“Problems cannot be solved with the same mind set that created them.”
― Albert Einstein
There are more natural ways to achieve the same results. Perennial Polycultures use natural flora & fauna in a closed loop ecosystem. They also have higher overall yields than monocultures.
These solutions are available to us right now. In fact there's a growing movement of farmers who are utilizing & learning more about Perrenial Polycultures.
I was under the impression that nitrogen fixation was still the limiting factor in plant growth. If that's the case, will improving photosynthesis really improve yields?
Yes, it will. Plants need nitrogen to make proteins, and the most abundant protein in plants is RuBisCO - the one that fixes CO2 in the air into carbohydrates to store the energy from sunlight.
Most plants have to produce a vast amount of RuBisCO to make up for the fact that photosynthesis is so inefficient. By making it more efficient, we reduce the amount of RuBisCO needed and therefore reduce the nitrogen required.
C4 plants are much more nitrogen efficient than C3 plants.
I'm a vast gaping maw of ignorance here, but I thought we had solved nitrogen fixation with the fritz-Haber process at the cost of using fossil fuels. Am I wrong, or are we just trying to keep farmers from having to buy ammonium nitrate?
Supplementing nitrogen comes with a whole host of environmental trade-offs. In particular there are problems with pollution, where nitrogen added to fields gets washed off in the rain and ends up in waterways. There it can totally destabilise ecosystems by introducing a flood of nitrogen which is usually a scarce resource, leading to massive population explosions of some kinds of organisms, which in turn can leave huge buildups of toxic byproducts. This is called eutrophication.
What I've been told is that, while fertilizers obviously help a lot, they aren't a panacea and the plant still needs to do some expensive nitrogen chemistry which will set limits to its growth, regardless of how much energy it gets from photosynthesis.
Would improved photosynthesis be liable to find its way into nearby weeds via horizontal gene transfer? It sounds like a really advantageous modification, and so something that's likely to be picked up on. (Whereas, say, a modification for higher yields wouldn't be, because it wouldn't be advantageous for a weed.)
I think this is extremely unlikely. This is because the engineering projects we are talking about involve co-ordinating the regulation of dozens of genes (at least 40 in my project). To build the system we have to transfer in the components separately in many different plants and then carefully stack the changes using breeding techniques. The probability of this happening in nature would be infinitessimally small, especially because we have found that by taking only some of the changes you actually get a decrease in photosynthesis.
Are C3 and C4 really simply interchangeable mechanisms? What about CAM, would it be possible to "install a CAM module" into maize to make it drought resistant, though less productive?
Also, but that might not be directly related to your work, the article says "plants already absorb more sunlight than they can use" but still goes on to talk about how they could be more efficient if they used a larger part of the light spectrum. Would it serve any purpose, then?
You can think of C3, C4 and CAM as interchangeable functions, yes. They take in CO2 and energy from sunlight, and they output sugar:
def photosynthesis(co2, energy)
# C3, C4 or CAM
return sugar
end
to your second question, plants absorb photons that are not converted to biomass because all the light harvesting machinery is saturated. But this is only true at the parts of the plant that are most exposed to light. The idea is that we could reduce the absorption in those parts and let some light through to other parts of the plant, where it could be absorbed at a different wavelength if we install that ability.
Monoculture, petrol, chemical agriculture is often produced in a centralized manner, which introduces inefficiencies (with environmental issues) in transport, fertilization, pest control, etc. The current paradigm also requires large amounts of capital to purchase machinery, mined fertilizer, poisonous pesticides, GMOs where seeds can't be saved, etc. This cycle of dependence has caused many small farms to be in financial crisis. Also, don't forget that large scale factory farming is subsidized by the government. Without these subsidizations, large scale factory farming is not viable.
Factory meat production follows the same pattern of monoculture, with disgusting & unhealthy results.
The alternative is to decentralize food production. Small, organic, polyculture farms reduce or eliminate the need to transport food over long distances, import fertilizer, use pesticides. Decentralized food production also enables the farmer to be independent of having to purchase expensive inputs from large multinational corporations.
Small farms are more humane and, similar to startups, freer to innovate.
Large scale monoculture is a necessity to feed the world. What are you going to do with a tiny farm that cannot benefit from the economy of scale and agricultural tech?
Large scale monoculture is not necessary. It's not one tiny farm, it's many tiny farms owned by the people who live in that region.
Many of the problems that are "solved" with technology don't exist in natural perennial polycultures. For example, pests. In a natural perennial polyculture, you have an ecosystem that naturally manages the pests (via predators). These organisms evolve with the pests.
Tiny farms grow more food per acre than large monoculture farms.
Agricultural tech creates problems of it's own & does not match the prowess of nature. Natural processes grow the food, not technology. Technology can help, however, it can also hinder, and it does in our current petrolchemical centralized paradigm. Look at the pollution, soil degregation, erosion, desertification, poverty, etc. Large scale monoculture ruined just about every ecosystem that it has been used on. For example, the American Plains used to have 10s of feet of rich topsoil built by natural processes over the years. It's now eroded due to runoff & mismanagement propagated by large scale monoculture.
I can provide many other examples & problems, but I'll keep this post short.
Large scale monoculture is a failed experiment & a blight on the planet. It's also only viable because of government subsidization. Our monoculture paradigm benefitted from, wasted, & toxified our natural inheritance in less than 100 years. So yes, monoculture is extremely efficient at creating a mess.
We no longer need to have 90% of the population working as stoop-labor agricultural peasants. Famine is essentially a thing of the past (it only happens in areas where the government is severely fucked up for one reason or another). Mechanized agriculture is the greatest success story in the history of the human race.
If you really want to go back to the age of peasants and serfs, why don't you lead by example? Start by producing all of your own food using intensive hand cultivation. Then produce all of the food for 150 other people using intensive hand cultivation.
This is like judging someone's wealth by their ability to rapidly use a credit card. Monoculture has destroyed our ecosystems, caused rampant desertification, caused soil runoff, stip mined the less fortunate countries, polluted our water, increased pests overpopulation, increased disease, etc.
> If you really want to go back to the age of peasants and serfs, why don't you lead by example?
Dualistic solution-centric thinking is an issue with our times. It's time to think systemically. How can we improve existing systems? Which paradigms are appropriate to our entire context? Can we move toward an ethics driven paradigm, instead of a solution centric paradigm? There are many solutions to a problem, but some have maladaptive implications in a broader context not considered by myopic vision.
Can we start to view the world with a broader context; beyond money & a certain strain of technological progress?
Can we move beyond reductionistic metrics & take the entire situation into account?
Also, is it so bad to have more farmers? Many natural farmers don't seem to think so. Is the hustle & bustle of city life with it's stress & unemployment a good life?
Will the Pharmaceutical industry cure our Nature Deficit Disorder? What's left when you worked hard all of your life & it's your time to die?
While I don't own land (it's quite expensive in the current economic system), I do support local farmers & participate in local economies to a certain extend. I'd love to increase my participation because it's the responsible thing to do.
Well, it's not so bad if you're the lord of the manor, maybe.
Being the serf sucks, though.
That's exactly what you're advocating, behind all your rhetoric. Get rid of the tractors and fertilizers and processing factories, and you're right back to unfree laborers working with hand tools.
Quite possibly you've even fooled yourself... you admit that you don't actually know anything about farming, but still advocate some vague program based on feel-good emotions.
You don't want to fuck with the food supply unless you really, really know what you're doing. History is full of utopian agricultural "reform" ideas. It's also full of millions of dead bodies produced by those "reforms".
That's a stretch. Iowa grows more every year; our soil is in the best shape its ever been; erosion is at a low; water pollution is at a low. We can certainly make it work.
There's also a concern about water management. Natural ecosystems tend to get the most out of their water usage. I seem to recall that the midwest water aquifers are a limited resource.
That aside, I can buy that soil is improving. I also agree that we can make it work. I do applaud regenerative efforts in Iowa.
However, I'm looking at a global scale, where desertification, pollution, runoff, lowering productivity, etc. are big problems. As an analogy, many climate change deniers will claim that it's still winter in their local area, but that perception is not fully representative of what is happening on a global scale.
Re: the industrial paradigm on improving local soil systems; is importing nutrition on a massive scale, robbing that nutrition from other ecosystems, a responsible thing to do in a global context? I'm realistic in the sense that some importation may be necessary, in fact nature moves nutrients via animals, wind, etc. However, nature works in a cooperative & systemic way.
Our soil is about perfect for growing what we grow. Topsoil used to be the big thing, before ammonia fertilizer. Now the best crops grow on clay hillsides. Which we have plenty of, since Iowa used to be largely timber.
Confused about the 'importing nutrients' thing - ammonia fertilizer is fixed from the air (since WWII); no more shipping bat guano around the country.
I can't criticize your approach, since I'm not a farmer. I respect what you do & the work that it takes to run a farm. I can only point out what I've seen & what inspires me.
re: Amonia
> A typical modern ammonia-producing plant first converts natural gas (i.e., methane) or LPG (liquefied petroleum gases such as propane and butane) or petroleum naphtha into gaseous hydrogen.
This requires the importation or local extraction of fossil fuels. Given that the United States is now utilizing fracking to extract natural gas, this causes pollution within the aquifers as well as reducing the integrity of the surface strata.
A natural approach of fertilization is animal poop from grazing & polycultures (nitrogen fixing perennial plants, like Black Locust), similar to how the ancient prairies were fertilized.
Mark Shepard, who's farm is in Wisconsin, has a large scale example of "Restoration Agriculture". He has a silvopasture that feeds his livestock. The livestock fertilize the fields. He also grows nuts. He also saves money by not having to buy fertilizer or pesticides. He also uses keyline design, swales, & ponds to efficiently use water & reduce runoff.
My friends at http://www.fieldswithoutfences.org/ in New Jersey have a lush polyculture medicinal herb & food farm that started from rocky spent earth. There was no top soil when they started a few years ago. You can see how it looks right now.
Natural fertilizer is a pile of manure. There's no chance the supply will come close to serving the demand. Also, its already being used (you have to do something with it) and its only mildly useful. Unless you have some political point to make, its always supplemented (read: almost totally surpassed) by ammonia and other carefully calculated amendments. Vs whatever randomly came out of a cows back end.
Natural fertilizer is how our ecosystems were made to be so productive. Your land in Iowa is incredibly productive from a legacy of natural fertilization.
There are a growing number of examples of farmers using natural methods in the modern context. There is some supplementation, especially in the beginning to re-mediate lands that have been damaged by conventional agriculture; however nature has a way of making things work.
Natural polyculture systems produce more food than monocultures for a number of reasons, such as utilizing multiple layers, creating a functioning ecological systems, more efficient water usage, etc. This is done despite the lack of research that goes into creating natural food systems. Imagine how much better it will be when it's fully adopted.
Re demand: Much of our demand is artificial, narrow, globally structured, driven by subsidies, marketing, & supply. Corn based ethanol uses more energy than it creates. The only reason for corn based ethanol is to subsidize certain farmers. Our level of factory meat production is also destructive to the environment, resource intensive, & unhealthy. America pushes junk food creating an unhealthy, morbidly obese population.
I'm just pointing out how ecological & biological systems work, the consequences of the status quo, & how things can be improved.
I stand to be a good steward of our planet by considering the global systemic implications of our systems. That is the ethical thing to do. It's easy to hide behind rationalizations to shirk responsibility to explore viable options that have been proven to work.
If you see that as political, then you also being political.
This is an urban legend. Iowa is so incredibly productive because it get sun and rain in a good predictable quantity, and we apply man-made fertilizer to largely level fields in controlled quantities. The rest is wishful thinking. Topsoil became irrelevant to farming decades ago.
Returning to a Pollyanna view of a perfect agrarian society of cows fertilizing humble fields of vegetables, would result in widespread shortages.
Corn based ethanol no longer uses more energy than it creates; that threshold was reached years ago. Some more reading is in order, I suggest.
Just pointing out how agriculture economic systems work, and its absolutely nothing like described above.
It's an urban legend that Iowa has a legacy of good soil built up from generations of natural processes? I'm skeptical of your assessment. Can you dive more into it?
The ecologists I talked to seem to think that soil is very important to the health of the ecosystem & to grow healthy food.
> The rest is wishful thinking.
That is what I call an urban legend. It's certainly a made up story.
> Topsoil became irrelevant to farming decades ago.
Your perspective on topsoil is interesting, considering how nutrition in our food is on a downward trend. Also interesting how we are having drought, desertification, loss of habitat, pollution, etc. Most ecologists will disagree with your assessment that Topsoil is "irrelevant".
> Returning to a Pollyanna view of a perfect agrarian society of cows fertilizing humble fields of vegetables, would result in widespread shortages.
That's a myth & a failure of imagination; especially when you consider the pattern of decentralizing (localizing) agricultural production around the world. The UN endorses organic & distributed farming as the most viable options to feed the world. They can go even further & take a restorative approach to also heal the natural ecosystems that we are destroying.
There are studies that show that perennial polyculture systems grow more calories than monoculture systems. Third world countries are beginning to take the lead in growing their own food using many small scale, distributed, perennial polycultures ecosystems, with animals.
You can't write it off just like that. There's too much evidence that it will work...
The alternative is the status quo, destroying our ecosystems, polluting our water, decreasing food nutrition, making more crappy monotonous food, obesity, declining human health, desertification, etc. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for efficiency, however let's efficiently do healthy things, not efficiently do unhealthy things.
> Corn based ethanol no longer uses more energy than it creates; that threshold was reached years ago. Some more reading is in order, I suggest.
It looks like there's a controversy over Ethanol's net output. You also need to consider the energy required to produce the fertilizer/pesticides, transport the ethanol, etc. It's certainly an order of magnitude less productive than fossil fuels.
I'm more interested in renewable energy, such as solar, wind, biogas, etc. Utilizing so much land, soil, water, etc. to grow energy seems wasteful & counterproductive to growing food that is nutritious, has variety, is restorative, & clean.
> Just pointing out how agriculture economic systems work, and its absolutely nothing like described above.
I can see your point when taking a reductionistic lens to this system. When you look at the big picture, the agricultural sector is responsible for most of our CO2 pollution, soil runoff, loss of habitat, loss of health, etc. I'd venture to say that our agricultural practices are not restorative/responsible & leave much to be desired. In short, the product, it's costs, & it's consequences suck! This is also the planet I live on & I'm relying on you to be responsible with it's systems.
To write off improvements as "not able to work" is intellectually lazy. The improvements will work & require more attention if we (humanity) will prosper in the future...
I work with people on that space. You can realistically supply, with proper irrigation techiques and soil nutrition, much more than enough to feed yourself with only a moderate investment in time.
If we can do more with less, we will use less; less space, less soil augmentation, less everything. That's still a good thing.
Also, the more minimalistic our food plants become, the more alternatives we create for ourselves; if nothing else, space travel and settlement is going to demand as much efficiency in our crops as we can get.
Generically, sure. In this specific arena, food demand is at least modestly constant. And now that endless overpopulation is less of a concern than it used to be, I don't think we have much to worry about there.
By increasing crop yields in the most common staple crops, we have a clear technological engineering problem to solve and various ways to approach it, all achievable. This allows more food to be produced more cheaply in the areas that need it most.
If we refuse to produce more food until the food that is already produced is distributed evenly, many people will die or go hungry because the socio-political problems are very complex. There is no engineering solution to them in sight.
By all means let's try to solve problems of inequality. But let's also try to feed people as soon as possible by whatever means are available.
It is clearly both, which is what I said above. Synchronising the entire global economy is harder and less tractable than engineering photosynthesis, so we should be working on both (which is exactly what we are doing).
Naive questions (largely because this is a whole area of science I'm ignorant to, but I am curious):
If plants could benefit from more efficient photosynthesis, over the span of the billions of years they've been doing it, wouldn't they have evolved to do so? Sure, it may benefit us in some way to assist, but how does the plant benefit?
The fact they're green and not other colors could be a significant evolutionary advantage... or wouldn't we expect to see other a large diversity of other colour plants? Why did green win out and not some other colour that absorbs different areas of the light spectrum?
If one of the laws of nature is survival of the fittest, what do we humans know that makes us think that our ability to tinker with evolution without negative consequences is a wise decision?
Firstly, some plants have evolved to do photosynthesis more efficiently. One of the projects in the article (the one I work on) is to take a particularly efficient kind of naturally occurring photosynthesis - C4 photosynthesis - and copy it over to species that don't already have it. Sugarcane is an example of a plant with very efficient photosynthesis.
Secondly, there are relatively few evolutionary innovations in photosynthesis for several reasons. The main one is that the global environment is constantly changing - the atmosphere is very different now than it was 1.6 billion years ago when photosynthesis first evolved. The atmosphere started out with no oxygen, so photosynthesis first evolved to handle that scenario. But photosynthesis releases oxygen by breaking up water molecules, so it gradually oxygenated the atmosphere and depleted the carbon dioxide. Modern conditions with very high oxygen and low carbon break a lot of the assumptions that were fixed into the early photosynthetic system, so improvements tend to be workarounds because evolution mainly builds on what is already there.
The thing that humans have that evolution doesn't is the ability to reason about the system. Evolution is like an optimisation algorithm working within constraints, and humans are like software engineers that can change the constraints.
I forgot to add a second reason why there are few innovations in photosynthesis. In most ecosystems, photosynthesis is not the limiting factor. Other things like water, space, mineral nutrients and predation are more important, so there is no evolutionary pressure for photosynthesis to improve.
But in agriculture we solve those problems - we provide space, water and nutrients, and we keep pests and competition away. Then photosynthesis becomes the limiting factor.
The article gives at least one answer to that question: the over concentration of chlorophyll can be valuable when competing against other plant. This is a case where evolutionary fitness doesn't align with the goals of agriculture.
This is one out of two typical answers which are
1) The fitness function is different, so there would be a trade-of but we don't mind it.
2) The biochemistry needed is very complicated, requiring many steps and is unlikely to be discovered by evolution.
If the plant doesn't use all the extra chlorophyll as the article suggests, then what purpose does it serve when competing against other plants. From what I gleaned from the article, this in my mind is akin to a track athlete having 50 pairs of shoes outperforming an athlete that only has 1. If the athlete can't use all 50 pairs of shoes at once, then what benefit do they offer?
Can you clarify your interpretation of that statement because I don't get it.
It absorbs light which prevents other plants fro being able to access it lower in the canopy. The absorbed light doesn't get converted to food, but is absorbed as heat energy which is radiated away.
To use your analogy, there is a set number of pairs of shoes available. Two athletes are to compete against one another. If one athlete wears one pair and takes all the others and throws them away, the other athlete has to run without shoes and will probably lose.
I didn't exactly get it either, because if they didn't absorb the photons with the extra chlorophyll, it's not like it would go to the other plants anyway...
I just assumed there is a more complicated reason involving competition that the article didn't bother going into.
Plants that may be "behind" this plant in the path of direct sunlight are starved of sunlight by the increased absorption. Thereby reducing their ability to compete for other resources.
You're talking about a "local maximum" sustained over half a billion years and trillions of organisms. It's much more likely that this is just optimal for plants.
That's a logical fallacy on its face given the nature of evolution. If there is no pressure to improve then there is no reason for an improvement to take hold, but that in no way implies that a given mechanism is perfected along any access, just good enough.
Exactly - if an infinite number of monkeys sat typing at an infinite number of typewriters, eventually, one would produce the entire works of Shakespeare...
It isn't wise. Every time somebody figure's out how to optimize for one variable, everyone starts optimizing and we end up with great productivity for a brief bit and then the California drought.
We have been lucky so far cause scaling up takes time.
There's also, I fear, a trap here where we believe we understand nutrition, only to discover there are nuances that we still don't have a great handle on.
As an example, there's the emerging posibility that one's gut flora can have a huge impact on overall health - and that certain types of foods can have a negative or positive impact on that gut flora.
Manipulating basic elements could easily lead to our skipping over critical parts of our health needs, with unintended consequences down the line.
Put another way: our dietary habits and nutritional systems developed over tens-to-hundreds of thousands of years. I'm very leery of any theory that we can easily replace that.
Right, gladly I believe we are some way beyond 'emerging' and into 'researching' , 'This year, the US National Institute of Mental Health spent more than US$1 million on a new research programme aimed at the microbiome–brain connection.' http://www.nature.com/news/gut-brain-link-grabs-neuroscienti...
When I was doing nanotech 10+ years ago, and people asked me when nanorobots were coming, I'd always ask them why they thought nanorobots would be different than, say, bacteria, or viruses? The constraints "at the bottom" (as Feynman would say) are quite high—and we're not really very close to being able to engineer at that scale. Heck, even making a robot the size of a grain of rice is a pretty daunting task, and a nanorobot would be built on a scale that's 10^12 to 10^18 times smaller (the cubic relationship is a real bitch), depending on what you mean by "nanoscale".
Engineering a "thing" to convert basic chemicals and sunlight into food is a pretty significant task. While I would bet that plants are nowhere near close to optimal, they're already solving the problem. Changing & rethinking an existing system is far easier than simply creating one from whole cloth.
If I had to guess, I'd say that "producing food from manipulating basic elements" using a piece of tech entirely designed by human hands, from scratch, is at least a couple of centuries in the future.
If we ever get to tame energy I don't think we'll need to care about water and food. It seems inefficient to tame energy only to then invest more time in food research to give our bodies energy.
There are some problems with plants, and one of them is that plants are, often misunderstood, live beings that are strategist by nature. If you put an improved photosyntesis in rice, this could lead to more grain of course, but also could boost the production of leaves and roots and the result could be less or none grain in the same time. Or atract predators. Have you consider this possibilities?
I'll make a complaint on the way this article is written which I think is quite damaging: the sense that all of this work is being done by "scientists" and "experts" who will develop this technology in their ivory towers and make it available to the public at some point. Just wait around and you will be handed these gifts.
This style sucks because it separates the reader from "experts" (you are not one), and it implies that you cannot participate even by intent. Experts will decide what is best for you, and you must receive it and like it. The notion that the future is something produced by a few and the majority only receive it passively is an affront to a free society.
I'm pretty confused by your logic, I certainly don't think that it implies, for example, that the reader would be unable to go into education and go down a career path where they would become one of the few experts who are working in this field. It even links to papers and technical articles.
I'm assuming that is because this future WILL be created by experts. That isn't elitist, but if you want to help you will have to put in the time an effort to became an export.
― Albert Einstein
There are more natural ways to achieve the same results. Perennial Polycultures use natural flora & fauna in a closed loop ecosystem. They also have higher overall yields than monocultures.
These solutions are available to us right now. In fact there's a growing movement of farmers who are utilizing & learning more about Perrenial Polycultures.
Here is some literature:
http://www.amazon.com/The-One-Straw-Revolution-Introduction-...
http://www.edibleforestgardens.com/about_book
http://www.afforestt.com/index.html
Here are some farms that I'm familiar with (either I know the farmers or they are well known):
http://www.newforestfarm.net/
http://www.polyfacefarms.com/
http://www.fieldswithoutfences.org/
http://www.thevitalfarm.com/