The pathway to go after farming and fertilizers ( Anti-capitalists have a plan?)

Reading this, especially with the climate doom opening paragraph, I’m left with the idea that it will be used as a tool to limit modern farming practices by going after yield enhancing chemical fertilzers.

Nitrous oxide (N2O) is a harmful climate gas. Its effect as a greenhouse gas is 300 times stronger than that of carbon dioxide. Nitrous oxide destroys the ozone layer. In industrial agriculture, it is generated on excessively fertilized fields when microorganisms decompose nitrate fertilizers. Decomposition of nitrous oxide frequently is incomplete and strongly depends on environmental conditions. Researchers from Freiburg, Constance, and KIT have now identified the structure of the enzyme that decomposes nitrous oxide and the decomposition mechanism. Their results are published in the Nature journal (AOP; DOI:10.1038/nature10332).

The study demonstrated that the N2O-reductase enzyme possesses active centers made up of four copper atoms and two sulfur atoms. “Surprisingly, we found that microbiologists all over the world have assumed an incorrect structure so far,” explains Professor Oliver Einsle, group leader at the Institute of Organic Chemistry and Biochemistry of the University of Freiburg. Scientists have assumed a single sulfur atom only and have not been able to completely identify the nitrous oxide decomposition mechanism. Based on the new data, the reaction sequence of the enzyme can be modeled much better. Future investigations are to provide further details and help understand which influence environmental conditions have on the process.

“It was of decisive importance that all steps of our investigation were executed in the absence of air oxygen,“ emphasizes Walter G. Zumft, retired professor of Karlsruher Institute of Technology. In contact with oxygen, parts of the enzyme react and the enzyme changes its structure. Together with Dr. Anja Pomowski from the University of Freiburg, the bacteria were cultivated under an oxygen-free atmosphere, the enzymes were isolated on a large scale, crystallized, and the structure was analyzed using X-rays. The team of four authors was completed by Professor Peter Kroneck from the University of Constance.

“The current study provides interesting and complementary insight into the nitrogen cycle,” says Dr. Ralf Kiese from the KIT Institute of Meteorology and Climate Research. Nitrous oxide and nitrogen production on fields, pastures, and in forests depends on a multitude of often opposing effects. Last year, a KIT study demonstrated that animal husbandry may lead to less nitrous oxide unter certain conditions (doi:10.1038/nature08931).

Detailed knowledge of microbial processes and their dependence on environmental conditions might help to better model the nitrous oxide contribution to the climate. In the long term, it might even be feasible to use the knowledge in order to prevent nitrous oxide from being released into the atmosphere, for example, by additives in fertilizers that preserve the functioning of N2O-reductase or by optimized processes in sewage treatment plants.

KIT press releases on other studies relating to nitrous oxide:
“Greenhouse Gases from Forest Soils”

Homepage of the working group of Professor Einsle at the University of Freiburg: http://portal.uni-freiburg.de/xray.

Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) is a public corporation according to the legislation of the state of Baden-Württemberg. It fulfills the mission of a university and the mission of a national research center of the Helmholtz Association. KIT focuses on a knowledge triangle that links the tasks of research, teaching, and innovation.

You may be confusing hybrid seeds with GMO seeds. Hybrid corn is made by crossing corn with corn, and is not analogous to a mule made by crossing two species (that’s how we know they are two species: if they were the same species, the offspring would be fertile).

Heritage seeds don’t breed true in general either, and for the same reason. Unless a plant is homozygous for all expressed traits and is pollinated only by other plants with the same genome (at least on the part governing expressed traits), it won’t breed true any more than a hybrid will. One doesn’t notice it so much with heritage seeds as they have always produced a variety of phenotypes instead of the uniformity found in commercial hybrids that makes not breeding true so obvious in their case.

I stand with you in objecting to any attempt to stamp out heritage seed lines, but for a different reason: basic population genetics shows that genetic diversity is necessary to the long term health of a population (in this case of some plant we grow for food). A strain of some rust or blight particularly adapted to attacking whatever Monsanto is hawking would be a disaster for the food supply if the only seeds available are the ones Monsanto is pushing.

We do agree, I used the cross breed point as it is so easy to see, but you are correct. I did not know your level of understanding. GMO is a whole new ball game, I find very untrustworthy.

Hybrids are indeed corn to corn, but have a lot of the problems previously mentioned. Breeding a strong rootstock corn with a high yield corn does make the high yield corn take off because in nature the hi yield was held back and balanced by its rootstock. In the first generation you get a hi yield that produces like crazy, but over depletes the land. In the following generations you get all kinds of odd throwbacks to its parents, none of them as good as the parents, and often none as good as the natural selection that produced the parents in the first place. Certainly not good commercial seed stock.

If a Heritage line is cross bred by close planting (which often happens in a home garden) you end up with non selective hybrids, a real problem in maintaining your heritage seed. However as they tend to throw back to the parents of a strong seed line that has good qualities of its own vs the selected trait method of artificial hybrids they tend to still produce well, and via natural selection over a few generations may adapt to your local conditions.

But it is clearly a best bet to keep your plants separated as much as possible in your home garden if you are doing the survival thing.

I am most interested however in the broad picture of what has happened to our production farm system. The Hybrid / petro chemical fertilizer boom is a Farming Bubble if you will. It has supplanted smart farming practice that tends to build up the soil and the land with dumb farming, ya gets ya seed from da man, he tells you when to put the fertilizer ya gets from da man and he tells ya when to harvest and what he gonna pay ya for it.

I bemoan the loss of the small family farm that was diverse and adaptive to the large acreage corn industry. Just as you mentioned, genetic diversity vs a blight but multiplied by replacing diverse farming with agra business corn patches miles across is a disaster waiting to happen. The fact that this industry is all balanced on the head of the price of oil is a real tack in the seat of future generations.

I am convinced that famine is in our future, and that some people see this as a valid political move to reduce populations either as an act of war or as an act of ecology worship makes it all the more likely to take place.

This is why the title about anti-capitolist farm moves attracted me.

Thanks for your input, been a fun discussion, and... I got to vent. Thanks also for your patience.

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