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> Scientists have accomplished a key step in the long-term ambition to engineer nitrogen-fixation into non-legume cereal crops by demonstrating that barley can

> Scientists have accomplished a key step in the long-term ambition to engineer nitrogen-fixation into non-legume cereal crops by demonstrating that barley can instruct soil bacteria to convert nitrogen from the air into ammonia fertiliser. E. g. make non-legumes act like legumes. The actual paper is https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.2117465119 https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.2117465119

mrpopo 4y ago
Farmers have practiced crop rotation for nitrogen fixing for millenia, among many other benefits : less favorable conditions for weeds and pests due to changing conditions, diversification of nutrients, improved soil structure which in turn improves carbon sequestration, ... Legumes also provide amino-acids that are lacking in cereals, which makes a legume-cereal combination a healthy well-balanced diet. Crop rotation doesn't prevent mechanization or reduce farm productivity in any way, rather the opposite because it improves soil health. So, my question: what is the benefit of this? Would that further improve yield in combination with crop rotation?
- ch4s3 4y ago
  There are places where the weather permits 2 harvests per year, and if you could do that without rotation, and without added nitrogen then you could produce as much or more barley on less land. Or rotate between this GMO, barley, and soy while still building up nitrogen. While crop rotation has its place, it's hard to argue with how much more grain we can produce per acre now vs even 100 years ago.
  - mrpopo 4y ago
    Crop rotation is not an old esoteric practice. It's widely used in European fields with 3 or 4 types of crops, including cover crops, and actually improves yield. The USA farming practices keep it to a strict minimum, I believe to reduce labor costs(?) but at the expense of soil health.
    - ch4s3 4y ago
      The US system is optimized to produce the most grain and soy of consistent quality at the lowest possible price. It’s clearly not a perfect system, but it makes food staples really cheap in a lot of places where the historically were quite expensive. It’s kind of hard to compare US and Western European agriculture apples to apples, since the US is so heavily focused on commodity crops for export. But it’s pretty clear where the corn comes from.
    - thaumasiotes 4y ago
      American agriculture is dedicated toward optimizing the productivity of agricultural workers rather than agricultural land. Historically (and currently), the United States has a large amount of relatively unused land and a comparatively tiny population to work it. So the productivity of the land isn't a concern. The goal is to have a system where one guy can produce enough food for 400 people. There are some implications of moving in the other direction that you might not like. In the one-farmer-feeds-400-people model, food is very cheap because it represents a trivial amount of work. In a model that devoted more resources to cultivating the same land at higher yields, one of two things would happen. The less likely option is that food would become much more expensive because of all the additional labor. This would preserve the general standard of living of Americans, except of course that they'd all be much poorer because so much of their money would be spent on food. But they'd all be poorer together. The more likely option is that the price of food would only rise a little, and a class of extremely poor people would provide agricultural labor. This would be a blow to American egalitarianism.
      - ch4s3 4y ago
        > American agriculture is dedicated toward optimizing the productivity of agricultural workers rather than agricultural land At least with respect to corn, US farms produce 4 tons per hectare more each year than the global average, and have substantially higher yields than the 4 nearest competitors[1]. > the United States has a large amount of relatively unused land and a comparatively tiny population to work it We've actually increased forrest cover substantially in the last 50 years, which is great. [1]https://agfax.com/2022/03/07/corn-how-competitive-is-the-u-s-in-international-production/ https://agfax.com/2022/03/07/corn-how-competitive-is-the-u-s...
  - mschuster91 4y ago
    > it's hard to argue with how much more grain we can produce per acre now vs even 100 years ago. The key thing is for how long soil will be able to keep that production rate up. Humanity is doing completely unprecedented things now - we have eradicated a lot of the predators and their feed species that kept ecosystems intact, and replaced it by artificial means... and eventually, that soil won't be able to keep up any more, but humanity will have grown a fatal addiction to cheap grain and other agricultural products (the fact we're growing plants to turn them into bio-fuel is maddening!). And by then, it will be too late to fix the issues in the soil for at least a couple of years if not decades. Healthy soil is something that grew over hundreds and thousands of years after all, and humanity will blow through it in a century. What remains is to burn down forests like it's being done in the Amazonas area, but even that destruction will only yield something like two to four seasons and then it's gone (which is why the farmers burn down so much every year).
    - ch4s3 4y ago
      > The key thing is for how long soil will be able to keep that production rate up We're basically going hydroponics with sterile soil as a substrate. The limiting factors are fertilizer and water. This may not be ideal, but it frees up a lot of land for things other than wheat/soy/corn. > we have eradicated a lot of the predators and their feed species that kept ecosystems intact, and replaced it by artificial means The US and Europe are re-wilding substantial amounts of land, precisely because less is now needed to grow food.
      - mschuster91 4y ago
        > We're basically going hydroponics with sterile soil as a substrate. The limiting factors are fertilizer and water. This may not be ideal, but it frees up a lot of land for things other than wheat/soy/corn. The problem is that now the produce only consists of fertilizer. Just compare the taste and nutritional value of mass-manufactured produce vs. organic-grown produce - the difference (at least if you're not suffering from covid) will be massive. Additionally, sterile soil without deep levels of old roots, fungi and other life in it has the downside that it will simply erode and, as a consequence of losing that structure, blow away sooner or later. The US literally went through this once in the 1930s [1] and at the moment 40% of the US are at risk for further desertification [2]. Yes, it may be more efficient in a short-term rabid capitalism POV to continue ruthlessly exploiting nature, but the long term of continuing as-is will only lead to an utter catastrophe and cascading effects - e.g. groundwater depletion once the soil compresses, effects on the local and regional climate (clouds and in consequence rain need evaporation of water) or heatwaves and as a direct consequence uninhabitability because pure sand can't buffer off heat. Earth is at the moment right at the tipping point of a lot of crises: CO² and other climate gases such as methane leading to a greenhouse effect, the collapse of ice shelves, the permanent destruction of arable land, the compression of soil in deserts destroying groundwater, predators going extinct and throwing ecosystems out of balance, invasive species being transmitted by air and especially water cargo, humans ending up with half a dozen pandemic or almost-pandemic events in two decades because we keep intruding on animal reservoirs in our ever deeper search for space... we need to stop and seriously rethink how we want to live, if we want to leave our children a planet they can actually live on - and that's leaving the social issues like erosion of democracies, of international law, and of war and aggression and their impact on nature, completely out of the discussion! And JFC the answer to the problems we're seeing is not geo-engineering or GMOs. That's band aids barely covering up the atrocities we have committed as a species! [1] https://share.america.gov/u-s-scientists-work-to-stave-off-desertification/ https://share.america.gov/u-s-scientists-work-to-stave-off-d... [2] https://science.howstuffworks.com/nature/climate-weather/atmospheric/us-desert-50-years1.htm https://science.howstuffworks.com/nature/climate-weather/atm...
flobosg 4y ago
> The actual paper is https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.2117465119 https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.2117465119 Paywalled, unfortunately, but a previous similar study by the senior author can be found at https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-10882-x https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-10882-x

mrpopo 4y ago

Farmers have practiced crop rotation for nitrogen fixing for millenia, among many other benefits : less favorable conditions for weeds and pests due to changing conditions, diversification of nutrients, improved soil structure which in turn improves carbon sequestration, ... Legumes also provide amino-acids that are lacking in cereals, which makes a legume-cereal combination a healthy well-balanced diet. Crop rotation doesn't prevent mechanization or reduce farm productivity in any way, rather the opposite because it improves soil health. So, my question: what is the benefit of this? Would that further improve yield in combination with crop rotation?

ch4s3 4y ago
There are places where the weather permits 2 harvests per year, and if you could do that without rotation, and without added nitrogen then you could produce as much or more barley on less land. Or rotate between this GMO, barley, and soy while still building up nitrogen. While crop rotation has its place, it's hard to argue with how much more grain we can produce per acre now vs even 100 years ago.
- mrpopo 4y ago
  Crop rotation is not an old esoteric practice. It's widely used in European fields with 3 or 4 types of crops, including cover crops, and actually improves yield. The USA farming practices keep it to a strict minimum, I believe to reduce labor costs(?) but at the expense of soil health.
  - ch4s3 4y ago
    The US system is optimized to produce the most grain and soy of consistent quality at the lowest possible price. It’s clearly not a perfect system, but it makes food staples really cheap in a lot of places where the historically were quite expensive. It’s kind of hard to compare US and Western European agriculture apples to apples, since the US is so heavily focused on commodity crops for export. But it’s pretty clear where the corn comes from.
  - thaumasiotes 4y ago
    American agriculture is dedicated toward optimizing the productivity of agricultural workers rather than agricultural land. Historically (and currently), the United States has a large amount of relatively unused land and a comparatively tiny population to work it. So the productivity of the land isn't a concern. The goal is to have a system where one guy can produce enough food for 400 people. There are some implications of moving in the other direction that you might not like. In the one-farmer-feeds-400-people model, food is very cheap because it represents a trivial amount of work. In a model that devoted more resources to cultivating the same land at higher yields, one of two things would happen. The less likely option is that food would become much more expensive because of all the additional labor. This would preserve the general standard of living of Americans, except of course that they'd all be much poorer because so much of their money would be spent on food. But they'd all be poorer together. The more likely option is that the price of food would only rise a little, and a class of extremely poor people would provide agricultural labor. This would be a blow to American egalitarianism.
    - ch4s3 4y ago
      > American agriculture is dedicated toward optimizing the productivity of agricultural workers rather than agricultural land At least with respect to corn, US farms produce 4 tons per hectare more each year than the global average, and have substantially higher yields than the 4 nearest competitors[1]. > the United States has a large amount of relatively unused land and a comparatively tiny population to work it We've actually increased forrest cover substantially in the last 50 years, which is great. [1]https://agfax.com/2022/03/07/corn-how-competitive-is-the-u-s-in-international-production/ https://agfax.com/2022/03/07/corn-how-competitive-is-the-u-s...
- mschuster91 4y ago
  > it's hard to argue with how much more grain we can produce per acre now vs even 100 years ago. The key thing is for how long soil will be able to keep that production rate up. Humanity is doing completely unprecedented things now - we have eradicated a lot of the predators and their feed species that kept ecosystems intact, and replaced it by artificial means... and eventually, that soil won't be able to keep up any more, but humanity will have grown a fatal addiction to cheap grain and other agricultural products (the fact we're growing plants to turn them into bio-fuel is maddening!). And by then, it will be too late to fix the issues in the soil for at least a couple of years if not decades. Healthy soil is something that grew over hundreds and thousands of years after all, and humanity will blow through it in a century. What remains is to burn down forests like it's being done in the Amazonas area, but even that destruction will only yield something like two to four seasons and then it's gone (which is why the farmers burn down so much every year).
  - ch4s3 4y ago
    > The key thing is for how long soil will be able to keep that production rate up We're basically going hydroponics with sterile soil as a substrate. The limiting factors are fertilizer and water. This may not be ideal, but it frees up a lot of land for things other than wheat/soy/corn. > we have eradicated a lot of the predators and their feed species that kept ecosystems intact, and replaced it by artificial means The US and Europe are re-wilding substantial amounts of land, precisely because less is now needed to grow food.
    - mschuster91 4y ago
      > We're basically going hydroponics with sterile soil as a substrate. The limiting factors are fertilizer and water. This may not be ideal, but it frees up a lot of land for things other than wheat/soy/corn. The problem is that now the produce only consists of fertilizer. Just compare the taste and nutritional value of mass-manufactured produce vs. organic-grown produce - the difference (at least if you're not suffering from covid) will be massive. Additionally, sterile soil without deep levels of old roots, fungi and other life in it has the downside that it will simply erode and, as a consequence of losing that structure, blow away sooner or later. The US literally went through this once in the 1930s [1] and at the moment 40% of the US are at risk for further desertification [2]. Yes, it may be more efficient in a short-term rabid capitalism POV to continue ruthlessly exploiting nature, but the long term of continuing as-is will only lead to an utter catastrophe and cascading effects - e.g. groundwater depletion once the soil compresses, effects on the local and regional climate (clouds and in consequence rain need evaporation of water) or heatwaves and as a direct consequence uninhabitability because pure sand can't buffer off heat. Earth is at the moment right at the tipping point of a lot of crises: CO² and other climate gases such as methane leading to a greenhouse effect, the collapse of ice shelves, the permanent destruction of arable land, the compression of soil in deserts destroying groundwater, predators going extinct and throwing ecosystems out of balance, invasive species being transmitted by air and especially water cargo, humans ending up with half a dozen pandemic or almost-pandemic events in two decades because we keep intruding on animal reservoirs in our ever deeper search for space... we need to stop and seriously rethink how we want to live, if we want to leave our children a planet they can actually live on - and that's leaving the social issues like erosion of democracies, of international law, and of war and aggression and their impact on nature, completely out of the discussion! And JFC the answer to the problems we're seeing is not geo-engineering or GMOs. That's band aids barely covering up the atrocities we have committed as a species! [1] https://share.america.gov/u-s-scientists-work-to-stave-off-desertification/ https://share.america.gov/u-s-scientists-work-to-stave-off-d... [2] https://science.howstuffworks.com/nature/climate-weather/atmospheric/us-desert-50-years1.htm https://science.howstuffworks.com/nature/climate-weather/atm...

flobosg 4y ago

> The actual paper is https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.2117465119 https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.2117465119 Paywalled, unfortunately, but a previous similar study by the senior author can be found at https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-10882-x https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-10882-x