China produces twice as much rice per hectare as India with the same volume of water.
FORBES: Veolia Environment's CEO Antoine Fr��rot On Water Productivity
Typically biofuel yields are of the order of three to four tons per hectare.
Peatland can store over 5, 000 tonnes of carbon per hectare, and when drained for cultivation emits it for decades.
The oil palm is an efficient crop, yielding up to ten times more oil per hectare than soyabeans, rapeseed or sunflowers.
Farmers in sub-Saharan Africa now use only about 9kg of fertiliser per hectare on average, compared with 142kg in South-East Asia.
At the moment farmers get paid an annual average of 200 euros per hectare in direct payments from taxpayers - for doing little more than owning land.
Dr Venter reckons that even with existing technology, it should be possible to turn out ten times more fuel per hectare than can be garnered from maize.
Yields soared from 2, 500 10-kilogram boxes per hectare to 7, 500.
Since 2000, yields per hectare have risen by nearly two-thirds.
ECONOMIST: Successes in the war on drugs expose the policy��s limits
Using this system, crop yields go up dramatically, from one tonne to four tonnes of maize per hectare in a good year, and from zero to a tonne in a drought.
ECONOMIST: A new twist on an old idea is improving farm yields in Africa
Initially the subsidies were based on tonnes of crops, or numbers of livestock, but now many farmers are paid around 200 euros per hectare annually for little more than owning fields.
That was partly because more land was taken into cultivation, but also because yields per hectare rose by some 17% over this period, according to the Rural Society, a farmers' lobby.
Patient crossbreeding created a variety, called braquiarinha in Brazil, which produced 20-25 tonnes of grass feed per hectare, many times what the native cerrado grass produces and three times the yield in Africa.
By producing sugarcane-based ethanol in Peru, whose northern coast has an output of 131 tonnes per hectare, compared with the Brazilian average of 72 tonnes, Brazilian companies could gain tariff-free access to the United States.
While keen to put expectations in perspective, D1 Oils, in partnership with oil company BP, has announced plans to plant 50, 000 hectares of so-called "elite seed" this year, capable of producing 2.7 tonnes of oil per hectare.
One hectare of land can, for example, produce rice or potatoes for 19 to 22 people per year.
FORBES: Staggering Global Food Waste Creates Green Tech Opportunities
应用推荐