
The Future of Food Looks Small, Dense, and Bushy - jelliclesfarm
http://cshl.nautil.us/article/516/the-future-of-food-looks-small-dense-and-very-bushy
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James_Henry
I'm really excited for the day that I can grow a decent portion of my food in
my sunroom. I'd pay a lot for one of Kwon's tomato plants. Perhaps I'll have
to figure out how to engineer them myself because of long FDA processes
though.

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jelliclesfarm
It’s easy. We trialed 75 varieties in my farm.. with just old fashioned plant
breeding by hand. Trial and error. We bred tomatoes with thin skin ..thick
skin..cherry toms that are determinate as well as indeterminate. Those that
can be harvested earlier and instead of picking all season long..we could
plant, harvest whole plant and then simply replant. Disease would be greatly
controlled. I was also interested in breeding varieties suitable for robots
and automated farms..instead of delicate hand picking, we’d just change traits
so it can have thicker skins, shaped like cherry tomatoes(highest margin in
tomatoes..current mechanization is only for canning varieties)

Multiple harvests is the way to go for automated farms and compact plants.
When you have robots picking, labour costs dont matter. Disease incidence and
spread is easy to control and varieties can be greatly enhanced as each
planting can be a different tomato.

Takes at least 7 generations..breeding old fashioned way by hand. If
alternated between Mexico and Ca, we can get it ready in 3 years and in about
2 years, of breeding is outsourced to China(they do it in glasshouses)

Crispr would be a game changer. I would like to see salt water tolerant plant
varieties. Saline Ag is going to be the future.

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James_Henry
Really interesting stuff. I didn't realize that breeding could show meaningful
results as quickly as 2 or 3 years through modern techniques. I think I'll
have to read up on some of the older techniques along with looking more into
the limits of at-home CRISPR (and probably waiting years until it is
feasible).

