Stephen Long is a professor of plant biology and crop sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and the director of a project called Realizing Increased Photosynthetic Efficiency, or RIPE. The premise of RIPE is that, as remarkable as photosynthesis may be, it needs to do better.
“All of our food, directly or indirectly, comes from the process of photosynthesis,” Long told me. “And we know that even our very best crops are only achieving a fraction of photosynthesis’s theoretical efficiency. So, if we can work out how to improve photosynthesis, we can boost yields. We won’t have to go on destroying yet more land for crops—we can try to produce more on the land we’re already using.”
It is often said that the world now needs a New Green Revolution, or a Second Green Revolution, or Green Revolution 2.0. The rate of yield growth for crops like wheat, rice, and corn appears to be plateauing, and the number of people who are hungry is once again on the rise.
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Long is particularly keen on getting photosynthetically souped-up seed to farmers in sub-Saharan Africa, a region that didn’t much benefit from the yield gains of the original Green Revolution. Today, more than two hundred million people there are chronically undernourished.
“If we can provide smallholder farmers in Africa with technologies that will produce more food and give them a better livelihood, that’s what really motivates the team,” Long told me.
