[HN Gopher] Electro-agriculture: Revolutionizing farming for a s...
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Electro-agriculture: Revolutionizing farming for a sustainable
future
Author : foota
Score : 83 points
Date : 2024-10-25 18:46 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.cell.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.cell.com)
| Aspos wrote:
| For those wondering what electro-ag is: convert CO2 into acetate
| --a carbon-rich compound that can fuel crop growth without
| sunlight.
| westurner wrote:
| "Electro-ag"
|
| "Electronic soil boosts crop growth" (2023)
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38767561#38768499 :
|
| > _Electroculture_
|
| > "Electrical currents associated with arbuscular mycorrhizal
| interactions" (1995)
| https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=3517382204909176031...
|
| Electrotropism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrotropism
| haccount wrote:
| What the op article suggests is using GMO plants that no
| longer use photosynthesis but instead drive their metabolism
| based on products derived from CO2 electrolysis and simple
| chemical man made compounds.
|
| Plant-made plants, like industrial chemical plant-made.
| westurner wrote:
| Is that more efficient than [solar-powered] industrial
| production processes that synthesize directly from CO2?
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40914350#40959068
|
| What about topsoil depletion and compost production?
| gene-h wrote:
| It's 4x more efficient at solar to food production than
| regular plants with the potential to get a 10x
| improvement.
| westurner wrote:
| What are the downsides?
|
| I read that it was [Vitamin E] acetate in carts that was
| causing EVALI lung conditions?
|
| What nutrients does it require synthetic or natural
| production of, and how sustainable are those processes?
|
| Have the given organisms co-evolved with earth ecology
| for millions of billions of years?
|
| Acetate > Biology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acetate
| pfdietz wrote:
| PV modules don't grow themselves. Also, the CO2 has to be
| captured somehow. Plants double as CO2 collectors.
|
| An upside is vastly lower water requirements, since no
| transpiration.
| cyberax wrote:
| > Plant-made plants, like industrial chemical plant-made.
|
| And what's wrong with that?
| Windchaser wrote:
| Hmm, this article is about using electricity and CO2/H2O to
| make chemical feedstocks that would grow plants. The plants
| would "eat" the chemical feedstocks, instead of "eating"
| light.
|
| It's not about using electric fields to direct plant growth;
| that's a different thing
| westurner wrote:
| Perhaps electro-agriculture is an all-encompassing term, or
| a new usage in this context
| haccount wrote:
| It's technically impressive in a way but it's also a dystopian
| hellscape enabler technology.
|
| The article even takes the opportunity to mention that It could
| be useful during "solar geo engineering events and nuclear
| winter". What kind of insane geo engineering event is envisioned
| where food crops cannot grow under natural sunlight and all food
| we eat is from GMO plants and mushrooms only?
|
| Did I mention the health inspiring carbon-monoxide step in the
| electrolysis process to produce the food for the plants? I did
| now.
| zemvpferreira wrote:
| A thousand atomic bombs are a dystopian hellscape enabler
| technology. Food that can grow without sunshine is a dystopian
| hellscape survival technology.
|
| You could not have this more backwards.
|
| EDIT: Unless you mean that someone would launch 1000 nukes on
| the belief that they could survive the impending hellscape only
| because of electro-ag mushrooms which is a possibility I strain
| to believe.
| haccount wrote:
| Harvesting Monsanto(tm) Dark-gro(tm) leafless GMO tomatoes
| with a cold LED headlamp in an underground bunker to the
| background hum of the electrolysis system that churns out
| megawatts worth of carbon monoxide feedstock.
|
| Not dystopian?
| Windchaser wrote:
| I think he's saying that the nuclear winter is the
| dystopian scenario. The technology that allows you to
| _survive_ the dystopia is not, by itself, dystopian. The
| technology that _creates_ the dystopia (like nuclear
| weapons) are dystopian.
|
| Worth noting that this same technology could let us reduce
| US agricultural land use by ~80-90% and rewild those same
| lands. Is having vast tracts of unspoiled wilderness
| "dystopian"?
| mometsi wrote:
| Look at lucky Mr haccount here, with his fancy brand-name
| produce. You call that dystopian? Here we just slurp our
| 10% white vinegar straight out of the acetate reactor for
| 300 kcal per liter.
| Qwertious wrote:
| If the tomatoes are a dystopian enabling technology there,
| then so is the cold LED headlamp.
| nomel wrote:
| > What kind of insane geo engineering event is envisioned where
| food crops cannot grow under natural sunlight
|
| For off-world, being able to dig a big hole, plug the leaks for
| atmosphere, and grow plants in it seems like it could be
| useful.
| goda90 wrote:
| Would a heterotrophic adult plant have all the same micro-
| nutrients that a photoautotrophic adult plant has? I can imagine
| while one might grow lots of cellulose, maybe there are chemicals
| that just end up never being made by the plant cells or taken up
| via the roots in those conditions.
|
| I'm reminded of suggestions to point a fan at hydroponic herbs in
| order to enhance flavor. Just water, air, light, and dissolved
| nutrients isn't enough for them to be delicious. The plant needs
| some degree of stress or variation while growing.
| roughly wrote:
| This is known among wine growers as well - you need to stress
| the plant to get interesting grapes, otherwise you just get
| sugar water.
| adrian_b wrote:
| Most likely not, but it is wrong to expect to get all the
| nutrients from a single food source. Some nutrients are
| required in much greater quantities than the others, so after
| obtaining them it becomes much easier to obtain the rest of the
| nutrients. Food should be cooked by mixing many ingredients,
| with each providing only some of what is needed.
|
| For example you can satisfy your energy needs with some starchy
| seeds, e.g. maize or rice and with some fat source, for
| instance olive oil. This would represent the bulk of the dry
| mass of food needed daily. Such food ingredients do not have to
| provide anything else but energy (i.e. mostly glucose and oleic
| acid). If they also provide other nutrients, that is just a
| bonus.
|
| The daily needs of protein could be satisfied e.g. with up to
| 100 grams of high-quality protein (like whey protein or egg-
| white protein) produced by a culture of a genetically-modified
| fungus (such genetically-modified strains of the Trichoderma
| fungus already exist). That fungus culture does not need to
| produce anything else but protein.
|
| With the previous food ingredients providing the nutrients
| required in large quantities, the rest of the food ingredients
| used for cooking (e.g. various vegetables or various animal
| products, if one prefers those) could be chosen only for
| improving the taste and for providing the small amounts of
| essential fatty acids, vitamins and minerals that are needed.
| beedeebeedee wrote:
| I'm not completely sold on it, but one of my friends is adamant
| that this approach powered by hydrogen deposits make all of our
| climate change issues (and other societal issues) into non-
| issues. I just wouldn't want it if it isn't done equitably.
|
| https://www.usgs.gov/news/featured-story/potential-geologic-...
| goda90 wrote:
| At a global industrial scale, we're pulling lots of carbon out
| of the ground for energy and its ending up as carbon dioxide in
| the atmosphere with big consequences. We should also consider
| the implications of pulling hydrogen out of the ground at
| global industrial scales and it ending up as water vapor,
| trapping atmospheric oxygen in it. Generated hydrogen at least
| has a closed loop on water and oxygen from the atmosphere.
| beedeebeedee wrote:
| That's a good point. I'm a little hesitant about it being so
| easy for us to just switch to a different fuel (without a lot
| of deep reflection and cultural change), and ending up with a
| different set of unforeseen (or foreseen but ignored)
| catastrophic consequences.
| wmanley wrote:
| I don't think this would be such an issue. There's about 500x
| as much oxygen in the air as carbon dioxide.
|
| Increasing the amount of carbon dioxide by 140ppm is a 50%
| increase in carbon dioxide levels since pre industrial times.
|
| Reducing the about of oxygen, currently at 209,000ppm, by
| 140ppm seems like it would have a negligible effect.
|
| The far greater likely issue with natural hydrogen is that we
| simply don't find any deposits of it that are both
| significant and economically extractable. And in the mean
| time we use it as an excuse to not do anything about carbon
| emissions.
| Qwertious wrote:
| We pull massive amounts of oxides out of the ground and dump
| the oxygen too. Iron ore is mostly oxides, for instance.
| pfdietz wrote:
| Long term, all the digging we're doing is pulling down
| atmospheric O2, by exposing ferrous iron and reduced
| sulfides, manganese, etc. to oxidation. The amount of crust
| that would have to be fully oxidized to deplete all
| atmospheric O2 is surprisingly small, I think just a few
| hundred meters. Atmospheric O2 is on quite a small scale
| compared to the reducing power of Earth as a whole.
| cyberax wrote:
| There are no significant hydrogen deposits. Otherwise, we would
| have long discovered at least some of them.
|
| Another possibility worth investigating is direct electricity-
| driven synthesis:
| https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn25894-meet-the-electr...
| tfourb wrote:
| The lengths some people will go to to avoid dealing with nature
| ...
|
| It is pretty preposterous to claim something is "sustainable"
| that will use man made energy when the alternative is a natural
| process powered by the sun, for free. There are plenty of
| agricultural systems out there that use a fraction of the energy
| required by conventional industrialized agriculture while still
| being sufficiently productive.
| waynenilsen wrote:
| Electricity to food via synthetic chemistry feels inevitable.
| Casey Handmer has discussed in detail. Probably starts out with
| electricity + air to ammonia first.
| krunck wrote:
| > The demand for food production is intensifying with a rapidly
| growing population, yet farmers around the world face
| unprecedented challenges owing to shifting climatic conditions.
|
| How about we stop creating so many people? We don't have to eat
| vat grown slop if we just realize that there is a limited
| capacity for this planet to provide us with real, nutritious
| food.
| CorrectHorseBat wrote:
| That's a solved problem, the population is projected to peak
| before the end of the century.
| trebligdivad wrote:
| It's a shame it needs GM; I initially thought they were targeting
| producing an intermediate that they could just add to standard
| plants.
| Animats wrote:
| That's a terrible paper. More than half of it is a puff piece on
| how great it would be if this works. Where's the new work?
|
| The process they're writing about seems to be this one: "A hybrid
| inorganic-biological artificial photosynthesis system for energy-
| efficient food production" (2022), in "Nature Food"[1] (I had no
| idea there was a "Nature Food" journal.) The actual conclusion
| there was that they could force algae growth with this approach,
| but when they tried lettuce, "... plant growth was largely
| inhibited by acetate at concentrations that would have measurably
| increased plant biomass, although some growth parameters such as
| roots showed increased growth ... Lettuce plants grown with
| electrolyser-produced effluent ... added to reach a final media
| concentration of 1.0 mM acetate did not show additional growth
| inhibition in plant weight or leaf number from secondary
| electrolysis products Plant tolerance and consumption of acetate
| as a heterotrophic energy source will need to be increased to
| fully decouple plants from biological photosynthesis."
|
| So, to make this work, it's necessary to bioengineer new food
| plants that will grow usefully on acetate-enriched water. That's
| a big project. It's a whole new food chain.
|
| Or you can grow algae and make various products of fermentation,
| and ultraprocess those into something edible. The Impossible
| Burger's bloody meat "heme" is a product of fermentation of a
| genetically engineered organism. That's just a flavoring. The
| product is mostly made from peas and soy.
|
| [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s43016-022-00530-x
| truyen22 wrote:
| Truyen22
| AngryData wrote:
| It is interesting work, but I feel like this is mostly just
| marketting fluff. Even reducing energy cost by 75% by switching
| from photosythesis to some hypothetical chemical food, that still
| comes out to about 400,000 watts per acre for 16 hours a day.
| Because using high efficiency grow LEDs you need 1.5 million
| watts minimum per acre for staple crops.
|
| I don't see how we are anywhere even close to the energy
| requirements needed for vertical farming to be anything but a
| gimmick for multiple decades.
| kleton wrote:
| Mammals can safely get a pretty large fraction of their carbon
| and energy from acetic acid directly.
| guiriduro wrote:
| No light? What are they expecting to grow, rhubarb and mushrooms?
| torlok wrote:
| I can't imagine that building facilities and capturing resources
| to funnel them into underground farms is more efficient than
| using the sun, rain, and soil that's already there. With modern
| farming techniques, you can capture more carbon dioxide in the
| ground than you produce, and you can create habitats for
| biodiversity that help dealing with the more unstable climate.
| But that means more effort in food production, and thus more
| expensive food. Also you can't sell that idea to VCs or
| billionaires building doomsday bunkers.
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