> Scientists have accomplished a key step in the long-term ambition to engineer nitrogen-fixation into non-legume cereal crops by demonstrating that barley can instruct soil bacteria to convert nitrogen from the air into ammonia fertiliser.
Farmers have practiced crop rotation for nitrogen fixing for millenia, among many other benefits : less favorable conditions for weeds and pests due to changing conditions, diversification of nutrients, improved soil structure which in turn improves carbon sequestration, ...
Legumes also provide amino-acids that are lacking in cereals, which makes a legume-cereal combination a healthy well-balanced diet.
Crop rotation doesn't prevent mechanization or reduce farm productivity in any way, rather the opposite because it improves soil health.
So, my question: what is the benefit of this? Would that further improve yield in combination with crop rotation?
There are places where the weather permits 2 harvests per year, and if you could do that without rotation, and without added nitrogen then you could produce as much or more barley on less land. Or rotate between this GMO, barley, and soy while still building up nitrogen.
While crop rotation has its place, it's hard to argue with how much more grain we can produce per acre now vs even 100 years ago.
> it's hard to argue with how much more grain we can produce per acre now vs even 100 years ago.
The key thing is for how long soil will be able to keep that production rate up. Humanity is doing completely unprecedented things now - we have eradicated a lot of the predators and their feed species that kept ecosystems intact, and replaced it by artificial means... and eventually, that soil won't be able to keep up any more, but humanity will have grown a fatal addiction to cheap grain and other agricultural products (the fact we're growing plants to turn them into bio-fuel is maddening!).
And by then, it will be too late to fix the issues in the soil for at least a couple of years if not decades. Healthy soil is something that grew over hundreds and thousands of years after all, and humanity will blow through it in a century. What remains is to burn down forests like it's being done in the Amazonas area, but even that destruction will only yield something like two to four seasons and then it's gone (which is why the farmers burn down so much every year).
> The key thing is for how long soil will be able to keep that production rate up
We're basically going hydroponics with sterile soil as a substrate. The limiting factors are fertilizer and water. This may not be ideal, but it frees up a lot of land for things other than wheat/soy/corn.
> we have eradicated a lot of the predators and their feed species that kept ecosystems intact, and replaced it by artificial means
The US and Europe are re-wilding substantial amounts of land, precisely because less is now needed to grow food.
> We're basically going hydroponics with sterile soil as a substrate. The limiting factors are fertilizer and water. This may not be ideal, but it frees up a lot of land for things other than wheat/soy/corn.
The problem is that now the produce only consists of fertilizer. Just compare the taste and nutritional value of mass-manufactured produce vs. organic-grown produce - the difference (at least if you're not suffering from covid) will be massive.
Additionally, sterile soil without deep levels of old roots, fungi and other life in it has the downside that it will simply erode and, as a consequence of losing that structure, blow away sooner or later. The US literally went through this once in the 1930s [1] and at the moment 40% of the US are at risk for further desertification [2].
Yes, it may be more efficient in a short-term rabid capitalism POV to continue ruthlessly exploiting nature, but the long term of continuing as-is will only lead to an utter catastrophe and cascading effects - e.g. groundwater depletion once the soil compresses, effects on the local and regional climate (clouds and in consequence rain need evaporation of water) or heatwaves and as a direct consequence uninhabitability because pure sand can't buffer off heat.
Earth is at the moment right at the tipping point of a lot of crises: CO² and other climate gases such as methane leading to a greenhouse effect, the collapse of ice shelves, the permanent destruction of arable land, the compression of soil in deserts destroying groundwater, predators going extinct and throwing ecosystems out of balance, invasive species being transmitted by air and especially water cargo, humans ending up with half a dozen pandemic or almost-pandemic events in two decades because we keep intruding on animal reservoirs in our ever deeper search for space... we need to stop and seriously rethink how we want to live, if we want to leave our children a planet they can actually live on - and that's leaving the social issues like erosion of democracies, of international law, and of war and aggression and their impact on nature, completely out of the discussion!
And JFC the answer to the problems we're seeing is not geo-engineering or GMOs. That's band aids barely covering up the atrocities we have committed as a species!
> Just compare the taste and nutritional value of mass-manufactured produce vs. organic-grown produce - the difference (at least if you're not suffering from covid) will be massive.
If the variety is the same I generally can't tell with things like onions, potatoes, and most fruits. As for flour you'd be hard pressed to see any difference. I bake and brew and spend some time looking at spec sheets for flours and barley and organic/not doesn't really register as a difference. Price tiers matter, but that doesn't correlate well with organic. It may be the case that less intensive agriculture makes sense for non-staple crops, but that isn't the issue here, we're talking about things like barley, wheat, corn, soy, and rice.
I'd also mention that organic doesn't mean anything about soil health, size of the farm, or really anything other than some specifics about chemical application.
> Additionally, sterile soil without deep levels of old roots, fungi and other life in it has the downside that it will simply erode and, as a consequence of losing that structure, blow away sooner or later. The US literally went through this once in the 1930s [1] and at the moment 40% of the US are at risk for further desertification [2].
This is largely being solved by a shift to no till agriculture.
> Yes, it may be more efficient in a short-term rabid capitalism POV to continue ruthlessly exploiting nature
This strikes me as religion, and not a judgement based on science or economics. Switching to more responsible irrigation, and reforesting old agricultural will go a long way towards alleviating those issues. More crops from less land leaves more land for undisturbed nature.
> Earth is at the moment right at the tipping point of a lot of crises: CO²
This is a great case for returning more former crop land to forests.
> And JFC the answer to the problems we're seeing is not geo-engineering or GMOs. That's band aids barely covering up the atrocities we have committed as a species!
It isn't really a bandaid, it's taking a traditional technique of using beans to fix nitrogen in depleted soil, and giving that trait to other crops. It's pretty amazing in fact. Humans have always shaped landscapes on REALLY large scales, and we going to continue to do so just by our very presence. It makes sense to use every tool available.
Crop rotation is not an old esoteric practice. It's widely used in European fields with 3 or 4 types of crops, including cover crops, and actually improves yield. The USA farming practices keep it to a strict minimum, I believe to reduce labor costs(?) but at the expense of soil health.
The US system is optimized to produce the most grain and soy of consistent quality at the lowest possible price. It’s clearly not a perfect system, but it makes food staples really cheap in a lot of places where the historically were quite expensive.
It’s kind of hard to compare US and Western European agriculture apples to apples, since the US is so heavily focused on commodity crops for export. But it’s pretty clear where the corn comes from.
American agriculture is dedicated toward optimizing the productivity of agricultural workers rather than agricultural land. Historically (and currently), the United States has a large amount of relatively unused land and a comparatively tiny population to work it.
So the productivity of the land isn't a concern. The goal is to have a system where one guy can produce enough food for 400 people.
There are some implications of moving in the other direction that you might not like. In the one-farmer-feeds-400-people model, food is very cheap because it represents a trivial amount of work. In a model that devoted more resources to cultivating the same land at higher yields, one of two things would happen.
The less likely option is that food would become much more expensive because of all the additional labor. This would preserve the general standard of living of Americans, except of course that they'd all be much poorer because so much of their money would be spent on food. But they'd all be poorer together.
The more likely option is that the price of food would only rise a little, and a class of extremely poor people would provide agricultural labor. This would be a blow to American egalitarianism.
> American agriculture is dedicated toward optimizing the productivity of agricultural workers rather than agricultural land
At least with respect to corn, US farms produce 4 tons per hectare more each year than the global average, and have substantially higher yields than the 4 nearest competitors[1].
> the United States has a large amount of relatively unused land and a comparatively tiny population to work it
We've actually increased forrest cover substantially in the last 50 years, which is great.
This is a really fussy question, but I notice something odd in your link:
> The typical farm in Brazil produced corn and soybeans in 2020. Corn was a second crop following soybeans and was produced on approximately 78 percent of the typical farm’s acreage during the five-year period.
For corn to be a secondary crop following soybeans, at the same time it's produced on 78% of the farm's acreage, something has to be weird. Either soy is so much more productive and valuable than corn that its yield can be worth more while less than a third as much land is devoted to producing it (why not just grow more soy?), or a given acre might sometimes produce corn but more often produce soy over the five-year period, while being counted as "an acre used in the production of corn".
Then, the productivity of the farm is given in yield per hectare. But we've already seen that "hectares" is a funny measurement. What's the yield per hectare-month?
Also, this is fully compatible with American strategy being to use as little labor as possible:
> Labor costs as a proportion of total costs were relatively higher for the typical farms in Russia and the Ukraine.
(Annoyingly, the article's chart doesn't display the detail the article discusses. But "operating costs", the category that includes labor, are anomalously low for the US, beating everywhere except Argentina.)
On that model, high productivity per acre would be more of a happy coincidence.
Not relevant to the topic, but sad:
> Economic profit for the five-year period was positive for the typical farms in Argentina and Ukraine. [But not for Russia, Brazil, or either US farm.]
Yeah the economics of farming are pretty tricky and it is easy to end up in an apples to oranges situation. Corn is tricky as well, because ThenUS is so dominant in that crop so that surely displaces some growers.
I’m not discounting the labor angle entirely, but there seems to be some consensus that for at least some crops US farms are quite productive.
This might have been true in the early 00s, but not now: Based on satellite imagery analysis I've seen, large parts of the midwest are doing crop rotation with corn and soybeans in the main season, which more differences in the winder depending on weather.
The reason a US farmer chooses what to plant each year is the same as everywhere else: Given the state of their soil, the expected weather in their plots, legislative incentives and some guesses on crop value, they plant whatever they think will keep making the most money. The increase in soybeans as a useful rotation crop come from higher price per bushel vs 2000, and the increase demand making it easier to sell it in their local elevator. The extra $4 a bushel makes it much better than doing all kinds of extra treatments to the soil to keep trying to run more corn. As prices rise and fall, practices change to match.
And this is why modifying plants to lower the need of fertilizer can make such a big difference: A crop that before might not have been economical can become more viable. If a farmer has to risk soil health to have a somewhat profitable year, because anything else looks like losing money, they'll take the risk, in the same way that they'll cheap out in their pesticide applications. When the farmers are making good money with safer practices, they'll use them, and they'll keep investing. But for every 2012, when drought raised prices through the roof, and everyone else got their insurance payouts, there's many years where the farmer doesn't cover costs.
Always assume that the farmer is doing the best they can to make money, whether they have some organic apple orchard, or they are planting Monsanto soybeans.
E. g. make non-legumes act like legumes. The actual paper is https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.2117465119