The climate-ag grab bag

Here’s a three-part puzzle for global agriculture: How do you increase calories for a growing population, while zeroing out emissions and minimizing land usage? The stakes are enormous. According to the UN, the world has to feed an estimated 9.8 billion people by 2050. But agriculture currently accounts for about a third of global carbon emissions and is driving the conversion of important ecosystems – like rainforest and grasslands – into farmland. Converting land is especially problematic because it releases additional carbon into the atmosphere. So what do we do about it? In this episode, Shayle talks to journalist Mike Grunwald, who recently penned a defense of industrial agriculture in The New York Times. He’s also the author of the upcoming book “We Are Eating the Earth: The Race to Fix Our Food System and Save Our Climate.” Shayle and Mike cover topics like: The drawbacks of industrial agriculture, like the overapplication of fertilizer and the mistreatment of animals and employees Why calories per acre need to grow substantially to feed a growing global population Why minimizing land usage through industrial agriculture may cut more emissions than alternative methods of farming like regenerative agriculture Why feed additives are not as important as the land efficiency of beef production Potential solutions, like biofertilizers, cultivated meat, and addressing food waste Why vertical farming requires too much electricity to be viable Recommended resources Simon & Schuster: We Are Eating the Earth: The Race to Fix Our Food System and Save Our Climate The New York Times: Sorry, but This Is the Future of Food Canary Media: Why vertical farming just doesn’t work Reuters: Fertiliser ban decimates Sri Lankan crops as government popularity ebbs Catalyst: Mitigating enteric methane: tech solutions for solving the cow burp problem Catalyst: From biowaste to ‘biogold’ Catalyst is brought to you by EnergyHub. EnergyHub helps utilities build next-generation virtual power plants that unlock reliable flexibility at every level of the grid. See how EnergyHub helps unlock the power of flexibility at scale, and deliver more value through cross-DER dispatch with their leading Edge DERMS platform, by visiting energyhub.com. Catalyst is brought to you by Antenna Group, the public relations and strategic marketing agency of choice for climate and energy leaders. If you're a startup, investor, or global corporation that's looking to tell your climate story, demonstrate your impact, or accelerate your growth, Antenna Group's team of industry insiders is ready to help. Learn more at antennagroup.com.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Shayle Kann?

  Latitude Media, podcast at the frontier of climate technology.

• 0:07Speaker 01

  I'm Shail Khan, and this is Catalyst.

• 0:13Speaker 01

  The world is going to need a lot more food by 2050 to feed nearly 10 billion people. And it's going to have to do it without more land and with a lot fewer emissions.

• 0:27Shayle Kann?

  Coming up, we've got indoor ag, we've got industrial agriculture, we've got cellular agriculture, all the fun stuff. It's a conversation with Mike Grunwald.

• 0:44Speaker 02

  Catalyst is brought to you by Antenna Group, the communications and marketing partner behind the most influential companies in energy, climate, and infrastructure. For three decades, Antenna has helped ambitious companies stand out, build market leadership, and become category-defining brands. From breakthrough startups to global industry leaders, their team brings the expertise, relationships, and track record to accelerate your momentum. Learn more at antennagroup.com.

• 1:11Speaker 03

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• 2:17Shayle Kann?

  I'm Shayle Khan. I invest in revolutionary climate technologies at Energy Impact Partners. Welcome. All right. So one thing we I think haven't talked a lot about here are some of the areas where traditional environmentalist views sometimes conflict with the ideal thing to do if what you're optimizing for is combating climate change. Nuclear power is probably a good example of this, or sometimes things like wildlife protection in areas that are attractive to build renewable power, or transmission line build out. Jesus, transmission line build out. Anyway, another one of those that I think is sort of under discussed is in the agriculture world, where I think the traditional sort of progressive environmental perspective is

• 2:58Shayle Kann?

  one that favors smaller farms that are local, using less chemicals, less genetic engineering, etc. But as our guest this week, Mike Grunwald, points out in a really good recent op ed in the New York Times, industrial agriculture is basically the only thing holding us back from even worse climate calamity. And we may need to do a whole lot more of it in the future in order to feed the growing global population. It also intersects with all these other areas of technology that have been emerging in the food and agriculture world, like indoor agriculture, like regenerative agriculture, like cultivated meat, all these kinds of things play into this question of how are we simultaneously solving the problem

• 3:43Shayle Kann?

  of feeding the global population while not increasing emissions and not increasing land use? Anyway, Mike is a journalist who's been covering this stuff for an extremely long time, talking about it for a long time. He has a book coming out on the topic this summer. And so ahead of that book's publication, I brought Mike on to just kind of talk through a grab bag of topics in the world of agriculture as it relates to climate change. Here's Mike. Mike, welcome.

• 4:10Speaker 01

  Oh, thanks for having me, Shayle.

• 4:12Shayle Kann?

  I'm excited to catch back up after a long time since the last time we chatted. And there's a lot, I think, for us to cover here because you've been thinking and writing about issues related to agriculture and food and climate for a long time. And it's a multifaceted, complex problem. I'll maybe have you start at the highest level, which is, as you think about the intersection of food and land and climate, what are the multiple variables we are trying to solve for here? Like, what are the puzzle pieces we need to put together?

• 4:42Speaker 01

  Now, that's a great question because I really have been, you know, in my cave for a few years thinking about this. And, you know, the basic problem is that the world is going to need a lot more food by 2050 to feed, you know, nearly 10 billion people. And it's going to have to do it without more land and with a lot fewer emissions. And the numbers are really gigantic. You know, we're probably, at this point, going to need about six quadrillion more calories by 2050, which is, you know, I like to say it's, it's like a dozen Olive Garden breadsticks every day for every human being on earth.

• 5:26Speaker 01

  That's extra, we're going to have to grow. And at the same time, we're going to have to do it with no more land where we're on, currently on track, if, even if we continue to increase farm yields at the same rate they've increased throughout the green revolution, we're going to need another two Indias worth of land, which essentially means, you know, kind of bye-bye Amazon and Congo rainforests, you know, very much not good. And at the same time, we're going to have to reduce emissions from food and land, which is about a third of our emissions overall. We're going to have to reduce it 75, 80%. So the challenge is just enormous, and it leads to some real trade-offs, sometimes unpleasant ones.

• 6:09Shayle Kann?

  So it seems like if I'm hearing you right, to boil down what you think are the sort of core things we need to simultaneously be thinking about, it is Total number of calories, like the amount of food we produce globally, it is the amount of land that it takes to produce that amount of food, and it is the emissions associated with the production of that.

• 6:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, nailed it. And there are, right now, we're on track for, you know, to come way short. And, you know, when I talk about, you know, how are we going to feed the world without frying the world? You know, there are always, people have these Malthusian discussions where it's like, oh, we're heading for a catastrophe, the entire world is going to go hungry. And it is terrible that you have almost a billion people right now who are, you know, food insecure and not getting enough to eat. But the fact is that the world is pretty good about meeting food demand. You know, if we need more food and people can get paid for it, they'll make more. The problem is the without frying the world side. And can you do it without chopping down what's left of the, you know,

• 7:12Speaker 01

  forests and wetlands that really, we need to store all that, you know, store all the carbon for all the, you know, the fossil fuels we've been pumping into the air. So it really is a tough problem.

• 7:23Shayle Kann?

  Okay, so that gets to, you wrote an op ed in the New York Times recently that I liked a lot, that I would frame as sort of a defense of industrial agriculture. Maybe walk me through-

• 7:34Speaker 01

  At least a semi-defense.

• 7:35Shayle Kann?

  Semi-defense. It felt pretty full-throated to me. But yeah, I mean, walk me through why, first of all, why you thought you needed to defend industrial agriculture? And in this context of solving for those three things simultaneously, why is, you know, why is industrial agriculture, and maybe more and more industrialized agriculture, actually the way to do it?

• 7:56Speaker 01

  Sure. Well, I think to take the first part of your question of why I needed to defend industrial agriculture, because everybody hates it, right? You know, industrial agriculture itself is kind of this phrase that essentially means bad, right? Like factory farms. Nobody's saying something good about that. And there is a lot not to like about it, right? I mean, you know, they treat animals badly in these packing houses. They treat people badly. They use too many antibiotics. They create too much water and air pollution. And, you know, they do create a lot of greenhouse gas emissions as well. There's, you know, their politics are bad. Their, you know, their culture is often bad.

• 8:41Speaker 01

  I get why there's, you know, there's a lot of- You know, people upset about this, this whole notion that we're packing lots of animals into small areas, that we're growing monocultures and bombing them with chemicals. I get it. You know, the reason for the defense is to go back to what we were talking about, about what agriculture needs, what is agriculture's main job over the next, you know, 25 years? It's going to be to make tons of food without much land. And that's what industrial ag is good about. You know, factories are good at manufacturing stuff. And we're going to need to manufacture a lot of food without expanding our agricultural footprint. And

• 9:25Speaker 01

  it turns out that, you know, if you try to stop using agrochemicals that people don't like because they make a mess. Well, we saw what happened in Sri Lanka, where they banned them and immediately farm yields crashed. Sri Lanka could no longer feed itself and essentially started outsourcing not only its food production, but the pollution and emissions from that production. So I just think, you know, there is, you know, it's, there are a lot of, there are many, many reasons to not like industrial agriculture, but there's one really good reason to like it. And then it's that it makes food extremely efficiency, efficiently, and we need efficiency.

• 10:05Shayle Kann?

  Okay. So you mentioned a minute ago, how, what would happen if we continue to increase our, our yield per unit land in the future? How much have we increased it historically? Like, what has been the trajectory of our land use efficiency for industrial agriculture?

• 10:22Speaker 01

  Well, since the 1960s, with the beginning of the green revolution, which people think of as, you know, the sort of higher yield wheat that Norman Borlaug started to grow. But I think it also includes synthetic fertilizers and, you know, really awesome tractors and, you know, and the, this irrigation projects, this entire, you know, universe of, of yield and increasing technologies. Basically, we've tripled yields since the 1960s. So we're producing three times as much food or as much calories, as much protein per acre. You know, our livestock efficiency has also increased by a factor of three.

• 11:07Speaker 01

  And all of those sort of scary numbers I gave at the beginning about, you know, how we are gonna need 1.5 billion acres of extra land by 2050 on the current trajectory. That assumes we continue to increase yields at the same rate. So if we don't increase yields at all until 2050, we're gonna need seven more Indias worth of land. So we're gonna need a lot more food.

• 11:35Shayle Kann?

  Has their trajectory been pretty consistent? Like, are we, if I looked at that chart of yields since the 1960s, has it been steady? Or are we hitting an asympt, does it look weird like we're hitting an asymptote? Is there an obvious, I guess what I'm asking is, is there an obvious next set of things that are coming down the pike that you could say, okay, this is how we're gonna continue to increase yield?

• 11:54Speaker 01

  Well, let me take the first question first because the answer is not so great. Because if we go back to the 1960s, we're gonna need two more Indias. But yield growth has actually tapered off a little bit in the last couple decades. And if they only continue to increase at that rate, we're gonna need three more Indias. So, so yeah, that's, you know, we're gonna actually need more yield growth than we've already had. I think there is a lot of excitement about, you know, some promising new technologies, some of which farmers are just starting to adopt, some of which may take some time to adopt. But we're gonna need it.

• 12:35Speaker 01

  And essentially what I always like to say, and others say it too, is that we're gonna need, you know, not just more green revolution, but a truly greener revolution. Where, you know, not just more synthetic fertilizers, but fertilizers that can, you know,

• 12:55Speaker 01

  Get more nitrogen into plants without getting the nitrogen into the Gulf of Mexico and creating a dead zone the size of Connecticut and without creating nitrous oxide emissions that are 300 times more potent than carbon dioxide.

• 13:09Shayle Kann?

  Well, that's a good example of where these things, there's like a little, there can be a little bit of a push and pull here, right? So, one way to increase yields, at least to a first order, is going to be adding more synthetic fertilizer or adding fertilizer where we're not using it otherwise. But of course, that results in more nitrous oxide emissions, which is a powerful greenhouse gas, third largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the world behind CO2 and methane. So, yeah, I guess the question is, how do we, how do we thread that needle of like, get the yields up, but don't, you know, just play a game of whack a mole and create emissions that overcome that somewhere else?

• 13:49Speaker 01

  Right, and you know, as long as, I really try not to be like Debbie Downer about this stuff because I am excited about a lot of these solutions, but to add a little bit more Debbie Downer-ism, one of the reasons this is going to be so hard is because the green revolution has already spread to so much of the world that a lot of the low-hanging yield and emissions fruit has already been plucked. The, a great example there is large-scale irrigation projects. You know, only five to, maybe five to seven percent of the world's agriculture that could be irrigated still needs to be irrigated, which is a sort of wonky way of saying that it's going to be a lot harder to increase yields, you know, now that most farmland

• 14:32Speaker 01

  is irrigated and fertilized than it was when most farmland wasn't. And at the same time, of course, you have climate change, which is another threat, sort of an ironic threat to yields. You're talking, some scientists think that it could decrease yield, wheat yields by as much as a third over the next few decades, whereas you start to see particularly the heat waves and droughts, but also the worst floods, the worst storms, the spread of pests and diseases to new areas that used to be too cold for them to flourish. You know, there's a lot of bad stuff coming down the pike, which again, only

• 15:14Speaker 01

  You know, emphasizes the needs for us, the need for us to decrease our demand for the most land-intensive products such as beef and lamb. We're going to have to waste less food. We're going to have to use less land for biofuels. But then on the supply side, we're going to have to do a lot better at making a lot more food with a lot less land. And as you said, we can't just say, hey, more fertilizer. Because actually, we already waste half of the fertilizer that we're putting down on these fields. If anything, we're going to have to use less fertilizer.

• 15:48Speaker 02

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• 17:58Shayle Kann?

  Getting into maybe slightly controversial territory. In climate tech world, there are a lot of folks focused on, oh, various forms of like regenerative agriculture and I think what you called carbon farming, but you know, increasing soil carbon sequestration and stuff like that.

• 18:15Shayle Kann?

  I guess the sense that I get from what you're saying and what you wrote in the op-ed is like, you think that's sort of the wrong way to tackle the problem. And the right way to tackle the problem is basically increase yields, like decrease land use or minimize land use. And if you do that, you have a bigger carbon impact, at least at a macro level, than whatever you're going to do that's more regenerative and might actually at the local level reduce emissions or increase carbon uptake in the soil or something like that.

• 18:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, again, I don't want to, you know, as he said, I've written a book and I get into some of this in a lot more detail, so I'll just have to oversimplify here. But regenerative agriculture definitely does some nice stuff for the soil. And it can, in moderate ways, help the biodiversity on the farm. But first of all, to the extent that regenerative or organic or basically more natural, kinder and gentler forms of agriculture make less food per acre, they're going to need more acres to make food. You know, land, agriculture that is less... Intensive needs to be more extensive. And that's a disaster for biodiversity. Right?

• 19:29Speaker 01

  That's coming straight out of the, you know, the peatlands and the forests that are, you know, storing biodiversity and storing carbon. So yeah, to, to the extent that regenerative agriculture reduces yields. And what I would say is that it usually does. You know, there are some regenerative practices that are consistent with excellent yields. And I'm all for that. But this idea that we need to sort of shut down these horrible industrial monocultures and shift to these lovely, more natural fields of diverse crop rotations and no chemicals. There's a reason that human beings, you know,

• 20:15Speaker 01

  converted a lot of natural areas into agriculture. And it was because it made more food. And the idea that making agriculture more like nature, there's going to be a yield hit to that.

• 20:29Shayle Kann?

  You mentioned needing to eat less beef and lamb. I guess I want to talk a little bit more about that and, and how different forms of food production use land. I mean, we think of as an example, I think folks who listen to this podcast, we've talked about it before, know part of the problem of, of beef being ruminant emissions from essentially burps for the most part. But I think people talk a little bit less about the land impact. So can you just orient me in terms of what is a good land efficient source of calories? And what is not?

• 21:02Speaker 01

  Sure. I mean, the, the best ones are the, it's kind of what you'd expect. It's beans, it's lentils, it's other pulses. And then, you know, what's also pretty good is soy and, and corn or maize. Right? These, you know, incredibly efficiently grown crops. And now if you're feeding it to, you know, if you're running that soybean through a chicken, it's not quite as efficient as eating it in the form of tofu or edamame.

• 21:35Speaker 01

  But in general, the plants are very efficient.

• 21:41Speaker 01

  Chicken and pork is less efficient, but beef and other ruminants are spectacularly inefficient. It takes about nine calories worth of grain to produce one calorie worth of chicken meat. And when it comes to cows, which are, you know, much less efficient, dairy is even worse, and beef, it's extraordinary. It can be 30, 50, some people would say 100 times as inefficient as just, you know, eating grain directly. So interestingly, you know, I've cut out beef, basically because I didn't want to be such a journalistic hypocrite. I still eat meat because I'm bad and meat is delicious.

• 22:26Speaker 01

  But going vegan is fantastic, and that's the best thing you can do for your diet, for the climate. But going vegetarian is usually about the same as just cutting out beef, because vegetarians tend to eat more dairy. So beef is such the baddie, as Tamar and I used to talk about in Climavores, that it really overwhelms the math.

• 22:52Shayle Kann?

  Does that mean that your view, you know, there's all these solutions out there, like feed additives for cattle and things like that, to reduce their methane emissions, the cow burps and so on. Is your view on that, that it is a step in the right direction, but insufficient? Because at best, even if it were 100% efficacious, if it worked and totally removed those emissions, you'd still have the problem you're describing of how much land we use to grow the crops to feed the cows. So do you think about that stuff as a Band-Aid that's a distraction? Or do you think about it as like a step in the right direction, but it alone is not going to do the trick?

• 23:27Speaker 01

  Definitely not a distraction. I'm very excited about some of these feed additives, but I think you're absolutely right. They're not as important as, you know, basically making beef more efficiently. I've gone to Brazil, where...

• 23:43Speaker 01

  A shocking amount of the cattle ranches have almost no cows on them. You know, they're considered degraded. And we're talking about hundreds of millions of acres. You know, several Iowa's worth of land that's basically being wasted on just a few cows. And it turns out it's not that hard to triple the efficiency or sometimes even quadruple the efficiency of those cattle ranches. And that moves the needle a lot more than, you know, giving cat, you know, feedlot cattle, you know, and remember they're only in the in the feedlot for a very small portion of their life. You know, I I'm all for feeding them

• 24:24Speaker 01

  the the various additives that can, you know, some people think reduce their emissions while they're on those on those additives as much as 80%. That's terrific. But like you said, those those emissions are a very small part of the, you know, of what makes cattle such a climate disaster.

• 24:44Shayle Kann?

  What about, when we think about the, you know, sort of the next generation of technologies? If you're thinking about it from a climate perspective, I suppose, cellular ag in terms of calories per acre, I imagine would be extraordinarily good, right?

• 25:01Speaker 01

  Phenomenal.

• 25:02Shayle Kann?

  Yeah, it's great. The issues with it are not not climate issues, but rather cost and regulatory and so on?

• 25:08Speaker 01

  Exactly. It's great for the climate and I think the the problems are cost, taste and regulatory. Now, I've had some, you know, what is often derogatorily, is that even a word? What people, you know, when they're being derogatory, call lab grown meat. I think the the preferred term of art these days is cultivated meat. I've had Cultivated burger, I've had cultivated fried chicken, I've had cultivated salmon nigiri. And I'll tell you, I think it's, it's great. And it sends that kind of meat signal of 2 million years of evolution saying hi

• 25:51Speaker 01

  in a way that even I've found, you know, I like impossible burgers a lot, but to me, they taste like a really good substitute. The cell-based meats taste like meat because they're meat, you know, from an animal. Just grown, you know, if you can grow beef without growing the cow and without growing the hooves and without growing the reproductive systems and the breathing and, you know, the pooping and all the stuff that, you know, takes a lot of energy. You can imagine how it could be a really efficient process. Now, right now, they're basically using sort of pharma-grade equipment to make food.

• 26:31Speaker 01

  And, you know, it's, the economics of growing somebody a new heart are a lot, you know, easier than the economics of growing lunch. But, you know, the long-winded way of saying, for the climate, it's fantastic. And I really hope they, you know, they get it to market.

• 26:50Shayle Kann?

  From an economic standpoint, are you optimistic? Do you think that, do you, do you see a pathway toward cellular ag that approaches the cost of, of animals?

• 26:59Speaker 01

  I do. They've reduced the costs, like, I guess I would say certainly at least 99.9% in the last decade, probably closer to 99.99%. The last mile really matters. They're not competitive yet, and they certainly won't until they start building factories and build and making this stuff at scale. And of course, it's hard to make this stuff at scale when they're not inexpensive enough, which is why I do think, I do think government assistance is going to be, you know, a big part of the solution here. So far, the entire cultivated meat industry has had about $3 billion worth of investment in its entire history.

• 27:43Speaker 01

  And, right, the Inflation Reduction Act is, you know, building Battery factories in Georgia for that that are going to be twice that. And the entire solar industry in the first half of last year, I think, had about $250 billion worth of investment. So, you know, this is it's made incredible progress in a very short amount of time. That said, you know, I don't know. You know, some people think they'll never make it. I tend to think, look, I like walk around every day with a device in my pocket that gives me access to all the world's knowledge. And, you know, I can order something that comes to my house the next day and I can

• 28:27Speaker 01

  use it as a flashlight and video chat with somebody on the other side of the world. So I have a lot of faith in these people who, you know, these very smart people who are working on technological solutions to very hard problems. But I'd be lying if I said, oh, no, they're definitely going to make it. I know it. They might.

• 28:44Shayle Kann?

  All right, moving on to another category of of other technologies that have a role to play here or may. What about indoor agriculture? So there's various versions of it, right? There's greenhouse and then there's fully closed environment agriculture, vertical farming, that kind of thing. The latter, of course, having seen a pretty brutal past couple of years, bunch of company bankruptcies and so on. As you think about it from a climate and energy perspective, where does the expansion of indoor ag fit into your mental framework?

• 29:15Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, I've been a bit of a skunk at the indoor ag party. And, you know, in many ways, it's what's awesome about it is that it's a potential solution to all these problems of outdoor ag that I spend so much time banging my spoon on my high chair about. Right? If you can do it inside, if you don't need the pesticides and the antibiotics and the, you know, and the fertilizers, if you're, you know, if the birds aren't pooping on your crops, so you don't have those kind of food safety issues. If you don't have to worry about bad weather or climate change or nighttime, you know, it's a it's a very attractive proposition.

• 29:59Speaker 01

  But I think the, you know, the short answer is that I have. Some confidence that it might solve the lettuce problem. And I think maybe at some point you'll see it solve the strawberry problem. But I don't see a path for it to solve the food problem. You know, you might be able to replace a couple hundred thousand acres of global agriculture, but not the 12 billion that we're currently using.

• 30:26Shayle Kann?

  You feel that way about both. Do you differentiate between greenhouse and fully closed environment in that context?

• 30:33Speaker 01

  I'm more bullish about the greenhouse because the sun is really awesome. And it seems like a better source of energy than, you know, trying to make your own. Which is why I think some of those greenhouses are going to solve the lettuce problem. And I think you're going to have these very cool greenhouses in metropolitan areas rather than, you know, growing lettuce in Southern California and Arizona. And it's mostly water and then shipping it across the country. I don't think that makes a lot of sense. And I do think that will be disrupted. But, and again, I don't want to, you know, have excess confidence relative to knowledge.

• 31:17Speaker 01

  Because who knows, maybe somebody will come up with a great answer. And maybe some of these energy problems that are right now the main sticking point for a lot of the vertical farms and even the greenhouses that work at night as well. Maybe they'll be solved, but I just think it's going to be a real hard problem. And when I wrote about this, one of the things I was most excited about is a company like AeroFarms, which is, you know, a vertical farming operation. But they have basically the most monitored plants in the history of agriculture. So they are learning about how plants grow every day. And I'm hopeful that some of what they learn is going to help in the great outdoors. It may work better as a laboratory than as an actual factory.

• 32:02Shayle Kann?

  Well, as evidenced by the fact that they filed for bankruptcy. Amongst many others in that category.

• 32:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. That's going to be, you know, it's going to be a not very exclusive club, I think.

• 32:14Shayle Kann?

  Yeah. What else are you optimistic about? I mean, I guess maybe if we go back to this, like, what are the next set of things that we can do to increase yields? What do you see on the horizon that might help us get there?

• 32:27Speaker 01

  Well, I'm still optimistic about about plant-based meat and particularly some of the fungi-based meat, the mycoprotein, which I think, you know, you blend that with with real meat or with plants. I think you're, you know, you're going to start. I think you can make it taste good, and I think you can make it cheap. And I think you can get consumers to like it. I'm pretty optimistic about that. You know, I do think, you know, there are a lot of these bio-fertilizers and bio pesticides that have a lot of promise. I think it's been very sad what's happened with GMO crops, the way consumers have just revolted against them and regulators have have put up all kinds of obstacles.

• 33:12Speaker 01

  But also, I think they've been a little disappointing overall in terms of what they've actually offered. I think CRISPR and some of these other gene editing technologies really do have the possibility of creating super crops where you can see much higher yields. I went to a project where they're, you know, using CRISPR to essentially and as well as these incredible supercomputers to try to reinvent photosynthesis, which happens to be a very inefficient process, even though it's worked pretty well, you know, keeping us alive and all life on earth for the last few billion years. It can be improved for for food production.

• 33:53Speaker 01

  I do think a lot of those gene editing technologies are very exciting. And then some of the kind of low-tech stuff. I mentioned in Brazil where you, you know, there are these companies or nonprofits where they'll go to a ranch, they'll put in a better grass. They'll put in water infrastructure so the cows don't have to waste their energy walking to the, you know, walking to the river every day. They're all, you know, they'll, they're all these kind of boring, low-tech improvements. That can make beef production more efficient. And it's a little bit like the, you know, like they asked Willie Sutton why he robbed banks. And it was right because that's where the money is.

• 34:36Speaker 01

  I think, you know, if you want to reduce agricultural emissions, if you want to fix the food system, which is a third of our climate problem, you want to go where the emissions are. And that's beef. And it turns out that there are huge opportunities because, you know, unlike industrial chicken, which is almost shockingly and horrifyingly efficient. There are a lot of opportunities to make beef more efficiently in ways that don't necessarily, you know, torture cows.

• 35:05Shayle Kann?

  I guess wrapping up, the one thing that I know we haven't talked about really, but does seem like also a big opportunity and a big issue is food waste. Like it's not that every calorie we produce goes into somebody's body, right? It's actually a significant fraction that that doesn't. And so I wonder how you think about the, our ability to minimize food waste? And also how big a difference that would make in, in helping us solve this land use problem?

• 35:34Speaker 01

  I mean, that's a great question. I mean, let me give you sort of two answers because one of the, you know, one of the real complaints with what I wrote in the New York Times about, you know, how we can feed the world with industrial agriculture. And a lot of people come out and said, oh, this is ridiculous. We don't need more food. We just need to do a better job of distributing the food we have, or we need to waste less food, or we need to eat less beef or less meat. And those things are all true. We do need to do all of those things. You know, we do make enough food theoretically to feed the world if we, you know, all just ate plants. And, you know, and we distributed it to the people who needed it.

• 36:15Speaker 01

  And we stopped wasting probably a quarter of it. Because when we waste that food, we waste the land that went to grow it, the fertilizer, the water, the labor, the emissions. It's terrible. The first thing I would say is that even if we reduced our beef consumption 50% Rich countries and reduce food waste 50% in the entire world. We would still need, you know, the numbers are so bad that we would still need to jack up our yields significantly to, uh, to feed 10 billion people by 2050. Um, the numbers are that bad. We need to do all the things. But that said, food waste is a huge opportunity.

• 36:59Speaker 01

  And there are all kinds of exciting ways to go about it. Some, you know, through kind of behavioral change. Where in, actually in London, they did a, I think it was called, uh, you know, love food, hate waste campaign where they gave people tips on how to basically waste less food in their house. And they reduced food waste 25% um, in, you know, over in a matter of months. So you can see real opportunities.

• 37:30Speaker 01

  Behavioral change is hard, but there are all kinds of nudges that really work and, you know, in cafeterias, right? Where you, uh, you know, you have, you pay by the ounce or even just giving people smaller plates. They tend to, to waste less food. There are also a lot of exciting technologies. Either, you know, some of it is inventory management where you're putting this stuff on the blockchain or you're, you know, using AI to have your refrigerator tell you when your avocados are going bad. And then there are also kind of agricultural technologies. There's a company called Appeal, which has invented a biotech invisible tasteless organic peel

• 38:11Speaker 01

  that you can put around your avocados and, uh, and bananas. So they, you know, go bad much more slowly. So I think there's a lot of excitement about ways to, you know, unlike, you know, we would all theoretically like to eat less beef, but it's, beef is delicious, which makes it hard. And people, most people don't really want to eat less beef. We all want to waste less food. You know, the average American wastes more than a thousand dollars a year on food that ends up going in the garbage. So I think that is something where the incentives are aligned. There are all kinds of exciting technological and behavioral changes that, uh, that could be made to make it a problem, less of a problem.

• 38:56Shayle Kann?

  All right. That's a high note. Let's end on that one. Uh, Mike, thanks so much for the time.

• 39:01Speaker 01

  I really appreciate it. You got a great show, Shell.

• 39:05Shayle Kann?

  Mike Grunwald is the author of the upcoming book, We're Eating the Earth: The Race to Fix Our Food System and Save Our Climate, comes out this summer. This show is a production of Latitude Media. You can head over to latitudemedia.com for links to today's topics. Latitude is supported by Prelude Ventures. Prelude backs visionaries, accelerating climate innovation that will reshape the global economy for the betterment of people and planet. Learn more at preludeventures.com. This episode was produced by Daniel Waldorf, mixing by Roy Campanella and Sean Marquand, theme song by Sean Marquand. Stephen Lacy is our executive editor. I'm Shayle Khan, and this is Catalyst.