Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

RNA breakthrough creates crops that can grow 50 percent more potatoes, rice

sciencedaily.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 173 posts

Re: RNA breakthrough creates crops that can grow 50 percent more potatoes, rice

#111

Post by idiotsecant »

HPsquared wrote: post #80
babatuba wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ins…

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.

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.

Re: RNA breakthrough creates crops that can grow 50 percent more potatoes, rice

#112

Post by overcast »

ravenstine wrote: post #99
necovek wrote: post #21

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 nat…

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 w…

Milorganite does just that! Comes from the Milwaukee sewage treatment.

Re: RNA breakthrough creates crops that can grow 50 percent more potatoes, rice

#113

Post by jeffbee »

RosanaAnaDana wrote: post #110
foxyv wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pet…

>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…

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.

Re: RNA breakthrough creates crops that can grow 50 percent more potatoes, rice

#114

Post by ravenstine »

sfasf wrote: post #5
andy_ppp wrote: post #2

How dangerous is this? Could we end up creating something indestructible like Japanese Knot weed except worse?

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…

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.

Re: RNA breakthrough creates crops that can grow 50 percent more potatoes, rice

#115

Post by pjc50 »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #78

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.

The politics of land distribution are even worse, with the added problem of being much more permanent.

Re: RNA breakthrough creates crops that can grow 50 percent more potatoes, rice

#116

Post by X6S1x6Okd1st »

necovek wrote: post #21

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 nat…

> 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.

Re: RNA breakthrough creates crops that can grow 50 percent more potatoes, rice

#117

Post by postingawayonhn »

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #77
postingawayonhn wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be great if we could produce the same amount of food on less land. Low quality land can be returned to nature.

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.

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.

Re: RNA breakthrough creates crops that can grow 50 percent more potatoes, rice

#118

Post by titzer »

RosanaAnaDana wrote: post #110
foxyv wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pet…

>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…

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.

Re: RNA breakthrough creates crops that can grow 50 percent more potatoes, rice

#119

Post by dwiel »

yosito wrote: post #84
foxyv wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pet…

Presumably if you have more productive crops, the ratio of petrochemicals to food output improves.

Why assume that more output doesn't come with more input? It doesn't seem presumable to me one way or the other.

Re: RNA breakthrough creates crops that can grow 50 percent more potatoes, rice

#120

Post by beauzero »

foxyv wrote: post #40
necovek wrote: post #21

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 nat…

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 pet…

Also why daikon radishes are used as a "cover crop" that and for nematode reduction.
Post reply on HN