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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.
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?
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...