Comment by griffzhowl 8 hours ago
Yeah, ok. I read about half the article and it was just talking about growing tomatoes in Texas rather than their homeland of the northern Andes.
Now I see in the last paragraph it says C4 photosynthesis is more efficient in hot climates and C3 more efficient in cooler climates.
I don't see though what's the benefit of bioengineering C3 plants to operate with C4, rather than to utilise C4 plants where the climate is suitable for them?
Is there an agricultural analog of portfolio theory? Permaculture always seems to be pitched in terms of the ecological perspective, but I wonder if there's some way to firm up the idea that if your fields/portfolio are diversified across a range of crops/assets whose yields are not closely correlated, you'll have fewer bad years.
Well I'd say the ecology perspective is exactly that! It's not just about partitioning the resources efficiently or creating synergistic relationships... A diverse interconnected ecosystem is a damped system capable of absorbing shocks.
But I get your point. This was of course obvious to any subsistence farmer in history. Without long-distance trade and perfectly reliable preservation, you had better be harvesting food as close to year-round and possible, which means lots of different crops (in different microclimates if possible, to spread out their season.)
There were layers and layers of fallbacks, down to "famine foods" like wild roots or acorns. They also invested in social relationships by banqueting each other in productive times.
Some areas are already running short on arable land suitable for some C3 species. Check out the napa cabbage harvests from Japan and South Korea, for example. Japanese rice production is also struggling, though that’s a more complicated example with several causes.
In a similar vein, one of the most obvious and easy-to-show-people impacts of climate change on agro-economics is the shifting wine growing region, especially for champagne. You now have these prestigious French champagne houses planting vineyards in England!
Sure, we should diversify our food sources. The stat is something like 20k+ edible plants, but 90% of calories come from 20 of them, and 50% come from wheat/rice/maize.
(Note that maize, sugar cane, sorghum, and some millets are C4 crops already in use.)
It takes a lot of selective breeding to develop varieties that are palatable, productive, climate adapted, (remain) disease resistant, amenable to automation, etc etc. There are folks doing amazing work in their backyard to improve promising and interesting species (see "landrace gardening" community. It's super cool how one can leave a "genetic legacy" for future generations this way.) And of course university and extension office breeding programs too.
Many people believe that we need to shift towards a more management-intensive perennial-emphasized polyculture / "permaculture" type approach in order to create diverse and resilient systems tailored to the local conditions. But then the entire food consumption system needs to align on top of that. Lots of coordination problems.
So of course the big industrial ag systems are also doing things their way, which includes modern biotechnology. I'm not opposed to that - if I could wave a wand to improve some crops I certainly would. Hopefully we get lots of people exploring all types of solutions.