Catalyst with Shayle Kann - The climate-ag grab bag

Episode Date: January 23, 2025

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.

Latitude Media, podcast at the frontier of climate technology. I'm Shayal Khan, and this is Catalyst. 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. Coming up, we've got indoor ag, we've got industrial agriculture, we've got cellular agriculture, all of the fun stuff. stuff. It's a conversation with Mike Grenwalt. When utilities need flexible capacity they can count on, they turn to Energy Hub.

Energy Hub works with more than 170 utilities, coordinating over 2.5 million devices to manage 3.4 gigawatts of flexibility built for the moments when utilities can't afford uncertainty. Energy Hub builds and operates virtual power plants that utilities actually stake their grid planning on, coordinating EVs, batteries, thermostats, and more through a single platform built for utility scale. Predictive, verifiable, and designed to perform when it counts. Learn more at energy hub.com. Trillions of dollars are flowing into clean and critical infrastructure,

but those investments aren't driven by technology alone. They're shaped by markets, by policy, by capital, and by the institutions that connect them. I'm Alfred Johnson, CEO of Crux, and host of a brand new podcast, Critical Capital. Each episode, I talk with people deploying capital, shaping policy and building the clean economy. Tune in as we unpack how progress is actually made.

Listen to critical capital on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. Catalyst is supported by Fish Tank PR. An award-winning PR firm focused on climate and energy tech, renewables, and sustainability. Fish Tank is known for generating prominent and effective media coverage for the brands they work with. If you want a PR partner that's thoughtful, shoots straight, and gets results, you'll like Fish Tank PR. To learn more about Fish Tank's approach, visit Fish Tank, That's f-i-s-h-fish-tankpr.com. I'm Shail 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 wild blood-life 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 one that favors smaller farms that are local, using less chemicals, less genetic engineering, et cetera. 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 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. Oh, thanks for having me, Shail. 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. Or 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?

Oh, 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 like a dozen olive garden breadsticks every day for every human being on Earth. 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 currently on track. 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 India's worth of land, which essentially means going to buy-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 forests. 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.

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 that it is the emissions associated with the production of that. Yeah, you've nailed it. And 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's side.

And can you do it without chopping down what's left of the, you know, forests and wetlands that really we need to store all that, you know, stole 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. 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...

Semi-defense. Semi-defense. It felt pretty full-throated to me. But, yeah, I mean, walk me through why you, 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? Sure.

I think to take the first part of your question of why I needed to defend industrial agriculture, it's 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. And 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. I get why there's, you know, there's a lot of, you know, people upset about this whole notion that we're packing lots of animals into small areas, that we're growing monocultures and bombing him 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 agriculture.

cultural footprint. And 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, there are a lot of, uh, there are many, many reasons to not like industrial agriculture, but there's one really good reason to like it.

And it's that it makes food extremely efficiently and we need efficiency. Okay, so you mentioned a minute ago how what would happen if we continue to increase our yield per unit land in the future. How much have we increased it historically? What has been the trajectory of our land use efficiency for industrial agriculture? Well, since the 1960s with the beginning of the Green Revolution, which people think of as 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 this irrigation projects, this entire universe 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. And all of those sort of scary numbers I gave at the beginning about, you know, how we are going to 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 going to need seven more India's worth of land. So we're going to need a lot more food. 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 asymptote? Does it look 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 going to continue to increase yield? 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 going to need two more India's, 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 going to need three more Indians. So, yeah, we're going to actually need more yield growth than we've already had. I think there is a lot of excitement about some promising new technologies, some are which farmers are just starting to adopt, some of which may take some time to adopt, but we're going to need it. And essentially what I always like to say, and others say it too, is that we're going to need,

not just more green revolution, but a truly greener revolution. evolution, where not just more synthetic fertilizers, but fertilizers that can 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. 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.

We're 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, the third largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the world behind CO2 and methane. So, yeah, I guess the question is, how do we thread that needle of, like, get the yields up, but don't just play a game of whack-a-mole

and create emissions that overcome that somewhere else. 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 Downerism, 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. 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 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, and sort of an ironic threat to yields. You're talking some scientists think that it could decrease wheat yields by as much as a third over the next few decades, whereas you start to see particularly the heatweights 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, 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. Virtual power plants are becoming a reliable way for utilities to manage capacity,

but enrolling devices is just the start. What really matters is confidence, knowing those resources will perform when dispatched and being able to prove it from the control room to the living room. Energy Hub's platform handles the full picture, from near-real-time forecasting, locational dispatch, and the kind of rigorous verification that holds up when regulators, grid operators, or leadership ask, did it deliver? Easy enrollment creates momentum, proven performance builds trust.

That's why more than 170 utilities rely on Energy Hub to manage over 2.5 million devices delivering 3.4 gigawatts of flexible capacity. See what that looks like at energy hub.com. We're living through a profound economic shift, and energy sits at the center of all of it, Trillions of dollars are flowing into power plants, transmission lines, battery factories, data centers, but the future of energy isn't shaped by technology alone. It's shaped by markets, by policy, by capital, and by the institutions that connect them. I'm Alfred Johnson, CEO of Crux, the capital platform for the clean economy.

Join me for my brand new show, Critical Capital, as I talk with people deploying capital, shaping policy and building projects. Together, we unpack how risk is priced, how incentives are structured, and how progress is actually made. Listen to Critical Capital on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. Are you tired of overpaying for big-name PR firms, but not really knowing what they're delivering? Is your comms team wasting time reviewing lengthy messaging briefs and decks, instead of engaging journalists or producing content? Are you wondering why your competitors are getting press and you aren't? Fish Tank PR is an award-winning climate and energy tech, renewables, and sustainability.

FACISPIR firm dedicated to elevating the work of both early stage and established companies. Whether you need to position yourself as a thought leader in between project announcements or translate complex ideas and technologies into tangible, compelling stories that resonate with the media, Fish Tank can help. Check out fish tankpr.com. That's F-I-S-C-H-Fish-Tankpr.com. 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, 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 decreased 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. 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? 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 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, 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. You mentioned needing to eat less beef and lamb. I guess I want to talk a little bit more about that 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 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? Sure.

I mean, the best ones are the, you know, 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 corn or maize, right? these 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 at a mommy.

But in general, the plants are very efficient. 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. 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 Tamara and I used to talk about, and climavores, that it really overwhelms the math.

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 remove 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? 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 a shocking amount of the cattle ranches have almost no cows on them. They're considered degraded. And we're talking about hundreds of millions of acres, 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, you know, feedlot cattle, you know, and remember, they're only in the feedlot for a very small portion of their life. You know, I'm all for feeding them 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 emissions are a very small part of what makes cattle such a climate disaster. 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? Phenomenal.

Yeah, that's great. The issues with it are not climate issues, but rather cost and regulatory and so on. Exactly. It's great for the climate. And I think 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 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 nigeri, and I'll tell you, I think it's great.

And it sends that kind of meat signal of two million years of evolution saying hi 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 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, 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. From an economic standpoint, are you optimistic? Do you think that, do you see a pathway toward Cellular Ag that approaches the cost of animals? 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 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. And, right, the Inflation Reduction Act is, you know, building battery factories in Georgia 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, 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.

all the world's knowledge, and I can order something that comes to my house the next day, and I can 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, 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. All right, moving on to another category 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, a 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? 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 very attractive proposition. But I think 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 solved 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.

You feel that way about both. Do you differentiate between greenhouse and fully closed environment in that context? 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. 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 Aero Farms, which is 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. Well, as evidenced by the fact that they filed for bankruptcy, amongst many others in that category. Yeah, exactly. That's going to be a not-very-exclusive club, I think. Yeah. What else are you optimistic about? I mean, I guess maybe if we go back to this,

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? Well, I'm still optimistic 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 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. I do think there are a lot of these biofertilizers and biopesticides 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 put up all kinds of obstacles. 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 supercrops where you can see much higher yields. I went to a project where they're using CRISPR to essentially end, 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 food production. 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 there are these companies or nonprofits where they'll go to Iran,

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'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 ask Willie Sutton why he robbed banks. And it was right, because that's where the money is. 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.

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 doesn't. And so I wonder how you think about our ability to minimize food waste and also how big a difference that would make in helping us solve this land use problem. I mean, that's a great question. I mean, let me give you sort of two answers. Because it's 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. 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. 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% in rich countries and reduced 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 feed 10 billion people by 2050. The numbers are that bad. We need to do all the things. But that said, food waste is a huge opportunity, 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, you know, love, food, hate waste campaign where they gave people tips on how to basically waste left food in their house. and they reduce food waste 25% in, you know, over in a matter of months. So you can see real opportunities.

Behavioral change is hard, but there are all kinds of nudges that really work. And, you know, in cafeterias, right, where you pay by the ounce or even just giving people smaller plates, they tend 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 using AI to have your refrigerator tell you when your avocados are going bad. And then there are also kind of agricultural technology. There's a company called Appeal, which has invented a biotech, invisible, tasteless, organic peel that you can put around your avocados and bananas. so they 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 beef is delicious, which makes it hard. And most people don't really want to eat less beef. We all want to waste less food. You know, the average American waste more than $1,000 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 could be made to make it a problem, less of a problem.

All right. That's a high note. Let's end on that one. Mike, thanks so much for the time. I really appreciate you. You got a great show. Mike Grenwald 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 Latitude Media.com for links to today's topics. Latitude is supported by Prelude Ventures. Pralood Back's visionary is accelerating climate innovation that will reshape the global economy for the betterment of people and planet.

Learn more at Prelude Ventures.com. This episode was produced by Daniel Waldorf, mixing by Roy Campanella and Sean Marquan, theme song by Sean Marquan. Stephen Lacey is our executive editor. I'm Shail Khan, and this is Catalyst.