The Business Times need to learn some basic science

Mia Pei’s recent story for the Business Times is such a train wreck of bad journalism and misinformation:

Temasek sees plant seeds as a game changer to fixing the broken global food system

[SINGAPORE] Pulses, or edible plant seeds such as chickpeas and lentils, could be the transformative answer to a global food system that is under severe strain.

Firstly, the title. Most of the major food crops (wheat, rice, maize, soybeans, etc.) are “plant seeds”. For a story that is just about pulses, this title doesn’t make any sense.

Secondly, sure, pulses are “edible plant seeds”, but so are those other major crops. The journalist is doing a terrible job explaining (if you can call it that) what “pulses” are. If they bothered to take a quick look at Wikipedia, they would know that pulses are simply legumes that are not soybeans or peanuts.

“Pulses produce 90 per cent fewer emissions per gram of protein than beef. They use half the water of soy and corn to produce the same amount of calories. They require 20 times less land than animal proteins,” said Maheshwari, adding that these plants also fix atmospheric nitrogen that is responsible for as much as 6 per cent of the global greenhouse gas emissions.

At the farming stage, pulses have a symbiotic relationship with nitrogen-fixing bacteria in their roots, allowing them to convert atmospheric nitrogen gas into a usable form for plants. This process of nitrogen fixation not only enriches the soil, making it less reliant on synthetic fertilisers, but also reduces nitrogen compounds in the air that contribute to the greenhouse effect.

Lastly, and most infuriatingly, the journalist is confusing nitrogen gas (N₂), which happens to be 78% of our atmosphere and not a GHG, with nitrous oxide (N₂O), the third most important anthropogenic GHG. If they didn’t learn this in secondary school, a quick Google search should make it clear that legumes (including pulses) and their symbiotic Rhizobia bacteria convert N₂ from the atmosphere into ammonia in the soil. Legumes and Rhizobia do not “fix” or draw down N₂O, so they don’t reduce atmospheric GHG directly. If anything, the nitrogen that legumes and Rhizobia fixed into the soil will be converted by other microbes into atmospheric N₂O over time, so they can actually release GHG in some cases.

Business Times, you need to do better.