"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function."
Albert Allen Bartlett
It could cause our starvation well before we could respond effectively.
> In this novel originally published in 1923, as denitrifying bacteria inimical to plant growth spreads around the world, toppling civilizations and threatening to wipe out humankind, the British plutocrat Nordenholt sets himself up as the benignant dictator of a ruthlessly efficient, entirely undemocratic, survivalist colony established in Scotland's Clyde Valley.
Basically if there's an easy way to change the explanations so the movie makes more sense to scientists, but it would have made less sense to much of the general audience, I just cut them some slack.
Harvest them like we did with guano deposits. Won't take long for a second Guano Island Act [1].
It is curious that, apparently, almost all agricultural technology is focused on to break the ecosystem between the crops.
That tech discards the nitrogen that would be produced by microorganisms and animals like worms, included seasonally shed leaves plants with deep roots, while promote "solutions" towards the soil desertification and the dependence on multinational corporations that destroy such sings of life around the crop (what also introduce Cancer in our lives), to sell their annual interdependence solutions, as Bayer-Monsanto does.
IMHO, the bioengineering tech for crops should be more focused in the ecosystem equilibrium, predators for the plages only over the specified plants, which should include micro-robotics also ( Before harvesting, command to make predators leave the plants ).
so crazy is it? It's just an Akira Miyawaki style applied to crops plus tech.
What I was expecting is a comment in line about the harvest is a nutrient extraction process, similar to a mineral mine. Therefore, even with a balanced ecosystem, there may come a time when the compost from the harvest, or animal excrement that consumed the crop, is needed to replenish what was taken by the crop for to close the loop. In such a case, it should be applied in liquid form by injecting it underground at the same time the seed is planted, but not in the same quantities that are required today, thanks to the balanced ecosystem, which rewards also with high-quality crops.
We have always had this problem of other species outcompeting crops - we call the undesired-but-superiror-plants "weeds" and traditionally they were removed mechanically. The 20th century saw the invention of achieving the dame task via sprayed chemicals such as Round-Up.