Excessive fertilizer use can be expensive and bad for the environment, but plants require nutrients to grow. To combat this problem, scientists have been attempting to use genetic engineering to help crops control their own fertilization, making them cooperate with nitrogen-fixing bacteria. The new method could fight food insecurity and save waterways.
Cropping fertilizer use
The U.S. used almost 20.1 million metric tons of fertilizer for agriculture in 2023, with nitrogen fertilizer being the most used at 11.6 million metric tons, according to Statista. Plants need nitrogen to grow, and most crops require fertilizer to obtain it. However, a “small group of plants, including peas, clover and beans, can grow without added nitrogen” by “forming a partnership with specific bacteria that turn nitrogen from the air into a form the plant can absorb,” said a release by Aarhus University about a study published in the journal Nature.
Taking a page from those plants’ books, researchers have been working on developing self-fertilizing crops, and major strides have already been made. In August 2025, scientists were able to use the gene editing tool CRISPR to make wheat crops produce their own fertilizer, according to a study published in Plant Biotechnology Journal. The edits enabled the wheat to “assist specific soil bacteria in nitrogen fixation,” which meant the “plants can absorb necessary nutrients without the reliance on synthetic fertilizers,” said Sustainability Times. The same could potentially be done to other crops as well. Scientists found a “molecular switch that lets plants partner with nitrogen-fixing bacteria instead of fighting them,” and “successfully engineered this change in the plant Lotus japonicus,” then “tested the concept in barley and found that the mechanism worked there as well,” said the release.
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Overuse of fertilizers can have a plethora of ecological consequences. Plants only absorb about 30 to 50% of the nitrogen in fertilizer, and what is not taken up “flows into waterways, which can create ‘dead zones’ that lack oxygen, suffocating fish and other aquatic life,” said a news release from the University of California, Davis, about the Plant Biotechnology Journal study. “Some excess nitrogen in the soil produces nitrous oxide, a potent climate-warming gas.”
In addition, gene-editing crops can also be a “potential boon for food security in developing regions where access to fertilizers is limited,” said Sustainability Times. “In Africa, people don't use fertilizers because they don’t have money, and farms are small, not larger than six to eight acres,” Eduardo Blumwald, the lead author of the Plant Biotechnology Journal study, said in the release. “Imagine, you are planting crops that stimulate bacteria in the soil to create the fertilizer that the crops need, naturally. Wow! That’s a big difference!”
Self-fertilizing crops are a “fundamental redesign of how modern agriculture works,” Steve Cubbage, a precision agriculture consultant and farmer, said in a piece for The Scoop. “Reduced fertilizer dependence means lower exposure to global supply disruptions, energy price shocks and geopolitical risk,” as well as a “resilience strategy that should be taken as seriously.”
