Question: why do you want to make plants grow better?

Senga Robertson answered on 14 Nov 2017:

Hi Tumble bum, I loved chatting with you yesterday, very cool that you want to be a gymnast. I bet you need to practice really hard for that!
Ok this is going to be quite a long answer because I want to explain what I do properly 🙂

Anyway, I have 3 reasons I’d like to make plants grow better:
1-The first is that the number of people in the world is going to increase by nearly 3 billion within the next 30 years and we need to make more food in order to feed everyone
2-just now farmers need to add fertilisers and pesticides to plants to make them grow as big as they need to to make enough food, these chemicals are REALLY bad for our environment. The fertilisers make water near them toxic to animals and the pesticides can cause cancer (thankfully there are not enough of the pesticides on our food to give us cancer-and we wash our food anyway, but farmers that handle these chemicals all the time are at quite a high risk)
3-just now there are areas in the developing world where it’s very difficult for plants to grow due to the soil having very low nutrients, it means there are a lot of areas where there is space to farm but the plants just wont grow.

SCIENCE FACT:
*bacteria (tiny creatures you can only see with a microscope) live all around us and can do some really helpful jobs – bacteria that live in your gut help you to get nutrients from food and defend you against bad bacteria that can make you sick…plants have these bacteria too and they live around their roots. The bacteria around plant roots help the plants to get nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorous (that plants need to survive) out of the soil and also send them special signals to warn if there are bad bacteria around that can make them sick.
MY JOB:
My job is to find a way for plants to get more of these helpful bacteria so that they can get more food from the soil naturally and defend themselves against “germs” instead of farmers having to use chemicals that are bad for people, animals and the environment. These bacteria can also help plants to grow in soil that doesn’t have as much nutrients as it will make plants be able to take up the nutrients in the soil more efficiently so the soil doesn’t need to have as much…this means that we can use land not being used just now for farming and also produce enough food to feed the growing population.

Senga 🙂