The Next NEXT Generation of Environmental Progress
By Harry Huntley, Senior Agriculture Policy Analyst
One of EPIC’s core strategies is refocusing government programs onto what matters: outcomes. Environmental policy for the past 50 years has largely been focused on procedures, recipes, routes. By reorienting these dollars, regulations, and goals, governments can create demand for quantified units of environmental progress and invite innovators to deliver these results faster and at a larger scale than currently possible. I believe this approach will be the next generation of environmental progress.
But what will the next NEXT generation look like? Put another way, what tools will those creative, irreverent problem-solvers develop to create the supply of water quality improvements, temperature reductions, or wildlife habitat?
My work in policy is mostly practice-agnostic. But sometimes I like to daydream about what those practices will be and what agriculture might look like in a world that values ecosystem services. This is what I call the next NEXT generation of environmental progress and–stimulated by some amazing concepts I heard at Aspen Ideas: Climate last week–this blog post will explore a couple of those ideas good and bad that might not be quite ready for prime time yet but forward-thinkers should be thinking about.
New Environments
Some of the new advances may be not just about how we grow food but where we grow it. Ask the general public “Where will food come from in 30 years?” and you’ll likely hear about the much-hyped concept of vertical (indoor) farming. But among other issues, large-scale indoor farming requires cheap energy. While the cost of renewable energy continues to decrease, electrical demands on the grid (including from electrifying industrial processes like steelmaking) are increasing steeply. Breakthrough technologies–like nuclear fusion–continue to be too distant to address the urgency of climate change, and newly-built projects are struggling to connect to the grid. Until electricity becomes significantly cheaper, indoor agriculture will likely continue to be limited to niche locations and high value crops like greens in Alaska.
Aquaculture offers an attractive alternative to on-land farming that is poised to take off. While communities around the world have practiced some forms of smallscale aquaculture for millenia, and Norwegian salmon farmers kicked off a booming–albeit sometimes problematic–industry in the 1960s, modern aquaculturists are growing more mollusks and plants that could prove a significant part of agriculture’s next next generation. In-ocean farming could create environmental problems similar to farming on land, but many of the existing and emerging techniques actually have environmental benefits like oysters filtering the Chesapeake Bay and kelp forests sequestering carbon. Organizations like GreenWave are training the next generation of aquaculturists and developing innovations to bring their products to market, while others like Minorities in Aquaculture ensure this new aspect of the food system doesn’t repeat the injustices that have been perpetrated on land.
A scary reality of climate change is that existing production systems will have to move. Probably not literally transplanting whole orchards, but crops that used to be grown in one part of the world may no longer be suitable there. This is already a reality for Georgia peaches that are struggling to reach the needed number of chill hours as winters get warmer. In some situations this could provide some benefits, like more crop options for farmers in the Dakotas who’ve been limited to growing only the most hardy plants. It could even make some crops that have historically been grown in the tropics, like oil palm, more viable outside of those biodiversity-rich ecosystems. For industries less willing to move, another option might be to modify existing crops to better survive in warming climates, such as genetically engineering slick-haired cattle.
New Tech
Genetic engineering will offer options beyond just adapting to a changing climate. Ongoing research by the Salk Institute’s Harvesting Plants Initiative (If you click no other link in this post, click this one—or even better: read the moving Washington Post story on it!) is exploring exactly how plants sequester carbon. This could provide the basis for existing crops to be supercharged into pulling more CO2 out of the atmosphere into their roots and the soil. Not only would this mitigate rising temperatures, it could potentially replenish depleted and poor soils across the country, increasing their ability to hold water, improving their tilth, and growing yields. Others are working on creating plants that can pull not just CO2 out of the air but N2 by fixing it into nitrogen sources plants can use. This would both minimize the production of energy-intensive, greenhouse gas-emitting chemical fertilizers and also limit runoff of excess nitrogen into waterways where it causes algal blooms. Unfortunately, the labor intensive process for approval of new genetically engineered crops will make it costly and slow to bring these new crops to fields and plates.
Beside the impacts nitrogen fertilizer can have as runoff, its production requires burning huge quantities of natural gas. Production and transportation of nitrogen fertilizer alone accounts for approximately 1% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. Companies like Nitricity are looking to electrify this process, but other companies are developing alternatives to synthetic nitrogen. Pivot Bio is already selling microbes that can fix nitrogen from the air into fertilizer. There’s also emerging efforts, like in Fort Lauderdale, to turn algae and seaweed into fertilizer and compost.
While it wasn’t discussed much at Aspen Ideas: Climate, I continue to be excited by synthetic biology efforts that could offer radically new ways to produce protein and other products, like leather from fungi. I’m also closely following new advances in using software for precision agriculture (as I wrote about in my Farm Bill post), especially using artificial intelligence to design new conservation projects.
New Markets
And perhaps still the reimagined system will be about not just where or how food is produced but about a whole range of new markets for agricultural crops and even new crops. The existing agriculture industry is already betting big on sustainable aviation fuel. This is borne of a simple reality: In the next ~30 years, cars will electrify and airplanes won’t. That reality poses an existential threat to the US ethanol—and by extension, corn—industries. The United States currently produces about 15 million gallons of ethanol—overwhelmingly from corn—every year, a product for which electric cars have no use. Planes on the other hand are not going to be electrified any time soon due to the weight of batteries, and so need a way to produce jet fuel that doesn’t jeopardize climate goals. Sustainable aviation fuel is chemically the same as existing jet fuel but made with ethanol molecules as an intermediate.
Of any of the technologies mentioned here, this seems most likely to further or at least continue existing environmental harms, currently wrought by ethanol. Experts disagree on ethanol’s climate impacts, but the demand for corn it induces can at least partially be considered responsible for excess nitrogen runoff to waterways, causing the same problems mentioned above, as well as replacing native ecosystems with monoculture. Hopefully, sustainable aviation fuel can avoid the issues of ethanol. Because unless we all give up flying or carbon sequestration becomes possible on a scale no one is even imagining, SAF will be one market for agricultural products.
Agriculture is not just corn; it’s not just row crops and the animals that eat them. Specialty crop industries (what federal policy considers everything from oranges to lettuce to saplings) can all too easily be left out of conversations of agriculture policy. One topic mentioned repeatedly at the Aspen Ideas: Climate was wildfires. Here’s a crazy stat: California’s 2020 wildfire season released twice as much CO2 emissions as the state cut between 2003 and 2019 combined. Much could be said about new efforts to prevent wildfires (and to not prevent them!), but the fact remains that these forests do not immediately regenerate naturally after burning. At the unnatural scale wildfires are currently occurring, forest regeneration will need a helping hand from humans to ensure it creates wildlife habitat and sequesters carbon. Mast is one company working to grow the nursery stock to replant these forests. And they’re doing the breeding and replanting in some fascinating ways!
Fundamentally, plants are adapted to pull CO2 out of the air and turn it into living tissue. That means they provide excellent opportunities for carbon sequestration. The trick is to make sure the carbon stays in the plant tissue. There are a few next next generation ideas of how to do this. One we’re already doing: buildings. Unlike concrete or brick, producing wood from sustainably-managed forests can decrease CO2 concentration in the atmosphere, and putting that wood into buildings–even skyscrapers–can ensure it stays out of the atmosphere. Another use for wood is turning it into long-lived biochar that can then be spread onto agricultural fields for a variety of benefits like improved soil tilth. Finally, a compelling concept I heard that is only just being considered is to grow algae in oceans and sink it deep enough that there’s no oxygen to break it down and release the CO2. This mimics a natural process and wouldn’t require the use of existing cropland. All of these would only make sense if there exists a market for carbon sequestration.
Many of these next NEXT generation locations, technologies, and markets will be a reality within my lifetime if policy can align incentives to create a sustainable future. To do that, we need the speed that comes with focusing on outcomes. And speed is imperative if we hope to prevent global temperatures from rising more than 2° Celsius and the catastrophic impacts on people and the planet that would come with it. I’m grateful for the opportunity to be be exposed to so much knowledge and expertise from people thinking creatively every day about how to prevent that tragedy.
