11–20 of 296 posts
The Land Institute has been doing amazing work for decades, and it's great to see they've done it for a common grain. Their work on Kernza was fascinating but seemed unlikely to catch on. The question will always come back to yield loss (vs. annual cultivars) vs. cost savings due to perenniality.
This is really excellent news. Annual plant cultivation at the scale we need is pretty unsustainable long term. Yes we’ve been doing it for thousands of years but only 100 or so relying on oil for our enormous yields.
I have one concern though. What happens to nutrients content of this rice over time? I mean with our current practices the land gets enough time to produce quality rice for another year. If we are going perenial what happens to soil and rice quality?
This is really excellent news. Annual plant cultivation at the scale we need is pretty unsustainable long term. Yes we’ve been doing it for thousands of years but only 100 or so relying on oil for our enormous yields.
I have one concern though. What happens to nutrients content of this rice over time? I mean with our current practices the land gets enough time to produce quality rice for another year. If we are going perenial what happens to soil and rice quality?
I know very little about rice cultivation but the flooded fields system has very different cycles and feedback from dry land grain cultivation. It varies a lot by region but rice paddies are entire ecosystems, with specific fish & eels introduced to control pests and enrich the fields. At least for the first few years iirc rice cultivation itself actually somewhat terraforms the land, improving it for rice cultivation. I'm sure there are drawbacks, caveats, and limits on that but I don't know what they are. I suspect you'd need to be a dedicated rice crop expert to have a truly informed understanding of it.
This is really excellent news. Annual plant cultivation at the scale we need is pretty unsustainable long term. Yes we’ve been doing it for thousands of years but only 100 or so relying on oil for our enormous yields.
I have one concern though. What happens to nutrients content of this rice over time? I mean with our current practices the land gets enough time to produce quality rice for another year. If we are going perenial what happens to soil and rice quality?
Perennials are such an intuitively appealing idea but a plant expends a lot of energy ensuring it can make it through the fallow/winter season successfully. Thus perennial cereals only make sense where the cost of seed and planting exceeds the impact on yield. My understanding is even at the theoretical minimum energy needed for most cereals in most growing regions to have a 90% chance of surviving perennially you ne…
They touch on, but don't get into the details on one of the more interesting aspects of perennial rice.
Rice fields are actually a huge emitter of methane. Depending on the accounting, they contribute as much to global warming as the aviation sector.
The fields emit methane when flooded, the stagnant water gets oxygen depleted, and the biomass in the soil degrades. This flooding is mostly used to control for weeds, but weeds have a much more difficult time competing when a perennial canopy already exists.
So, perennial rice may end up reduce GHG emissions substantially.
Perennials are such an intuitively appealing idea but a plant expends a lot of energy ensuring it can make it through the fallow/winter season successfully. Thus perennial cereals only make sense where the cost of seed and planting exceeds the impact on yield. My understanding is even at the theoretical minimum energy needed for most cereals in most growing regions to have a 90% chance of surviving perennially you ne…
In other words you can take a significant hit to yields and still come out ahead.
> They then spent years breeding for the desired traits until they landed on three new perennial varieties to test in the real world Good old-fashioned genetic engineering :)
> So what our colleague Duyan Tao did - he, at an early stage, around 10 days after the [by-human-hand] pollination, went in there and dissected out the very young embryo that was developing and put it in tissue culture and gave it nutrients to help it grow. And then he rescued one of these seedlings. And that was the beginning of it.
Also, the "old-fashioned genetic engineering" of selective breeding of animals/plants is...not as old-fashioned as you may think. Animal husbandry has been around for millennia (or longer), but it was an undirected process prior to the work of Robert Bakewell in the 1700s. Thanks to his groundbreaking work (and a lot of refinements from others), humanity learned how to shape the trajectories of other species. I like this quote from Bakewell's wikipedia page[0]:
> In 1700, the average weight of a bull sold for slaughter was 370 pounds (168 kg). By 1786, that weight had more than doubled to 840 pounds (381 kg).
(Obviously, humanity has gone on to be much more aggressive and successful with selective breeding. Beef cattle are now usually 1200-1400 pounds at slaughter, for example. Though, personally, I'd say we've gone "too far" when you learn about the horrors of modern, industrialized animal agriculture.)
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Bakewell_(agriculturali...