Methanol Is Embraced as Crop Aid
Arthur Nonomura may not consider himself a savior. But because of his simple, serendipitous discovery, the world is beating a path to his doorstep.
What this scientist-turned-farmer has stumbled onto could revolutionize agriculture in scorched, arid regions of the world, many researchers believe.
In research in defiance of “conventional wisdom,” Nonomura discovered several years ago that simply spraying methanol on his plants nearly doubled their growth rate while requiring only half as much wa ter as the untreated plants. Methanol, widely available as wood alcohol, is generally thought to be toxic to plants.
Today, the 42-year-old botanist has been so busy answering queries and attending conferences around the world that he no longer has time to run the farm he had chosen over a promising career in research and education.
The process works in only hot, dry areas, and it does not work on all types of plants. But research indicates that the process could revolutionize farming of such crops as wheat and cotton in much of the world, experts familiar with Nonomura’s work say.
“I think it’s going to save the world,” said Andrew Benson of Scripps Institution of Oceanography, Nonomura’s collaborator and a leading researcher in the field of plant growth. He predicts vastly expanded agricultural use of arid lands.
Benson believes that the discovery will revolutionize farming in such areas as Mexico, Egypt, Israel, North Africa, Brazil and other regions where water is scarce.
Although the Environmental Protection Agency is slightly less effusive in its praise, officials nonetheless recently designated methanol as a fertilizer, not a pesticide or plant growth regulator, clearing the way for essentially unregulated use of methanol on farms. Many countries are gearing up to test the technique this summer, and the state of Arizona has also recently begun exploring the use of methanol for crops.
How the process works is not well understood, leading to some skepticism on the part of other experts who want to see additional results before concluding that the discovery is as important as it seems. Many are planning their own experiments.
“I feel there’s something there,” said Richard Smiley, superintendent of Oregon State University’s Columbia Basin Agricultural Research Center. Scientists at the center were briefed by Nonomura this spring.
“We don’t understand why it’s working,” Smiley said, “but I don’t question the integrity of the work.”
It all came about, Nonomura says, because he and his wife wanted to raise their family on a farm.
The bespectacled Nonomura was a researcher at Scripps in San Diego when he met and married a college professor. Carole Nonomura longed to return to her parents’ sprawling farm west of Phoenix because that seemed a more suitable environment to raise a family.
Nonomura, who had never worked on a farm, agreed, and the two abandoned their academic careers. Within a year, Nonomura was running his own farm in the Arizona desert.
Soon after his first crops came up three years ago, he noticed something that troubled him: During the hottest part of the day, the plants wilted.
The sight took Nonomura back to the early days of his academic career, after he had earned his doctorate at UC Berkeley and joined the staff at Scripps. The young scientist was doing research on a type of algae that produced hydrocarbons, which Nonomura thought could be used as a substitute for gasoline. The world was in the grip of an oil crisis at the time, and Nonomura found that spraying the algae with methanol supplied enough carbon for the algae to double its growth rate.
But the oil crisis ended, interest in fuel substitutes waned and Nonomura went on to other things.
He remembered the algae when he saw his plants wilt, and he wondered if the problem could be a lack of carbon. Plants absorb carbon dioxide from the air, which they break down through photosynthesis into sugar and other nutrients. Nonomura thought that maybe the sun was causing photosynthesis to take place at such a rapid rate that the plants were exhausting the supply of carbon dioxide.
He and his one employee worked all day to take care of their crops, leaving little time for experimentation, but Nonomura decided to try something while his helper was taking a lunch break. Although plants should never be sprayed during the heat of the day--because any liquid can cause damage under those conditions--Nonomura began spraying a few rose bushes and cotton plants with highly diluted methanol, using a small, hand-held squeeze bottle.
No one else had tried it, he said, because laboratory experiments had shown methanol to be toxic to plants.
But the result, he said recently, was stunning. The plants he had sprayed no longer wilted.
“They were standing up, they were crisp and very healthy as compared to any of the plants around them,” he said.
Methanol, when applied to the plants in these concentrations, is not toxic to people, he said. More than 100 million tons of the molecules are released into the atmosphere every year by trees, grasses and plants. So he decided to experiment with edible plants. He found himself with watermelons twice the size of unsprayed plants, tomatoes that were huge and sweet and cabbages that defied imagination.
Convinced that he had stumbled across something significant, Nonomura called Benson, who had helped him in his early work on algae. At 75, Benson is considered one of the world’s leading experts on how plants use sunlight to convert carbon dioxide into the basic ingredients needed for growth.
Nonomura faxed Benson two cotton leafs--one treated and one untreated--showing much greater growth in the leaf sprayed with methanol. The treated leaf, Nonomura said, “was the size of two of my hands and the untreated leaf was only the size of one.”
The two talked on the phone for more than three hours, and Benson asked for additional evidence. Nonomura sent him two cabbages by express mail, one normal and one treated, which was twice as large.
“These are kind of famous cabbages,” Nonomura said, because they convinced Benson that his younger colleague had indeed discovered something very important.
Benson said that he used the cabbages to make cole slaw and that the two tasted the same.
The two carried out additional experiments, including increasing the level of methanol until the plants showed signs of toxicity, which usually did not occur until the amount of methanol surpassed 30%. But they also discovered that the process did not work on everything, and they believe that the finding offers a valuable clue as to what is going on inside the plants.
They found that methanol increases the rate of growth in ancient crops, classified as C3 plants, including cotton, wheat, strawberries, melons and roses. It did not work on C4 plants, which include corn, sorghum and many noxious weeds.
C3 plants are known to be less efficient users of photosynthesis, apparently because they originated about 300 million years ago when the Earth’s atmosphere was far richer in carbon dioxide than it is today, Nonomura said. Most C4 plants began about 40 million to 50 million years ago and are thus more suitable for today’s environment than the older specimens.
The C3 plants on his farm, Nonomura reasoned, were wilting during the heat of the day--when photosynthesis is at its greatest-- because there was not enough carbon in the air to sustain their growth and they were discarding much of the energy they had absorbed. Spraying them with methanol, he concluded, gave them a boost by supplying the carbon they lacked, thus inhibiting a process called photorespiration, in which plants reject some of the energy they have collected through photosynthesis.
“It gives a wake-up call to plants that are taking a siesta in the afternoon,” Benson added.
A companion result may prove even more valuable. Because the sprayed plants were far more efficient in their use of sunlight, they grew twice as quickly as the untreated crops. Thus, they were ready to harvest much earlier, halving the amount of water.
Benson said the reduction in water was partly the result of the plant breaking methanol down into sugar, which pulled water up from the ground and into the plant, reducing evaporation from the soil.
Methanol had never achieved that in the laboratory, Nonomura said, because laboratory experiments are conducted under controlled conditions that typically have much less light than he found on his Arizona farm. He found that in the shade, the treatment was either harmful or ineffective, further underscoring his conviction that methanol allowed his crops to double their use of sunlight.
Simply making the crops more effective, he said, also reduced the need for pesticides.
“When you increase the efficiency of anything, you decrease the use of a lot of other things,” he said. “We get an increased rate of growth, we get healthier plants, and we get an earlier season.”
Nonomura found, for example, that he avoided a confrontation with the dreaded white fly because his crops were out of the ground by the time the annual infestation arrived.
Nonomura and Benson published their findings last October in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, of which Benson is a member. The discovery has been accepted with rare speed. The EPA’s endorsement of methanol has been followed by support from the Arizona Department of Agriculture.
“We’re very enthusiastic,” said John F. Hagen, deputy director of the department.
“Our philosophy from the beginning was what can we do to get this in the hands of the farmers,” Hagen added.
He said there are still some concerns over the technology, because the process is not yet fully understood. If not applied correctly, for example, high doses of methanol could damage crops, and methanol is a flammable liquid that must be stored correctly.
Yet it is readily available to anyone who wants to experiment with it, and by comparison with most other farm products, it is unregulated. That opens the door to disaster by farmers who are unfamiliar with the technology.
To help get the technology to farmers, Nonomura has joined the staff of Estrella Mountain Community College in Litchfield Park, a new institution that serves this farming belt. Farmers and farm workers are encouraged to come to the college for information on the process.
Meanwhile, researchers worldwide are gearing up for experiments this summer, their first opportunity to test Nonomura’s discovery. Delegations from several countries have been briefed on the technology.
“We’ve had inquiries on everything from cranberries in Massachusetts to grapes in California and Australia and Chile,” Hagen said. Other researchers have come from as far away as Japan.
Methanol could be used routinely around the world within about two years--an extraordinary pace in the deployment of an agricultural discovery.
More research is needed to understand the process and ensure there are no adverse side effects, Benson said. He wants to be sure, for example, that the process does not alter the genetic makeup of the plants in a way that would reduce their life spans. But he clearly believes that to be a long shot.
“You always keep your fingers crossed,” Benson said, “but I think this is going to be tremendous.”
By year’s end, much more research will have been completed, and a farmer and his highly respected mentor should know if they have, indeed, launched a new green revolution.
