THENEWYORKER,DECEMBER13, 2021 33
of pumping continue, in twenty-five
years the state, which is sometimes re-
ferred to as “the food bowl of India,”
could be reduced to a desert.
“The situation is alarming,” Rana
Gurjit Singh, a member of Punjab’s
Legislative Assembly, observed a few
months ago. “It is time to wake up.”
It is often said that the world now
needs a New Green Revolution, or a Sec-
ond Green Revolution, or Green Revo-
lution 2.0. The rate of yield growth for
crops like wheat, rice, and corn appears
to be plateauing, and the number of peo-
ple who are hungry is once again on the
rise. The world’s population, meanwhile,
continues to increase; now almost eight
billion, it’s projected to reach nearly ten
billion by 2050. Income gains in coun-
tries like China are increasing the con-
sumption of meat, which requires ever
more grain and forage to produce. To
meet the expected demand, global agri-
cultural output will have to rise by al-
most seventy per cent during the next
thirty years. Such an increase would be
tough to achieve in the best of times,
which the coming decades are not likely
to be. Recent research suggests that cli-
mate change has already begun to cut
into yields, and, as the planet warms, the
bite will only get bigger. (Agriculture it-
self is a major contributor to climate
change.) Devoting more land to farm-
ing isn’t really an option, or, at least, not
a good one. Most of the world’s best soils
are already under cultivation, and mow-
ing down forests to plant corn or soy-
beans would lead to still more warming.
“At no other point in history has ag-
riculture been faced with such an array
of familiar and unfamiliar risks” is how
a recent report from the Food and Ag-
riculture Organization put it.
“We need to up our game,” Enock
Chikava, who grew up on a ten-acre
farm in Zimbabwe and now serves as
the interim director for agricultural de-
velopment at the Gates Foundation,
told me. “We can’t continue business
as usual.”
O
ne day while I was in Urbana, Long
took me to visit RIPE’s test fields.
This was in the midst of one of last sum-
mer’s brutal heat waves, and to avoid the
midmorning sun we met up at 8 A.M.
Even so, it was sweltering.
RIPE’s test plots are to the average
farm what a Tesla is to a Model T.
Looming above the plots are hundred-
and-fifty-foot-tall metal towers strung
with guy wires. The wires are controlled
by computerized winches imported from
Austria—a setup that was originally
devised to film professional sports
matches. RIPE’s setup carries sensors
that, among other things, shoot out laser
beams and detect infrared radiation.
When I visited, the sensors had just
been installed; the idea was to track the
plants’ progress on a day-to-day basis.
Long led me over to a plot sur-
rounded by an electric fence. It was di-
vided into forty identical rectangles,
each studded with white tags. The rect-
angles were planted with different strains
of genetically modified soybeans, which
had been tweaked in much the same
way that the tobacco plants had, to speed
up N.P.Q. Long bent over some rows
labelled E27.
“I might be imagining, but it looks
like these are a little bit taller,” he said.
He quickly added, “You’ve got to be
very careful at this stage, though.” In
the summer of 2020, the tweaked soy
plants had produced significantly more
soybeans than the control ones did.
E27 had performed particularly well.
But was this just a fluke? “We’re hop-
ing to get the definitive answer this
year,” Long told me.
In another plot, tobacco plants were
growing low to the ground. These, he
explained, represented an effort to ad-
dress a different drag on photosynthe-
sis, involving the enzyme RuBisCo.
To make sugars, plants use carbon
dioxide they’ve taken in from the air.
RuBisCo, which is believed to be the
most abundant enzyme on the planet,
in effect grabs the CO 2 and sends it on
to the sugar-making process. Like
N.P.Q., RuBisCo is slow. Even more
significantly, it’s error-prone. Some-
times, like an assembly-line worker who
picks up the wrong part, it grabs a mol-
ecule of oxygen instead of carbon di-
oxide. (Presumably, RuBisCo makes
this mistake because at the point it was
first synthesized, billions of years ago,
there was hardly any oxygen around to
worry about.) When RuBisCo acciden-
tally picks up O 2 , the plant produces a
compound that’s toxic, which it then
has to get rid of. The exercise is quite
“As long as they’re giving me the option, I’m
going to keep on camping from home.”
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