Why We Need the Monks to Achieve Sustainable Agriculture
What has shaped modern agriculture is science. We have applied science to defeat Thomas Robert Malthus's doomsday claim that agriculture could only grow linearly but populations would grow exponentially so people would have to engage in war or starvation to maintain stable numbers.
He was writing this in the late 1700s to early 1800s and couldn’t see industrialized farming, or the increased understanding from science of plant nutrition, and he didn’t understand that we would develop spectacular breeding techniques to improve crops. All these things allowed us to feed a huge population that is now passed 8 billion.
Recently we exceeded the natural production of Nature of nitrogen fertilizers. This was a big event in human history because half of the people now alive are totally dependent on one chemical process that’s difficult and expensive to do and not sustainable. I’ll get to this dramatic connection to fossil fuels and why it adds to the problem of getting off of them in a minute.
Agriculture has been this process of chasing yields. It turns out only a few bushels per acre more of say corn can make the difference between a profit and a loss. Farmers are fighting over trying to get six more bushels per acre so that they can be more profitable and put their neighbors out of business. This is the process I’m referring to as chasing yields. It definitely is not sustainable.
Just to make that a little clearer suppose that 18 bushels per acre of corn is your profit after production costs and your neighbor is getting 36 bushels per acre more. That neighbor will be making twice the profit per acre even though, in fields of near 200 bushels, it is a very small difference.
It is this process of small changes in yield that have driven people to dump all sorts of poisons on their fields or to reduce their input costs from labor with complex machinery. It’s chasing yields for a profit. It simply is not sustainable.
One of the things that is not widely understood is that 2% of climate change carbon dioxide is being generated from the process of producing nitrogen fertilizer. Corn is one of the most hungry nitrogen crops so I will use that from now on in this talk.
I don't know if they've adjusted farming practices since I was young but the general rule was to dump 200 pounds of nitrogen per acre. A lot of that simply runs off. But what's important here is that this is 10 times what Nature delivers to these fields naturally from rain.
Also it is important to point out that this nitrogen is in the air all around us and it's hard to transform it chemically into what the plants can absorb.
Around the early 1900s a couple of Germans developed an energy expensive process of producing nitrates out of the air using natural gas and catalysts and a lot of energy and pressure. They produced ammonia which plants can then use. It’s known as the Haber-Bosch method.
Before this process was invented wars erupted over bird dung that accumulated over a million years or so on islands off of Chile. That is because it not only was wonderful for fertilizer but you can use these nitrates to make gunpowder. And guess who was able to monopolize these resources? I’ll give you a hint: it was not Germany!
I don’t remember what the recipe is for gunpowder, but they used to scrape down chicken coops in order to make the gunpowder for the blunder buster guns. This obviously couldn’t yield very much. Then they found these Islands filled with this bird dung generated from eating fish that are overly abundant in proteins that the birds don’t need so they ended up excreting a lot of nitrogen compounds that accumulated to great depths. These deposits were desirable to run, not only the military, but also agriculture.
No wonder war broke out over harvesting this smelly obnoxious goo. Imagine transporting that stuff in stifling heat into wooden boats, and then transporting it halfway around the world!
This means that in 1900 or so when the Haber-Bosch discovery took place it was just in time to ramp up the military for World War I. Obviously another thing that Thomas Robert Malthus couldn’t have foreseen! Fossil fuels or fertilized plants.
Very quickly we retired the horse and doubled the amount of crop land that we wanted to dump fertilizers on. And of course we doubled down on fossil fuels because the replacement for the horse was the car. Pretty soon people would want to go so fast that they would have hundreds of horses under the hood.
This created so much wealth that we started inventing rider lawn mowers and started having a massive increase in lawns. These we also started dumping ridiculous amounts of nitrogen fertilizers on because that's one of the things that grasses need for lush growth.
This means that trying to create higher yields also drove us into war because we had abundant explosives as nitrate compounds are used in explosions.
That might be an issue for another day but these nitrates require fossil fuels in abundance because it's an energy demanding process.
The solution to that is to use natural processes which we are just beginning to understand but it requires us to have the specialties of the monks knowledge of atoms and what they’re doing, if we would like quick and dramatic progress.
This requires that I explained a little bit in a general sense about how plants came to be on the earth and their really complicated relationship with fungus and bacteria.
Plants cannot produce the nutrients they need and they form extended relationships with bacteria and fungus. In exchange they deliver carbon rich compounds which we think of as sugars.
What is really important here is that plants can do this really effectively even though it requires a lot of energy to split the water molecule and to split the carbon dioxide molecule in order to stitch calories together using solar energy to produce sugars.
This is an interesting contribution from plants. They're supplying the carbon-rich nutrients that the bacteria and the fungus need. The fungus are supplying certain minerals in particular phosphorus which doesn't have a water transport system like all of the other cycling chemicals of the Earth so the plants really need it weathering from rocks which fungus are doing. And the bacteria are able to set nitrogen from the air which requires a lot of energy which the plant is happy to supply if the bacteria will share, which they do!
At first glance when I say that all plants have a relationship with fungus and bacteria it's not real obvious how incredibly complicated this whole process is. The plants are giving sugars to these two actors such that together you get much more growth taking place with plants that can support really rich associations and ecosystems, run on sunlight.
Again at first glance you might just skip over the complexity here. Plants actually let certain fungus enter tubes that they create for them and then they feed them sugars and if the fungus gives them phosphorus which is hard for the plant to come up with then everyone is happy. And of course legumes do a very similar thing in which they feed sugars to colonies that they create habitat for in the root nodules.
But what most people don't know is that a cruder method takes place where a lot of plants simply weep sugars right into the soil to feed bacteria there in order to benefit when these fast living organisms die off, surrendering their nitrogen compounds.
These various systems require something that’s similar to our immune system. You can’t just let anybody into your tissues to colonize because there will be cheaters. There will be things that want your sugars but will give you nothing back for them. The plant has to come up with some kind of set of chemical signals that are given back and forth along with these trades.
Let’s use soybeans as a quick example. They want help from fungus in order to get phosphorus but they also want help from nitrogen setting bacteria. The roots reach out and send out signals looking for these friends. They join up and if a transaction takes place the soybean gets the growing nutrients that it needs and produces an abundance of surplus sugars that it sends down to its helpful friends. If however the deal is not delivered, it has to kill off the invaders because they are imposters and are not completing this sophisticated symbiosis.
We are just beginning to understand how strong this relationship is and how amazing. It is the key to establishing sustainable agriculture instead of this relentless insane chasing of infinite yields which is not possible. It is where the monks will contribute because finally understanding chemistry allows us to explore these things so much better.
Back to corn as an example. We cleared almost the entire state of Iowa, in the United States, of a very rich prairie ecosystem and light savannah so that we could grow nothing but corn and soybeans.
We rotate them because soybeans help a little bit to reduce fertilizer costs because of their association with nitrogen setting bacteria.
But what do we do with this incredible high-yielding corn? We cook it with a bunch of energy then we grind it up into a syrup that we dump in a vat with yeast that turns it into alcohol. We then mix it with a whole bunch of petrochemicals to burn in people's cars.
This means we are growing a huge amount of corn in order to turn it into a small substitute for fossil fuels. We are using fossil fuels to produce a ridiculous amount of nitrogen fertilizer to grow this bumper crop that’s one of the highest yielding so that we can throw it away burning it in cars and thinking that it is somehow green.
In addition the prices are so low for this crop that most farmers this year are in danger. One of the most ironic things of modern times is we have more starvation around the world than ever and are cutting funding for that while having some of the cheapest nitrogen fertilizer prices because of fracking shale deposits which are perfect for producing natural gas that can be turned into guess what, fertilizer.
This should have made farmer's profitable but because of tariff and trade wars that's not happening.
In addition the idea that we are going to get higher yields to get out of this problem is obviously not correct.
Add to that that we are trying to exit into electric cars that will not be needing half of the corn crop to burn and you get a clear set of events that make the future of corn cropping dismal.
What we really want to do is one day to settle down and have some kind of sustainable healthy ecosystem in the soil. If there was a way that we could promote healthier symbiosis with bacteria and fungus and corn we might not need to fertilize them at all. And if we were willing to set aside this relentless competition with our neighbors to get a few more bushels so we can put them out of business we could become sustainable.
This is somewhat true of all of our grain crops that support 80% of the population. These crops are mostly wheat, corn, and rice. If these grasses could be manipulated to have those signaling genetics so that they too could form better relationships with fungus and bacteria to supply the fertilizer benefits, then we might finally reach some stage of healthy intimate understanding and relationship with the biosphere.
Let's get down too how the monks come into all of this? Well they are explaining the structure of atoms and how they hold together and what electrons and light are doing in chemical reactions.
Currently we don't know how things use the sugar molecule to drive all sorts of chemistry. What does it mean that it's full of energy? That is finally being explained by the monks.
Biochemistry is going to be an incredibly fruitful place to explore once we actually understand how chemical reactions take place. To be able to manipulate things skillfully on a level never thought of before will allow us to do extraordinary things that our imagination is just too limited right now without having the correct ideas.
The basics of science are probably the most important thing to have as a tool. They are now available on my co-authors publication called Light Orbits.
If those ideas are recognized as correct and start being spread around we will see the greatest changes in human history. One of them could easily be sustainable agriculture for the first time.
Modern life so far has been all about jumping from crisis to crisis. Science keeps changing the rules on us and pushing us.
When I was a kid they used to constantly say that you should put in a small chicken coop of a thousand chickens and you could be comfortable. As more people did that the price of eggs kept dropping and you had to keep adding more and more chickens.
That's how science keeps Us constantly running chasing yields. It never settles down to sustainable. We need such dramatic improvements that will only happen once we have The Theory of Everything. Then perhaps we can finally settle down and have something stable that people can make a living at but also be happy doing...
