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Irish Girls Win Google Science Fair With Astonishing Crop Yield Breakthrough
An anonymous reader writes Irish teenagers Ciara Judge, Émer Hickey and Sophie Healy-Thow, all 16, have won the Google Science Fair 2014. Their project, Combating the Global Food Crisis, aims to provide a solution to low crop yields by pairing a nitrogen-fixing bacteria that naturally occurs in the soil with cereal crops it does not normally associate with, such as barley and oats. The results were incredible: the girls found their test crops germinated in half the time and had a drymass yield up to 74 percent greater than usual.
It's a resource allocation problem. There is enough food on earth right now to sustainably feed everyone, the problem lies with the people on the path from the food to the hungry mouths. Increasing food production increases the wealth of the people in the middle, who now have more resources to allocate, but does not necessarily reduce the number of hungry people.
It isn't how much we make, it's where we can make it and who can afford it. If something like this can be applied to areas where food is scarce to come by (by any method), good for all of us.
The Permaculture community and advocates of companion planting have been around for decades preaching this same message, that plants grow better in messy complimentary families instead of in tidy rows of monoculture in which everything else is considered "weeds" and exterminated.
It's great to see youngsters getting rewards for bringing this message to the public eye, countering Monsanto's advocacy for broad-spectrum herbicides that are effectively killing off the biosphere with each passing year. Nature is amazingly productive when allowed to do her thing, instead of undermined by highly destructive profit-led myopia.
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This is not new. The problem has always been one of getting the nitrogen fixing bacteria to stay on the seed when handled in a commercial/industrial manner.
The real holy grail is getting the bacteria to just follow the plants life cycle, like in beans.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Nature is amazingly productive when allowed to do her thing, instead of undermined by highly destructive profit-led myopia.
Is that why our modern crop yields are so much greater than those of our ancestors?
I wonder how much hunger in the world is caused by crop yeild vs other factors (war, political instability, etc).
A major factor is land ownership. It is extremely rare to see a peacetime famine where farmers own the land they are tilling. Nearly all peacetime famines result from some sort of collective ownership: communism, feudalism, nomadic grazing of common land, etc. But this research could have a big impact. Most food shortages are in poor tropical countries, and most tropical soils contain very little nitrogen. The girls produced their results on barley, which grows well in Ireland, but not in Africa. Lets see if we can get the same result with rice, maize, or wheat.
The problem is not production. The problem is distribution.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
No that's because use huge amounts of natural gas (half a billion tonnes or so a year) to create nitrogen fertilizers. And even more pesticides.
Which don't get me wrong, I'm all for. But modern farming sacrifices some land productivity in exchange for much higher labor productivity.
We use tidy rows of monoculture because it allows extremely efficient harvesting, not because it has better yields.
The problem is that anytime the soil is turned you annihilate the local population so you need to inoculate every year with direct contact between the spores and the root mass.
Or, you know, don't turn the soil?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N...
PS. fuck you slashdot for cutting off all the links.... site is getting more useless everyday...
No, the effect of global warming is to make everything worse. That's why they predict drought at the same time as they predict massive hurricanes (which transport large amounts of water). All weather gets worse: hotter in the summer, colder in the winter, scarier all around.
Wow. Either you are an asshole who is deliberately ignoring the obvious intent of that statement or your one dumb fucking pedant. Either way, all that post does is make you look a total fuck.
An increase of germination speed by 50% is a decrease in germination time by 33%. In your effort to denigrate their efforts and results, you display not only a sour attitude but poor math skills.
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