Kernza and the Second Green Revolution
We all need to eat. But feeding billions of people should be impossible; this was the global mindset in the 1960s, when few thought hunger outside of one’s own country was a problem worth solving. The proxy conflicts of the Cold War were exacerbating famine and poverty throughout the global South, while domestic turmoil in upper-income countries led to a slowdown in vital foreign aid.
It was in front of this backdrop that Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich wrote The Population Bomb, which predicted worldwide famine in the 1970s and 1980s due to overpopulation. While speculative and at times completely unscientific, his book had an outsize impact on policy and public thought by stoking anxieties about Asian and African birth rates. The book’s ideas symbolized the paralysis of the United States Agency for International Development. When faced with looming global famine, our best minds came up with ideas like a forced, US-organized sterilization of all Indian males with three or more children. Ehrlich famously said “our inadequate aid ought to be reserved for those which can survive”. And yet the United States was and is the only superpower even slightly concerned with the global poor, despite its often disastrous foreign policy; without US support, a worldwide famine would be inevitable. So when many American politicians wanted to withdraw from the international arena, a young Iowan agronomist named Norman Borlaug stepped in.
Norman Borlaug is the greatest person to ever live, and it’s not close. His innovations and leadership directly saved over a billion human lives by contributing to the extensive increases in agricultural production known as the Green Revolution. From two small farms in the Mexican countryside, where he led the Cooperative Wheat Research Production Program, Borlaug’s team worked nonstop to breed disease-resistant, high-yielding varieties (HYVs) of important staple crops. Coupled with his push for the global adoption of fertilizers, pesticides, scientific irrigation practices, and tractors, Borlaug’s work single-handedly made Mexico a net exporter of wheat by 1963. His ideas then spread through the developing world; India was the second major adopter of HYVs and modern agricultural practices, and their turnaround was so dramatic that Ehrlich had to remove all of his predictions of Indian food shortages in later editions of The Population Bomb. In less than a decade, the subcontinent stepped back from the brink of a famine that would have been, by the numbers, among the greatest disasters in human history.
For his pivotal role in bringing food security to a very large percentage of humanity, Borlaug won the 1970 Nobel Peace Prize. At his Nobel Lecture, he reminded the world that “food is something that is taken for granted by most world leaders, despite the fact that more than half of the population of the world is hungry”. While, fifty years later, this statistic is no longer accurate, we’re now increasingly confronted with the need for a second Green Revolution, a reconciliation of Borlaug’s triumph with the rapidly approaching consequences of climate change.
Scientists again have taken the reins from an ineffective and small-minded government, pro-actively developing technological solutions ahead of relevant policy; Kernza is an illustrative example. Officially Thinopyrum intermedium, the genetically modified intermediate wheatgrass is bred from a perennial forage plant common throughout the North American prairie. Our entire agricultural system is based on annual plants, which can be harvested only once before having to be resown. Therefore, global staple crops like wheat, maize, and rice — the plants that feed the world — have weak and shallow root systems, torn up year after year. Their rootstocks deplete the necessary nitrogen from the local environment, and since modern agriculture is a dominating monoculture (a farming system centered around a single crop) that replaced a previously diverse and productive ecosystem, a common side effect of the Borlaugean agricultural synthesis is widespread land degradation. This is not to say we should return to the traditional systems in place before the Green Revolution; this would lead to mass deforestation and other unintended agro-ecologically destructive consequences, not to mention mass starvation. Instead, we should replicate concepts like Kernza which seek to combine the best of both worlds, allowing agricultural productivity and environmental health to coexist.
Kernza, as a perennial crop, is more sustainable than today’s HYVs. Its strong and deep root system adds nitrogen to the surrounding environment and serves as a potent carbon sink, similar to the few remaining parcels of virgin prairie around the United States. Furthermore, it can be grown in a polyculture effectively with unrelated crops such as alfalfa, increasing resistance to disease and limiting the need for excessive pesticides and herbicides. The central advantage of perennials is that they’re soil-forming. Soil — besides being an order of magnitude more biologically rich than the upper ocean — stores and filters water, counterbalances the atmosphere, and most importantly, supports plant growth. As annual crop fields are tilled year after year, there is no time for the development of medium-term soil ecosystems. Even better, perennial plants form symbiotic relationships with nitrogen-fixing bacteria, as well as microscopic soil mesofaunal invertebrates that support higher food-chain levels. Nitrogen- and microbe-rich soil allows for fungi and ‘good’ weeds, which can extract phosphorus and other agriculturally important elements from the subsoil to an increasingly rich upper-level humus. Therefore, the development of perennial crop fields heals degraded agricultural soils and helps build a thriving, self-sustaining ecosystem.
However, Kernza is just one front in the budding second Green Revolution, which is attempting to commercialize perennial cultivars (selectively bred plant varieties) of the most important staple crops. According to sustainable agriculture NGOs like The Land Institute, this line of research yields less obvious benefits, from more manageable irrigation needs to increased biodiversity. So, as the global population continues to grow and climate change degrades greater and greater swaths of arable land, innovations like Kernza in conjunction with carbon removal technologies will become increasingly essential.
Both sides of the political spectrum are unconvinced by the fundamental compatibility of a sustainable food system and effective climate change mitigation. Many environmental groups lobby for policies that undermine the former while only superficially addressing the latter, trying to sway political leaders who don’t even see a problem. Organic farms, recycling programs, and the like are useful tools, but personal action cannot meet the scope of what we face. In fact, these issues won’t be solved by policymakers or the people, even with a massive and unlikely shift in public concern. Our fate seems to be instead predicated on the speed at which scientists can innovate towards a second Green Revolution, bringing a thousand ideas like Kernza to an efficient global market.
Published exclusively in Brown Tech Review. Image source.
