The way we live is out of balance with the way we eat. About eleven percent of the Earth’s land area is used for agriculture; meanwhile, two-thirds of the human population is now jammed in cities, which cover a mere three percent. Continued urbanization and population growth will require more farmland, more transportation, and an even bigger ecological footprint—unless we can find more efficient ways to feed the world.
One intriguing solution is to give traditional agriculture a 90 degree twist into vertical farming, where crops are grown indoors in tightly stacked rows, sustained hydroponically so that they don’t need dirt. A lot of food production could then be relocated to urban regions, so that less wilderness would need to be converted to cropland, notes Choon-Tak Kwon, a postdoctoral fellow in plant biology at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. The financial and ecological cost of transporting food should decrease substantially, too. “You can grow perishable crops near your home all the year around,” Kwon says, ideally leading to “fresher foods with stable prices.” [...]
Other researchers are finding ways to apply targeted genetic shrinking to completely unrelated crops, as well. In 2018, Erika Varkonyi-Gasic and her colleagues with the New Zealand Institute for Plant & Food Research Limited in Auckland created a dwarf kiwi vine through gene editing. Instead of long, climbing vines that take a few years to mature, the engineered kiwis were just a meter long at maturity and produced fruit within a year. The global appetite for kiwi fruit may be modest, but the shrinking technique could soon be ubiquitous.
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