Stuff You Should Know - What Will Farming 4.0 Look Like?

Episode Date: February 23, 2021

The human population is expected to increase by a couple billion people in the next 30 years and those who are paying attention are wondering exactly how we’ll feed all those extra mouths. Will going high tech or getting back to nature save us? Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio.

Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant and Jerry's with us as well. And we all have a nice bit of hay sticking out of our teeth, got a hat on. It's a derby. It doesn't quite fit, right? But it's still a hat. And I'm wearing overalls with nothing underneath and no shoes and socks. Have I told you my Olin Mills story? No. I can't not. When I lost my two front teeth, my mom promptly took me to Olin Mills and there is a picture in existence. I'll try and find it and put it on my Instagram. Of me in front of like a lazy river scene or a lake or something with overall shorts and cut off overalls, I guess. Nothing else on, no shirt, no shoes.

And I'll have to see it. I feel like I had like a cane pole and maybe a straw hat. Geez. Did they have the engraving and stone mountain as the background? No, thank goodness. It was straight up cosplay. It's very embarrassing. But I'll see if I can find that and throw it up on Chuck the Podcaster Instagram. You should, Chuck. I think that would really garner some likes. I've been putting a few old pictures up there every now and then. It's fun. That's very cute. So I guess you're saying we're talking about wearing nothing but overalls because we're talking about farming, right?

Yeah. I mean, that picture basically I learned all I needed to know about farming that day. Yeah. Which is, I'm not cut out for it. Not cut out for it. I am cut out to be photographed for money. Whoa. That was me doing my impression of you. Yeah. I didn't get paid. Yeah. I guess that's the opposite happened. Your mom paid somebody take pictures of you. Regardless, none of that really happens in farming. Maybe people running around with

overalls on probably have something underneath the overalls. But for the most part, this is a gross misconception of what farming is. Especially now that I've done some research on the current state of farming, we're pretty far from the whole idea of people running around with hay in their mouths and wearing overalls and nothing but. Sure. I mean, well, it depends on who you are. Have you ever seen, and I've talked about it before, the documentary, The Biggest Little Farm? Yeah. I think you have talked about that. I don't remember what episode it was in there.

And we'll get to that. That's coming up on the last part of this episode about agroecology, but those are people that are adherents of bringing it back to what farming used to be, which was ecologically sound, harmonious with nature, that kind of thing. Right. Which makes a tremendous amount of sense, but we'll see if that's even possible in the future. Because here's the thing. There's a huge boom in demand for agriculture that we are on the precipice of. Actually, I guess you could make a pretty good case that we're in the midst of it right now. By the year 2050, there's a predicted somewhere around nine to 10 billion. That's a pretty big gap, but let's say nine to 10 billion people are expected to be running around on planet

earth. And all those people are going to need to be fed. But the thing is, we're not exactly sure how we're going to reach that increased demand. Because there was a study by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN that said that we're basically going to have to increase food production compared to 2007 levels by 70% to feed all those people. That's if we hit the low end, the nine billion in population by 2050. Yeah. And you mentioned agriculture. We're also talking meat and protein because not only is the population increasing, but income is on the rise worldwide, especially in developing countries. And as you are a developing country that gets a little more money in your pocket as individuals, you want to eat more meat

in protein. So I think they said global meat consumption is going to rise by about 70% by 2050 as well. Yeah. And when you're talking about meat consumption, as far as agriculture goes, like you're talking about agriculture times two, because not only do you have to use all those inputs to grow the cattle themselves, the livestock themselves, so you can eat them, you have to feed them to get them ready to be eaten, right? So you have to grow the food to feed to the cattle that you're going to grow, that you're going to eventually eat. So there's a lot of agriculture that's going to have to be going on. But here's the thing, agriculture has handled this before. Yeah. There was a time, you and I have talked about

countless times, the Green Revolution. Back in the early mid-20th century, there were a lot of people saying, we're not exactly sure that agriculture is going to be able to keep pace with the growing population. And we think probably about a billion people are going to starve. And that may have happened. We'll never know. But we know that it didn't happen thanks to the Green Revolution that was hastened by scientists like Norman Borlaug. Yeah. We've been talking about that guy for years. And the irony of the Green Revolution is today's terminology you might think that has something to do with environmentally sound practices. It was kind of the opposite of that in a lot of ways. They meant green,

just like a lot of plants. It was really harmful to the environment. It did feed a lot of people. And there's a lot of mixed reviews on Yelp about the Green Revolution. I guess that's an easier way to say controversy. Because what happened is a lot of the greenhouse gas emissions that we see in the world today come from food production. We've talked about methane coming from cow poots before. We've talked about... It's a big problem. It's a real big problem. We've talked about deforestation, obviously transportation, getting this food and transporting it. Because the idea... We kind of went away from the idea of local farms feeding regions into shipping food across the globe if we need to.

And that's just a lot of pollution. I think raising livestock and fish accounts for about 31% of agriculture's greenhouse emissions with livestock being about 25% of that. Yeah. So we've reached an inflection point that really resembles the last inflection point where, okay, we're about to have a big increase in population. We need to make sure that agriculture can keep up with food production to feed everybody or else we're going to have big problems. But this time there's an added twist in that we know the last thing we did kind of wrecked the environment. So now we have to figure out, okay, how are we going to meet this challenge this time without further wrecking the environment and then maybe even figuring out a way to

help the environment through food production. That's kind of where we're at right now. Agriculture's gone through different iterations and right now supposedly we're in agriculture 3.0. And what everybody's trying to figure out is what comes next. What's agriculture 4.0? Yeah, 1.0. You say dot? Yeah. Okay. 1.0 was from Neolithic to the 1920s. So that was, boy, that had a good long run, didn't it? Yeah, it's a good long stretch. A very good long stretch. But that included a lot of labor from human hands and animal hooves. 2.0 was that green revolution we were talking about. 3.0 was about 10 or 11 years ago when big data kind of came in to help maximize yields. And they're saying like 4.0 needs to

start happening now. And sort of is, we're just not exactly sure what the final iteration is going to look like. Yeah. And a lot of the stuff that's going on in 3.0 is going to make an appearance in 4.0, but it's going to be dot. That's a way to say it. Some people say point. Yeah, of course. Although it reminds me, have you watched Cobra Kai? We watched the first like 4 or 5 episodes and then we're like, I get it. I'm done. Yeah. Same here. But that one where Johnny's handing out flyers for his new website. He's like, check out this cool website. H-T-T-P colon slash slash W-W-W, period Cobra Kai, period C-O-M. They just spelled it out while he was handing out a flyer, but he says period. He doesn't even say dot.

That's really funny. Well, two period O, three period O. I like that better. That was great. Yeah, it was a great premise that they really pulled off for a little while there. So now whenever you say 2.0, I'll say, do you have a problem, Mr. Clark? Yeah. And I'll say no mercy. No mercy. Yeah. Okay. That's the new response to that question. But you don't say it like that. You don't go, no mercy? Oh, you don't. How shall I say it, director? No mercy. Okay. Let me try it. Okay. No mercy. Very intimidating. Thank you. Where were we? We were talking about what 4.0 is going to look like.

Yeah, because here's the deal. Farmers themselves, the human beings are getting older. Farmers over 65 years old outnumber those under 45 years old by 2 to 1, actually a little more than. 2.1 to 1. 2.1 to 1. No, those are colons, my friend. No, there's a dot. 2.1 colon 1. 2.1 colon 1. Oh man. I have a feeling this is going to happen. So one of the first kind of things that people think may happen, and that we're already seeing some is consolidation of farms. Instead of a lot of medium to small size farms, how about fewer really big farms? And that's already kind of been happening. Yeah. In a normal industry, let's say the kazoo manufacturing industry, if the kazoo

makers were way old and there weren't very many young kazoo makers, that wouldn't fare very well for the kazoo industry, but no one would really care. We wouldn't miss kazoos all that much. It would be okay. Farming does not really fall within that same category as kazoos. We need food. So rather than farming just going away, they're just going to figure out how to consolidate it with fewer younger farmers with bigger farms under their belt. Right, which if you think there's fewer farmers, so you consolidate the farms, that makes sense, but you're like, you still need people because these farmers are getting older and ostensibly, farm hands are getting older as well. But here's where four period O comes in is robots, as John Hodgman would say.

Yeah. Oh man, I didn't hear it in any other way every time I read it. Yeah, because there's a lot of inefficiencies in traditional farming with farm hands. I mean, just one example is when you fertilize an area, you can fertilize like a plant, but you fertilize that whole plant. If there's a part of that plant that doesn't need fertilizing, it's probably going to get fertilized anyway just because they just run the fertilizer over that area. Right, exactly. That's just what is the most efficient. And as we'll see, that's a real problem. That's sad that that's the current way to do it, but that's conventional farming practices. You just fertilize the whole field

and go on to do something else because there's a million other things that need to be done as well. But one of the things that's going to be saved in that way by robots is they're going to take these different steps that are involved in farm work and break them down into what's the word I'm looking for, Chuck, where specialties. So a robot specializes in a certain task or whatever. And because you'll have a bunch of different robots, they're doing the same task, they'll be able to give more personal tailored care to the plant. Say some plants need fertilizer, those plants will get fertilizer. A plant doesn't need fertilizer, it's not going to get fertilizer. And that's going to save a lot of inputs is what you talk about when you're talking agriculture,

which is generally a good thing, not just financially, but when it comes to the environment as we'll see. Yeah, and you think about a tractor that requires a human to drive that tractor. They already have tractors that can drive themselves with GPS accuracy involved. And that's been going on for a little while now. And the idea I think is, and some of these tractors are something called the lettuce bot, which is kind of cool, where you basically have a tractor, at least that's sort of the current iteration. And on the back of that tractor is a big row of, I mean, we call them robots. It's not like George Jetson type of stuff. A robot just means it's a mechanical automated system. Right, they're not looking for a husband like Rosie.

So the lettuce bot is pulled along behind the tractor and it's got just a big row of little robots that can do everything from kind of custom fertilization to picking out a weed, using the same technology that they use in facial recognition. Like there's a ragweed or something. Let's get rid of just that weed instead of like, let's just spray the whole field with roundup or whatever. Right. And it's going to increase efficiencies. And I think that's the first iteration. And what they're looking at in the future is instead of even a big tractor that still costs a lot of money. Yeah, like hundreds of thousands of dollars for a new tractor. I think like it doesn't really dawn on city slickers how incredibly expensive

farm equipment is. Yeah, those big, big tractors. Not like you're sort of fun tractor. No, not a fun tractor. Sure, that's like 50 grand. Who cares? But like a really big tractor. Yeah, it's a lot of money. So I think the idea is, or at least what I saw was conceptual drawings of smaller robot tractors that are, I don't know, it looked like the size of like a like a six foot folding table or something. Yeah, just kind of going over like a row of lettuce. Like it's in charge of that one row probably. Yeah, but what I wonder is how expensive are those and do you have to get 50 of those to equal one tractor and how does it suss out financially? I mean, I'm sure that like there's a maximum number that you would possibly need or

else you're like, I have more than I can use. Right. And then you have a farm that like doesn't make quite as much money as another farm. So they make do with half the number of robots. And that maybe they have to supplement that with humans or whatever. Or it takes longer for that to be done or they can grow less lettuce. Right. But I'm sure that like there's, from what I read, there's a price point where like having robots is going to be financially better, way better than having to sink several hundred grand into a new tractor, even like 150 grand for a used tractor. And then the other thing, and this is really important too, number one, you don't need a human to drive these things, which frees the human up to do other things, or you don't have to pay the

human anymore. So that's going to save you some money. And then secondly, if one of those robots breaks down, you can still work all the other rows. If the tractor breaks down, you're done, you have to wait until the tractor's fixed. And then all of that work has to wait. This is just one single say row that isn't getting attended to right then while that one robot's broken down. So that's a huge advantage right there. Yeah. And you can just tell robot number two to scoot over and cover the ground that robot number one is missing. Exactly. And he's like, I got to pull a double. So shut up. You're a machine. You can't talk. The other thing robots can potentially do is harvest. Harvesting is very labor intensive. And it's also kind of inefficient, especially when

it comes to something like maybe like strawberries, which you harvest one time during the year. And, you know, there's still a little bit of leeway in there. Like it's not an exact science in that some of those plants will have ripe fruit before you go to harvest and it'll rot and drop off. Some of them may need to wait a little bit and ripen afterward. So you're wasting a lot of fruit there on the ground. And robot harvesters would just constantly kind of patrol these rows of plants and harvest the berries when they're ready to be harvested. Right. Which would make it a lot more money for the farmers who are growing that stuff. It's pretty awesome. And then as we kind of evolve further and further along in our technology, and we finally reach the capability

of nanotechnology, one of the things that they are hoping that nanobots, which are currently just hypothetical robots on the scale of like a strand of DNA or an atom or something, they'll be able to manipulate matter about like on that scale. So what they're hoping for is with agriculture, nanobots will eventually be able to deliver nutrients directly to the roots of a plant like right when it needs it. Not from some human saying like, hey, nanobot, go take this nutrient, this little bit of nitrogen over to that plant right there. It will be all of this stuff will be guided and directed by computers that are paying attention to the plants through sensors. And then directing the nanobots to go take this nutrient to this particular plant because it needs

it right now. And this kind of attention, this tailor to individualize attention is what's called precision farming. And that seems to be something that's looming on the horizon that will be a big part of for period O. Yeah, I think the nano is like serious future farming. Right. When we get to that point, but a lot of this stuff is on the imminent horizon. Nutrient waste is a really big deal and a big problem. I think about 60% of fertilizer that you apply to a field is lost to runoff. So there's a big cost factor there that you're losing. And it just wreaks havoc on watersheds that are nearby, which we talked about a little bit in the watershed episode. And fertilizer production and then transporting that where you need it is a big, big part of

CO2 emissions. I think five to 11 kilograms of CO2 are emitted through the life cycle of one keg. I'm sorry, one kilogram or a kegger. A keg, type of keg of that fertilizer, man. Keg stand. One kilogram of fertilizer. And once you fertilize the plant, it gets in that soil and these microbes have to convert that fertilizer into something this useful. And when it does that, it emits N02 or I'm sorry, N2O, nitrous oxide. And that's number three behind CO2 and methane is a big problem gas. Right. So there's a lot to be saved by cutting down on that 60% of waste fertilizer. A lot of stuff would be helped by that. And the more you can precisely tailor agriculture, the less waste you're going to have. And I would say that for anybody who's interested in hearing

how colossally wrong deploying nanobots into cropland could go, I would direct you to my 10-part series, The End of the World with Josh Clark, specifically the AI episode. It's pretty good, kind of eye-opening. I think that's my favorite one actually. Oh, thanks, Chuck. All right. So let's take a break and we'll come back and talk about big data right after this. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yeah, we know that,

Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Okay, we're back and we're talking about Chuck. Big data and three period, oh, which was already or is already using a lot of data. Um, we talked about the GPS guided tractors that have been around for a while. Um, they do use

things like drones and satellites to get like literal big pictures of farms that can be really useful, um, in determining like areas that are patchy or dry or, hey, this looks ready for harvest, but they're going to bring, uh, lidar into the mix, which is something I know we've talked about before, lidar. When did we talk about that? I don't know. It might have been, it's used most famously for, um, mapping dense, jungle ruins. Um, like I was reading about it in this book called The Lost City of the Monkey God by Douglas Preston, which I actually heard about in researching our episode on the fenn treasure because Douglas Preston was the friend of Forrest Finn who, um, vouched for having seen the treasure in person before in his closet.

And I was like, oh, that book sounds pretty interesting. I went and read it and it's really interesting, but he talks a lot about lidar being used to map these, these, these ruins that have been overgrown by jungle that you normally would never be able to see overhead, but the lidar, um, is able to basically get beams of lasers through the breaks and like leaves and all that in the canopy to hit the ground below and then bounce back up. And so you get a picture of the understory too, which would come in handy big time for, for crops, especially tall crops that are grown closely together, like say corn. Right. So you bundle all that together in a handy little app for Mr. Future Farmer and Mrs. Future Farmer or Ms. Future Farmer or Ms. Future Farmer or Dr. Future Farmer.

Or Future Farmer, they. Or they, the Future Farmers. Right. That's, that's great. I think we covered all the bases. I think so. Um, so you have an app there and, uh, machine learning becomes more intelligent, uh, the internet of things kind of gets a little more robust. And then you have farmers that don't have to constantly make these tiny little decisions, these micro decisions that they have to make every day about keeping their farm healthy. Right. They can kind of rely on this AI technology to figure it out and do it for them. Uh, and I guess they can spend their time building future weapons to fight the eventual, uh, robot uprising. That's right. But I mean, like, think about it, all of this stuff is just using things that are popping up in other sectors right now.

Machine learning, um, sensors that are connected to the internet of things and then integration of all this stuff that, um, to oversee this so that the farmer doesn't have to make these decisions. And when you combine all this stuff together, you have like a farm that could be humming along, um, just an absolute peak performance with minimal inputs that are delivered just at just the right time and just the right amount with minimal waste, um, with the farmer having to make minimal decisions. And if you take this to its, you know, eventual conclusion, I mean, uh, the, the, there won't be like young farmers running in, you know, huge farms. It'll be like somebody who owns the farm, but really it's like an AI that's overseeing the entire farm,

communicating with everything through the internet of things, directing this nanobot over there, um, this lettuce bot over here. And then potentially as we grow as a, um, an advanced society, there may just be one AI that we rely on to run all the farms everywhere around the world and then handle distribution and all of that stuff. So I don't know, maybe that it's agriculture 5.0. Who knows? Maybe we'll never get there. There's some people that certainly hope we, that's not the direction we go, but we'll talk about them in a little bit. Yeah. Like if you're screaming right now, how awful this sounds, we'll get to you later. Don't worry. Um, another part of 4.0 is, um, trying to grow crops where it doesn't seem like you

should be able to grow crops. And the desert is obviously one of those places. Uh, Saudis are already investing a lot in trying to, um, figure out the genomic codes or genomic genomic. I think both work. One seems British. Well, it's a genome. So it's probably genomic gen, genomic. That's how the British would say the genomic codes. Yeah. Uh, these plants that can withstand the desert conditions and figure out how to grow stuff there. And this is kind of where we, uh, wander gently into GMOs, which I think we have been dodging this one as a full topic for a while. We need to do it. We should at some point because it is very controversial. It has a bad wrap. Some people say rightfully so. It has a bad wrap. Uh, I think about 35% of Americans say they think

GMOs, um, are safe to eat, which is, you know, pretty, pretty decent minority there. Yeah. Science says that they are safe to eat, but for all this sort of bluster about GMOs, GMOs, they haven't really done a lot with GMOs yet except for a couple of a few little kind of dirty underhanded things. Well, yeah. Like, um, creating patented, um, seeds that grow plants that don't produce more seeds. So farmers are forced to buy seeds every single year. Boo. Yeah. That was a big one. There's another one that only responds or responds best to a specific brand of pesticide. Um, so you have to buy that brand of pesticide, which happens to be manufactured by the same company that owns the patent on the plant. It's kind of shady stuff

like that. The thing is, it's not like that's all they've tried to do. They've also tried to have breakthroughs in, you know, um, like plants that can withstand like horrible droughts and they haven't been able to break through in that sense or plants that, you know, produce double the yield with minimal inputs. They haven't had that breakthrough. That doesn't mean they're not going to break through that there won't be huge advances in plant science. But even if we do reach that point, we're like, there's going to have to also be like a public information campaign that basically says like, yeah, this stuff will not mutate your children. It's safe to eat. It won't make you glow. And there is definitely an enormous amount of fear of science from what I

can tell involved in GMOs. I haven't done the research yet. So my opinion might change when we actually do the episode, but from the minimal research I did on it, it seems like a fear of science. And as far as science is concerned, it's, it's everything we know about it. It's, it's safe to eat. Um, I don't know that will remain to be seen. Let me do some more research first before you quote me on that. Yeah. And I think part of the bad rap too is just like we were talking about the couple of three uses so far that have allowed certain companies to really take advantage of the situation. Let's just, yeah, it's not like giant mega corporations have, you know, garnered a lot of trust from the general public over the years. And in fact,

they've squandered it pretty, pretty efficiently actually. So seawater farming is another thing on the horizon. Um, and there are a couple of iterations of that, one of which is actually using seawater, uh, to farm. And when we're not talking about spraying plants, obviously, we're talking like farming shrimp, things that like seawater. Why is this working? It's like, um, idiocracy where they were using Gatorade to water the plants. Um, yeah, like growing shrimp, farming shrimp, um, because that protein demand that we were talking about as, as developing nations get more money, they're going to, they're going to want more shrimp. I'll eat more shrimp. Uh, remember when you were allergic to shrimp? Yes. And I was like,

I am not going to spend the rest of my life allergic to shrimp. And you figured it out sort of, right? I handled it. Um, there's a Japanese snack called shrimp chips and they're like little fried, just kind of like French fries, but they're crispy, um, chips and they're dusted with shrimp flavoring that include shrimp. And I just kind of immunotherapy therapied or therapized myself. I immunized them, myself to them, to shrimp so that I could eat them again and it worked. You know, we should quickly thank our, uh, scallop buddy. Oh, I think that's a great idea, man. So huge, huge, huge thanks to our pal, Togue Braun, who just hooked us up, man. I mean, hooked us up with some amazing scallops.

For Maine. Yes. Fresh ones. They had been in the, in the water like the day before we got them, I believe, right? Yes. It was very fresh and, uh, I think her boat is the down East day boat out of Maine. That's her company for sure. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But you can, you can order this stuff and like you can get the best scallops in the world sent right to your door very quickly. And boy, were they good. I mean, they were so fresh dude that the first two, three, all right, 17 scallops I ate were raw. Like I just ate them. I ate them raw. They were amazing. Yeah. It was, it's really good. So I strongly recommend them to hats off. Thanks a lot, Togue. I'm not the biggest raw scallop person, but, um, there was a lot of butter and garlic involved in my scene.

Yeah. And they cooked up so nicely. So perfectly. Yeah. Uh, so yeah, thanks for that, uh, diversion since we were talking shellfish, but yeah, farming shrimp for seawater farming. And another is where they actually have greenhouses built that will use seawater that evaporate, uh, the salt out of it into freshwater. They can sell that salt, which is great. And then have that great, delicious freshwater to irrigate their crops. Right. And then land use is a big problem too. A lot of people are like, we're running out of land where you need it to live on and do other stuff on. And some people have said, well, how about this? We'll just grow stuff indoors vertically rather than outdoors horizontally. Yeah. I actually have a friend who's engaged in this endeavor up in Jersey.

He broke his teeth. My friend Matt, um, he broke his teeth, not literally, but he, he gained experience working on space lettuce for NASA. Um, like he's cut his teeth, right? That's right. I was like, that doesn't sound right. He cut his teeth. Um, and he's an expert in, um, like the, like light spectrums, like artificial light spectrums to grow plants in space. It's pretty awesome. Yeah. It's amazing. Yeah. So, hey, Matt, should we take another break and then talk about the other side of the coin here? Hold on. Let me think. Yes, we'll be right back. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road.

Ah, okay. I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh man. And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that Michael and a different hot, sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you through life step by step. Not another one. Kids relationships life in general can get messy. You may be thinking this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say

bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Mangesh Atikar and to be honest, I don't believe in astrology, but from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life in India. It's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology. And lately I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention because maybe there is magic in the stars if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, major league baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had to handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology,

my whole world can crash down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. All right. So if we were talking about all the benefits of consolidation of farms, bigger farms, automation of farms, future farming, there is another group of people that have been screaming for years. We don't want to go that way. We should go back to the neat, not the neat with it necessary, but we should go back to one period and practice agroecology.

And that's what I was that documentary I was talking about, the biggest little farm, these people that move from LA to very impossibly, or I guess, and probably start their own farm, where everything lives in harmony. There's livestock and there's wild animals and there's pests that they say are beneficial that they let live. And they really have tried to figure out this idea that you can have a small farm that feeds people locally with giving people fresh food and not transporting it halfway across the country or the world. And that is the way forward, not what we're heading toward with 4.0. Yeah. People who are proponents of agroecology are looking at the other proposals for 4.0 and they're like, you're talking about genetically

modifying plants so you can grow them in the desert. Do you really not see that we've really lost our way here? Let's figure out something else. And they're saying, look, we've really tried this green revolution, which basically a good definition I saw for the green revolution is where you take ecosystem services, which is like natural pest control, like predatory insects, or the natural nutrient cycle, and you manipulate them. You create an artificial version of it that you can control a lot more easily and you use the heck out of it to grow the heck out of some plants. That's the green revolution. They're like, we tried this. It worked for a little while, but now we know for sure that it is really harmful to the environment. So we need to dial

that back, not double down on it. And that's where there's a tension now. There's a split. We've reached a fork in the road and we're like, which way do we go? Do we just really keep hammering this traditional farming because we know that we can coax enough food to feed some people or 10 billion people? Or do we say, no, we actually need to go the agroecology route, because we have to take into account basically just as much as our ability to feed 10 billion people, the idea that we're not harming the earth with our agricultural practices. That's the split that we're looking at right now while we're trying to figure out what Ford Otto is going to be. Yeah. And it seems like, and Emily is way, way into this stuff with agroecology for years

now. And it seems like it's really all about the soil and the devastating effects on the actual soil that I guess the Green Revolution has caused by all that manipulation. And she has made an effort just in our little backyard over the past whatever, how long we've been here, 14 years, to reclaim that soil and to make it good soil again. And that's awesome. We've got great soil now. And it takes a long time because so much damage has done over so many years, it's not the kind of thing where you can just be like, all right, we're going to stop doing that. And then the soil is going to be great again, right? Right. It takes many, many years of really caring for that soil to get it back where it began or as close to it as possible.

Yeah. And in some cases too, when you're talking about what conventional in agriculture does to the soil, as far as like crop production is concerned, and it's never going to get okay again. It's never going to come back. And so there's a process in conventional agriculture where you use up a plot of land and you move on to the next one. And when you run out of land, you bring more crop land online into the food production sector. And that's what you do. You use up land until you have to replace it by taking over more land. That's the current iteration. Agricology is like, you don't have to do that. If you just treat the soil like Emily, this is their motto, it's going to be all good. You don't have to keep

replacing land with more land because you don't use up the land. You actually leave the land better off than it was before you started using it. That to me is the thing that just makes my eyes pop open and my heart just swell for agroecologies. You're actually improving the land. And there've been studies. I ran across a study of a place called White Oak Pastures down in, oh, I can't remember where it is. It's like South Central Georgia, not too far from Albany. And they've hired independent researchers to come in and look at the environmental impact of what they do, which is regenerative grazing. And the study turned up findings that literally made international news. That's how eye-opening what they found was.

Yeah, so just a little backstory. Regenerative grazing is a very simple premise. Basically, don't let your livestock eat all the grass down to the nub where it will probably die and then just move them on to another area to do the same thing. Move them more often. They won't eat down to the nubs. Those plants and those grasses will grow back even better probably. And you'll have, like you said, you won't be using up the land. So this study, they wanted to compare the CO2 cost of industrial beef production, which is something that we've talked about before. But traditional grazing emits, and this is just astounding and awful, emits 33 pounds of CO2 to raise a single pound of meat. Isn't that nuts? It's nuts. So you go to plant-based meat like a

beyond situation, which I still haven't tried. I want to try that. That's good. Impossible and beyond are both good. All right. So these meat alternatives made from plants, they really reduced that to about three to three and a half to four pounds of CO2 for a single pound. But at White Oak, that's good. You're on the right track, but White Oak is actually sequestering CO2. It's amazing. Yeah. So if meat alternatives emit about three and a half pounds of CO2 per pound of meat alternative, White Oak pesters is raising beef, like actual beef. And when they do, they are syncing, sequestering 3.5 pounds of CO2 for every pound of beef that's produced.

It's like having solar power and creating more energy than you use. Exactly. Yeah. It's insane. These findings were, and they've been looked at and studied and looked at again, and everybody's like, this can't make sense. Apparently, some of the meat alternative companies out there were like, this is all wrong. This can't be right. And they were like, no, it's actually right. Regenerative grazing produces livestock that actually capture carbon and store it. It's insane. What are you doing? We're just moving the cows a little more. Yeah. That's basically it. And then they move them to another meadow and like when it's belly high and then they do it again. And like, here's the thing. The reason that everybody's not doing

this already is because it's way more expensive to regeneratively graze. If you look at White Oak Pastures, you can order their stuff online. It's very expensive. It's not ridiculously expensive. Like there's definitely like long established mail order beef companies that are three, four times the price. You know what I mean? Yeah. It does sound gross. Mail order beef. Mail order beef. But some of those companies are way more expensive, but it's still more than you're going to go pay if you just go to the grocery store and get whatever beef they have. But in buying that, if you can afford it, you're actually helping to save the earth. It's pretty impressive stuff. Well, yeah. And that also helps solve the issue. If you need to feed

however nine billion people, but in the next 30 years, one of the big issues is like, do we even have enough land to do that? Right. Well, yeah, dummies, we might if we don't just use up land and move on to new land. Because that's a big criticism of regenerative grazing is it requires 2.5 times the land that conventional grazing does, which is why it's so much more expensive. But yeah, if you're not using up the land and having to bring more land in as crop land, then that issue might not actually exist. That might not be a problem, right? Yeah. Pretty impressive. Super impressive. I think the last thing here as far as future farming goes is we need to hit on food waste, which is, I mean, if they could, if they could reduce food waste

by 30%, that would be a game changer for feeding the world. I think right now it takes a land mass larger than China to grow food that goes uneaten ultimately, uneaten the size of China. It's like, it's hard to even talk about without getting like super upset. So food waste also needs to be an episode that we have to do because it is just so mind boggling. But from what I saw, up to 50% of the food that America produces is thrown away, or that Americans buy maybe, I'm not quite sure, but 50% in America, about 30 to 50% in the world overall, a ton of water is wasted. I saw as much as a quarter of the world's water is wasted through this wasted food, our freshwater intake. And if you can just dial back a significant portion of that food waste,

not only are you going to save a lot of money and a lot of environmental harm, you're going to feed a lot of people. Because like you said earlier, our food supply, our food chain is globally interconnected. So we make enough food already for a lot of people, probably everybody. It's just some people go hungry because we waste so much food and we're terrible at distributing it equitably. If we can figure that out, we may not have a problem at all. And it's possible that agroecological farming could supply food for 10 billion people. That's a big one. There's studies underway right now to figure out just what kind of gap we're talking about between say organic or agroecological crop yields and conventional crop

yields. And for a long time, it was like, yeah, you just get way more food from conventional farming. And some people are actually doing the study zone. They're finding like, yeah, that's true in some cases, not true in other cases. And if we can quantify exactly what the gap is, we can figure out how to close that gap. And then yeah, we can just use agroecology. Yeah. And I think this, you know, the fork in the road where we are, hopefully what it'll look like is not a hard left turn or a hard right turn, but maybe a gentle turn on both sides that eventually come back together down the road where there's a mix of both where there is precision farming used in agroecology. Because they're not, I mean, I suppose there are some really back-to-basics

agroecological farmers that, you know, want to have an oxen pulling a plow. The Amish. Yeah, probably just them. Point is, they're into it, man. I mean, they don't mind the idea of a robot and precision weeding and stuff like that. It's these massive farms and all this waste is what they're trying to combat. So hopefully they can, there can be a marriage and that can be the best way forward. Yeah. That's what I'm hoping to. Pretty cool stuff, man. Who knew? Great. I love it. And we got two episode ideas out of it. So there you go.

If you want to know more about the future of farming, just start reading about it. There's a lot of really interesting stuff out there. And since I said that, it's time for Listener Mail. This is kind of fitting, actually. This is about hydrology. Hey, guys, I have a PhD in hydrology and teach hydrology and water resources at a university. One of the misconceptions I'm constantly battling in my courses is that water is a renewable resource, which is something we said in the episode on hydropower, because it's only renewable if we use it as such. I often use money analogies to teach this point to my students. Imagine your local hydrologic water balances like having a rather large inheritance and you are unable to ever work again

or make money. As long as you live off the interest, you and your family can live forever without ever working. But if you spin the principle, you'll eventually run out of money. It's the same with water. If you only use the renewable water, you won't have an issue, as Josh noted. But if you lower lake levels, deplete groundwater, melt ice caps, you will eventually run out of renewable water. You might ask, but it'll just rain again, right? And that's true, but not enough to refill the pot or the interest to refill the bank account. The money isn't gone. It's just in someone else's pocket. Similarly, the water isn't gone. It's just in someone else's watershed. We're most likely the salty oceans, which we can't drink.

That is Dr. Pete Wittington, associate professor at Brandon University. Dr. Pete? Dr. Pete. Dr. Pete sounds like one of those people who still continue to insist that climate change is real, even though it's cold outside. You know? Yeah, right. Marty Pants, I guess. Well, thanks a lot, Dr. Pete. We appreciate being set straight. Thank you. And that is an excellent point. Yeah, I didn't mean to get across this idea that there's water everywhere and we don't need to worry about water. No, I think you got it mostly right, he said. Good. I love hearing that. So,

you got anything else from Dr. Pete? Nothing else. Okay, well then, everybody, if you want to get in touch with us like Dr. Pete did, you can send us an email. Send it off to stuffpodcast.ihartradio.com. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeart Radio. For more podcasts from iHeart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart Podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help.

And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts.