Big Picture Agriculture

Last week I attended the 5th Annual Aspen Institute Environment Forum co-sponsored by National Geographic. (This event precedes the Ideas Festival and the two events overlapped with one day of talks on forests.) Walter Isaacson is the President of the Aspen Institute, so it was he who introduced the event and the first day’s featured speakers, E.O. Wilson and Stuart Brand.

Personal highlights, though there were many, were having my photo taken with Stuart Brand, and finding myself next to Hari Sreenivasan of PBS Newshour on a walking commute between buildings, for an uninterrupted five minutes of conversation. Ever the astute interviewer, his first question for me was how I make money by having a site about agriculture. The fact that he asked the question meant that my answer came as no surprise to him.

Dennis Dimick, the Environmental Editor of National Geographic has been an online supporter of this site since nearly its start, so it was nice to finally meet him in person. Because Dimick has an education in Agriculture from the University of Wisconsin, he appreciates the fact that agriculture is the number one cause of planetary ecosystem destruction. And that is why he moderated the Ag panel talk and saved it (the best) for last. Ag panelists were Jon Foley, Jason Clay, Chris Reij, and Dan Glickman.

This hour long discussion is definitely worth a listen.

Breakthroughs on the physics side will be in materials. The battery manufacturer Envia [Systems] announced a 400-watt-hour-per-kilogram battery. That’s at least a factor of two more than the previous best. It still has to go through some more stages of testing. We are investing in other battery companies that will go another factor of two beyond that.

Biofuels are a little bit further out only because your competition is oil. Early-stage research sponsored by the Department of Energy has microbes you can feed simple sugars and out pops diesel fuel. Another company is using photo-synthetic bacteria and swapping whole genomes and metabolic pathways. [The microbe] generates long alkane chains that are the immediate precursors to diesel fuel. It’s 5 to 10 percent energy-efficient, whereas a typical plant is only 1 percent efficient. This is a little weird bacterium or yeast. In the past 15 years or so I’ve gotten into biology like this. I follow it with avid interest. It’s really almost science fiction.

Out of a possible 5,752 records: 205 (Broken) + 74 (Tied) = 279 Total

Corn growers in the middle of the nation are saying that this is the week that will determine this year’s crop. If there is still no rain there will be major crop losses.

Midwestern droughts have historically followed southern droughts, like the Texas drought of the past couple of years. Also, the Midwest has not had a drought for many years, and many say that it is due.

Climate Change? As Kevin Trenberth (NCAR) just told us at the Environment Forum (#1 above), “Five to ten percent of all of today’s weather is because of climate change.”

Research spending as a share of sales is highest in the crop seed/biotechnology, crop chemical, animal health, and animal breeding/genetics sectors.

Global trade in agricultural inputs has grown rapidly over the past two decades. Between 1990 and 2007, international trade in animal breeding material grew by 260 percent, and trade in farm machinery grew by 190 percent (in constant U.S. dollars).

The private sector accounted for 45 percent of total food and agricultural R&D spending worldwide. Although the global estimates of public research spending do not separate food from agricultural R&D, the U.S. data may be illustrative, at least for high-income countries. According to USDA’s Inventory of Agricultural Research, in 2000, about 60 percent of total U.S. public agricultural R&D was allocated to research related to plant and animal systems; 15 percent went to food and human nutrition; and 24 percent went to environmental and other issues not directly related to food or farm production. If these figures are representative of public agricultural R&D in high-income countries, it would imply that the private sector accounts for roughly 46 percent of total production agriculture research and 76 percent of food related research in these countries.

Source: USDA’s Amber Waves

This is not to say that grassfed beef are not appropriate in some areas. Large herbivores roamed many of this Earth’s lands prior to modern agriculture and Allan Savory has written much about the benefits of these natural systems.

I might add that in the Andes, Peruvians eat guinea pigs (Cuy chactado) kept adjacent to or inside their houses. Then, there’s the old dovecote, or pigeon house used in the Middle East, Europe, and the early years in America. Or, as PBS’s NOVA recently explained to us, the best sensible protein source for humans might be insects… now there’s a challenge for the food innovators, processors, and packagers.

At the Aspen Institute Environment Forum (#1 above), Jon Foley said, “If there’s an elephant in the room with the global food system, it’s a cow.”