An engineered barley plant that ‘orders’ soil bacteria to manufacture fertiliser

[topher_t]

I'm a little worried that having plants sending signals to soil bacteria to produce ammonia without releasing the associated sugars and nutrients that legumes do, might put evolutionary pressure on those soil bacteria to stop reacting to those signals, potentially harming legume crops if that non-reactive soil bacteria proliferates.

[flobosg]

I’m not sure if I’m following you correctly. If a non-reactive strain is evolved, by definition it will be unable to establish itself in the plant nodules, and that niche will still be occupied by reactive, symbiosis-capable bacteria. Besides, the signal for ammonia production, rhizopine, is actually a sugar-like compound.

[melissalobos]

That actually sounds very frightening, can anyone comment on how possible that would be?

[sjg007]

How do you know they don’t? The bacteria will die if they don’t get what they need to live.

[svieira]

> 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.

E. g. make non-legumes act like legumes. The actual paper is https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.2117465119

[mrpopo]

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?

[flobosg]

> The actual paper is https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.2117465119

Paywalled, unfortunately, but a previous similar study by the senior author can be found at https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-10882-x

[lootsauce]

I have recently discovered Greg Judy on YT and have become fascinated with the possibilities of regenerative agriculture with grazing. He is producing organically with almost no inputs, no heavy equipment and it is growing better soil. Pretty impressive when you compare how many inputs are required with other methods. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tPmYlRMuXo8

[photochemsyn]

The thing about food production is that intensive fertilizer use allows double-cropping (two+ harvests per year in one field, like corn-soy). Brazil uses this a lot. So if you switch to lower input 'regenerative' processes, you'll only get one harvest per year most likely. This means Brazil might stop exporting food, and a lot of countries rely heavily on those exports.

https://www.card.iastate.edu/ag_policy_review/article/?a=94

Becoming reliant on such intensive farming practices was a mistake, but here we are.

[appleflaxen]

Wow! Awesome video! Thanks for the link!

[whalesalad]

This is the way. We need to go back to the way our ancestors did things. Factory farming will kill us eventually.

[paulkrush]

You can write a 1000 year plan with GMO. Try that with mined fertilisers.

[dv_dt]

I think you could make a plan with renewable energy produced fertilizers.

[Andys]

are we able to do away with phosphorus?

[worik]

> You can write a 1000 year plan with GMO. Try that with mined fertilisers. Been doing agriculture for >10,000 years without either

[aaron695]

The only people who think you can accurately plan more than 50 years ahead are environmentalists and economists in the heads of environmentalists.

But if we got everyone to first world conditions we still could be using mined fertilisers in 1000 years, along with using fossil fuels to run the planet in a fine utopia.

Of course I and a lot of others want to be visiting space in decades. Along with the population will start to explode again in decades. And lots of other things like traveling to the nearest star within 1000 years would take a lot of fossil fuel using current tech.

1000 years is a pointless thing to think about.

[passivate]

I do wonder at which point does modern agriculture stop being natural? We killed micro-ecologies from vast areas of land, removed wild plants/rodents and other so-called "pests" and forced large scale growing of plants in various ways - selective breeding and process optimization to boost yields, etc. Do we call all that natural and draw the line at GMO?

[kadoban]

> I do wonder at which point does modern agriculture stop being natural?

A point decades ago, at _least_. More likely centuries or millenia, depending on your definition.

[credit_guy]

If you are against fertilisers, chances are you are against GMO as well.

[christophilus]

My main problem with GMO is that it usually means: loads of pesticides and abuse of monopolistic powers, especially in poorer countries.

[eloff]

I think the biggest objections to fertilizers are environmental? It's not like pesticides where people worry about residue on their food? They may not be overlapping then.

[delecti]

I think we should use less fertilizer because most of it is made from petroleum we should be leaving in the ground. I think GMOs that let us use less fertilizer is awesome.

[Melatonic]

Most people are against the current *implementation* of GMO. Hopefully as the process gets easier and cheaper we will get more options

[striking]

There's a synthetic fertilizer shortage right now. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-05-01/farmers-a...

[bell-cot]

IIR, there's quite a bit of opposition to large-scale, commercial agricultural fertilizers that is based on "the poor farmers often end up in debt bondage" arguments.

(A line of reasoning which could also be applied to GMO's where the underlying IP is controlled by big, greedy corporations.)

[infogulch]

These just-in-time manufacturing techniques are getting ridiculous.

[epa]

People easily forget that crypto is still in beta/early version, we are in javascript 1.0 mode.