Farming Needs to Suck Less

Fertilizer isn't sexy but it's a worse climate problem than aviation. Here's a way to fix it.

Synthetic fertilizers generate 2.5 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, create a dead zone the size of Connecticut in the Gulf of Mexico, and put farmers at the mercy of petro-giants like Koch Industries and petro-states like Russia. They suck! But they also feed the world. Half the people alive today would be very not alive if fertilizers manufactured from natural gas weren’t super-sizing our harvests. The Haber-Bosch process that alchemizes nitrogen from the air into steroids for crops was the most important invention of the 20th century, even more important than the atomic bomb.

My new Canary Media column is about a company that’s invented a better kind of fertilizer, replacing the toxic chemistry of the 20th century with the futuristic biology of today. It’s called Pivot Bio, and it’s backed by green investors like Bill Gates and Al Gore as well as giant agribusinesses like Bayer, Bunge and Continental Grain. It makes genetically edited microbes that take nitrogen out of the air like miniature Haber-Bosch factories—and unlike chemical fertilizer, which loses half its nitrogen in the form of air and water pollution, Pivot’s bugs feed all their nitrogen to crops.

It’s a big deal! You can click here to read about it.

One theme in my Eating the Earth essays (like the one about the super-tree that can save the world, or the one about fake meat and other food technologies) is that the solutions to our food and climate problems need to scale up absurdly quickly. In 2019, when I first visited Pivot, it was testing its first-generation product on 10,000 acres of cornfields; now farmers are using its second-generation product on 5 million acres. But it’s only displacing about one-fifth of the fertilizer load on those acres, and the world has more than 4 billion acres of croplands. These problems are really hard.

A cool twist in the story is that there’s huge potential for carbon markets to reward farmers who reduce their nitrous oxide emissions by using Pivot’s bugs, which could help not only with fertilizer but with the carbon markets, which also really suck. They let airlines, oil companies and other polluters buy carbon offsets instead of reducing their own emissions, like medieval Catholics buying papal indulgences to greenwash their sins, and most of the offsets have been totally bogus. But Pivot has started to do deals where food and agriculture companies are buying “insets” to reduce the emissions in their own supply chains—and the emission reductions seem quite real.

Anyway, this is the kind of stuff I’m obsessed with these days. It doesn’t get as much attention as fossil fuels, but the world needs to produce 50 percent more food with 75 fewer emissions by 2050, and it needs to do it with a smaller agricultural footprint. We’ve basically figured out what to do about energy - duh, electrify everything and run the world on zero-emissions electricity - but we gotta figure out this stuff quick.

Thanks for reading! The book is two thirds written, so I’ll start emitting more soon. And please share this with anyone you think would be interested.

Mike