Scientists Discover a New Way To Provide Plants the Nutrients They Need To Thrive (techcrunch.com) 76
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have discovered a new method for delivering key nutrients to plant roots -- without having to ensure they're present in the soil where the plants are growing. This method, described by researchers in detail in a new academic paper, would manage to improve efficiency to nearly 100% absorption of nutrients and pesticides delivered as nanoparticles (particles smaller than 50 nanometers across -- a human hair is about 75,000 nanometers wide, for context) sprayed onto the leaves of plants, which then make their way through the plant's internal vascular system all the way down into the root system. Agricultural professionals could also use this method to greatly improve delivery of plant antibiotics, making it easier and more cost-effective to treat plant diseases affecting crop yields. "It would be cheaper to delivery all nutrients and pesticides, too, because the big bump in efficiency of uptake by the plants means you can use much less of anything you want to deliver to achieve your desired effect," the report adds.
Pot growers (Score:1)
Pot growing is going to have a small boom if this works. Those guys are always on the cutting edge.
New more efficient ways of delivering carconigens (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:New more efficient ways of delivering carconige (Score:5, Insightful)
I hope the people spraying this stuff wear some space suits to keep from breathing it in. Same goes for anyone who lives near or drives by any of the farm fields. ...
Drift will be at least hundreds of miles.
These nanoparticles are near the enough to the size of air molecules that Brownian motion will keep them aloft. An aerosol.
They will land, eventually, everywhere. Especially in the lungs or gills of creatures. There, they can dump their toxic loads and slowly poison everything.
A real folly (Score:4, Interesting)
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Have you met a farmer lately? I suspect that you haven't.
Nearly 30 percent of today’s farmers and ranchers have attended college, with over half of this group obtaining a degree. A growing number of today’s farmers and ranchers with four-year college degrees are pursuing post-graduate studies.
https://www.fooddialogues.com/article/farmers-education/
My dad was among the last of his kind. His education ended at the 9th grade. He worked on a dairy farm for nearly his entire life. He died in his big brick house out among the corn fields, with millions of dollars in his bank account.
In college my brother had a roommate for one semester that was a farmer. This farmer worked on the farm 9 months of the year, then would take college courses fo
Re:A real folly (Score:5, Insightful)
Nearly 30 percent of today’s farmers and ranchers have attended college
So what?
I'm pretty sure that 100% of Trump's cabinet has attended college. That doesn't mean that even one of them would give half a shit about fertilizer runoff.
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I'm pretty sure that 100% of Trump's cabinet has attended college. That doesn't mean that even one of them would give half a shit about fertilizer runoff.
Fertilizer costs money. Those the reduce runoff will make more money than those that don't. Farmers that learn this lesson will leave millions of dollars, and plenty of very nice farmland, for their grandchildren when they die. Those that didn't learn will be working for those that did. When they die their grandchildren will inherit a worn out tractor and a distaste for farming.
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It's not like there's a single point where more fertilizer stops helping crops grow and starts running off.
It's entirely plausible that a farmer is still maximizing his own profits while still contributing to choking lakes and poisoning drinking water.
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A bit triggered are we?
I agree we need to end some of these subsidies to these farmers. Starting with the windmill subsidies. These millionaire farmers shouldn't get government money to put windmills in their cornfields and steer lots!
Since this is Slashdot I have a suspicion on your ideas on what we should do about wind power. Just be careful on where your complaints on federal government subsidies might take you. The people getting these windmill subsidies aren't poor dirt farmers. They are sharehold
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I think you mean "bonkers".
Brawndo (Score:5, Funny)
It's got what plants crave
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It must have electrolytes.
Brawndo electrolytes (Score:5, Informative)
It's got what plants crave.
It's got electrolytes.
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Came to see this as top comment, was not disappointed.
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It's got what plants crave. It's got electrolytes.
This. A million times this. I'm so happy this is already at 5 points, but I'd have gladly helped mod it up if it wasn't.
This just in! (Score:1)
Scientists discover a way to give plants cancer.
needs thought (Score:2)
A lot of farmers can't even be trusted to han
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I think coating chemicals with chemicals defeats the purpose, but at least you're thinking outside the box.
The problem with farming is that no one wants to do it. Currently only a few farmers are responsible for growing all of the $crop. One person growing all of the corn for thousands of families. One person growing all of the potatoes for thousands of families, etc...
If each person was required to grow a certain amount of their own food, most all of the farming problems would go away. Would be a lot e
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Yep. It's a known fact that you can grind up egg shells (OMG nano particles!!!!), mix with water, and spray on most plants suffering from blossom-end rot. Fixes it almost immediately.
Bye Bye SpaceX (Score:2, Funny)
If we can just keep growing more and more food where is the business case for settling Mars. Elon needs to buy this company and shut it down.
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If we can just keep growing more and more food where is the business case for settling Mars. Elon needs to buy this company and shut it down.
I guess this was in jest but, just for the fun of it: asteroids, global thermonuclear war, global pandemic, etc.
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Its all a question of what you are used to. For people from the tropics, Canada is cold as hell but people manage to live there. People will adapt. Probably some gene splicing from antarctic fish will allow Mars Humans to maintain a lower body temperature.
As for California, the weather is one of the best in the world so your knocking California about weather just does not compute. Why do you think the Bay Area is the most expensive place in the United States. its because everyone wants to live here. We call
In related news (Score:2)
Growers in Colorado have used this new technique to grow some of the most intense hydroponic cannabis crops nearing 40% potency.
Wait, so... (Score:2)
Terrible Idea (Score:3)
Conjugating pesticides or other things to nanoparticles (NPs) – before spraying them on crops – is a terrible idea.
Crop spraying always produces some drift. And in the case of NPs, the drift could be hundreds of miles (see Stoke's Law). They don't settle out of the air. But once you breathe some in, they will lodge somewhere and will remain resident in your body forever. Anything smaller than than about 1000 nanometers is unrecognizable by the body as a foreign object. The NPs will stay resident in the body, very likely releasing the pesticide into the bloodstream.
Just when society has begun to realize the pervasiveness of nanoparticles of plastics and other materials in our environment and already in our bodies, these boners propose attaching poisons to them and spraying them on crops.
Oh, because plants don't recognize NPs as foreign either (see the article), the NPs will inevitably end up in your food, and subsequently inside of you.
So fusion (Score:1)
You can get cancer from pesticides. You can get cancer from nanoparticles. Now they want to spray pesticides in nanoparticles all over our food and the air we breathe.
Needs water (Score:1)
As other posters have pointed out, if it's just applied as dust, it'll scatter for miles around.
In water, because of the nano-size, it'll form a colloid suspension, and can be applied simply by spraying it, without choking people and animals in the vicinity.
As for the pesticides, there's no need for them.
Every 'pest' has natural predators. Some plants attract these.
If these plants are planted together with the crop, the pests you want to avoid will be eaten by the predators.