With 'electro-agriculture,' plants can produce food in the dark and with 94% less land, bioengineers say
www.sciencedaily.com
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 call 'electro-agriculture.' The method essentially replaces photosynthesis with a solar-powered chemical reaction that more efficiently converts CO2 into an organic molecule that plants would be genetically engineered to 'eat.' The researchers estimate that if all food in the US were produced using electro-agriculture, it would reduce the amount of land needed for agriculture by 94%. The method could also be used to grow food in space.
  • Lugh@futurology.todayOPMEnglish
    1·
    3 days ago

    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.

    • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
      1·
      3 days ago

      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.