
A biotechnology dream: nitrogen-fixing cereal crops - jelliclesfarm
http://news.mit.edu/2020/making-real-biotechnology-dream-nitrogen-fixing-cereal-crops-0110
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solomonb
Or you don't monocrop. Plant legumes along with your cereal crops and shift
focus from extracting value from the soil to cultivating soil health/wealth.

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empath75
One of the reasons you monocrop is that it makes it easier to harvest and
plant with machines— starting with the invention of the plow, probably, but
imagine if we developed intelligent robotic plant harvesters that could tend
to entire ecosystems, instead.

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adrianN
How about we try to improve the machines so that they work on healthy fields
instead of finding ways to engineer crops that suck the Earth dry quicker.

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mschuster91
It doesn't work this way. Healthy fields require regular, extended downtimes
to regenerate. You can't "fix" a depleted soil, this is something that nature
must do alone.

The only fix is to legally mandate (or incentivize by subsidies) that soil
gets to regenerate. The problem is that this will reduce the amount of usable
agrarian fields by a _massive_ amount and so prices will rise - which
governments want to avoid like the plague. What they ignore: if we continue
down that path the soil is fucked beyond repair in decades...

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christophilus
Given how much we waste, I wonder if it would really affect prices much. Also,
you can regenerate land with permaculture, but trying to do permaculture at
scale or with automation would be pretty challenging.

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aazaa
> Eighty percent of chemical nitrogen fertilizers today are made using the
> Haber-Borsch process, which involves transforming nitrile gas into ammonia.

Two errors in one sentence. It's the "Haber-Bosch process", and it transforms
nitrogen gas into ammonia.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process)

~~~
sleepyK
That's high school chemistry. Surprised people are still getting it wrong.

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Animats
There was an article on HN a few months back about some variant of maize found
in southern Mexico which can fix nitrogen. The trouble is that it makes the
plant less efficient - only one crop per year, and requires a hot climate.

There's an overhead cost to plants that can fix nitrogen. It's good to have
that capability, though; it's useful for areas with lots of arable land and
sun but no good fertilizer source.

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njarboe
Hopefully, if this comes to fruition, the resultant GMO plants can be looked
at on its own merits instead of just being labeled "GMO bad" and not used.

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pjc50
That depends on the ownership structure, I think.

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jl2718
This may be naive, but I would assume better results from the strategy of
engineering the bacteria rather than the chloroplasts/mitochondria. The latter
are massively conserved, efficiently coded, and take a long time to iterate
along with the host. Bacteria evolve quickly and we have great tools for
engineering them. The right variants might already exist naturally; you just
need to find a selection mechanism. Alternatively, perhaps getting the crop to
express the symbiotic byproduct of legumes might be simpler. Does anybody have
insight as to why the Voigt lab chose to do it that way?

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text70
The Voight lab does it this way because they are a plant engineering lab and
they have a grant to try out the experiments. Simple as that.

You would be right to assume that engineering the bacteria would be easier.
There are already companies that work to provide specialized nitrogen-fixing
bacteria strains for agricultural use. However governmental regulations for
using a genetically modified bacteria vs a genetically modified plant for
widespread agriculture use are different.

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mmettler
There are already some startups working on this, including Pivot Bio
(nitrogen-fixing for corn using microbiomes in the soil):
[https://www.pivotbio.com/](https://www.pivotbio.com/)

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MrBuddyCasino
My stance on GMOs changed from pro to very sceptical when I got acquainted
with the Talebian viewpoint: [https://medium.com/the-physics-arxiv-
blog/genetically-modifi...](https://medium.com/the-physics-arxiv-
blog/genetically-modified-organisms-risk-global-ruin-says-black-swan-
author-e8836fa7d78)

Anyone got a good counter argument besides the generic "classical breeding
isn't acually safer", which I don't buy without further detailing? The reason
I'm asking is that over the years, I was often sceptical about his opinions
and the way he presented them, but in the end Taleb always turned out to be
right on the few predictions he did make, which is no small feat. If GMOs
really are a global systemic risk, this would be an important science fact to
get right, and I want to hear all sides. I figured there should be some
competent people on HN.

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pm90
It’s a valid perspective. If there were to be a contagious disease that could
rapidly spread via eg spores, it could wipe out the entire population of these
crops. I am hoping that various ag labs around the country store a diversity
of cereal grains.

That being said, it’s unlikely that GMO crops will stop being popular anytime
soon. The best we can hope for is that labs get really good and fast at
producing GM crops so that when the disease eventually hits, the lab/company
can quickly produce a disease resistant variety.

The population of the world is growing rapidly. We absolutely do need highest
yielding food crops if we are to not cut down every forest to just feed
everyone.

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riffraff
> The population of the world is growing rapidly. We absolutely do need
> highest yielding food crops if we are to not cut down every forest to just
> feed everyone.

Do we really need GMO for this though? The EU is more or less self-
sufficient[0] without GMO production. It is true it relies on GM imports (soy,
rice) but it also exports a ton of other stuff.

I am not against GM crops, but I'm not unconvinced they are the only option.

Africa is (was? I'm not up to date) a net food importer, but it has crop
yields 5 times lower then US/EU/Asia, which could also be improved by other
means such as better land management.

[0]
[http://register.consilium.europa.eu/doc/srv?l=EN&f=ST%201336...](http://register.consilium.europa.eu/doc/srv?l=EN&f=ST%2013364%202014%20INIT)

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RocketSyntax
"Cleaning up this pollution and paying for the public health and environmental
damage costs the United States $157 billion annually."

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AngryData
Ill believe it when I see it, cereal crops take an ass ton of nitrogen
fertilizer to flourish and that fertilizer takes a lot of energy. Maybe im
wrong but I feel like increases in nitrogen self-sufficiency will either A.
Not be a huge change in fertilizer usage or B. Result in a an overall loss of
yield as the energy goes towards nitrogen production. Hopefully im wrong.

The science is good, I just don't think the people using it care enough about
good science for that to matter, they will still pump it full of just as much
nitrogen before except now they get like .005% higher yield. So they can give
their corporate administrators a bonus for utilizing the work and efforts of
others and we get jack shit because their object is producing money, not
making as much food as possible with the least amount of resources.

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Turing_Machine
> I just don't think the people using it care enough about good science for
> that to matter,

They care about money.

> they will still pump it full of just as much nitrogen before except now they
> get like .005% higher yield.

Why on earth would they do that? Fertilizer is _expensive_ , dude.

~~~
protomyth
Yep, the farmer would be so happy to not have to deal with fertilizer.

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nyolfen
this made the rounds a while back, but there’s an heirloom maize strain from
mexico that fixes its own nitrogen from the air with a slime membrane:

[https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/corn-future-
hu...](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/corn-future-hundreds-
years-old-and-makes-its-own-mucus-180969972/)

really mind-blowing stuff.

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mrfusion
I’ve always been surprised by the huge amounts plants can grow with so little
nitrogen. I never underdtood how their cells could get enough amino acids.

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thaumasiotes
Most plants don't contain much protein. The exceptions are legumes (which I
believe are also the nitrogen fixers) and nuts -- but even then, the high-
protein content is the seeds, not the plant.

Where animals are made of protein, plants are made of carbohydrates. They're a
different form of life.

Don't be fooled by the Whole Foods post claiming "yes, plants have protein". (
[https://www.wholefoodsmarket.com/blog/whole-story/yes-
plants...](https://www.wholefoodsmarket.com/blog/whole-story/yes-plants-have-
protein) ) They proudly tell you that broccoli has more protein per calorie
than steak. That's true. Broccoli also has about 10% the protein content of
steak by mass. Steak is an efficient food with a lot of calories. Broccoli is
a plant.

~~~
mrfusion
Right on all that.

But plants are made of cells too and cells need amino acids for all the
machinery of life. So how do they get away with so much less than animal
cells?

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thaumasiotes
In addition to using proteins for "all the machinery of life", animal cells
use them extensively for purely structural reasons. Plants don't do this, so
they need much less protein than animals do.

This is basically just a repeat of my earlier comment, because I don't really
understand what you're asking about. I don't see why it's a mystery that an
organism which uses a lot of protein needs to produce much more protein than
another organism which uses very little protein.

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jacoblambda
Not OP but as you seem to be better informed with regard to cellular biology
than me I am curious about something and figured this is a good time and place
to ask.

\- Isn't part of the reason that plant cells contain so much less protein by
mass because plant cells are larger and a large portion of their mass is a
vacuole for storing carbohydrates and water?

\- How much lower is the protein content per cell in plant cells vs animal
cells?

\- What organelles or increased concentration of organelles cause animal cells
to contain more protein than plant cells if it isn't just that vacuoles skew
the results?

\- If it isn't a difference in the cells, is it just a difference in organ
structure between plants and animals?

Note: Not trying to be snarky, legitimately interested in this as I have
always has a passing fascination in cellular biology.

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maxerickson
Plants use the carbohydrates for structure (cellulose).

I'm not trying to be snarky either, if you are more than passingly interested,
go get a textbook and read through it. It'll answer questions you have yet to
think to ask.

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dang
Url changed from [https://modernfarmer.com/2020/01/mit-is-getting-closer-to-
ce...](https://modernfarmer.com/2020/01/mit-is-getting-closer-to-cereal-crops-
that-require-no-fertilizer/), which points to this.

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chabes
Why spend so much money and resources to make monocropping feasible? Just
accept that it’s an unsustainable way to produce food for a growing human
population.

If a fraction of that money went towards research of alternative agricultural
practices, we wouldn’t have to worry about how to produce more nitrogen while
simultaneously dealing with the detrimental effects of nitrogen pollution, as
we are currently

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susijdjdjxa
The funding for this research is minuscule fraction compared to the
agriculture industry. Exploring this part of the potential solution space is
worthwhile, even if it doesn’t end up being the best way forward. We need to
look into all the options to have a chance at finding out what works best.
This article is actually about research of an an alternative agricultural
process so it’s odd to naysay it in the same comment.

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chabes
“Alternative practices” as in an alternative to conventional monoculture. This
is just another attempt to fix monoculture, because it’s not working

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Turing_Machine
It's working just fine.

When was the last famine in the United States? When was the last famine
anywhere on the planet that wasn't due to some kind of fucked-up government?

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SuoDuanDao
...Till the fossil fuels run out.

Drawing down savings to pay the mortgage works just fine too, until they run
out. There being no obvious alternatives doesn't mean you won't end up
homeless.

