There’s an inside joke The departed that you should treat the Feds like they’re mushrooms: Feed them poop and keep them in the dark. The same sentiment has been expressed toward journalists, which is appropriate, since at least some of us are fun guys. (Don’t go away, no more puns, I promise). Scientists have now applied this idea to plants, suggesting that they can grow in conditions once thought impossible.
Chemists at several universities, including the University of California, Riverside, looked at the process of photosynthesis, in which plants convert sunlight into sugar that they use to fuel their growth, and decided it may be too inefficient to keep up with demand in human growth. for food. In the diary joulethey write that climate change and population growth are pushing humanity to develop better ways to grow crops that don’t depend on the Sun. To this end, the team invented a new agricultural method, which they say bypasses conventional photosynthesis and could be part of the solution to the global problem of food insecurity.
“If we no longer need to grow plants with sunlight, then we can decouple agriculture from the environment and grow food in indoor, controlled environments,” said Robert Jinkerson, an associate professor of environmental chemical engineering at the University of California, Riverside. , who led the research, in a press release. “I think we need to move agriculture to the next stage of technology, and producing it in a controlled way that is disconnected from nature should be the next step.”
The problem with photosynthesis, from a human perspective, is that plants convert very little of the light they absorb into chemical energy. By finding ways to artificially improve this number, farmers will be able to significantly increase their yield, without requiring more resources or producing more greenhouse gas emissions. While electro-agriculture, as the researchers called it, is not a new concept, they wrote in the study that previous attempts to maximize crop yields with the technique had run into problems. Some efforts have resulted in plants increasing their production of ethylene, which although acts as a growth hormone for plants, does not directly result in more efficient production of chemical energy.
To solve this problem, researchers began looking for other compounds that would induce plants to grow more efficiently. They settled on acetate, which can be created using a chemical reaction involving carbon dioxide (CO2) and water. This process, they wrote, could be powered by solar panels placed atop massive indoor hydroponic farms, which would be home to large quantities of crops genetically engineered to improve their acetate metabolism. The system, they said, would result in a massive boost to food production, without adversely affecting the environment. It would also reduce the land needed for food production by up to 94%.
“The whole point of this new process is to try to increase the efficiency of photosynthesis,” said Feng Jiao, an electrochemist at the University of Washington who also worked on the research. “Right now, we are at about 4% efficiency, which is already four times higher than for photosynthesis, and because everything is more efficient with this method, the CO2 footprint associated with food production becomes much smaller. small.”
The system is so efficient that the plants need very little light. While the researchers didn’t specify exactly how much less, they noted that their method works “in the dark,” eliminating the need for large banks of lights or HVAC cooling systems to manage heat, according to the paper.
While the document mainly presents the theory behind the proposed electro-ag method, the chemical engineers wrote that they had achieved “preliminary success” with experiments on lettuce, rice, canola, pepper and tomatoes. They also envisioned a future where electro-ag could be used as a carbon source to fuel the growth of lab-grown meat.
About 14 million United States households experienced food insecurity in 2023, according to the USDA, while the World Health Organization puts the number at 2.33 billion globally. That’s not to mention the rising cost of food, (something that could get even worse in the future if Kroger gets its way). If tomatoes grown in the dark can lower those numbers, maybe keeping them in the dark isn’t so bad.