While I see people worry about the nutrient content in the resulting food, I wonder more about the nutrient content of the soil after a few years of such products. While we fertilize the soil, the mention of "longer and deeper roots" means that such plants will take out more from the ground, making ground less usable for future 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).
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).
Deeper roots tend to make for healthier soil. This is why dandelions are such a boon for someone with poor soil. Their deep roots break up poorly aerated soil allowing aerobic bacteria to produce nutrients for plants.
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.
>Modern farmers are keenly aware of soil quality and spend a lot of time and money to keep their farms running at top efficiency.
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.
This is an unfortunate consequence of a long chain of economic transformation. My family was all farmers, a nearly unbroken chain reaching back at least 300 years into western Germany. My father went into the business world, but hated it and tried to return to farming in the mid 1980s, at which point economies of scale had already transformed the market so that the 200 acres of corn and soybeans the family had raised for generations no longer could support his full income. He borrowed money, bought another farm, couldn't even afford the equipment to harvest my grandparents' farm, had to contract out to the burgeoning Wagners who were farming thousands of acres. In the end, he had to give up the idea of farming and became basically a day trader by the mid 1990s. He was nostalgic about the old farm and it was tragic that his entire world was upended by enormous macroeconomic forces that pushed him into dry tech-driven commodity futures trading, about the exact opposite of what was bred into his genes.
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.
>> Its purely anecdotal, but the vast majority of farmers I had the opportunity were not good farmers
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
> I find your identification of 96-97% of farmers as short-term profiteers rude and borderline offensive.
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.
I provided actual numbers of conservation tillage adoption that are highly correlated. I don't know what else to provide you besides actual data to correct the bias in your understanding.
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.
> 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.
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.
Don't have you tell you this, and not disagreeing with you.. but ... Farming is mining. It's extractive. 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. I concur most farmers don't give a crap. But even the ones who do, it just slows it down, doesn't stop 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.
As does the nitrogen, this is basic biology. Post is tosh. We’ve been farming in Europe for 10,000 years and still going strong. Soil regeneration is not rocket science.
Pretty much all organic carbon in the soil ultimately comes from the air.
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.
The premise is not flawed. I don't disagree it's possible to build topsoil and add carbon and use nitrogen fixers and cover crops to accumulate soil organic matter and nutrition. It's just not possible to do that and grow an annual crop of any sufficient size.
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.
Please try to be more specific and accurate, as you're essentially making sweeping generalizations, while moving goalposts. It's hard to know what is hyperbole, and what do you actually mean and believe. One cannot finitely argue against a changing topic.
> 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.
Abundant renewable energy, driven by decreases in costs of solar, wind and energy storage could be used with no other inputs but energy* via the Haber process + electrolysis.
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?
They do both. Usually though, soil organic matter which contains the most SOC ensures food for bacteria and fungi which make healthy soil. Plants, much like humans, require microbiota to survive and stay healthy. You are not just feeding plants, but also the bacteria and fungi that prevent disease and help produce nutrients.
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.
That's what we get from the "grow as fast as possible today" mentality. People aren't thinking about how to maximize economic output. That is probably the biggest failing of capitalism. People think maximum growth is the same thing as maximum output.
Recently read the book "Running Out" about aquifers in western Kansas. Takeaway was that the overwhelming majority of farmers were explicitly targeting emptying the aquifer within their lifetimes.
While the statement implying that modern farmers are good Shepard's of soil quality is... debatable at best and I'd argue mostly false it is certainly true that, as a rule, deeper / larger root structures benefit soil rather than diminishing. Especially within the same family of crops deeper roots will always result in a healthier soil than shallow.
I don't remember saying they are good shepherds. Just keenly aware. The usual solution is to dump many tons of petrochemical based fertilizers and amendments into their soil which washes off into local waterways.
> Why assume that more output doesn't come with more input? It doesn't seem presumable to me one way or the other.
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.
This is not how plants work. The increased biomass comes from carbon in the air.
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.
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.
That article is ... confused. Donald Davis, the main source for most of the article, suggests that a lack of selection towards nutritious crops as the cause of lower nutrition, while the article itself claims that the cause is poorer soil quality. Noticeably, neither of these points support the argument that engineered crops are any worse for the soil than past crops.
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.
Conjecture with me for a moment, friend: if given fruit X yields 100% nutrient fruits, is then selected for volume, and in the increase of size, the proportion of nutrients declines it follows, to me, that the increased volume is creating a diluting effect. To me it seems as if any increase of proportion in volume had ought to scale right alongside the proportion of nutrient values, unless that compromises the organism. This is the framework I'll be working from.
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.
Plants are ~70-90% water, and of the dry mass, 70-95% is carbon, the structure of the plant which is extracted from the air (splitting the C from the O2).... the remaining nutrients are from the soil + dissolved in rain water, although plants do absorb a limited amount of nutrients through their leaves via dust etc.
I'm sorry what!? This is how everything works. If you force something to use more ingredients/nutrients/whatever at a faster pace, you will deplete something else in the ecosystem faster than previously.
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.
What matters is the ratio of soil depletion to food production. If the plants produce 50% more food, you don't need to plant as many of them. This might end up actually reducing the environmental footprint.
In practice, this is not how it would work out - the farming entity is incentivized to produce the maximum profit - if you can make 50% more food and sell it for the same price, you will just make 50% more food. Even if you can make 50% more food and sell it for 80% of the price per unit you will still do that because it means more profit.
You missed something important: demand is not elastic like that ( to some extent people will switch from beans to meat, but eventually you have enough to eat and won't buy more at any price). Thus as farming gets more productive someplace needs to stop growing food. We can allow a bit to go to waste, but eventually someone is going to realize that the price they can get for their crop isn't worth the cost for putting it in the ground and stop farming. Not sell out to a different farmer because no other farmer will invest in that land.
The above happens all the time. It doesn't happen on the most productive land, it happens on the marginal land.
The last such report I saw pinned lower micronutrient density not on the quality of soils, but on higher atmospheric CO2 concentrations, leading to quicker growth of the plants. Plants in lower concentrations grew more slowly but had relatively more micronutrients for the same mass.
This is like asking if the vitamins that you give to a chicken as a chick will poison you when you eat it as adult, I am not talking of hormones or growth agents, just literal common vitamins
You don't eat "the vitamins" you eat the chicken, you don't eat the fertilizer, you eat the plant
Life can create, modify, and break chemical bonds, but can't create, modify, or destroy elements. Vitamins can get metabolized into other compounds but mercury stays mercury.
The initial varieties into which the researchers introduced the FTO gene do not appear to be modern high-performance crops though. They didn't have yields that were already optimized by breeding, so they were easier to get impressive performance gains from. What FTO can achieve in the performance-optimized varieties that farmers grow today remains to be seen in further experiments.
>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).
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.
> 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).
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.
Not to mention we don't need it. We don't have a problem with producing food, but with distributing it.
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;
If this process is simple to scale then we absolutely do need it. There is little chance of us fixing our food waste problem and increasing the efficiency of foreign aid in a timely manner. If more and larger crops could be grown on even more marginal land closer to where people desperately need the food then it is a solution we should use. I'm assuming that we'd aim for making these modified plants easily available to any farmer that wishes to grow them.
> If more and larger crops could be grown on even more marginal land closer to where people desperately need the food then it is a solution we should use.
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.
I agree that patents on this are likely to stifle most of the advantages, but not that this would create more problems than solutions.
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.
> 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.
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.
Foreign aid isn't the problem. It's the problem of the market pushing out local production and making countries entirely dependent on imports from hypercapitalist countries. What countries need is industrial and technical support to be more self-sufficient with aid filling the gap rather than replacing their entire economy.
This means trade barriers, tech-transfer, and not bombing the shit out of places.
“The plants are bigger” isn’t evidence either pro or con, nutrition is about what’s in the plants rather than their raw mass — they might be more nutritious, or less, or even both at the same time because the balance of proteins, sugars, fats, vitamins, and minerals shifted.
There has to be demand for that produce. The market ultimately decideds how much food we need to grow.
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.
Humans are pretty good at creating excessive demand (it's what lots of marketing is about).
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.
The thing is, the nutrient content of the resulting food plays close to zero role in the creation and marketing of food. Consumers, broadly, shop on looks, and even the health-conscious consumers who eat raw, whole, organic foods might be eating nice-looking, nutrient-sparse water, and won't know anything's amiss. Health problems experienced due to this issue are unlikely to be identified as dietary issues by such consumers.
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.
> 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).
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.
Agree. It's a complex topic, I think we should move away from "nature knows best" type of arguments. I would add, these selective pressures are not just from mankind, but potentialy from any other living thing. The "natural state" is more random than natural.
Yet monocultures of plants are still able to deplete soil. With the sharp reduction coming in fossil fuels (which help make fertilizer), we may be seeing the end of crops that can only grow on life support in the next few decades.
It makes me wonder if we aren't using human waste properly.
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)
> 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.
IT very much is. Just be careful, it is also full of harmful bacteria that you shouldn't eat. It is very useful fertilizer but needs to be properly cared for or you could poison whole cities.
> It makes me wonder if we aren't using human waste properly.
I'm being serious.
Such "Organic Farming" been taking lives of millions from communicable diseases every year in South Asia in China until the advent of synthetic fertilisers.
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
Generally, the longest term productive areas continually replenish the soil with nutrients due to upstream/uphill prior volcanic activity. So, for example, the Willamette Valley will probably be fertile longer than the center of the US.
If the concern is minerals, aren't there rocks in the soil that as they get broken down over time will release minerals?
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.
In nature biomass ends up in roughly the same places so this balances out, with crops farmers are removing significant biomass from farmland. The use of fertilizer is in part a consequence of specific plants depleting soil.
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.
> As for non-mineral things like nitrogen, isn't the soil supposed to have an ecosystem that replenishes these things?
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 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.
Farmers are starting to put in Sulfur. It isn't common, and not a lot is needed, but some farmers need to. As acid rain goes goes down more and more will. (I'm always amused to see there is a downside of eliminating acid rain - still worth doing)
>I wonder more about the nutrient content of the soil after a few years of such products.
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
well, if we're growing more consumable biomass per acre or whatever, we can do something else with land we would have otherwise dedicated to producing the same amount of potatoes.
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.
Or a glass half full way to look at this is 50% more yield means less land area needed to produce the same amount of food. Typically also longer roots improve soil quality. There are always tradeoffs, but this looks amazingly positive.
There are many crops that have been modified over time to be unsustainable without human intervention. Most grains, tomato cages, etc. as long as we know what the new needs are we can supplement and adjust.
No cultivated species is the result of natural selection, they have been selected for centuries, sometimes millennia, by humans for the things we value.
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)
Perhaps there's a net good application to this, more yield so a plant can produce more, feed more hungry people, survive storage and shipping -- but I see 4lbs packs of Driscoll strawberries at my store, year round. The fruits are gigantic, way bigger than what a strawberry should be, firm, uniformly red, and absolutely tasteless. Same with tomatoes, bananas, potatoes, anything you could buy at a typical grocery store. Especially tomatoes, you can taste what an astounding difference between a commercially produced tomato (even with monikers like vine-ripened, kumato, heirloom, etc.) and an ugly homegrown one. I don't want this future, but my want is at odds with that of the producers: what's wrong with fresh tomatoes and basil year round? and that of the poor: what's wrong with affordable berries, asparagus, good-tasting not-mealy apples?
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!
When I first moved from India to US, this is the first noticeable difference I found. Huge ass veggies, devoid of taste. I just couldn't believe tomatoes. They looked so pretty yet had literally no tart. So yeah I'm cool with all of these RNA fiddling etc but for the love of God, do not turn vegetables into tasteless elements that just look pretty in super market shelves.
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 :)
> I mean, man I could just eat the red onion without a drop of tear in my eyes. Try doing this in India.
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.
This is one of my points for people who gripe so much about California.
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.
In Europe I'd say Italy takes that prize. I suspect it's the fact that there are a lot of different climates within the country (much like California). Spain grows a lot of produce for Europe, but things like cucumbers don't taste as good as they do from cooler climates.
You're right, but it is multiple things. These giant foods do lose flavor concentration. Additionally, a lot of these things are not allowed to ripen naturally. They are picked early and put in storage with nitrogen gas to suspend ripening. This is also why produce seems to spoil after 3 days in the fridge. You'll see quite a difference if you can get fresh grown vegetables from your own garden.
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.
Tomatoes are the most noticeable example to me. A grocery store tomato can't hold a candle to a garden one. Large berries are also a great point, basically just large solid water that they charge $4 a pound for.
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.
The last few years I've been noticing the weird plastic tomatoes a lot. I don't know what they've done to them but they last for ages in the fridge and they taste like cardboard. I tend to go for the truss tomatoes because they're a bit more like actual tomatoes.
That's all about variety, not size. They selected strawberry genes for size, color and transportability. And sacrificed flavor. (probably because flavor is related to ripening etc which is critical to the other three variables)
If you grow your own tasty 'heirloom' strawberries, now you can grow 50% more. That's a good thing.
There’s a ton of bio specific domain knowledge you’d need to pick up. I haven’t met too many self taught comp bio people I’d imagine it’s the same as the number of self taught computational mechanics people.
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.
Thank you for the info depth response. I am credentialed and experienced at picking up things across domains so I might kick it around a bit - as far as it dove tails with computational quantum mechanics at least.
Could be interesting to look at the interface between quantum and classical chemistry… …And look at the interface between molecular dynamics and continuum FEM.
It's probably about the same, it seems like the change is producing larger more robust plants which yield more. It doesn't seem like that should either the size of the rice grain itself or the nutrient content.
I don't think that's a safe assumption at all. In fact unless it's somehow increasing the rate of nutrient intake, doesn't that all but guarantee the nutrients are being used to make the base plant larger rather than going into the rice?
The abstract mentions how it leads to longer roots ("produced longer root systems"), which is probably the explanation for all the properties (it can extract water from deeper soil, and it can extract more nutrients from the soil).
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 :)).
>How easy is it to break into computational biology as a, say, practitioner of computational mechanics?
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!
Growing more food can alleviate the distribution problem. At some point folks can grow their own, becoming less dependent on the politics of distribution.
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.
Like anything gene based, it can be used for good/evil.
That said, it has great potential for good - with full knowledge and regulation.
I can recall the old Disney cartoon of the lazy sorcerers apprentice on youtube.
For example, something that ate chlorophyll getting loose in the oceans - call it chlorophage - the end of all sea plants that use chlorophyll..
Forget about yields, increased resilience to drought etc could be the big news if exploited. Deep root systems and resilience could dramatically reduce necessary irrigation & fertilization. Hardy plants need fewer inputs, deeper fertilization means less runoff, and deep irrigation means less evaporation.
I wish every time this sort of thing is tried, they would do it with the perennial versions too.
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.
I think that'd be unlikely - there was a massive evolutionary benefit for the plant to produce the amount of carbohydrate stores that the plant naturally makes. If it'd been more beneficial to produce more carbs, the plant would already.
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
That's the thing that gets me about the idea that the world needs more food.
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.
If I had to guess I would say dramatically larger plants require dramatically more nutrition. It will probably be a net negative outside highly fertilized industrial farming scenarios, preventing it from spreading far in nature.
Weeds somehow manage to become giant and prolific in soil that wouldn't grow any food crops. I don't think we're near any limits of soil or biology with our foods.
This is exactly the kind of gene you wouldn't want to spread "horizontally" on its own, just like antibiotic resistance among bacteria.
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.
The problem is that if we introduce it, it might take a while for those evolutionary pressures to show up. Uncontrolled growth isn't an immediate pressure, it kicks in after the damage has already been done.
I predict that mRNA is going to be an obnoxious fad, where every marketer on the planet tries to leverage the concept/acronym/terminology into their product packaging (regardless of whether it's a medicine, a car part, a floor polish, ...) -- like how Blockchain became such a darling for several years.
I wouldn’t put Blockchain in the past tense here. Having recently conducted a job search in IT, the number of jobs, companies, and startups that are either completely focused on, or at least discussing blockchain is staggering. It’s in the same boat with IoT. With some job descriptions you get both! I can’t roll my eyes hard enough.
At least IoT seems to have settled a bit so that the things that are still around are often actually pretty useful. I just wish vendors would stop trying to get nontechnical customers to base business-critical systems around cloud-based services. No, your feed bin level should NOT have to get to your dashboard 1km away via a 4G connection, a SIM not under your control, and a vendor's cloud service. Install some fiber or a wireless bridge with a couple of cantennas and then if some goober dredges up an undersea cable or you forget to update your credit card and your subscription fee bounces all your cows don't all die.
Classic hype cycle. We've seen mRNA can do one thing really well, now it will be suggested to do everything. It will be a few years before we have a clear picture.
That seems unlikely to me. mRNA could be vaguely defined as a biological programming language. I don't think people like thinking about it so its poor marketing too.
The incentives under capitalism don't work well in that scenario though. If a variety is much better than alternatives, it will dominate and thus create a monoculture.
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.
That will be a great argument when one of these new varieties is, say 5% of world cultivation of any particular crop. We are decades away from that circumstance. This isn't even a slippery slope argument; it's more of a "moderately smooth horizontal plane" argument. Given the challenges that humanity currently faces, these sorts of low-effort Chicken Little objections would endanger millions of human lives, if anyone took them seriously.
There are lots of hungry people, in lots of places. Please have some sympathy for their plight. Capitalists tell us that they can properly distribute the food produced in a few nations to everywhere, but they have so far largely failed to do so. Invariably capitalists and their useful idiots invoke "market failures" as reasons for capitalist-owned politicians to take even more freedoms from producers and consumers than they've already taken. It beggars belief to complain about a strictly hypothetical "monoculture" (resulting from new crop varieties!) when giant firms like Cargill, Tyson, JBS, etc. control so much of our society.
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.
Original paper linked here (behind paywall) [0]. The researchers introduced the human FTO gene into plants to increase crop yields.
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.
We share the majority of our genes with other animals and plants. If sharing a gene with humans makes eating it cannibalism it becomes cannibalism to eat almost any living thing.
They probably used the human version for laziness, because it is probably available on the shelf. If it causes too many problems for the PR department, they can switch to the chimpanzee version, or the mice version. They are very similar (or identical?).
This could benefit the soil as less land will be needed to produce the same amount of food. This would allow more land to lie dormant with nitrogen fixing plants, allowing wider periods between crop rotations.
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.
More, larger, breasts, dicks etc.
Get a date with 6 Breasted Annie(TM), or Double Dick Dan(TM).
Possibilities endless in terms of body mods, repugnant as it sounds - it may come to pass.....
Not conclusively. Some studies find that glyphosate causes increased incidence of non-Hodgkin lymphoma [0], although most environment regulators have minimized these results. Anecdotally, in my hometown, of the two men who over the last several decades personally have applied the most glyphosate (although, to be fair, most other herbicides as well), one is already dead before his time from cancer and the other's health is failing. Humans shouldn't die painfully in their 50s.
It's worth noting that the chemical companies have long histories of inventing a new kind of poison and then covering up what it does to humans so that it takes decades to figure it out. Such was the case with DDT.
It's amazing to me that people are still claiming to do beneficial work when they work on improving yields or size in this case. The amount of food (let alone the size of vegetables) we produce is already enough to feed everyone, but we throw away at least a third of the food we produce (the internet is full of references for that) instead of distributing it fairly where it is needed the most (one part of the world is obese, another is malnourished).
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.
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).