I'm a little worried that having plants sending signals to soil bacteria to produce ammonia without releasing the associated sugars and nutrients that legumes do, might put evolutionary pressure on those soil bacteria to stop reacting to those signals, potentially harming legume crops if that non-reactive soil bacteria proliferates.
> Scientists have accomplished a key step in the long-term ambition to engineer nitrogen-fixation into non-legume cereal crops by demonstrating that barley can instruct soil bacteria to convert nitrogen from the air into ammonia fertiliser.<p>E. g. make non-legumes act like legumes. The actual paper is <a href="https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.2117465119" rel="nofollow">https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.2117465119</a>
I have recently discovered Greg Judy on YT and have become fascinated with the possibilities of regenerative agriculture with grazing. He is producing organically with almost no inputs, no heavy equipment and it is growing better soil. Pretty impressive when you compare how many inputs are required with other methods. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tPmYlRMuXo8" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tPmYlRMuXo8</a>
I do wonder at which point does modern agriculture stop being natural? We killed micro-ecologies from vast areas of land, removed wild plants/rodents and other so-called "pests" and forced large scale growing of plants in various ways - selective breeding and process optimization to boost yields, etc. Do we call all that natural and draw the line at GMO?