This sort of news is a real test of whether the folks who say we are in a climate or food or energy or nitrogen emergency really believe what they are saying.
Or not.
Following on June 10's "Want To Be A Trillionaire? Find A Cost-Effective Process To Fertilize Using Alternative Nitrogen Fixation"
From Reason Magazine, August 10:
Thanks to some amazing recent crop biotech breakthroughs
A recent spate of crop biotech breakthroughs presage a New Green Revolution that will boost crop production, shrink agriculture's environmental footprint, help us weather future climate change, and provide better nutrition for the world's growing population.
The first Green Revolution was generated through the crop breeding successes pioneered by agronomist Norman Borlaug back in the 1960s. The high-yielding dwarf wheat varieties bred by Borlaug and his team more than doubled grain yields. The Green Revolution averted the global famines confidently predicted for the 1970s by population doomsters like Stanford entomologist Paul Ehrlich. Other crop breeders using Borlaug's insights boosted yields for other staple grains. Since 1961, global cereal production has increased 400 percent while the world population grew by 260 percent. Borlaug was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 for his accomplishments. Of course, the disruptions of the COVID-19 pandemic and Russia's invasion of Ukraine are currently roiling grain and fertilizer supplies.
Borlaug needed 20 years of painstaking crossbreeding to develop his high-yield and disease-resistant wheat varieties. Today, crop breeders are taking advantage of the tools of modern biotechnology that can dramatically increase the rate at which yields increase and drought- and disease-resistance can be imbued in crops.
The Green Revolution's crops required increased fertilizer applications to achieve their higher yields. However, fertilizers have some ecologically deleterious side effects. For example, the surface runoff of nitrogen and other fertilizers not absorbed by crops spurs the growth of harmful alga in rivers, lakes, and coastal areas. In addition, excess nitrogen fertilizer gets broken down by soil bacteria such that there are rising atmospheric concentrations of the greenhouse gas nitrous oxide, which, pound for pound, has 300 times the global warming potential of carbon dioxide.
The good news is that in the last month, two teams of modern plant breeders have made breakthroughs that will dramatically cut the amount of nitrogen fertilizers crops need for grain production. In July, Chinese researchers reported the development of "supercharged" rice and wheat crops, which they achieved by doubling the expression of a regulatory gene that increases nitrogen uptake by four- to fivefold and enhances photosynthesis. In field trials, the yields of the modified rice were 40 to 70 percent higher than those of the conventional varieties. One upshot is that farmers can grow more food on less land using fewer costly inputs.
Some crops like soybeans and alfalfa get most of the nitrogen fertilizer they need through their symbiotic relationship with nitrogen-fixing soil bacteria. Soybeans supply the bacteria living on their roots with sugars, and the bacteria in turn take nitrogen from the air and turn it into nitrate and ammonia fertilizers for the plants. However, nitrogen-fixing bacteria do not colonize the roots of cereal crops....
....MUCH MORE
The second team is at the University of California-Davis. We happend to catch their work in August 2018's "Can We Grow One of the World's Largest Food Crops Without Fertilizer?"
For the seven or eight thousand years before the nineteenth century all crop production was organic and low yields made the food supply chains more precarious which meant small changes in the weather had dramatic effects on the human population which meant famines caused by nature. Since the 1880's almost all famines, despite having a crop failure at their base, have been caused by governments in one way or another.
In the case of the Irish famines you could even extend that "1880's" back another forty-odd years as the British landlords and bureaucrats at minimum turned their backs on the starving people and in a less charitable view actually hastened the deaths of hundreds of thousands.
And then there was Borlaug. When he was awarded the Nobel peace prize it was estimated he had saved over one billion people from starvation.
On the flip side it was argued his "Green Revolution" facilitated the overpopulation of the earth by humans and was thus to a great extent responsible for all the ecological destruction we've seen since the late 1960's.
If interested see:
"Can Planet Earth Feed 10 Billion People?"
"Amber Waves: The Extraordinary Biography of Wheat"
Out Standing in His Field: John Deere Profit Tops Estimates on Farm Equipment Demand, Market Wants More (DE)I first heard the "Out standing..." line in reference to wheat agronomist Norman Borlaug who went on to win the Nobel Peace Prize for preventing up to one billion premature deaths.
The Peace prize committee had different criteria in 1970.
We are finding some serious problems with the input intensive approach that he favored but judged by the standards of the time his work was miraculous.
On a completely different subject:
Norman Borlaug would have to be in the running for most lives saved but the sheer variety of Hillerman's vaccines is just remarkable.
