Hi, this is Kate from MinuteEarth. Ten thousand years ago, we humans came up
with a revolutionary new idea for how to feed ourselves: agriculture! Plough land, plant a crop, water, fertilize,
harvest, and repeat each year. And today, we’re pretty much still doing
the same thing as 10,000 years ago. Thanks to the industrial revolution, we ARE
producing much larger quantities of food than we used to. But we are also putting far more resources
into producing food than we used to. As a result, water levels in the world's largest
aquifers are falling faster than they’re being replenished; our underground supply
of phosphorous – a nutrient critical to plant photosynthesis – will be exhausted
in a few hundred years; and we’re using up the very ground itself, since soil blows
and washes off of our fields 50 times faster than it forms. We can extend the life of these inputs with
resource-saving techniques like precision farming and technologies like gene editing,
but it's likely that no amount of retrofitting our 10,000-year-old approach to farming will
make it work for billions of people for the next 10,000 years. So, what are future humans going to do about
dinner? One possibility is to switch to a food-making
system where resources get recycled rather than depleted. Radical as it sounds, this kind of system
already exists all around us, in nature, where sunlight is the only major energy input, and
ecosystems comprised of many different coexisting plants and critters cycle nutrients and water
within the system, or use resources at a rate equivalent to how much is coming in. We have started taking some cues from natural
ecosystems, by interspersing crops with trees to encourage a healthy habitat for pollinators
and pest controllers, and by changing the crops themselves. For example, we’ve begun to develop perennial
forms of wheat, rice, and other grains that can live through many harvests, unlike traditional
grains, which we have to plough and replant every year. The idea is to eventually grow the new grains
alongside a variety of other long-lived plants in self-sustaining ecosystems that keep hold
of soil, water, and nutrients. If we could manage to do this for all of our
food, it would be qualitatively different from any other way humans have grown food
on a large scale: not quite hunting & gathering, not plant-harvest-repeat, but… a sort of
futuristic blend between the two. Hey there, I’m Alex! I’m here, visiting the Land Institute, the
sponsor of this video. They’re creating a new form of agriculture. It mimics natural ecosystems in order to help
feed the world's population with fewer environmental impacts. Here at the Land Institute, plant breeders
and ecologists are developing perennial versions of grains, legumes, and oilseeds, like these,
behind me. The goal is to grow them in ecologically functional
and diverse mixtures, called polycultures. To learn more about how the Land Institute's
perennial polycultures could help revolutionize agriculture, or to support their work, visit
LandInstitute.org.
