The Growth Mechanisms Of Plants

Since global warming due to increased carbon dioxide in the air is a well-established fact and food prices are also rising across the world, wouldn't it be great if we could just turn all of that excess carbon in the air into food?

The so-called Green Revolution of the 1960s, led by Norman Borlagh, was a success but we could really use another such revolution about now. Plants pull carbon out of the air for use in building the structure of the plant and release oxygen after using the energy of sunlight to split molecules of carbon dioxide. My proposal is that since all living things have a mechanism telling them how fast to grow, in humans it is associated with the thyroid gland, why can't we tinker with the growth mechanism in plants?

The previous green revolution made crops grow larger, what if now we could make them grow faster? We have been cross-breeding plants for thousands of years. St. Paul used the parable of the wild and cultivated olive trees in his Letter to the Romans contained in the Bible.

Today, so many foods have been genetically modified. Why couldn't we adjust the growth mechanism in seeds to get crops to grow two or three times as fast so that there are multiple crops per year instead of just one? Not only would this provide an abundance of food and more jobs, but it would pull a vast amount of carbon out of the air.

Over the long term, there has been a similar concentration of carbon dioxide in the air for millions of years and plants are adapted to this level. In recent years we have raised this concentration by burning fossil fuels. This opens the possibility that plants could possibly grow faster but nature takes a long time to adjust to such changes. Why can't we adjust the speed of crop growth since we have the ability?

Plants are physically capable of growing much faster than they do, look at bamboo as an example, but the bottleneck until now has been the availability of carbon. I do not claim that this will be as simple as I have made it seem here. Making plants grow much faster than they do now is a definite possibility but it will require more chemical fertilizer and also more water, which will be a problem in many areas.

But consider a country like Brazil. It has really been trying to step up it's already vast production of food, it does not seem to have a serious shortage of water and we could solve so many of the world's problems just by making crops grow faster.