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by BaseballPhysics 1058 days ago
The trouble is you need a ton of water and fertilizer to support that growth, and drought combined with soil quality degradation is already a huge problem in a lot of regions, and will only become moreso as the globe warms and, p.s., fertilizer production is heavily dependent on petrochemicals and contributes to CO2 emissions.

It could be a huge development, no doubt, but there are many bottlenecks in agricultural production, so we need to be careful not to oversell this as some kind of panacea.

1 comments

Would it take more water and fertilizer per pound of crop? If not, then that's a wash.
The claim was this technology would increase carrying capacity. That implies growing more food, not growing the same amount of food on less land.

I agree, as far as being able to use less land for agriculture, this could be a beneficial development. Only problem is that's not how humans typically work.