Food does not come from “the store”. Food comes from the land. Food comes from people implementing technology to do clever work. Humanity invented agriculture to take control of our food supply and in effect be able to save for the future. In doing so we became insanely productive and resilient. It was no longer necessary to move to find food. With agriculture we could find a good place, settle it, farm it, and invest in building great works and infrastructure. We could stay put to deeply explore and extract the other resources of the land, such as mining. All of which would magnify the production of the people there. Agriculture is the invention that unlocked civilization. The land became massively productive providing more food for more people per acre than ever before. We learned to use selection to make our domesticated plants and animals more productive for our purposes.
People take farming & ranching for granted, especially at scale. Feeding billions of people with a reliable continuous food supply takes engineering, knowledge, intelligence, work, and cooperation. Agriculture was probably the first thing humanity did at scale.
Being a hunter-gatherer sucks. Subsistence living sucks. You do not get to have the glories of modern civilization without agriculture at scale. Sumerians, Indus Valley People, Olmec, Egyptians, Chinese… all were farming. First Farmers
I’m going to throw out some stuff here as I think of it, and I think is interesting that is involved with farming and plant biology. This is in no way all inclusive, or even a tip to a knowledge iceberg. This topic is massive because humanity has a huge incentive to know a lot about agriculture, our very survival on an individual level depends on it. Yet, most people know very little if anything.
Ryan North wrote a humorous book called “How to Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler”. This book is a surface primer of how a lot of our technology works, or at least the basic idea. Inventing farming is a major section of the book. But in no way is it an all-inclusive how to.
In “The Martian”, the stranded astronaut is a botanist. If any of the other crew members were stranded instead of Mark Whatney they would have been dead under the same circumstances. His background made it so he had a complete other MacGuyver toolkit available to him that allowed him to survive. We’ll ignore that the Martian soil cannot do what Whatney did because of pervasive perchlorate composition and a reductive environment. A City on Mars
The foundation of plant agriculture is fertilizer. The rules of chemistry rear their head once again. You cannot create new elements in this context, so in order for plants to make the enzymes and structures they need to live they will need nitrogen to make amino acids. Plants are, by themselves, incapable of breaking the nitrogen triple bond to yield nitrate, nitrite, ammonium. Plants also will use up local sources of phosphorous. If you’re rapidly growing plants and then removing the entirety of their biomass from the field to do it again, so too you remove the nitrogen, phosphorous, and other elements. You need to put it back - fertilizer. In ancient times people would use fish or manure. Today we go maximally efficient with ammonium nitrate (NH4NO3) and various kinds of phosphate fertilizers.
You must have enough nitrogen present so the plants can build RuBisCO, and other enzymes, to fix carbon dioxide and water into sugar, cellulose, and all of their other biological molecules. Plants need to respire just as you do using oxygen in their mitochondria to burn some of that sugar to make ATP and other energy currency molecules such as NADH and FADH. Giving plants biologically available nitrogen is akin to giving people protein. Fertilizer is where nearly all the nitrogen to make protein in agricultural plants comes from. The major reason for the reduction in protein found in food plants over the last decades is a directed effort to create strains that use less fertilizer, because fertilizer is the main cost of production on a farm. You cannot escape the conservation of matter laws of the Universe. Less fertilizer, less nitrogen, less amino acids, less protein. But, less expensive food and plants more resilient to fertilizer shortages. No solutions, only trade-offs.
As you can imagine fertilizer production and shipping it around the world is a big giant deal.. The Haber process is how humanity converts atmospheric nitrogen to ammonium and nitrate (through further processing). N2 gas, hydrogen, and finely ground iron plus a lot of heat and pressure. You can also use a slight variation of the process where your inputs are water, methane, and atmospheric nitrogen. Yes the chemist that gave us mustard gas, weaponized chlorine gas, and had a lust for chemical weapons during World War 1 also gave us a key technology to feed a lot more people. I cannot overstate how important the Haber process is to agriculture and modern civilization. People think “food comes from the store” and this is a big reason why. It’s also worth looking into Carl Bosch if you want to know more about the kind of industrial chemistry that makes our world possible. Nobel Prizes to both for their parts in this work. Haber for inventing it in the first place and Bosch for making it industrially efficient.
Various microbes can fix nitrogen from the atmosphere to help, but it’s never enough or fast enough (at our current level of knowledge and technique). Field rotation, which is a key technology, partially works on fostering funguses and microbes in order to fertilize the soil by the varying kinds of plants to increase productivity overall. There are nutrients beyond nitrogen that are of concern, and different plant species absorb and excrete different nutrients. What plants to rotate on what fields, in what order, and which combinations for sale in the right seasons such the field is always profitable depends on a great number of factors. Here’s a USDA PDF on the practice and a crop sequence calculator from USDA for the Northern Great Plains. You’re not doing this alone though you will still need fertilizer made by the Haber Process. “Natural” and “Organic” farming is mostly crunchy hippie nonsense for people with enough money that efficiency doesn’t matter to them and the burden of maintaining a stable food supply falls on someone else. It’s marketing mostly, not a practical way to feed people at scale.
Cereal grains are the group of plants at the heart of civilization. Starting to utilize grasses and eventually cultivate and domesticate them was the invention of farming. The plants we eat regularly today have all been altered by us to be better food sources for us. They are in no way even kind of like the plants our ancestors 20,000 years ago knew. Some of them didn’t even exist. Such as all of the variety of plants we made from the wild cabbage. Some didn’t exist at all until after the 1920s when gamma ray bombardment to induce genetic mutation was used to create cultivars such as various strains of rice, wheat, & barley, the star ruby grapefruit, and a couple thousand more. Mutant Variety Database is pretty amazing. There’s a database on there you can search by all kinds of different categories such as radiation source, type of plant, the trait improved. Keep in mind some of the traits improved are the sorts of things that make feeding billions of people possible. None of these are considered GMO or require that label even though they very, very much are.
Some grasses evolved the C4 carbon fixation system to make up for some massive inefficiencies in RuBisCo. See… RuBisCo in the presence of O2 can literally become jammed and the enzyme must be destroyed in order to recover. RuBisCo isolated away from the oxygen it is producing would lead to a massive increase in efficiency. This is what C4 grasses have evolved. Rice is not a C4 plant, but its relatives are, there’s a major initiative to engineer C4 Rice which could increase food crop yields by 50%. Corn, sorghum, and millet are C4 crops. This is the sort of thing humanity invents in agriculture to feed more people, better. When you’re anti-GMO this is the sort of thing you’re against. And Golden Rice. Gene insertion is a lot like the radiological and mutation methods described above, but with complete known working genes & proteins, rather than inducing a random mutation and seeing what happens or selectively breeding for decades to centuries.
Here’s another big freaking deal the discovery of the nitroplast in Braarudosphaera bigelowii and the actual paper. An organelle in a eukaryote, that lives in an oxygenated environment that cracks N2 into biologically relevant molecules. Now, would growing algae that are fixing their own nitrogen, or transplanting the nitroplast into other plants (GMO again!) be more efficient in creating enough nitrogen to rapidly grow plants for food? Maybe. Still, more knowledge and options is always good. Either way, more food, more nutrients, fewer crop failures, for less input/cost. That’s what GMO does. Being against GMO is being against that and failing to understand that every single crop that we use today is a GMO. Every. Single. One. The criticisms that land are mostly about Monsanto and trying to patent life while suing farmers. It’s not really about genetic technology or safety, other than some feelings that fall into the appeal to nature fallacy, and an assumption that natural is safe & healthy. Let me introduce you to some natural products that will mess you up strychnine found in certain seeds and tree nuts, cyanide - almonds, cassava root, lima beans, apples, apricots, tetrodotoxin - octopus, pufferfish, crabs, toads & frogs, ricin - castor beans. That list is in no way all inclusive.
The vast, vast majority of our food plants are angiosperms. As in, flowering plants, a clade that arose during the Cretaceous (the last age of the dinosaurs), and has since taken over the world. That’s right stegosaurus (Jurassic) predates grass. There were no grasses anywhere on Earth when stegosaurus was alive. No flowers, no wild cabbages. Consider how very different that world would be. Anything that flowers did not exist. Heck, there weren’t even really bees as we know them because bees as we know them today are co-evolved with flowering plants.. An earlier draft I had that that no dinosaur ate fruit, because fruit did not exist. However, it did at the end of the Cretaceous and we found a dinosaur that ate it Hell Chicken.