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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.

2 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 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.