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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 produc

• BiteCode_dev 5y ago
  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; - weak nutritional content of our food; - food chain dependency on a few players;
  • pharke 5y ago
    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.
    • BiteCode_dev 5y ago
      > 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.
      • db48x 5y ago
        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.
        • BiteCode_dev 5y ago
          Oh sure, I don't say to toss the tech on the trash. I'm just saying it won't solve world food current problems. Although I'm skeptical for mars, bigger plants will deplete their substrate very fast, it could be a limiter.
  • postingawayonhn 5y ago
    It would be great if we could produce the same amount of food on less land. Low quality land can be returned to nature.
    • BiteCode_dev 5y ago
      Unless human nature has changed last week, this is not going to be used to use less land, only to produce more on the same land. We are already overproducing food, that doesn't prevent us to try to produce more.
      • postingawayonhn 5y ago
        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.
        • necovek 5y ago
          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.
        • BiteCode_dev 5y ago
          Again, we are already producing more than the demand, we just don't distribute it to all the demand. The market, at this point, has produced concentration of power and hasn't sold distribution problem. Creating something that can produce even more is not gonna help.
  • baybal2 5y ago
    > - weak nutritional content of our food; Today we have the most nutritious foods in history. Don't make things up. Today's potatoes are 4-6 times bigger than 19th century ones. Tomatoes 3-5 times. Most fruits, got just enormous. Even "watery" leafy greens are actually getting more meatier, and starchy, and with more folates as everybody seem to be crazy about them.
    • ben_w 5y ago
      “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.
      • baybal2 5y ago
        I doubt there is any difference
• foolinaround 5y ago
  I agree with you in general... yes, waste and distribution should be high in focus... but this would also help? But could we then grow crops in concentrated places without need for deforestation? We may let some of the fields lay fallow for a couple of years, and alternate? Could we transport less because local farms produce more, bringing in carbon and cost savings?
• criley2 5y ago
  >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.
• DubiousPusher 5y ago
  > 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.
  • lugged 5y ago
    I really wonder sometimes how much is human selection on purpose and how much is human selection by simply finding the bigger crops easier to forage. Guessing it's a bit of both.
• ArchD 5y ago
  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.
  • Retric 5y ago
    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.
  • bluGill 5y ago
    > 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.
• grey-area 5y ago
  No cultivated species is the result of natural selection, they have been selected for centuries, sometimes millennia, by humans for the things we value. For the most extreme example see seedless grapes.
  • thret 5y ago
    Peas famously have been cultivated from a single mutation that does not burst when ripe. They can't reproduce without human intervention.
    • quakeguy 5y ago
      Even when birds or small mammals eat and digest the seeds?
      • bluGill 5y ago
        Peas are the seeds. 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)
        • quakeguy 5y ago
          Thank you for clarifying this.
      • thret 5y ago
        To be clear my knowledge of this topic is limited to that found in 'Guns, Germs, and Steel' by Jared Diamond. I haven't checked his sources.
• GoodJokes 5y ago
  Do you have any expertise in this or are you just aggregating some “50 years of top soil left” articles in your head? Sounds like the later tbh
• searine 5y ago
  > the nutrient content of the soil 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
• foxyv 5y ago
  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.
  • yosito 5y ago
    Presumably if you have more productive crops, the ratio of petrochemicals to food output improves.
    • dwiel 5y ago
      Why assume that more output doesn't come with more input? It doesn't seem presumable to me one way or the other.
      • bluGill 5y ago
        > 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.
  • RosanaAnaDana 5y ago
    >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.
• lugged 5y ago
  No dig market gardens and jadam techniques are spreading. I'm not really that worried about stuff like this.
• wombat-man 5y ago
  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.
• thomasweiser 5y ago
  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. Source: https://heise.de/-6180853 https://heise.de/-6180853 (German)
• furstenheim 5y ago
  > There's an evolutionary reason why plants do not naturally grow this big. That could be said of current crops. They are the result of years of artificial selection
• bullfightonmars 5y ago
  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.
  • babatuba 5y ago
    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.
    • HPsquared 5y ago
      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.
      • idiotsecant 5y ago
        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.
        • 5y ago
• dekhn 5y ago
  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.
• UncleOxidant 5y ago
  > While we fertilize the soil 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.
  • bluGill 5y ago
    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)
• kingkawn 5y ago
  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.
• sjwalter 5y ago
  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.
• eloff 5y ago
  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.
• ravenstine 5y ago
  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)
  • phonethrowaway 5y ago
    humanure is a thing
    • bluGill 5y ago
      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.
  • baybal2 5y ago
    > 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.
  • edflsafoiewq 5y ago
    Yes it does. > 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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosolids https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosolids
    • ravenstine 5y ago
      I guess I was using the wrong keyword. That's pretty amazing!
  • overcast 5y ago
• X6S1x6Okd1st 5y ago
  > 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.
  • maxFlow 5y ago
    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.
  • tehjoker 5y ago
    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.
• JTbane 5y ago
  >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