With 'electro-agriculture,' plants can produce food in the dark and with 94% less land, bioengineers say.
With 'electro-agriculture,' plants can produce food in the dark and with 94% less land, bioengineers say.
Photosynthesis, the chemical reaction that enables almost all life on Earth, is extremely inefficient at capturing energy -- only around 1% of light energy that a plant absorbs is converted into chemical energy within the plant. Bioengineers propose a radical new method of food production that they ...
Some people's reaction to this proposal might be to wonder why bother? We already have a functional agriculture system using sunlight that's been working for several thousand years. But there is a lot to be said for improving on it.
This approach could grow many foods where they can't currently be grown. Thus we could localize food production, and decentralize it. This could vastly reduce the waste of food transport. Furthermore, pollution from pesticides could be vastly reduced. It also allows us to think about rewilding huge swathes of our environments. Finally, this is an approach amenable to full automation. Ultimately that will reduce the price of food and its availability. Who knows, several decades from now, the standard way to produce food may be via indoor methods tended to by robot farmers.
You missed the big one, which they empasise themselves: plants are really power-inefficient. They've already quadrupled it with their acetate-producing reaction from 1% to 4%. Meanwhile, solar cells can be 30-40% efficient. That means you can feed a lot more people with a lot less resources.
In a way, it's like the agricultural revolution happening all over again - we go down another trophic level, and now humans are the autotrophs. Apparently they've already gotten this method to work with mushrooms.
A field costs next to nothing to use. Setting up and maintaining a vertical farming setup already is not competitive. Add another layer of complexity with DNA engineering etc. and how exactly is it suddenly supposed to be competitive?
The nonsense 94 % number can go right down the toilet. If I plant my stuff on the side of a building it needs no space at all. If I put the vertical farming flat on the ground it's a bit less. If I put it in the highest possible building or underground it's essentially zero again. The number is useless because it is arbitrary.