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Comment by musasabi | Hacker News Reader

Vertical farming can grow micro-greens pretty well but it will never produce 90% of our calories, even with optimistic assumptions. It would also be an environmental disaster.

Transportation is a teeny tiny fraction of the environmental cost of food as well.

I'm also not aware of any GMOs that are 10x better than their non-GMO counterpart although there are certainly improvements to be had here.

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GMO yields are actually lower than non-GMO in ideal conditions. The savings come in other ways, such as no manual weeding with glyphosate resistance (or higher yields compared to letting the weeds rob NPK), or less insecticide use and spraying for BT corn. As a rough estimate, yields are about 6-10% lower for GMO seeds, but labor savings can be huge. GMO cotton cuts labor costs by 90%.

> GMO yields are actually lower than non-GMO in ideal conditions.

If, as is true of the most commom GM crops, the specific GMO trait at issue is a non-yield trait like, say, glyphosate resistance, sure, that’s what you would expect. (Though the yield is substantially higher in the intended conditions; real crops rarely grow in ideal conditions.)

Of course, there are crops modified for yield specifically, too.

It makes perfect sense from a biological perspective. I am not aware of any transgenic methods to increase yield as that is done through breeding and hybridization. Do you know of a specific seed that has enhanced yields through a crisper like process? I am aware of accelerated mutations by irradiating seeds, though I think this is rare and I only know of red grapefruits that successfully used this technique.

> I am not aware of any transgenic methods to increase yield as that is done through breeding and hybridization. Do you know of a specific seed that has enhanced yields through a crisper like process?

Not sure that anything particularly CRISPR-like is involved (there are other transgenic techniques), but:

https://www.science.org/content/article/new-genetically-modi...

Thanks for the article and I read the paper. I know people have been working on it for ages, but it is nice to see some promising results.

One huge problem with the article is this line:

> The plants are also 16% to 18% more efficient at using nitrogen

The paper said no such thing. These plants take up more nitrogen and increase yield.

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