Skip to content

Comment on Three schoolgirls in Kinsale pulled up a pea plant covered in warts (2014)parent

Comments

You would think that scientists would spend more effort trying to create "super" rhizobacteria that can colonize even more aggressively and also fix many times more nitrogen than ordinary ones

I think the problem with that idea is that the rhizobacteria needs energy to break the nitrogen tripple bond. A lot of energy. It gets that energy by getting carbohydrates from the host plant - which in turn are not available to the plant to grow.

I'm sure there's plants where not fertilizing with nitrogen at all would make the trade-off worth it, but the vast majority of our optimized crops can't spare double-digit percentage points of their total yield to feed bacteria. You're much better of just using natural gas (or green hydrogen) to fix the nitrogen.

Or cover crops. They require a season of no yield, but are widely used after harvest, betting on a long pre-frost growing season.

Interesting assumption, not yet proven, likely a great project for a thesis ...

AboutSource Built by g1lg1l

Hackerly is an independent reader for Hacker News, built on the public HN API. Not affiliated with Y Combinator.