Technology enables crops to take nitrogen from the air
nottingham.ac.uk
nottingham.ac.uk
Others have commented about the 'strong evolutionary advantage' this will convey crop species. I think that unlikely: a large number of species in the Fabaceae family (legumes) have the ability to form symbioses with nitrogen-fixing bacteria, and this simply allows them to exist on nutrient poor soil. But because it's a symbiosis, i.e. the plant trades some of the sugar it produces for the nitrate fixed by the bacteria, it's not a cost-free situation. Legumes don't dominate many habitats, but they do OK in very nutrient poor soils.
Modern crops don't perform well outside intensively nurtured field conditions. N-fixed crops will require less intensive nitrogen supplementation than before, but they will still perform poorly when competing against wild plants.
If the commercialisation involves extracting money from people who will gladly pay it to get better crop yields or lower fertiliser costs - like industrialised farmers in the first world - then it seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to do.
What would be a real shame is if the prices were set so that people in the third world could not use this advance to keep themselves and each other from falling into food poverty. However, food shortage is rarely about production capacity, and more often about allocation. Amartya Sen's work and all that.
Your second and third points are very good ones; it all depends on the implementation. I join you in hoping for a licensing strategy that maximises the social benefit of the technology.
It is a shame about the for-profit commercialization, but I think it's worth remembering that such things do sometimes result in faster implementation because the people working on it have more skin in the game. But either way, it will be public domain in 17 years worst case. I don't think that amount of time will make or break agriculture, and if you need 100% less fertilizer it's a pretty easy economic case.
Patents are good. Patent abuse is not. They need to be better regulated.
There is more to fertilizer than just Nitrogen compounds so you would still need a fertilizer, it just wouldn't need to be as nitrogen rich. And the farmers will continue to over fertilize.
The smart corporate farmers don't over fertilize, it costs real money. Research the technology that they use, satellites, GPS and automated tractors/spray rigs that adjust in real time for specific soil needs.
I think your analogy is flawed.
It never ceases to amaze me how so many above-average intelligent people are moving quickly yet don't seem to wonder about where they are actually going. I guess they're just not as lazy as I am. Me personally, I'd rather have enough idle land and unpolluted water for free range beef and wild fish, but I guess some people set their sights quite a bit lower.
But who says I disagree? Suggesting that improving agricultural efficiency is useless because of population growth is just a logical fallacy, a version of a Straw Man. You're suggesting that I don't think we need to reduce population, when what I'm actually saying is that this is independently a big deal. I believe they call this particular version of the Straw Man an "Appeal to Worse Problems".
And since nearly every post I see on here is about efficiency, and not sustainability, I'm compelled to offer another view point.
But yes, point taken that work to decrease population in a humane way is very important and underrated by technology driven people.
I generally agree with your comment, but I'd maybe say that "they can thrive in nitrogen-deficient soils". There are still other variables that affect the growth of nitrogen-fixers especially: soil pH; the quantity of other macro (and micro) nutrients like phosphorus, potassium, calcium, etc; and availability of water and sunlight.
Soybeans are a major crop that can fix nitrogen, but they may still need supplemental applications of phosphate, and the crop will die if not irrigated during a drought.
In other words: this is not a silver bullet that will magically make the problems of the world's crop-growers disappear overnight.
It might be hard to patent though. As far as I understood it you just need to infect the plants with the bacteria, and once the bacteria are out in the open, it will be hard to stop others from using them with or without intent...
And if you think there's a way to improve the efficiency of nitrogenase, that would be really welcome, since nature seems to have evolved it only once.
Upshot, without some serious plant engineering, at the very least using aggressive husbandry techniques, it's likely this tech will hit a hard ceiling in terms of usefulness.
"The day came for the tropical trial at the field station in Northern Queensland. A culture of P. eegarii was without ceremony sprayed in diluted form upon a small patch of experimental rice paddy. But here the bacterium forsook its contrived marriage with the cereal plants {40} and formed a more exciting but adulterous union with a tough and self-sufficient blue-green alga growing on the water surface of the paddy field. They grew happily together, doubling in numbers every twenty minutes in the warm tropical environment, the air and soil providing all they needed. Small predatory organisms would normally have ensured a check on such a development, but this combination was not to be stopped. Its capacity to gather phosphorus rendered the environment barren for everything else.
Within hours, the rice paddy and those around it took on the appearance of a ripe duck pond covered with lurid iridescent green scum. It was realized that something had gone badly wrong and the scientists soon uncovered the association of P. eegarii and the alga. Foreseeing the dangers with rare promptness, they arranged that the entire paddy area and the water channels leading from it be treated with a biocide and the growth destroyed.
That night, Dr Eeger and his Australian colleagues went late to bed, tired and worried. The dawn fulfilled their worst fears. The new bloom, like some living verdigris, covered the surface of a small stream a mile away from the paddies and only a few miles from the sea. Again, every agent of destruction was applied wherever the new organism might have travelled. The director of the Queensland station tried desperately but in vain to persuade the government to evacuate the area at once and use a hydrogen bomb to sterilize it before the spread was beyond all possibility of control.
In two days the algal bloom had started to spread into the coastal waters, and by then it was too late. Within a week the green stain was clearly visible to airline passengers flying six miles above the Gulf of Carpentaria. Within six months more than half of the ocean and most of the land surfaces were covered with a thick green slime which fed voraciously on the dead trees and animal life decaying beneath it."
EDIT: Added full title of the book.
Secondly, Lovelock made that story up: there is no Dr Eeger nor a P. eegarii. It's a fantastical situation unmatched by anything ever recorded in nature (except cancer, which is exactly what it was supposed to be a metaphor for).
Thirdly, the technology is being extensively tested, and will be more so before it gets regulatory approval.
To add to that: cancer works by tricking the body into continously feeding it. It's not an appropriate analogy to what these bacteria add to the process.
Now pick a species thats "new" like humans, and give us something weird like direct atmospheric nitrogen fixing for our proteins, or photosynthesis, now that could have some interesting consequences. Or instead of us, horses, or mules, or domestic dogs or something.
Surface area to volume ratio of humans and other animals is way too small to allow anything interesting to come of us photosynthesising (e.g. see [1] for crude calculations). Although a healthy green glow would be nice.
[1] - http://hplusbiopolitics.wordpress.com/2008/08/12/photosynthe...
1) The assumptions from the article I read long ago were you'd ideally have a topical UV sunscreen that magically gradually "infected" the skin, which wipes out both the UV problem and the application problem, and it would be cheap enough to distribute to war refugees, starving famine farmers, hurricane areas, that kind of thing. Temporary emergency rather than lifetime green glow. So depending on your math, laying around in the sun would only generate a couple apples worth of energy for a person. Not impressive for a hungry dude in Wisconsin in 2013, but a handful of apples is actually a pretty good day for someone in (insert every war torn drought famine area throughout the ages)
2) The article I read a long time ago was of a vintage where the jokes would revolve around Federation Starship Captain Kirk's paradise would be nude beach of skinny green skinned Orion women rather than Bruce Banner jokes.
3) There would be interesting sociological issues where if this was solely applied to poor people, their verdant green skin would be a nearly 100% effective way to discriminate for socioeconomic class based on skin color.
If its really sweet like honey, bees will go crazy. If its not sweet enough to attract bugs, there will be a lot of water drinking going on to the point of ridiculousness (like trying to gain weight drinking diet cola). If there's enough sugar to taste, yeasts will eat it resulting in lots of alcohol, and unfortunately yeasts are ridiculously tough.
But in the billions of years past, if such a feedback loop existed, it would have been exploited already. Perhaps the Great Oxygenation Event was one such loop being exploited.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxygenation_Event
Would the release of the first hydrogen bomb trigger a mass fusion through the entire atmosphere and hydrosphere? You could calculate the physics, as you should, but you could also notice that this requires a positive feedback loop, so it's extremely unlikely.
The examples could continue.
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/daylightatheism/2009/02/bands-o...
Let's hope we'll figure out something useful to do with all this excess carbon we've released into the atmosphere in a slightly shorter time period.
The one thing that worries me, is years back Dubbya said something like "I'm not worried about global warming, those scientists will invent something". I laughed at the feeble excuse to avoid Kyoto - but now ... Bush may have been right.
[EDITED to add: or (3) how, even if it turns out that this does solve the problem of global warming, it would have justified Bush in blowing off warnings about that problem. Saying "I am not worried about X, because scientists will solve it somehow" is generally not a sensible thing to say if X is a big problem and no concrete solution is in sight, and it doesn't become sensible even if it turns out that scientists do solve it in the end.]
I saw the attitude had two parts - "We will soon invent a technical solution" and "so, we don't need to alter our behaviour"
The first part seems to be true -surprisingly.
The second part, might also be true. That worries me. If the whole planet altered its behaviour slightly to become vegan, most energy, water and agricultural crises will vanish. Instead we invent lab-grown beef.
Economics seems to be the science of individual behaviour and crowd behaviour. Every long lived and successful person or company seems to recognise moderating ones own behaviour leads to more sensible restrained wants and needs. Franklin might be a good example.
I guess I am saying I worry that technology is enabling in the co-dependence sense of the word, humanities worst excesses - and that it is feasible for politicians to support that.
http://paleohacks.com/questions/56542/humans-werent-designed...
I'm not sure it's even possible to have a reasonable discussion about it because it seems tied up with the question of whether veganism is righteous or idiotic.
I am guessing the same applies to societies and to species.
Maybe I am wrong and at scale different rules apply. Maybe I am being prudish.
I am certainly not arguing that its ok for the luxury of some of the world to be bought at the expense of the rest.
Reminds me of people who still seem disappointed that Reagan didn't start a nuclear war like they kept claiming he would.
At the moment inorganic nitrogenous fertilizers are cheap. They are derived from the methane in natural gas by the Haber-Bosch process, so the price of fertilizers is tied to natural gas supply. Estimates vary, but we probably only have about 60 years of natural gas supply left when you factor in the increasing use and near-peak production (according to the 2013 International Energy Outlook [1]). And the extraction methods are becoming more environmentally challenging: fracking and shale gas are the natural gas sources of the future. The food-price effects of that will be felt as soon as we pass peak gas production. So we need a new way of fixing nitrogen in the near future.
Secondly, while much famine is caused by war, there are many other causes, and hunger is more widespread than famine. Increasing world population, especially in poorer areas, and a complete failure to make any progress so far in fixing the inequality-related causes of hunger mean technological crop solutions are likely to be important in feeding the future population.
So now we have an invention that will deplete one resource instead of another. Awesome, go science!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Revolution
Go science!
"Traditional" nitrogen fixing bacteria make their way to specialized nodules. Basically this is because the nitrogenase enzyme is incredibly oxygen-sensitive, and it's quite difficult to shield the interior of the enzyme selectively against oxygen (oxygen and nitrogen look awfully alike from a physical perspective). Inside a nodule, the plant maintains an anaerobic condition that protects the bacteria from oxygen, which for some reason plants like to produce. Not surprisingly, these nodules tend to be in the roots (which, from a naive design point of view would not necessarily be where you would think of grabbing nitrogen from). Added efficiency is critical, because nitrogenase is already a VERY inefficient enzyme. 16!! ATP + N2 -> 2ammonia + hydrogen! There are often enzymes in these bacteria whose purpose is to recycle the wasted energy from the hydrogen produced from nitrogenase.
Upshot, without some serious plant engineering, at the very least using aggressive husbandry techniques, it's likely this tech will hit a hard ceiling in terms of usefulness.
This problem is already solved in C4 plants, which account for many crops (sugarcane, maize, sorghum, barley, etc.). C4 photosynthesis creates an anoxic environment in bundle sheath cells to stop RuBisCO wastefully fixing oxygen instead of CO2. So nitrogenase, suffering as it does from the same oxygen discrimination problem as RuBisCO, will operate efficiently in BS cells. C4 is being introduced to more crops, and that's what I'm working on. So, two birds with the same fistful of stones.
Its a natural ecological cycle like many others with oscillations and such. Given a couple decades, a soil saturated with nitrogen would probably result in the non-fixers wiping out the fixers.
The more flippant answer is it can't be any worse than Kudzu. Kudzu is an edible (edible by goat standards) nitro-fixer that is eating the south. I would guess that issuing a human edible competitor to Kudzu would be a net win? Cover the American North with kudzu-like layer of super-wheat wouldn't be so bad...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soybean#Nitrogen-fixing_ability