From the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Researchers have some bad news for future farmers and eaters: As carbon dioxide levels rise this century, some grains and legumes will become significantly less nutritious than they are today.
The new findings are reported in the journal Nature. Eight institutions, from Australia, Israel, Japan and the United States, contributed to the analysis.
The researchers looked at multiple varieties of wheat, rice, field peas, soybeans, maize and sorghum grown in fields with atmospheric carbon dioxide levels like those expected in the middle of this century. (Atmospheric CO2 concentrations are currently approaching 400 parts per million, and are expected to rise to 550 ppm by 2050.)
The teams simulated high CO2 levels in open-air fields using a system called Free Air Concentration Enrichment (FACE), which pumps out, monitors and adjusts ground-level atmospheric CO2 to simulate future conditions. In this study, all other growing conditions (sunlight, soil, water, temperature) were the same for plants grown at high-CO2 and those used as controls.
The experiments revealed that the nutritional quality of a number of the world’s most important crop plants dropped in response to elevated CO2.
The study contributed “more than tenfold more data regarding both the zinc and iron content of the edible portions of crops grown under FACE conditions” than available from previous studies, the team wrote.
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“When we take all of the FACE experiments we’ve got around the world, we see that an awful lot of our key crops have lower concentrations of zinc and iron in them (at high CO2),” said University of Illinois plant biology and Institute for Genomic Biology professor Andrew Leakey, an author on the study. “And zinc and iron deficiency is a big global health problem already for at least 2 billion people.”
Zinc and iron went down significantly in wheat, rice, field peas and soybeans. Wheat and rice also saw notable declines in protein content at higher CO2.
“Across a diverse set of environments in a number of countries, we see this decrease in quality,” Leakey said.
Nutrients in sorghum and maize remained relatively stable at higher CO2 levels because these crops use a type of photosynthesis, called C4, which already concentrates carbon dioxide in their leaves, Leakey said.
“C4 is sort of a fuel-injected photosynthesis that maize and sorghum and millet have,” he said. “Our previous work here at Illinois has shown that their photosynthesis rates are not stimulated by being at elevated CO2. They already have high CO2 inside their leaves.”
More research is needed to determine how crops grown in developing regions of the world will respond to higher atmospheric CO2, Leakey said.
“It’s important that we start to do these experiments in tropical climates with tropical soils, because that’s just a terrible gap in our knowledge, given that that’s where food security is already the biggest issue,” he said.
The collaboration included researchers from Harvard University (which led the effort); Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, in Beer Sheva, Israel; the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; the University of California, Davis; the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service; the National Institute for Agro-Environmental Sciences in Ibaraki, Japan; the University of Melbourne, Australia; the University of Arizona; the University of Pennsylvania; and The Nature Conservancy, Santa Fe, New Mexico.
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Thanks Robin! I see the tobacco, coal and oil investorJeremy Grantham of Grantham, Mayo, Van Otterloo & Co.
Conserve nature and invest in oil, tobacco and coal. You know it’s the right thing to do. Let’s all join hands and invest in these reviled industries while conserving our beloved environment. This is how you know they are trying a fast one. Gore was out first on the block after saying himself that he sold tobacco and his family indeed got rich on oil. What’s not to like about these wonderful NON-HYPOCRITES?
May 7, 2014 at 2:50 pm | kalsel3294 says:
I can see the headlines … “Scientist grow new diet wheat”
Let them eat meat.
OMG. We shall have to invent vitamin pills.
If worse comes to worst.
Let them eat meat.
Har! Har!
Les Johnson says:
May 7, 2014 at 3:05 pm
What is not stated though, is what was the yield change. I am going to assume it was positive. If so, then the slight reductions are due to dilution.
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Exactly..when plants grow slower and harder they concentrate “nutrients”….
…notice they didn’t weight it against water gain or mass
I do not eat wheat and rice for their zinc or iron. Zinc and iron is widely available in many other foods. Calm down.
David A says:
Who eats the leaves, stems and roots of wheat? Apart from ‘global warming’ enthralled juice bar freaks that is?
Any research on the effect of CO2 enrichment on the nutrient content of wheat berries?
Eliminating pro CO2 arguments: Yet another GIGO report with no other destination but the shredder.
RalphB says:
May 7, 2014 at 2:31 pm
Okay, lets say this is true and CO2 concentrations continue to rise. We have plenty of time to make the genetic modifications that will give us grains that can utilize the benefits of the additional CO2 and raise the levels of iron, zinc and protein. Yum, carbon dioxide — we’ll eat it.
Exactly. All these studies always assume that we’ll be doing everything exactly the same in 10, 20, 50 or 100 years. That’s rarely the case and the main reason these doomsday predictions don’t come true.
Exactly! Otherwise I would just eat rice for its carbs, protein, zinc and iron. No thanks, it won’t work out folks, ask the many malnourished around the world who ONLY eat rice. This study is garbage.
A lot of the stuff we can’t or won’t eat goes to our livestock. When they are fat we kill and eat them. That’s the way it has worked for thousands of years. The study is an experiment in alarmism and bullshit. So what if nutrients go down, there will be more matter and the matter we don’t want can be fed to our animals. Win win situation.
For thousands of years we have been engaged in agriculture. It has never been a static, non-interventionist occupation. Most of our famous crops do not resemble the crops of 2,000 years ago. Why???
Re Mike Maguire and crying wolf, after 20 years of crying wolf I imagine the odd wolf has actually wandered past and even taken a dump outside the fence. But all the chicks, geese, goats, sheep and children are still here, so is the missus. Oh well, back to the daily grind.
Sorry chaps but here we go again. Why should the alleged fall in nutrients worry us? It’s not all bad and there is no need for emergency measures or to cut down our co2 output. There is every reason to increase it from our current 400ppm to 600ppm. Refer to greenhouse growers who pump in 1,000ppm and the video I posted above.
and from Andrew Leakey’s web page:-
Teaching
IB107, Global Warming, Biofuels and Food
IB 440, Plants and Global Change
Research
Integrative plant genomics, physiology and ecology
My research program is focused on improving mechanistic understanding of:
Plant responses in natural and agricultural ecosystems to global environmental change
Adaptation of food and fuel crops to global environmental change
Sustainability of biofuel feedstocks
Sounds like an agenda more than an area of interest to me.
Did that wolf just take a leakey on the gate post?
quote
“The teams simulated high CO2 levels in open-air fields using a system called Free Air Concentration Enrichment (FACE), which pumps out, monitors and adjusts ground-level atmospheric CO2”
I demand to know how many tonnes of CO2 were emitted to the atmosphere to carry out this experiment, &, did they have a licence to do so?
And will any harm likely come to any polar bears, penguins, or frogs due to this experiment?
I’ve had this argument before with a true believer. I am sure that the many millions of people who went to bed hungry tonight because they didn’t have food couldn’t give less of a crap if the food they might have had tonight was less nutritous than the food they didn’t actually have.
‘“It’s important that we start to do these experiments in tropical climates with tropical soils, because that’s just a terrible gap in our knowledge, given that that’s where food security is already the biggest issue,” he said.’
Terrible? How can a “gap in our knowledge” be terrible? Have they already determined their result, and it’s terrible? Like, OMG, a 5% drop in zinc? More tax dollars at play. They are trying to set up tropical vacations. BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE!
“And that, sir, is why the university should send us to Rio. To conduct experiments.” Department heads hear this BS over and over.
Once you have enough Zinc in your diet (& that is not very much) more doesn’t help you at all until it starts making you ill.
Most of those things also contain very little Iron to begin with, & in the Western World there are more problems with excess Iron than with deficiency.
Zinc & Iron are trivially easy to supplement, & in fact, all flour sold in the United States is required by law to have Iron added to it.
Nothing new here. Increased carbohydrate production with some dilution of trace micro-nutrients. The purpose of the paper is to put political spin on something which was previously known and not determined to be a significant nutrition problem.
more co2, plant grows faster using more soil nutrients.
more sunlight also leads to more soil nutrients being used.
good lord….
The good news is that crops grown in high CO2 levels don’t deplete the mineral content of the soil as rapidly as crops grown in lower CO2 levels. 🙂
@ttclod
Best bet is oysters? Yech! Who wants to eat a blob of living snot?
Best bet is chocolate. After that, bok choy.
kadaka: don’t forget probiotics! We all should take probiotic supplements daily. They are beneficial for physical and mental health.
MattN: Good point!
BTW, we don’t need to waste yet more money genetically engineering ANYTHING. I think I can live with 5% fewer nutrients in some foods. We eat too much bread, anyway. And I buy organic where it’s available.
As the scientific community and thinking public begin to wake up from the abusive indoctrination of doom-mongering CAGW and realise that CO2 is good for the biosphere, the spiv-scammers of CACA are also waking up to this fact and are putting out some desperate counter-propaganda.
“Plants grow faster? Thats not good, its bad, they drain out the nutrients.”
“People live longer? That’s not good, its bad, they use up all the food and we all starve!”