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Perennial rice: Plant once, harvest again and again

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Re: Perennial rice: Plant once, harvest again and again

#61

Post by lucb1e »

quonn wrote: post #42
lars_francke wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not an either/or thing. Germany emits 2% of all CO2, not worth us doing anything then?

Depends on the action. Gluing oneself to the street in order to prevent 5% of 2% of an industry that is rapidly shifting to EVs is questionable, for example.

Heard about someone who glued themselves to rails before a coal plant. Allegedly that prevented the equivalent of 800 years of average western european lifestyle emissions. Here I'm trying to get my own climate warming impact to be at least close to zero (and failing), and this dude has a 10x impact by doing nothing but sitting on rail for a bit. The cost is losing 9 months of their life on jail time. (Definitely an interesting proposition were it not for (1) the likely reality that some other coal/gas plant just spun harder during that time, and (2) that I'd likely get more jail time because I did it knowingly and found it worth it and as such it's not a sufficient deterrent.)

Re: Perennial rice: Plant once, harvest again and again

#62

Post by anthomtb »

efitz wrote: post #46

My wife is from Thailand. My father in law is a rice farmer. I’m unclear about the definition of “subsistence”, because you need more than rice to live, but he grows more than they need to eat and sells the rest to eke out a living. The questions in my mind are: 1. How expensive would these perennial rice strains be (patents)? The cost would have to be ridiculously low by western standards for rural Thai farmers to a…

> 1. How expensive would these perennial rice strains be (patents)? The cost would have to be ridiculously low by western standards for rural Thai farmers to afford this.

The perennial rice strain in question is developed by a non-profit: https://landinstitute.org/.

Near as I can tell, they do not patent their crops for revenue. According to https://landinstitute.org/learn/frequently-asked-questions/, they do have one of their grains trademarked and extract fees from those who use the trademark. Which strikes me as a fair play but others opinions may differ.

Re: Perennial rice: Plant once, harvest again and again

#63

Post by replygirl »

TheRealPomax wrote: post #26
melling wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The aviation sector is about 2%. Sounds like another premature optimization problem, as applied to climate change. “Premature optimization is the root of all evil“ https://wiki.c2.com/?PrematureOptimization= What about coal? What about coal?

Why do people keep pretending that we can only focus on one industry at a time? News flash: WE CAN ADDRESS MORE THAN ONE AT A TIME. What about coal? You tell me, what part of fixing rice production interferes with shutting down coal mining? Because as far as anyone can tell, the answer is not a single part.

we've been proving since before the kyoto protocol that we really aren't capable of addressing much at once. the first clean air act was 60 years ago, while the paris agreement's net-zero horizon is 27 years out. i don't trust a many-pronged approach because i already live with the consequences of its failure

Re: Perennial rice: Plant once, harvest again and again

#64

Post by tfourb »

WirelessGigabit wrote: post #21

Won't yields go down eventually as the soil becomes more and more degraded as the same nutrients are extracted? I'm assuming you need to find a way to make up for that. Something that's hard to do if you think about how grain is planted. Can't really drive over it with a tractor once it has a certain height. Even if you take off only the parts you need and leave the rest in place.

Perennial plants are much more effective at extracting nutrients because of more established root systems. Not tilling the field also allows for complex plant/fungi communities to develop which will increase moisture and nutrient levels in the soil. Put simply: you don’t need to fertilize a forest or other naturally occurring ecosystems and those are built around perennial plants. The closer you get back to a functioning ecosystem, the less reliant you’ll be on external inputs.

Re: Perennial rice: Plant once, harvest again and again

#65

Post by xyzzyz »

crazygringo wrote: post #54
xyzzyz wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So, perennial rice may end up reduce GHG emissions substantially. Not really. These GHG emissions from rice are in steady state with the amount of CO2 and methane in the atmosphere. They do not add additional GHG to the atmosphere the way burning fossil fuel do. When you burn fossil fuels, the carbon atoms released into atmosphere have been captured from the atmosphere millions years ago. When weeds and other organ…

Can you elaborate on this? Do you mean that rice plants are actually absorbing methane earlier on, so they're just releasing the same amount? Or are they actually producing methane from other molecules, like water and carbon dioxide? Because yes, methane breaks down in the atmosphere into H2O and CO2 so you could view it as a cycle, but the more rice there is the higher the steady state methane in the atmosphere is,…

Yes, the whole point is that it is a cycle. The fields don’t affect by much the total number of carbon atoms in the atmosphere. Without the fields, other plants would grow there, then die, decay, and release carbon into atmosphere.

At best, growing rice and flooding fields might affect the balance between the amount of methane and amount of CO2 in the steady state, but this is of no practical consequence, because the methane will not accumulate year over year, like the emissions from fossil fuels do.

Suppose we grow twice as much rice as we do now. This means that the steady state will have twice as much methane coming from the fields as it has now. Hell, let’s actually assume that all existing methane in atmosphere is from rice fields, and actually increase amount of methane in atmosphere by a factor of 2. What is the impact to the climate, according to our current models? Well, this is equivalent to less than 10% increase in total CO2 in the atmosphere. That’s like a difference between 2000 and 2020, which is to say, almost unobservable — and remember I assumed we increase total methane by factor of 2, not just methane from the fields.

Re: Perennial rice: Plant once, harvest again and again

#66

Post by tfourb »

quaintdev wrote: post #10
efields wrote: post #8

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?

Perennial plants are much more effective at extracting nutrients because of more established root systems. Not tilling the field also allows for complex plant/fungi communities to develop which will increase moisture and nutrient levels in the soil. Put simply: you don’t need to fertilize a forest or other naturally occurring ecosystems and those are built around perennial plants. The closer you get back to a functioning ecosystem, the less resist you’ll be on external inputs.

Re: Perennial rice: Plant once, harvest again and again

#67

Post by hosh »

twawaaay wrote: post #37
chris_va wrote: post #18

(disclaimer that I manage a climate group, but not a rice expert) 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 s…

I am not convinced (I grew up on a farm). It is usually harder to get rid of any weeds when your crop is growing on the field. After harvest, you just get rid of everything, turn the soil (but I don't know anything about rice farming) and you kinda get a fresh start. ON THE OTHER HAND, we already have robots that can easily identify weeds with a camera and zap them with lasers or other shit. Which just seems so much…

What about the people practicing permaculture and regenerative agriculture? There's been a big movement there to perennialize crops, and there are well-known patterns and practices from there to work with perennials.

Re: Perennial rice: Plant once, harvest again and again

#68

Post by lkbm »

melling wrote: post #30
insane_dreamer wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The need to eliminate coal emissions does not preclude the need to eliminate emissions from other sources.

I suppose if we didn’t wait decades to eliminate the big problems, we’d have more time to worry about the smaller problems. A 100 years of coal emissions is 1000 years of rice.

Did the people working on rice hamper the work on coal? Or is the issue that they're wasting their time by doing anything but trying to get rid of coal? As best I can tell, neither you nor I are working on coal either.

Re: Perennial rice: Plant once, harvest again and again

#69

Post by ccooffee »

NikolaNovak wrote: post #34
ccooffee wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, they've got fancy procedures in there, too: > 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…

Arr we saying that cattle today are 4 times the weight of 400yrs ago?

That's a very good point. I'm currently suspecting that the numbers quoted in Blakewell's article are the "hot carcass" weight (i.e. subtracting bone, head, and organs from the total weight). An Aurochs (wild ancestor of domesticated cattle) could reach 1300 lbs in the 1500s (and possibly in excess of 3300 lbs prior to recorded history, according to archaeological finds)[0].

If the numbers are hot-carcass weight, we would be seeing:

1700: 370 lbs, 1789: 840 lbs, 2020: 880 lbs [1]

But, uhh, that doesn't feel right either. I think that wikipedia page could use some additional citations, but I'm struggling to find useful numbers with which to update.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurochs

[1] https://beef.unl.edu/beefwatch/2020/how-many-pounds-meat-can...

Re: Perennial rice: Plant once, harvest again and again

#70

Post by CuriouslyC »

twawaaay wrote: post #37
chris_va wrote: post #18

(disclaimer that I manage a climate group, but not a rice expert) 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 s…

I am not convinced (I grew up on a farm). It is usually harder to get rid of any weeds when your crop is growing on the field. After harvest, you just get rid of everything, turn the soil (but I don't know anything about rice farming) and you kinda get a fresh start. ON THE OTHER HAND, we already have robots that can easily identify weeds with a camera and zap them with lasers or other shit. Which just seems so much…

Industrial farming of the sort you describe is destroying arable land, and relying on petrochemicals and strip mines to keep marginal land on life support. Properly managing the land using a mix of perennial crops and occasional rotation to pasture restores the soil, builds fertility, and requires very little in the way of inputs. Healthy plants in a polyculture setup where niches have been pre-filled also resist weed invasion better than monocultures.

We do a lot of stupid shit in farming for the sole reason that farm machinery is specialized, and proper land management costs more (in the short run, in the long run the land is much more productive).

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