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.

Comments

This is huge

[spiritplumber]

This is huge... although we already make enough food to feed 12B people; we throw away a lot of it. Still, efficiency!

Re:This is huge

[Anonymous Coward]

Increase C02 sequestration by reduced farmland size? Apply it to forest growth?

Re:This is huge

[Anonymous Coward]

Trees are almost irrelevant in sequestering CO2. Algae in the ocean and photosynthesizing bacteria are much more important. Trees are most important in the water cycle though.

Re:This is huge

[sillybilly]

I don't know how they can make the plants not normally associated with those bacteria interact with those bacteria. The truth is that nitrogen fixating bacteria do so at a tremendous expense of energy, usually supplied by root nodules of a plant. If there were such associations with barley and these bacteria, in the past, you can bet your pants on it that it would be already standard practice, and also a sort of darwinist survival of the fittest natural existence. The fact is, unless genetically engineered, barley must not provide these root nodules, unlike alfalfa or beans. However, rice is grown in puddles that have cyanobacteria or similar critters that do fix nitrogen, which, ultimately, end up in the local nitrogen cycle on cycle on critter death. So with rice, with two independent organisms, one living on its own and doing nitrogen fixation, side by side with rice, the situation is similar to growing alfalfa and barley, on the same plot of land, at the same time, independently of each other, side by side, and then somehow picking only the barley, and leaving the alfalfa to rot. Unlike with rice where the picking the rice only and leaving the cyanobacteria in the puddle is easy, with barley and alfalfa (or beans or peas) independent harvesting is so costly, that instead a monoculture of each is grown, in a yearly crop rotation way.

Another way to put nitrogen into the soil locally, is to run a windmill, into an indestructible nickel-iron tote battery temporarily, from which doing lithium hydroxide electrolysis, then extruding lithium wires to age in the atmosphere, them getting coated with an oxide layer first, then under that Li3N, lithium nitride, which when contacted with water gives back the lithium hydroxide and ammonia, your nitrogen source. With carbon dioxide from a cylinder or even from carefully regulated and cooled (such as using a suction pump from the stack and a bubbler through an aqueous ammonia solution) chimney exhaust gas from natural gas or propane (which are soot free), ammonia can be turned into ammonium carbonate and bicarbonate, baking powder, which is a great fertilizer salt, volatile, but not as volatile as liquid ammonia itself.
By the way there is a patent on corroding metallic lithium pieces in air, whereby a thin surface oxide coating forms at first, and then the corrosion under that continues as the pure nitride, at room temperature, from around 1970, give or take. Google and the USPTO are so great at hiding it right now, which is why I assume this post was made, because that's such an important patent to hillbilly farmers, that expired, and the powers that be, such as those present at Google or the USPTO, would love to repatent the whole thing and sue the shit out of every poor "kulak" over it. Oh well. So anyway, true it's a slow process and wastes some of the lithium as oxide, but it does not require pure oxygen free nitrogen, expensive reaction vessels to heat lithium metal in, or even high temperatures, unlike the other processes that rely on heating lithium with pure nitrogen. All you really need to invest in is the lithium hydroxide to lithium metal electrolysis, the lithium recycled, and the process using excess electric power coming from a windmill or a solar panel array. The Edison nickel iron battery is indestructible, it can be drained to zero and kept there forever, has no memory, unlike nicad with memory or lead acid that self drains and self destructs if allowed to stay at 0 charge for a long time, and other type batteries with their issues, however, while it is hillbilly friendly, it too has issues, it is not very efficient at energy storage because of hydrogen gassing, and also it quickly self depletes on charge completely within about a month, so it won't hold charge for a long time, and you gotta convert the energy in it into some other, more permanent storage, either as fuel or fixed nitrogen fertilizer.

Re:This is huge

[ShanghaiBill]

they could also do a crop rotation with nitrogen fixing crops, such as peanuts. Grows well in Africa already.

Crop rotation is better than nothing, but will give you no where near the benefits described in the summary. Peanuts (and other legumes) use most of the nitrogen that they fix, and much of what is plowed under is not absorbed by the next crop, because it washes away, is depleted by weeds, or is just too far from the roots of the grain. If, instead, you have nitrogen fixing bacteria in root nodules on the grain, it is directly accessible to the crop, and you are fixing nitrogen 100% of the time, rather than only during the legume part of the rotation.

Re:This is huge

[Anonymous Coward]

Global warming will increase precipitation globally. This is why people who claim that evidence of growing ice sheets in Antarctica conflicts with global warming are idiots.

Global warming will hasten desertification in some places, and halt or reverse it in others, such as Antarctica. The fundamental moral issue with global warming (disregarding for the moment ecological ethics) is the pervasive and growing economic and social inequality that will result from the rapid changes in local climates. Global warming isn't necessarily inherently bad, per se (unless you're Captain Planet), it's what's going to happen to various human populations that is indisputably horrendous and immoral, even if you hate Nature in general.

Re:This is huge

[Bob the Super Hamste]

And then there is the three sisters form of agriculture. Corn for the beans to climb, beans to fix nitrogen, and squash to provide ground cover to keep the weeds down and prevent evaporation. Each one provides something beneficial but mechanical harvesting can't be done (or no one has bothered to figured out how to do it.). Then there is the use of various soil amendments to make terra preta which seems to increase the nutrient holding ability of the soil as well as being basically a long term carbon sink.

Re:How about the "bio-fuels" ?

[cduffy]

Corn ethanol is ridiculously inefficient. Sugar-based biofuels, by contrast, can have a quite good return and are actively used by developing countries in South America that don't have money to waste on things that don't make economic sense (but aren't used in the US because we have relatively little land able to grow sugarcane).

In short, it's more complex than either "all bio-fuels are good" or "all bio-fuels are evil". This shouldn't be a surprise -- few things are so simple.

Re:Terrific counter to Monsanto's herbicide messag

[bmo]

In contrast, companion planting is mixing your crop (e.g. beans + carrots together) so that they work together.

That's not Kosher according to Leviticus 19:19.

Why aren't there "conservative" christians whining about this?

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BMO