Re: Article: The inefficiency of local food

I disagree. First, mass amounts of food are going to require mass
amounts of pesticides, fertilizers, and herbicides too, rhizobes and
the phyllosphere only marginally address one or two of these aspects.
Agriculturalists have known about rhizobes for nearly a century.
Instead they stuck with disease ridden animal waste for fertilizer,
then they found a better solutions; explosively reactive ammonium
nitrate and toxic as generally hazardous anhydrous ammonia. AFAIK, no
biological process approaches the speed, volume and efficiency of the
Haber-Bosch process (as in, orders of magnitude difference). The same
holds true for the P and the S in CHNOPS and several other elements on
down the line. It's no joke that farmers lie awake at night trying to
cook up the next way to increase their yields and will use it without
heistation. Animal husbandry was practiced for thousands of years
before Darwin or Mendel. Farming was DIYBio before even science was
cool. Any changes, rurally, aren't going to be radical.

IMO, if there are optimizations to be had, it's on the demand and
transport side of things. With the rampant consumption of $16/gal.
coffee (sweetened with HFCS to boot) it's odd that this isn't obvious.

On Nov 18, 4:16 am, BraveScience <bravescie...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi guys,
>
> i'm an italian student in biotechnology, i love plants and microbes
> and the complex interactions that take place in open fields. this is
> my first reply to a discussion so forgive me if my english isn't so
> good.
> You're talking about transport and de-localization but the real
> problem about agriculture impact is the production methods and the
> cultivated species.
> Using no-till tecniques, improving orgaic matter quantity in soils
> (both with no-till and Terra Petra), using aero and hydroponics,
> reducing soil lavorations (that emits Co2 by combustion and the
> release of carbon dioxide trapped in the ground as organic matter),
> and the shift from the mass use of pesticide and fertilizers to a
> model based on the understanding of plant-microbe ecology and the
> enhancement of such interactions is the key to sustainability.
> Even for this topic the key is a better understanding and use of
> biotechnology applied  to agriculture, like products based on
> mycorrhizae and bacterial community of phillosphere and rhizosphere
> (that can be grown directly by farmers).

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