The main cause of environmental destruction?
Fossil fuels and livestock.
The livestock?
Along with agriculture, it is the biggest cause of habitat loss, native fauna, soil degradation, air and water pollution, and climate change. The use made of the land is terrible.
Tell me.
We have ploughed, fenced off, and grazing vast swaths of the planet, cutting down forests, extinguishing wildlife, and poisoning rivers and oceans to feed ourselves.
How does it affect agriculture?
Half of the world’s habitable land has been colonized to produce food, yet some 800 million people go hungry.
How do you propose that we feed ourselves?
Agriculture should offer a high return so as not to have to occupy huge areas, and a very promising prospect is the cultivation of perennial cereals.
What do we get with that?
Avoiding annual plantings, which are an environmental disaster, involve clearing the land with a plow or herbicides each year. Those annual seeds need a lot of fertilizers, herbicides, pesticides and water. They entail a great destruction of the soil and of the life that surrounds the crops, the rivers and the sea.
What do perennial seeds allow?
Save yourself the wear and tear on the land and the use of so many toxic chemicals.
Are they already being used?
There are a number of crops that are capable of doing this, and these are being developed in the US and in China, where they have already commercialized their perennial variety of rice, which produces at a higher rate than annual rice. And there are many perennial cereals in the pipeline, which is very exciting.
I like that it excites you.
Well, I’m also excited to stop producing foods rich in protein and fat based on meat, fish, eggs and dairy. We are already working on it, we have the technological means to do it.
¿Synthetic meat?
There is room for productions based on animal cells, but I believe that this will be a much less important aspect than the cultivation of unicellular organisms.
Microbes, bacteria and fungi?
Yes, through single-celled organisms we can generate fats and proteins that can be produced much more efficiently, with far less land, water, fertilizers, and discharges into the environment.
Do you propose to eat bacteria?
We already do it with yogurt, sauerkraut, kimchi, but we’re talking about producing whole foods based on bacteria, it’s a method called precision fermentation, a very refined form of fermentation that is being carried out by various companies.
Have you been to visit them?
Yes, in Finland I ate some pancakes made from bacteria. Superb! Very succulent and tasty and with 65% protein. We had to add flour to lower the protein because otherwise it was like a tortilla.
Is it economical and viable to feed humanity?
Very quickly it will become much cheaper than animal products, we are talking about modular production that requires much less space, in fact it requires much less of everything than animal production, and it does not pollute anything.
He says that sheep are as destructive as cars.
Yes, along with livestock, they produce very high levels of greenhouse gases and they need a lot of space, and land is the most important resource.
For?
Life on the planet depends on forests, wetlands, jungles and savannahs. If we give them space, we can stop the sixth mass extinction, because they are the regulators of the planetary system. But the largest use we put to the land is for pasture, twice as much as all other uses combined.
28,000 species in imminent danger of extinction due to agriculture?
Yes, it is by far the biggest cause of extinction and we have overlooked it.
What lives under a square meter of earth?
The soil is the richest, most abundant and fascinating ecosystem that exists. Its richness is similar to a jungle or a coral reef, it is a biological structure created by the creatures that live on that land, without those creatures the soil would not exist.
Oh really?
We’re just beginning to understand it, it has some very strange properties that don’t exist in any other ecosystem and a level of connection that we still don’t understand. It is as if the earth itself were a living organism; and 99% of our calories come from it.
