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Irish Girls Win Google Science Fair With Astonishing Crop Yield Breakthrough

Posted by samzenpus on from the growing-better dept.

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.

6 of 308 comments (clear)

  1. This is huge by spiritplumber · · Score: 5, Interesting

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

    --
    Liberty - Security - Laziness - Pick any two.
    1. Re:This is huge by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

    2. Re:This is huge by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

    3. Re:This is huge by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

    4. Re:This is huge by Bob+the+Super+Hamste · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

      --
      Time to offend someone
  2. Re:How about the "bio-fuels" ? by cduffy · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.