Responding to Change

By ART CULLEN

Agriculture is bound for huge changes over the next 20 years no matter what we do. World population grows while the climate warms. Water grows scarce amid long-term drought in the Southwest and Great Plains. Disease threatens a burgeoning number of confined livestock, from new strains of deadly avian flus to a resurgence of African swine flu in China. It will become increasingly difficult to maintain top corn yields once you drift south of US Hwy. 30. Iowa can barely handle the number of hogs and poultry coming at it. It’s almost bewildering, until you realize that we can make the right choices to steer away from catastrophe.

Consider this:

Last year at this time, COVID vaccines were an abstract idea. This week, we get our second dose of a Moderna vaccine engineered with the assistance of genetics, computer technology and production innovations. The feat is a marvel.

We have more computing power in our pocket, or on our wrist, than John Glenn had navigating him around Earth for the first time.

We mapped the corn genome only in 2009.

We have come to a new understanding in the last 30 years of the importance of surface water in filtering pollution, of the importance of soil health in the battle against climate change, and how disease mutates from hog to human.

So you might think we are being a bit Dick Tracy here, but remember that wristwatch you can speak to. Bear with us:

We have been following the development of lab-grown meat, or cultured meat, for the past couple years. We always turned up our noses at soy “burgers” and the like. We love our pork and beef. Scientists have figured out how to produce beef from the cells of cows or swine using a fermentation process where the meat is actually grown in a production vat. It can have meat and fat marbling. They’re figuring out how to use veins from spinach around which they can build out the steak structure.

Companies in Israel claim to have brought the cost of cultured meat down to about $10 a pound. Singapore recently approved it for human consumption. As it becomes commercialized and production ramps up, the Israeli ambassador for climate change, Gideon Behar, tells us that cultured meat likely soon will become cheaper than chicken. The main reason is that it takes one-tenth the resources to grow meat by fermentation than it does by conventional livestock feeding.

The number of cultured meat companies in the US and abroad has exploded since 2018, and so has investment.

Cultured meat could become the base of your chicken nuggets, shrimp bites or fast-food burger. The wealthy (by that we mean almost everyone in Iowa, by world standards) will continue to eat beef grilled from the hoof at BozWellz or Smokin’ Hereford. At the drive-through, you probably will be eating cultured meat. In China, where they’re building hoghouses nine stories high to sate protein demand, cultured meat could become standard fare. It has all the necessary ingredients of meat, and can be designed to add beneficial nutrients like essential fatty acids.

We won’t have to grow corn fencerow to fencerow to feed the world. The world could feed itself through better science and stewardship.

Also consider that the transportation industry is quickly moving away from burning liquid fuels. General Motors is committed to electric cars, for one, and Tesla is growing rapidly. Asia is committed to it, with China leading in research and production. Half our corn crop goes to ethanol. The other half goes to feeding livestock, other food uses such as sweetener, and industrial use.

To stop the pollution of the Gulf of Mexico, we need to reduce corn/soy acreage by 30-50%, according to Dr. Dennis Keeney, founding director of the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State University. Climate modeling shows that our corn yields could drop by 30% over the next few decades as temperatures rise.

Those acres can be replaced by biomass to produce hydrogen for cells, or electricity for battery storage, according to a team of Princeton University energy experts who have outlined what it will take to get to net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. They predict farmers will be able to fetch five times as much per acre for, say, switchgrass as they could for corn.

We should take this all into account as we adjust. How will science enable new food production that can sustainably feed a growing world population amid climate change? If we no longer need to rip up rain forests to grow yet more soybeans to feed more hogs and chickens to feed China, that changes the whole scenario.

It is not too fantastic to think of the near-term implications of emerging science combined with massive computing power and capital. It could change Iowa to its core, for the better.

Art Cullen, managing editor of The Progressive Populist, won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing as editor of his day job at The Storm Lake (Iowa) Times (stormlake.com). He is author of the book “Storm Lake: Change, Resilience, and Hope from America’s Heartland.” Email times@stormlake.com.

From The Progressive Populist, May 1, 2021

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