Regenesis: Feeding the World without Devouring the Planet

by George Monbiot

pesticide and water that farmers use, don’t believe them. The majority of that food is not recoverable.

But in poorer nations, where a great deal of food is lost as a result of slow and unreliable transport and spoiling by high temperatures, rot, pests or bruising, the solutions, such as more and better roads, more refrigeration16 and more packaging can accidentally reverse some or all of the environmental savings.

paper in the journal Nature Food sought to discover how many of the world’s people could be fed with staple crops grown within 100 kilometres of where they live.55 It discovered that wheat, rice, barley, rye, beans, millet and sorghum grown within this radius could feed only a quarter of the world’s people. Maize and cassava grown within 100 kilometres could supply a maximum of 16 per cent of those who need them. The average minimum distance at which the world’s people can be fed is 2,200 kilometres. For those who depend on wheat and similar cereals, it’s 3,800 kilometres. A quarter of the global population that consumes these crops requires food grown at least 5,200 kilometres away.

The herbicide works by inhibiting the action of an enzyme that plants produce, called EPSPS,fn10 without which they cannot make a number of essential chemicals.22 Alarmingly, many bacteria and fungi produce the same variety of EPSPS, and glyphosate appears to affect them in the same way.

one toxin can make bacteria less susceptible to others.30 Some research suggests that, in trying to defend themselves against glyphosate, bacteria become better equipped to defend themselves against antibiotics.

Simon argues that the damage inflicted on soil life by glyphosate is much slighter than the damage caused by ploughing, as we could see from the remarkable difference in earthworm numbers between the ploughed strip and the rest of Tim’s land. The

No-till farming seems to be better for keeping the soil damp49 and reducing erosion50 and compaction.51 But, for complicated reasons, it’s no better at storing carbon in the soil,52 or preventing fertilizers53, 54 and pesticides55 escaping from the fields. Broadly speaking, it works well when people farm as Tim does: rotating their crops, keeping the soil covered with catch crops in the winter, and leaving straw and dead weeds (the soil armour) on the surface.56, 57 But it works badly when farmers, as Paul puts it, ‘spray and pray’: dose the land with weedkiller, drill the seed, but otherwise carry on as usual.

discuss the future of farming. Listening

Kernza is a perennial. It persists over several years, averting the need to clear and sow the ground for every harvest.

As their long roots draw nutrients from deep in the ground, perennial crops become their own green manures, their own herbal leys. So the land need not be taken out of production. The longer the plants stay in the ground, the stronger their relationships with bacteria that fix nitrogen, and microbes and fungi that seek out other nutrients. This means that they should, in principle, need less fertilizer.116 One estimate suggests that perennial systems hold five times as much of the water that falls on the ground as annual crops do.

The reason is that this method of food production shrinks, to an astonishing degree, the most important environmental impact of all: our use of land.

has compared the land area needed to grow protein by a process similar to Pasi Vainikka’s with the most efficient agricultural method: US soybean farming.6 In a typical year, soybeans occupy 36.5 million hectares of the US, an area greater than Italy. The land required to produce the same amount of protein by growing bacteria is 21,000 hectares: the size of the city of Cleveland, Ohio. In other words, you’d need 1,700 times less land to grow it.

suggests, he has chosen to generate it from sunlight.7 This is a land-hungry form of power generation. Even so, according to a paper in Engineering Biology, producing bacterial protein with solar panels needs between thirty and sixty times less land than soy protein.8 If wind power were used instead, the paper maintains, the ratio would rise to between 150 and 400 times. If the wind turbines were built offshore, where much larger machines tend to be used, even less land (or seabed) would be needed. If the hydrogen were produced by fourth-generation nuclear reactors, the space required would be even smaller.

While crop plants take months to grow, the bacteria in these tanks double every three hours. So if you maintain good growth conditions, you can harvest half of them eight times a day, every day of the year.9 This technology could release almost all the land currently needed to produce protein, whether it comes in the form of plants or animals. Much of our food supply could be farmfree.

As well as land, Pasi’s technology makes parsimonious use of other resources. He’s designing his process to enable the water and carbon dioxide that the bacteria need to be drawn directly from the atmosphere outside the brewery: his ambition is to conjure food from air.

we used Pasi’s method to produce all the protein needed for full human nutrition, it would raise the world’s electricity demand by 11 per cent.fn2

During the rest of the year, and in quiet hours in the peak months, clean energy systems will produce more electricity than their customers need. Precision fermentation is one of the technologies that might take advantage of this surplus, as hydrogen could be produced during the periods when unwanted electricity is most abundant, and therefore cheapest. If so, making the new foods would scarcely contribute to the need for new generating capacity, and therefore to the need for materials. As

An investigation by the European Court of Auditors discovered that the EU has no useful data on farm incomes, and therefore no knowledge of whether its subsidies serve any social purpose.42

In the US, 10 per cent of farmers – generally the biggest and richest – harvest 77 per cent of subsidies.43 Some of the recipients are absentee owners, who may never have set foot on their land.