[HN Gopher] RNA breakthrough creates crops that can grow 50 perc...
___________________________________________________________________
RNA breakthrough creates crops that can grow 50 percent more
potatoes, rice
Author : thomasweiser
Score : 192 points
Date : 2021-09-03 13:30 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.sciencedaily.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.sciencedaily.com)
| naasking wrote:
| Optimizing yield often sacrifices resilience in other ways. Let's
| also avoid a monoculture.
| jessaustin wrote:
| Creating new varieties is the obvious way to "avoid a
| monoculture".
| naasking wrote:
| 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.
| jessaustin wrote:
| 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.
| naasking wrote:
| Producing enough food is not a challenge humanity faces.
| We have more than enough food. Distribution is the
| problem.
|
| Monocultural has also been a problem many times in the
| past, so calling it a "chicken little" objection is
| disingenuous.
| jessaustin wrote:
| 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.
| naasking wrote:
| Honestly, I don't see what anything you just said has
| anything to do with what I've been saying.
| devchix wrote:
| 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!
| snarf21 wrote:
| 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.
| taneq wrote:
| 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.
| deepGem wrote:
| 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 :)
| xyzzyz wrote:
| > 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.
| s5300 wrote:
| 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.
| fy20 wrote:
| 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.
| jcomis wrote:
| > _So those in US, if at all you ever feel like eating real
| vegetables hop on a 15 hour flight to Delhi or Bangalore :)_
|
| Or check out your local farmers marker or CSA
| [deleted]
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| 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.
| jjice wrote:
| 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.
| cheese_goddess wrote:
| 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.
| LightG wrote:
| Coming soon ...
|
| "RNA breakthrough revolutionises the porn industry"
| vagrantJin wrote:
| How though?
|
| I'm intrigued.
| aurizon wrote:
| 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.....
| naasking wrote:
| Real tentacle monsters.
| tobmlt wrote:
| How about nutrient content by mass, or some such measure?
|
| I skimmed the article, maybe I missed it.
|
| Aside: How easy is it to break into computational biology as a,
| say, practitioner of computational mechanics?
| dekhn wrote:
| it's not. you must relearn everything more or less from
| scratch.
| CrimpCity wrote:
| 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.
| tobmlt wrote:
| 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.
| CrimpCity wrote:
| Computational chemistry is gaining momentum you may be able
| to jump into it! Good luck!
| ch4s3 wrote:
| 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.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| 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?
| necovek wrote:
| 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 :)).
| wiz21c wrote:
| larger plants means less plants per square meter, no ?
| searine wrote:
| >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!
| jbverschoor wrote:
| We need more nutrient dense food instead of big food
| necovek wrote:
| 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).
| X6S1x6Okd1st wrote:
| > 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.
| tehjoker wrote:
| 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.
| maxFlow wrote:
| 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.
| kingkawn wrote:
| 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.
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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)
| sjwalter wrote:
| 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.
| ravenstine wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| humanure is a thing
| bluGill wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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.
| overcast wrote:
| Milorganite does just that! Comes from the Milwaukee sewage
| treatment.
| edflsafoiewq wrote:
| 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
| ravenstine wrote:
| I guess I was using the wrong keyword. That's pretty
| amazing!
| foolinaround wrote:
| 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?
| ArchD wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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.
| dekhn wrote:
| 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.
| grey-area wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Peas famously have been cultivated from a single mutation
| that does not burst when ripe. They can't reproduce without
| human intervention.
| quakeguy wrote:
| Even when birds or small mammals eat and digest the seeds?
| bluGill wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Thank you for clarifying this.
| JTbane wrote:
| >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
| GoodJokes wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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.
| RosanaAnaDana wrote:
| >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.
| shawn-butler wrote:
| >> 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
| bluGill wrote:
| > 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.
| shawn-butler wrote:
| 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.
| necovek wrote:
| You can both be right: you are talking about acreage,
| they are talking about (numbers of) farmers.
| titzer wrote:
| 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.
| jeffbee wrote:
| 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.
|
| Unclear what they expect to happen next.
| omegaworks wrote:
| Bailouts. Every American farmer relies on the generous
| crop insurance policies maintained by our government.
| bluGill wrote:
| > 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.
| imtringued wrote:
| 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.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| 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.
| 7952 wrote:
| I think most carbon in plants comes from CO2 in the air.
| simonh wrote:
| 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.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Most plants can't take nitrogen from the air. Only
| nitrogen fixing legumes do that, and only with the
| assistance of bacteria in the soil biome.
| mauzy wrote:
| 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.
| beauzero wrote:
| Also why daikon radishes are used as a "cover crop" that and
| for nematode reduction.
| yosito wrote:
| Presumably if you have more productive crops, the ratio of
| petrochemicals to food output improves.
| dwiel wrote:
| Why assume that more output doesn't come with more input?
| It doesn't seem presumable to me one way or the other.
| bluGill wrote:
| > 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.
| eloff wrote:
| 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.
| thomasweiser wrote:
| 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 (German)
| lugged wrote:
| No dig market gardens and jadam techniques are spreading. I'm
| not really that worried about stuff like this.
| furstenheim wrote:
| > 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
| wombat-man wrote:
| 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.
| bullfightonmars wrote:
| 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.
| bbarnett wrote:
| There have been loads of reports about how crops have fewer
| nutrients already.
|
| And, for example, there are many trace elements which are not
| replenished with standard fertilizer.
|
| Selenium is an example here, I think it is the Danish?, which
| have a law now, forcing it to be added to fertilizer.
|
| Bacteria don't make elements.... although I suppose they
| could free them from rocks...
| smolder wrote:
| 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.
| babatuba wrote:
| 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.
| deltasixeight wrote:
| >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.
|
| This is exactly what he is saying. His claim is that carbon
| is the resource that is depleted faster and that depletion
| of nutrients in the soil will remain constant.
| HPsquared wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| bluGill wrote:
| 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.
| bamboozled wrote:
| Is it good for humans to eat more fertiliser, pesticides etc
| ?
| bullfightonmars wrote:
| You don't eat fertilizer in your food. It is applied to the
| ground before the plants fruit. It is also water soluble
| and quickly washes away.
|
| Pesticides aee higly dependent on crop and really have
| nothing to do with this conversation.
| bamboozled wrote:
| The parent said the plants will absorb more fertilisers
| CyanBird wrote:
| 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
| 8note wrote:
| If you feed mercury to the chicken as a chixk, then eat
| it as an adult, do you get the mercury?
| idroveatrain wrote:
| https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/soil-depletion-
| an...
|
| 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.
| tynpeddler wrote:
| 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.
| idroveatrain wrote:
| 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.
| hadlock wrote:
| 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.
| criley2 wrote:
| >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.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| 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;
| postingawayonhn wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| 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.
| necovek wrote:
| 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.
| pharke wrote:
| 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.
| tehjoker wrote:
| 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.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| > 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.
| baybal2 wrote:
| > 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.
| db48x wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| baybal2 wrote:
| > - 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 wrote:
| "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.
| DubiousPusher wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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.
| andy_ppp wrote:
| How dangerous is this? Could we end up creating something
| indestructible like Japanese Knot weed except worse?
| bayesian_horse wrote:
| 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.
| i_haz_rabies wrote:
| 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.
| sfasf wrote:
| 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
| ravenstine wrote:
| 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._
| stonemetal12 wrote:
| 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.
| nitrogen wrote:
| 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.
| eplanit wrote:
| 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.
| cblconfederate wrote:
| unlike other fads though this works. TBH i don't think it s
| going to be limited to RNA, DNA is already a major target
| especially after CRISPR.
|
| It's been 6 years since the CRISPR breakthroughs , how are we
| doing on that front?
| Scoundreller wrote:
| I recently bought gluten-free bubble bath. Didn't realize
| people were eating the stuff.
| nitrogen wrote:
| Surely you've seen skin-based allergy tests. Allergies
| don't just affect the digestive system.
| user3939382 wrote:
| 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.
| taneq wrote:
| 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.
| comicjk wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hype_cycle
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| 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.
| politician wrote:
| My money's on mRNAI/ML.
| Integrape wrote:
| I hope it's dangerous enough that it ends up creating ninja
| turtles, but not enough to bring dinosaurs back from
| extinction.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| 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.
| a9h74j wrote:
| Props to everyone here wondering about soil.
|
| Speaking from the old school where fossil fuel, aquifer, and soil
| depletion are _certain_ to kick in at scale within this century.
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| 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.
| 9qlGq9aGgQMgaax wrote:
| How does this impact the soil?
| elevaet wrote:
| 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.
| imwillofficial wrote:
| And there will be no downstream consequences we discover 59 years
| from now... Like monasto pesticides causing cancer.
| Nicksil wrote:
| >Like monasto pesticides causing cancer.
|
| Has this been determined?
| jessaustin wrote:
| 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.
|
| [0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S138357
| 421...
| tehjoker wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://groovyhistory.com/silent-spring-rachel-carson-ddt
| imwillofficial wrote:
| Can't tell, monasto and folks keep settling
| favoritecolor wrote:
| 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.
|
| [0] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41587-021-00982-9
| thomasweiser wrote:
| https://www.gwern.net/docs/genetics/editing/2021-yu.pdf
| gus_massa wrote:
| 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?).
| moses-palmer wrote:
| And of you would consider it taboo, would you still if the same
| generic sequence were found in another species?
| hirundo wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://www.saps.org.uk/saps-associates/browse-q-and-a/473-h...
| aurizon wrote:
| 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..
| neltnerb wrote:
| There's a link to the original press release.
|
| https://news.uchicago.edu/story/rna-breakthrough-crops-grow-...
|
| And the actual article.
|
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41587-021-00982-9
| virtuallynathan wrote:
| Interestingly this gene, FTO, is also known as the "fat gene" in
| humans too. Must be something fairly fundamental in
| growth/proliferation.
| aaron695 wrote:
| The comments here are fucking inane and answered in the paper /
| press release.
|
| Nutrition is fine, it's been tested. Not that it matters
| anywhere. The real poor need different nutrition, not more (or
| less) of the same. And your problem is you'll be to fat, or fine,
| or need targeted nutrition supplements in a pill under some
| circumstances like vegan or pregnant or winter in a colder
| climate.
|
| It tastes fine.
|
| It's not a Chinese scam (Western uni's were involved)
|
| It wrecks the soil is a dumb statement, it improves the soil
| quality.
|
| It's a real carbon sink.
|
| Deeper roots also mean big trees in places that were hard before.
|
| It's not just potatoes and rice and foods. It might be useful on
| all types of plants, like drugs, flowers, wood, scents. They just
| tried rice and potatoes first.
|
| The only issue is it's a Noble prizing winning find. Why hasn't
| it got more press if it's true? This could be because everyone is
| fucking stupid. Or there's a big catch that no one has mentioned
| yet. 50/50 on that.
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