There’s a joke in The Departed that you should treat Feds like they’re mushrooms: Feed them excrement, and keep them in the dark. The same sentiment has been expressed towards journalists, which is fitting, 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 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 the sugar they use to fuel their growth, and decided it may be too inefficient to keep up with the growing human demand for food. In the journal Joule, they wrote that climate change and population growth are pushing humanity to develop better ways to grow crops that aren’t dependent on the Sun. To that end, the team devised a new agricultural method, which they say bypasses conventional photosynthesis, and could be a part of the solution to the global problem of food insecurity.
“If we don’t need to grow plants with sunlight anymore, then we can decouple agriculture from the environment and grow food in indoor, controlled environments,” said Robert Jinkerson, an associate professor of chemical environmental engineering at the University of California, Riverside, who led the research, in a press release. “I think that we need to move agriculture into the next phase of technology, and producing it in a controlled way that is decoupled from nature has to 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 that number, farmers would be able to vastly 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 efforts to maximize crop yield with the technique had run into problems. Some efforts have resulted in plants to increase their production of ethylene, which although it acts as a growth hormone for plants, does not directly result in more efficient production of chemical energy.
To solve this problem, the researchers went looking for other compounds that would prompt plants to grow more efficiently. They settled on acetate, which can be created using a chemical reaction involving carbon dioxide (CO2) and water. That process, they wrote, could be powered by solar panels laid on top of massive indoor hydroponic farms, which would be home to vast amounts of crops genetically engineered to improve their metabolism of acetate. The system, they said, would result in massive boosts to food production, without negatively 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 boost the efficiency of photosynthesis,” said Feng Jiao, an electrochemist at Washington University, 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 the production of the food becomes much smaller.”
The system is so efficient that plants need very little light. While the researchers didn’t specify exactly how much less, they noted their method works in “darkness,” eliminating the need for large banks of lights or HVAC cooling systems to manage heat, according to the paper.
While the paper mostly lays out the theory behind the proposed electro-ag method, the chemical engineers wrote they had achieved “preliminary success” with experiments on lettuce, rice, canola, pepper, and tomato. They also imagined a future where electro-ag could be used as a carbon source to promote the growth of lab-grown meat.
Around 14 million United States households experienced food insecurity in 2023, according to the USDA, while the World Health Organization puts that number at 2.33 billion globally. That’s not to mention the rise in the cost of food, (something that could become even more nefarious in the future if Kroger has its way). If tomatoes grown in darkness can bring those numbers down, maybe being kept in the dark isn’t so bad.
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