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Comment by nightfly | Hacker News Reader

Plants also are able to make more of themselves from dirt out of pennies worth of matterial

Mostly they make themselves out of air, which is even better.

The dirt has necessary trace elements, but the carbon? That's all from CO2.

Oh man you've never cared for trees/plants have you. Some of em (most often the ones you "want") are total crybabies over those "trace elements".

You can't have DNA without phosphorus, for example, and many plants can't make nitrogen from air. Don't get me started on magnesium (needed for chlorophyll)

https://nutrients.ifas.ufl.edu/nutrient_pages/bsfpages/Essen...

    element     %, dry wt.
    oxygen      45
    carbon      44
    hydrogen    6.3
    nitrogen    1.3
    silicon     1.2
    potassium   0.9
    calcium     0.25
    phosphorus  0.16
    magnesium   0.16
    sulfur      0.15
    chlorine    0.15
    aluminum    0.11
    sodium      0.03
    iron        0.009
    manganese   0.006
    zinc        0.003
    boron       0.001
    copper      0.0005
    molybdenum  0.0001

Just CHON is 96.6% of plant mass. Adding silicon, potassium and calcium brings it up to 98.95%

Corn tissue...with a very instructive caveat emptor:

> Be aware that elemental concentrations in plant tissue can vary widely for a given crop depending on the stage of growth and environmental conditions and for different crops, yet plants can still appear normal and healthy. For some elements the range of sufficiency is wide and for others the range is narrow. A good deal of caution needs to be exercised in diagnosing mineral deficiencies based only on plant tissue analysis.

Appreciate the cite though.

That quote is talking about the way nutrients move around a plant I think, and how that introduces measurement issues depending on where and when you sample. Whereas I think this comment thread is just talking about overall composition. As in when the nutrients move from the stem to the head of a crop, if you sample the stem you would see a nutrient deficit, but actually the nutrients are still there, in the head.

That's important for farming, not that important when discussing the makeup of plants overall.

Useful sampling for crops is usually done post harvest, since that's the output and what we actually care about. Even after harvest, crops will change depending on the conditions endured during processing and shipment.

That could explain why the vegetables in Monsanto lands like America look and feel normal but have no flavor

No idea what gives an arbitrary vegetable "flavor" relative to another in the same genus. Given how much of the industry is trial-and-error breeding to objectively target certain characteristics, it's unclear that practicing experts do either.

What's your point? If I only allow you to eat C, H, O, N and their compounds, will you survive?

His point is that most of the mass comes from the air.

The ocean is 96.5% H2O, but man, I had a hard time drinking it for some reason.

Fascinating - that's lower than I would have guessed. It seems ocean water is 2.5% salts, which, yeah, is pretty damned salty compared to anything I cook...

I want to suggest re-reading their comment. “mostly they make themselves from air” and “dirt has necessary trace elements” are both 100% factually correct. The word “necessary” covers what you are saying in your comment. There’s no need to suggest they haven’t raised plants when what they said is literally correct.

I understand what you mean but the vast majority of their structure is carbon based and that comes from gaseous CO2. Can’t survive without the dirt but can’t get big without CO2

The boffins are working on self fertilizing crops now:

https://e360.yale.edu/features/indigenous-maize-who-owns-the...

It is wild that this is a thing.

It’s been a thing for hundreds of years. That’s why agriculture traditionally rotated crops and planted beans every 3rd season or so. I’m not sure what if anything is deferent about this species of corn, except perhaps that it is itself a desirable crop with more market value.

We stopped doing this and moved to artificial fertilizers in the 20th century because it vastly improved crop yields, and is cheaper.

> I’m not sure what if anything is deferent about this species of corn

This species of corn has weird roots halfway up which drip goop down on the ground. The goop contains nitrogen fixing bacteria from the soil which pull nitrogen out of the air to fertilize the soil.

It is massively different from what you say. It would vastly reduce farm runoff while increasing yields. All facts contained within the article.

I’m not sure you understand my post. Beans have the exact same nitrogen fixing bacteria in their roots too.

Beans still require extra fertilizer. This corn species does not.

Also it is corn, and not beans...? Beans is used in crop rotation in service of corn harvests. What if all of a sudden you don't have to rotate crops?

This is a big deal. Don't pooh-pooh it.

Beans have been used for thousands of years without fertilizer. They restore the nutrients in the ground by exactly the same process as this maize, because it is the exact same nitrogen-fixing bacteria at work.

I'm pooh-pooh'ing the idea because this isn't any more practical than rotating beans to restore a field was. These microbes don't fix nitrogen anywhere fast enough to supply acceptable yields. You end up with fields giving out 3-4x less end product with this strategy vs. using artificial fertilizer. You're not going to feed the worlds population with replenishing crops.

I defer to you, internet expert.

that's strictly nitrogen, which comes from the atmosphere. There are many plants that host nitrogen-fixing bacteria. Corn is not one of them. You cannot make other elements out of whole cloth unless they discover how to do transmutation in vivo. Not saying it's impossible, but we are far from there yet.

some say crop some say pest tomato tomato... really got that winter adapted hogs vibe that are causing havoc between Canada and the US

In the same vein, most of our energy comes from oxygen, not the food we eat :-)

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6379287/

Yikes sounds like decomposition.

Indeed, chemical engines, naturally aspirated. :-)

And self-repair. And self propagate. They are definitely not optimized solely for making energy.

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