy in selecting foodstuffs?
Given a plant that could expand both volume and nutrient proportionally, what would the result be? I'd conjecture rapid depletion of locally available nutrients, up to the point where diffusion and natural deposition becomes an ineffectual mode of conveyance and demands manual upkeep else the organism would be given to death.
Perhaps I'm presumptuous, I don't mind being so, I'll have to ask you to forgive me for my ignorance. I only ask for your participation in this discussion as it seems you're privileged to have a mind much more discerning and honed in this craft than mine own.
And, for example, there are many trace elements which are not replenished with standard fertilizer.
Selenium is an example here, I think it is the Danish?, which have a law now, forcing it to be added to fertilizer.
Bacteria don't make elements.... although I suppose they could free them from rocks...
The result here would be only more profit for some players, it's not going to help with world hunger. It's not going to take prices down (potatoes/rice price is not a blocker, but margin is nice). But it certainly will have a systemic cost that we will all share for a gain we will not.
Problems we do have but that they are making worst:
- poorer and poorer soils;
- big companies making it hard for small player to even exist;
- weak nutritional content of our food;
- food chain dependency on a few players;
That's not going to happen. People that desperately need the food don't have a problem of not growing enough rice or potatoes because of the nature of the crop. It's not why they are hungry. It's any other reason, politics, weather, logistics, economics, you name it.
The only things this will do is allow some company to patent this, and then sell it under restricted conditions that will be unfavorable to those who are hungry.
Yield increase is not really a winner if you have no water, if you are at war, if you don't have money/land, or if corporations own your society.
We reached a state in humanity development where any improvement in agricultural yield for basic food is not only unnecessary, but will lead to more problems than solution.
For one thing, it greatly changes the calculus of a Mars mission. A long–term Mars mission needs food, and growing that food on Mars seems like an obvious choice at first glance. But reliably growing food on Mars requires some fairly sophisticated technology: LED lighting, fine automatic control of atmospheric gasses (otherwise the O₂ from the plants would rapidly become a huge fire risk), similar for the water, refrigeration, and an extra large power plant to run it all. Up until now it looked like it would be cheaper to make regular shipments of food and water from Earth to Mars than it would be to make regular shipments of spare parts to keep all of that machinery working. A 50% increase in calories per square foot means that you only need 67% as much machinery, and therefore only 67% as many spare parts.
Even if this created no other benefits, which I find hard to believe, it would be worth it just for a successful Mars mission.
Although I'm skeptical for mars, bigger plants will deplete their substrate very fast, it could be a limiter.
Very much true. We eliminate the global hunger if we can eliminate food wastage in US supermarkets alone.
US supermarkets literally throw away enough food to feed all of famine struck countries, and probably even twice.
> We reached a state in humanity development where any improvement in agricultural yield for basic food is not only unnecessary, but will lead to more problems than solution.
I push for an idea of unification of the world under a single global democratic government.
The solution to the global problems, must be global.
This means trade barriers, tech-transfer, and not bombing the shit out of places.
We are already overproducing food, that doesn't prevent us to try to produce more.
Where I'm from (New Zealand) there are various schemes in place to encourage farmers to retire low productivity land and fence/plant buffer zones around waterways.
The market, at this point, has produced concentration of power and hasn't sold distribution problem.
Creating something that can produce even more is not gonna help.
With food: "oh, this apple has scratch marks from insects, throw it in the bin" — this is just one of them. "Best before" dates in the past results in lot of untasted food go to waste too. Etc.
Today we have the most nutritious foods in history. Don't make things up.
Today's potatoes are 4-6 times bigger than 19th century ones. Tomatoes 3-5 times. Most fruits, got just enormous.
Even "watery" leafy greens are actually getting more meatier, and starchy, and with more folates as everybody seem to be crazy about them.
But could we then grow crops in concentrated places without need for deforestation?
We may let some of the fields lay fallow for a couple of years, and alternate?
Could we transport less because local farms produce more, bringing in carbon and cost savings?
For the most part farmers only add 3 macro nutrients when they fertilize: N,P,K. As you suggest there are many micro nutrients that are likely being depleted because they're not being replaced.
Whole Foods is stocked full of these nice-on-the-outside fruits and veggies, e.g., Driscoll's large, deep-red strawberries that lack any and all flavour and whose cross-section is mostly white, tasteless flesh.
I'm being serious.
We don't absorb all of the nutrients and calories that we consume, partly because we are overnourished (our bodies might spontaneously combust if we utilized every single calorie we ate), so there's plenty of leftovers in our feces. Does it ever get recycled for use in agriculture in "developed" nations? (I can't think of a word for that which isn't now a faux pas)
Such "Organic Farming" been taking lives of millions from communicable diseases every year in South Asia in China until the advent of synthetic fertilisers.
> Biosolids are solid organic matter recovered from a sewage treatment process and used as fertilizer. [...] In the United States, as of 2013 about 55% of sewage solids are turned into fertilizer.
We're very far away from the wild versions of crops at this point. Evolutionary arguments here seem pretty odd to me, most of these crops have had huge selective pressure towards whatever people value, not necessarily what is good for them in isolation, without the pressure from people most crop yields would drop dramatically. They are much higher than what is optimal without selective pressure from people.
Sadly I don't think anyone cares about that. You can encourage the use of organic fertilizers all you want and they will still dump unsustainable mined phosphates on the fields
I remember when honeycrisps first came on the market, they were smaller, now they are gigantic, I don't know if they taste more diluted. I also remember green plumcots, they used to be smaller, more tart and sweet. Now they are huge!
My real shocker was onion. I mean, man I could just eat the red onion without a drop of tear in my eyes. Try doing this in India.
So those in US, if at all you ever feel like eating real vegetables hop on a 15 hour flight to Delhi or Bangalore :)
There is absolutely nowhere else in the U.S. where you can go just about anywhere and get fresh, cheap, properly flavorful produce. Even several capitol cities of MidWest states don't have a real competitor to what's widely available and affordable in Cali.
Or check out your local farmers marker or CSA
That’s actually to a large degree a soil thing. In US, there are some places where the soil is naturally very low in sulfur, and these places see a lot of onion cultivation, as the resulting produce is much less burning than onion grown elsewhere.
I think in the future, a lot of this produce will be grown at home in hydroponics devices. However, the bigger question there is figuring out the color of LED light to still produce a pleasing tomato.
I don't have that issue with apples or bananas however. Both in the north east and south east, I've always had solid apples and bananas, with quality varying by store (I love Aldi, but their produce is lacking in my experience). Generally speaking, if the fruit or vegetable is too big, it's probably bad in my experience.
On honeycrisps - I hate how large they are. They're good apples most of the time, but way too big for me to want to eat all of in one sitting. I much prefer a small firm apple.
If you grow your own tasty 'heirloom' strawberries, now you can grow 50% more. That's a good thing.
I skimmed the article, maybe I missed it.
Aside: How easy is it to break into computational biology as a, say, practitioner of computational mechanics?
My concern is how many generations of crops can one have in such a field before it needs artificial replenishing in the ways we do not do today (see my longer comment elsewhere on the thread :)).
From my limited experience (this could def not generalize) the two fields are very different in industry. Comp mech tends to be very design or analysis oriented and hence project management heavy. Generally you already have a product and are trying to refine it in some way. There’s also usually commercially available tools to do advanced FEA. For the most part people aren’t writing their own programs anymore.
Whereas comp bio tends to be more like data science applied to bio so it’s more of a software offshoot where projects feel more like full product development cycles where in some cases people produce software along with a final product. So you also need great coding skills.
Finally most comp bio people have phds. I don’t know if it’s a requirement for a job but that’s what I have seen. This may be a barrier.
To jump straight in could be very hard. Tho there may be other paths for example bioinformatics to learn domain and software then jump into comp bio once you have a base.
There’s also the going back to school option to pick up domain knowledge + credential but I’m generally against it just because of opportunity cost.
Anyway take all this with a grain of salt cause my experience/ what I’ve seen may be way off.
Finally def check out some free comp bio classes. I think Stanford and Berkeley have freely available online materials.
Could be interesting to look at the interface between quantum and classical chemistry… …And look at the interface between molecular dynamics and continuum FEM.
There are niches you can get into that are more computer/IT focused where you can start. Things like HPC management, software coding/upkeep for existing tools.
These jobs would like pay a lot less than corporate gig. To get into a true analyst role you'd need a few years of biology training. To start asking your own questions professionally you'd need several years of biology training.
Nothing stopping you from starting it as a hobby though!
Its not reasonable to dismiss this because 'we just have to distribute food better'. That's not been solved, with decades of trying. But eating local can be a bigger part of a real solution. And this discovery makes that 50% more effective, which is huge.
https://news.uchicago.edu/story/rna-breakthrough-crops-grow-...
And the actual article.
Speaking from the old school where fossil fuel, aquifer, and soil depletion are certain to kick in at scale within this century.
I'm a recovering doom porn addict but I do still like to watch others indulge.
Surely some ultra hot-rodded perennial strain would eventually catch up with the old commercial variety? But when both are getting more productive, how could the perennial one ever catch up?
Also, just as we must demand we should reduce working hours with labor productivity improvements, we should also demand that we reduce farmland with crop productivity improvements. The market can never do this on it's own, it must be externally imposed.
On the other hand, it hasn't, so far. It does exist in nature, and still doesn't pop up anywhere.
Plants also haven't evolved this functionality on their own. There are evolutionary drawbacks to uncontrolled growth, and most plants have their growth "tuned" well below what would be theoretically possible given their light and nutrient conditions.
I think a more likely question is what about nutrient density? Making more carbs, in a sense, is easy. Sunlight + CO2 == carbs. Nutrients are more stringently limited by the mineral properties of the soil. This just shoves into our food more calories we don't need diluting the nutrients we do.
Unless their plan is to make cheap, tasteless, vodka and sake
Yes, people are better off being fed rather than not in countries where food is scarce. Better yielding crops are great for this.
Should "developed" nations end up relying on rapidly growing crops that are selected for macronutrients (or perhaps just calories) at the expense of micronutrients? In my uncommon opinion, the answer is a likely no given that we generally eat way more than is necessary and at the expense of our long term health.
The only way I can see it being beneficial in places like the United States is if it allowed individuals to grow their own food faster, cheaper, and more easily. But then we will likely implement regulations to discourage people from growing their own food. But that's pure speculation.
It's been 6 years since the CRISPR breakthroughs , how are we doing on that front?
Same thing we saw with PPE at the beginning of COVID. Capitalist price optimization drove outsourced manufacturing which works great... Until it doesn't. Incentivizing against monoculture has to be explicit.
Monocultural has also been a problem many times in the past, so calling it a "chicken little" objection is disingenuous.
It has in most cases been far more reliable, resilient, nutritious, environmentally benign, and just to produce and consume food locally, rather than burning fuel to ship it around the world while it's still edible. We put up with lots of externalities from agriculture, because it's important that humans have food to eat. We can't dismiss completely benign ag tech out of hand, for essentially religious reasons. I make no particular claim for these particular crop varieties, but your objections are ridiculous.
You're simply wrong about this, and it's not "disingenuous" to say so.
Would this be cannibalism?
You could use RNA demethylases from other organisms for sure, but it's a really interesting and weird concept, whether people would consider eating a plant expressing human proteins to be taboo.
https://www.saps.org.uk/saps-associates/browse-q-and-a/473-h...
The deeper roots could also benefit the soil. Wild plants tend to have deeper roots, and this brings greater biological activity in the depths of the soil - so more of the soil is 'alive'.
These deep-rooted plants are hardier, so less pesticides will be needed, which also benefits the soil. And on the same note they will need less chemical fertilizer because they can access more nutrients from the depths. Again, good for the soil.
On the other hand, if these crops are farmed overly intensely, they will just end up depleting the soil to a greater physical dept, so we'll be back at the same problem, but deeper. But in the meantime, at least we'll have crops that are accessing more soil volume.
"RNA breakthrough revolutionises the porn industry"
I'm intrigued.
Has this been determined?
[0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S138357421...
It is clear beyond doubt that the real difficulty we're facing with food production is to sensibly set the limits of supply, so that excesses are avoided and to organise distribution so that everyone has as much as they need. Larger vegetables are not really a problem in the real world.
As to resistance to drought, while we're already in the shit for good with the amount of warming expected in the next decades, the root of the problem is not that our vegetables can't handle drought, it's that we have continue to fuck the environment and destabilise the ability of the planet to feed us. Solve this problem and stop faffing about with irrelevant bullshit.