Feeding the planet and its nearly 10 billion inhabitants in 2050 will require a sharp increase in cereal production in a context of shrinking arable land and accelerating global warming.
The post-war green revolution had already doubled rice and wheat yields per hectare.
It was based on the massive supply of nitrogen fertilizers which boost the growth of the plant and on dwarf varieties whose stems, shorter and more robust, can support more grains.
These yields, further increased by decades of intense genetic selection and crossbreeding, have now reached a plateau.
One of the major challenges for world food is now to limit the dependence of cereals on nitrogen fertilizers and an important step in this direction has just been taken with the discovery by researchers from the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences of a way to greatly increase the nitrogen absorption capacity…
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