Has China Found the Answer?

Chinese researchers believe that their country alone will require around 650 million tons of grain annually by the year 2030 in order to maintain their population. Consequently, China has become the world’s largest producer and consumer of fertilizer, making and using about a third of the global total.  Unfortunately, this mass fertilizer use is not even reaching crops as more than 50 percent leaches into surrounding environments. These practices, blaringly unsustainable, may no longer be needed, however. According to a group of scientists at the China Agricultural University, there is now a way to grow more food without increasing a higher toll on an already fragile environment.

            Using a new “smart” agricultural management technique in order to better match local soils and climate to optimize nutrient requirement, farmers were able to significantly boost yields while cutting their reliance on fertilizer. This agricultural management includes the introduction of GM crops that reduce fertilizer use by nearly 80 percent, as well as determining how biological, chemical, and geological processes determine soil properties. These techniques provide insight into the best times to add fertilizer, or the planting dates and densities that will optimize the use of water and solar energy. China is not the first country to utilize ecosystem-modeling approaches, but they are revolutionary in their integration of models and experiments with nationwide monitoring networks in order to redesign agriculture on such a vast scale.

            A major issue looming over scientists and researchers, however, is the challenge of transferring the knowledge of these farming practices across so many small farms. To support the transfer of knowledge and technology, the Chinese government is funding more than 12,000 researcher-led demonstrations of crop- and soil-management approaches throughout the country. It has established several programs and subsidies: for instance, last year, it invested 1.5 billion renminbi to pay for soil testing to guide farmers about how much fertilizer to add to their soils and when.

While it will be a while before these techniques can be implemented in more farms, they will offer a blueprint for Chinese farming in the future. If farmers could consistently obtain the 80 percent yields as performed in the study, and if crop acreage remains the same as it is now, then production will surpass the 2030 demand.  

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v497/n7447/full/497033a.html