3. Do we need fossil agrochemicals to feed the world?

Since 2020, over 120 million tonnes of nitrogen fertilizer have been produced annually—a number set to rise by 50% by 2050. It’s easy to assume this is non-negotiable, that without it, we’d face a food crisis. But do we really need all this fossil-based input? As it turns out, there are many ways we can reverse this trend - from curbing overuse and adopting alternative technologies to rethinking our diets and transforming farming practices. We explore a range of options to ease our dependency on fossil fueled agrochemicals.

Register for our webinar: Fossil Fuels and Food Systems: A Policy Discussion for COP29

Visit the episode webpage for more resources.

This series is powered by TABLE, IPES-Food and Global Alliance for the Future of Food.

Guests

• Lisa Tostado, CIEL
• Joanna Larson, Prairie Gates Farm
• Christine Delivanis, SytemIQ
• Georgina Catacora-Vargas, IPES Food
• Mamadou Goïta, IPES 
• Swati Renduchintala, CIFOR-ICRAF
• Jennifer Clapp, IPES Food

Produced by Matthew Kessler, Anna Paskal and Nicole Pita. Edited by Matthew Kessler. Audio engineering by Adam Titmuss. Cover art by The Ethical Agency. Music by Blue dot sessions.

Transcript

Matthew Kessler

My sustainable agriculture professor Laura Lengnick used to say: farming isn’t a rocket science - it’s much, much harder.  Because there are so many elements on the farm that are out of your control:  the weather, pests, weeds, soil, plants, animals. And then there’s all the other economic and political pressures.  Everything is alive, in motion, and not always a friend to the farmer. 

This is Fuel to Fork, a podcast that exposes the fossil fuels in our food and imagines a future without them. I’m Matthew Kessler, your guide for this series. 

Episode 3. Do we need fossil agrochemicals to feed the world?

Lisa Tostado

The production and use of nitrogen fertilizers alone, which are only one part of the fertilizer story, they contribute more to the greenhouse gas effect than commercial aviation. 

Jennifer Clapp

The challenge isn't just shifting technologies, it's shifting our mindsets. 

Matthew

We learned in our first two episodes that fossil fuels are the hidden ingredient in our food, and they power each part of the supply chain. In this and the following episode, we take a look at what are the options for removing fossil fuels from our farms, and we start by looking at the history of a family farm in North Dakota.

What’s the hardest part of farming?

Joanna Larson

You know, I'm managing many decisions at once in a short amount of time. You always have to decide things right now. So it makes the long-term planning harder. 

Matthew

That’s Joanna Larson. Fourth generation farmer in North Dakota in the United States.

Joanna

I'm joining from Sheyenne, North Dakota. It's a central part of the Prairie Pothole region.  I've got cattle and help my parents farm grain.

Mathew

In the late 1800s  Joanna Larson’s great-grandfather emigrated from Sweden.

Joanna

And it's classic Homestead Act. Four brothers farmed four quarters near each other. My family is the only one from that immediate line that is still farming here.

Matthew

Today, Joanna's family farms almost 5,000 acres of land. She’s part of a new generation of farmers inheriting a legacy of changing practices and growing concerns about the environment. This farm has a long history. 

I’d be curious to learn how each of those generations thought about fertility management on the farm, so if you go back to your great-grandfather, how were they thinking about fertility and nutrient management.

Joanna

When great grandpa came to the Dakota territory. There was no synthetic fertilizer, but there was a native prairie ecosystem that had a lot of carbon and fertility in it. So they were able to take advantage of that. And it was key to their survival out here is capturing that resource.

Matthew

Joanna says that  most fertility decisions on the farm were made by her grandfather, who had to grow up really quickly due to the tough conditions of farm life.

Joanna

Terrible drought. The homestead has no water. They dug wells everywhere and it was about impossible to find water. Of course they had cattle and were doing most things with horses, and growing wheat and plowing everything. Things that probably should not have been plowed. But this was a survival type decision.

Matthew

The farm began raising crops and livestock and managed them in a rotation.  This rotation was set up to supply animal feed, food for humans, and to help maintain a healthy soil.  But as times grew harder, they made another survival type decision - lose some of the farm’s diversity and focus on what they can sell.

Joanna

I know when the settlers came, wheat was king. And North Dakota raised really good wheat and there was a market for that.

Matthew

While Joanna's grandfather ran the farm, two important things happened. First came the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. Over plowing the soil plus dry and windy weather caused severe crop failures. The historical records show that millions of people living in rural communities were forced to abandon the land and flee. 

But there was some light at the end of this period. In the decades following the Dust Bowl, farmers began to get their hands on synthetic fertilizers. For Joanna’s grandfather, these new technologies were really attractive.

Joanna

I don’t mean this to be so much about the family psychology or whatever, I think that his upbringing was really traumatic in the sense that his family left somewhere because they were starving, and to him, and as I knew him as a young child, anything old was no good. Was trying to listen to all the modern science and do what he was told was the best thing.

Matthew

And the best modern science told him: use these new varieties, check out this new equipment and apply these now widely available and subsidized fertilizers. That’s a proven formula for high yields. Perhaps good in the short-term, but it has some serious consequences for the next generation, Joanna’s dad.

Joanna

They farmed conventionally and did what they thought was best at the time. And my dad has probably spent the last 50 years of his life trying to build soil back and trying to add fertility and trying to add carbon back into the soil. And I think he's done that with a lot of success. But again, at least early on, decisions were mostly made based on economics. He had a family, he had a lot of debt load.
 

Matthew

This shift toward modern, industrialized farming practices came with another hidden cost: a growing dependence on fossil fuels, which is something that Joanna - the fourth generation - thinks a lot about.

Joanna

I was raised up in the Lutheran Church. I really do feel that we have to leave our planet and our resources and our community better than how we got it. So for me, what can I do, I do think about it. It's part of the reason why I'm so passionate about local food and why I've tried to develop a market for horticulture crops in the middle of grain country in North Dakota.

Matthew

This is one direction Joanna is exploring for the future of the farm.  Using less fertilizer, using it more precisely, and offering another option for farmers in the region - growing vegetables.

Joanna

I like horticulture production. I grow food crops. I'm really into the cattle side of our operation, I have some cattle, and I'm just personally less excited about growing corn, soybeans, and wheat because I just don't get the joy out of it that I do growing a tomato or a cucumber or something else.

The thing I think about a lot here because we're so rural is that everything has to be trucked to us. We get our vegetables from California and Mexico in the wintertime or South America, but we can raise these crops here for at least six months out of the year, maybe more.

Matthew

In this series we really want to explore the solutions and opportunities for reducing fossil fuel use in food systems. But before we get there, let’s dive into fossil fuel origins of some of these farm inputs.

Part 1 - Fossil-based agrochemicals explained

Matthew

We’ve already heard in this series that we need to reduce our reliance on the unsustainable sources of energy behind these farm inputs. But how exactly? Can we just use less? Can we replace them with greener alternatives? Or is a more systemic change required?

To set the scene,  we speak with Lisa Tostado.

Lisa

I am the Agri-Chemicals and Fossil Fuels Campaigner at the Center for International Environmental Law and I am based in Paris.

So we have lots of lawyers but we also have some campaigners like myself to raise awareness, to connect movements for phasing out fossil fuels and protecting nature.

Matthew

Lisa’s work focuses on agrochemicals, including fertilizers and pesticides and their fossil fuel origins. One reason that she cares about this is because the scale of their impacts is massive.

Lisa

If you look at the statistics per se, the production and use of nitrogen fertilizers alone, which are only one part of the fertilizer story, they contribute more to the greenhouse gas effect than commercial aviation. 

Matthew

When we think about human-driven climate change, most people think of flying as one of the biggest contributors. But, when you add up the fossil fuels used in their production and the emissions from their application, nitrogen fertilizers surpass aviation in their climate impact. Another reason to care: geopolitics.

Lisa

The fact that agrochemicals are fossil fuel based also means that most of their production costs up to 90% are actually linked to fossil fuel costs. And therefore fossil fuel price spikes lead to fossil agrochemical price spikes, lead to food price crises. 

Matthew

Lisa Tostado is going to explain what fossil-based agrochemicals are and how their use is expected to grow in the future.

Lisa

Taking one step back to understand what fossil agrochemicals even are. So with regards to fertilizers, we have three main nutrients that plants need to grow. 

Matthew

That’s NPK, or Nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium. Phosphorus and potassium are mined.

Lisa

So they're still synthetic and they come with a whole series of environmental problems, but they're not per se fossil based.  When I say fossil fertilizers, I refer to nitrogen fertilizers and they make up over half of the fertilizers used globally today.

Matthew

We’ll talk about the potential to make these fertilizers fossil free later, but today, more than 99% are fossil based.

Lisa

And the reason for which we call them fossil fertilizers is that you need fossil gas or coal in some regions, most notably in China and India, to even produce the very raw materials, the molecules that make up the ammonia, which is then turned into fertilizers. 

Matthew

Nitrogen fertilizer really is a fossil fuel product. If you went to a nitrogen fertilizer factory, you'd see a big gas pipe going in one end and a big anhydrous ammonia pipe coming out the other. We're literally transforming these fossil fuels into fertility.

And it’s a similar story with synthetic pesticides - which includes herbicides, insecticides, fungicides - they’re nearly all derived from fossil fuels and are highly toxic substances. These include DDT, glyphosate, and neonicotinoids.

Lisa

In the past decades, the use of agrochemicals has grown absolutely exponentially. If we look at nitrogen fertilizers, over the last six decades only, the global production and use has grown ninefold to more than 120 million tons every single year today. 

And the story is very similar for pesticides. So if we look at the numbers since 1990, the use of pesticides has doubled and is today about 3 million tons.  Pesticides are already very toxic and effective in low doses. So that's why we need fewer of them.

Matthew

That’s worth repeating. Each year, we use 120 million tons of nitrogen fertilizers, and 3 million tons of pesticides. These are such big numbers that I couldn’t even think of a useful analogy to break this down for you.

Lisa

So a lot of fossil fuels go into the production of nitrogen fertilizers for fossil gas. That's about 5% of global gas use today. And that is growing, especially as other sectors started to decarbonize.

Matthew

This is an important point. As rich countries begin to shift their electricity grids towards renewables and away from fossil fuels, and as we move slowly towards electrifying our transportation - it becomes more and more noticeable the lack of progress we’re making around food and farming. 

Here, we’re actually investing more in fossil fuels than the other alternatives.

Lisa

Even though awareness has grown about the various negative environmental impacts and also human rights and human health implications, the projections are still going up. So according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, FAO, in a business as usual scenario, the use of nitrogen fertilizers could still grow by another 50% until 2050. 

Matthew

Our current farming systems and our climate goals aren’t compatible, and we’re trending in the wrong direction. 

Next up, we don’t just describe the problem, but suggest ways out of it.

PART 2 - Do we need fossil agrochemicals on our farms?

Matthew

Again, we’re going to focus on nitrogen use on farms. The science here is important to understand. It’s also complicated. 

So in all ecosystems, whether they are natural or managed by people, nitrogen is constantly being lost. On a farm, nitrogen is lost in two main ways.

First, when crops are harvested, you’re not just taking the food away, you’re also removing the nutrients, like nitrogen, that the plants have taken up from the soil. Second, there are also unintentional losses of nitrogen, like when it leaks into the water through rain or evaporates into the air.

So in order to keep up with a healthy harvest season after season, farmers need to replace the nitrogen that is lost.

There are basically two main ways to add new nitrogen to a farm. One way is to plant legume crops like peas, beans, clover, alfalfa, which have this amazing ability to take nitrogen from the air and put it into the soil. It’s really an incredible gift from nature. The other way is to use synthetic nitrogen fertilizers, which are made using fossil energy. Also, a pretty amazing gift from early 20th century scientists.

I didn’t mention manure and compost. These are really important in sustainable farming, but they don’t add any new nitrogen. They just recycle nitrogen that’s already in the system, helping to reduce the losses. So to keep up with good harvests, you’ll always need to bring in new nitrogen from somewhere. 

Now that we’ve covered the basics, let’s explore another farming approach that relies less on fossil fuels. This approach encourages us to view farms as ecosystems— specifically, agroecosystems. 

Georgina

I am Georgina Catacora-Vargas, I am from Bolivia. I teach and do research on agroecology.

Matthew

Georgina Catacora-Vargas is a professor at the Bolivian Catholic University and a panel expert at IPES Food. So what is agroecology, from a farm management perspective?

Georgina

These agro ecological farming systems. In my view, have three basic characteristics. The very first one, a very crucial one, is that it includes different species.

Matthew

So we’re not just talking about having a mix of diverse crops or crop rotations. But actively cultivating multiple crops alongside herbs and bushes and trees. And different types of livestock. 

Georgina

So really a feast of life. And that's why we say agroecology is establishing biodiverse systems, meaning the diversity of life. And all the species that are included in the system or are led to grow in the system have functions. 

Matthew

These functions aid in managing both fertility and regulating pests. For example, these bushes could help create habitats for pollinating and beneficial insects that help control pests. The second characteristic, protecting and covering the soils.

Georgina

So we are talking about protection from living materials, not from plastic, for instance. So this is one very important feature when we are talking about soils are covered. But not only that, but also are protected from disturbance. 

Matthew

This means minimal or no tillage. Not disturbing the soil through plowing and turning it over. As a way to keep nutrients in the soil and reduce losses from leaching and erosion. Georgina says we must feed the soil that feeds the plants that feed us.

Georgina

And a third one that I could say is that agroecological farms do not include the application, the use of harmful substances, harmful for the health and well-being of all living creatures in and around the system. I am referring to plants, to animals, to microorganisms, to human beings.

Matthew

All of this is in service of building a resilient ecosystem. Like a more natural system, that has a stronger ability to bounce back after droughts, floods, or pests and diseases.

But of course sometimes pests show up on the farm and they need to be dealt with. If you tell a farmer whose livelihood depends on farming, who is used to spraying their crops with pesticides, to just let the pests eat some plants and the system will bounce back, they might laugh at you.

There are strategies to deal with this. Like a push-pull system. You can selectively cultivate plants that deter and push pests, like marigolds, or that attract and pull pests away from your main crop, like grasses).

Another option is to make your own natural pesticides at home or from the farm itself.

Mamadou

Actually, I have more than 700 liters of biopesticides mixing, for instance, onions with ginger, with garlic. and then use a bit of neem trees.

My name is Mamadou Goita, I'm from Mali.

Matthew

Mamadou is the executive director of the Institute of Research and Promotion of Alternative Development, and is also a member of IPES-Food.

Mamadou

I'm using also biopesticides that are used just to keep the pests away. So it will just push them back because some of them you don't want to kill. In agroecology we don't kill all the pests because some of them are very useful to maintain the ecosystem in your farm.

Matthew

Mamadou is eagerly seeking out solutions that will support the people of West Africa, many of whom are farmers.

Mamadou

Here in West Africa, the last studies that were done show that we are not a big user of fertliizer, as the global trends. 

Matthew

This region uses a lot less synthetic fertilizer and pesticides. But the usage that is here, is really unevenly spread. Many smallholders use little or none. And the large-scale commercial farms in the region like Cotton, cacao and coffee, apply a lot.

Mamadaou runs an agroecological demonstration farm. The farm showcases a method to manage soil fertility and pests using biological methods.

Mamadou

At the very beginning you start using these organic manures, you will see that progressively that your soil be regenerated.

Matthew

The goal of Agroecological farming is to grow food in biodiverse systems, to maximize interactions between soil and plants and livestock, and make the best use of local resources. That includes having biological alternatives available. But Georgina wants to stress, it’s not just about replacing chemical inputs for biological ones.

Georgina

And sometimes bio-inputs are used, but as a complement. And here I would like to stress once again that agroecology is not input substitution. It’s not using bio -fertilizers instead of synthetic fertilizers, but to reestablishing these biological relationships that are going to contribute to reestablish ecological functions, among them this recycling of nutrients.

Matthew

So returning to our original question, do we need fossil agrochemicals on our farms? It is possible to manage pests and fertility without them. But, there’s a lot of knowledge that is required to farm this way. These are knowledge intensive systems as opposed to input-intensive ones and they typically call for more hands on the farm.

And there are some recent comprehensive studies that show that agroecological farming has achieved similar or even higher yields  in smallholder farms. It’s also shown to improve crop diversity, reduce pest infestation, and increase net income in 70% or more cases. Global policy-makers are also starting to pay attention, like at the UN Food and Agriculture Organization.

We’ll get more into additional benefits, the limitations and the challenges of scaling out these types of systems later and in future episodes. 

PART 3 - Optimizing nitrogen use on farms

Matthew

How can we make our fertilizer and pesticide use more efficient? For starters, we widely over apply fertilizer to the land. 

Lisa

So that means we could reduce fertilizers quite drastically without reducing yields, because a lot of the nitrogen fertilizers that we apply on our fields is not even taken up by the crops. 

Matthew

Lisa Tostado from the Center for International Environmental Law explains why. 

Lisa

There are several reasons for that, but one being that  subsidy schemes incentivize fertilizer use and farmers don't necessarily have the knowledge and even the financial incentives to apply the right rate at the same, at the right time, et cetera. 

Matthew

It’s worth adding that these agribusiness companies are also consistently lobbying politicians and farmers to distribute and subsidize these inputs. How much influence do they have? Well, in the United States, they’ve spent over half a billion dollars in the last 5 years lobbying Congress or favorable policies. That’s more than Oil companies have spent.

Lisa

So one pretty low-hanging fruit would be to increase the nitrogen use efficiency. So that is the indicator that describes how much of the nitrogen fertilizer that we apply is actually uptaken by the harvested crop at the end. And this nitrogen use efficiency has decreased in the past decades. It has remained stubbornly low in the past years around 46% only. 

Matthew

That means that half the nitrogen we apply each year is lost - to the water, the soil, in the form of climate warming nitrous oxide emissions. 

It’s true that we need to apply less, but there’s a lot of reasons this could be difficult to implement in practice.

Joanna

In my experience on our farm is that until we started doing soil mapping, We didn't realize how much nutrients were sometimes left in the soil profile that was accessible to the crops. 

Matthew

Joanna Larson, family farmer from North Dakota, hired a soil mapping to be done from their local co-op. It’s called a SWAT analysis and the whole process took 3 days. The aim is to take a really granular look at how water and nutrients flow through the farm and how much the crops are actually taking those nutrients up.

Joanna 

We might've been putting down too much just because we assumed that the previous year's used it all. So when they started soil mapping, really, our eyes were really opened that you don't always have as much utilization as you thought you had. 

Matthew

Joanna’s farm tried to be an early adopter of precision agriculture, where the promise is to use sensors and analytics to try to apply the precise amount of nutrients needed for the crops. 

Joanna

Adopting the technology to use the variable rate fertilizer sounds really nice, but I'm an agriculture biosystems engineer and I worked in R&D as test engineer and I can honestly say my dad and I are on our third year of pulling our hair out at the functionality of the technology and getting it to communicate with our Fent tractor and our, you know, new modern equipment that's supposed to work and it doesn't work right. 

Matthew

This a big issue. 

Joanna

And I know talking to my neighbors, they've been frustrated by the technology not working too. And they thought, we're going to adopt this precision rate fertilizer. And then it doesn't work. And then they just don't even bother the next year. They don't even hire the mapping done. So yeah that's a real problem.

Matthew

That’s one way to reduce fossil fuels use on farms. Increase Nitrogen Use Efficiency through better crop utilization of the fertilizer. Which, as we just heard, isn’t foolproof.

Here’s a second way:

Lisa

Another way to reduce the use of chemical nitrogen fertilizers would be to reinvest in biological fixation. Because the good news is, that's not our only way to provide nitrogen to soils. There's also plants that live together with bacteria and symbiosis that can do the same thing basically. That can make use of the nitrogen that we have in the air and provide useful forms of nitrogen to the soils. 

Matthew

This is nitrogen fertility without the need for fossil fuels. Legumes have this amazing ability to biologically fix nitrogen in soils. Alfalfa and clover for example are really important parts of crop rotation. But there’s also legumes that we can eat - soybeans, peanuts, beans, chickpeas, lentils, peas. On top of being delicious, protein rich, staple foods to cultures across the world. 

Lisa

They could provide not only the nitrogen but also other benefits such as better pest and weed control, improved soil structure, and also dietary changes.

Matthew

One study asked the question “what if Europe converted all of its agriculture to organic farming” and it found that by simply integrating legumes into the crop rotations on farms, they could fix between 70-300 kg of nitrogen per hectare per year. Even just including clover in rotations could lead to a 50% reduction in nitrogen fertilizer use in some European countries.

A third way to increase nitrogen use efficiency - change what we eat!

Lisa

And if we consider how much of these crops actually make it into human stomachs, the nitrogen use efficiency decreases even further because we grow a lot of crops to feed animal, we grow a lot of crops to produce biofuels. So if we prioritized crops for direct human consumption, we would also increase the nitrogen use efficiency.

Matthew

This is a different argument to shift to more plant-based diets in wealthy countries with historically unprecedented levels of high meat consumption. It’s an argument to reduce food waste and use less synthetic nitrogen. Let’s break that down. It’s really inefficient to feed crops to animals that we then eat ourselves.

Animal based foods, with red meat as a stand out, drives about three-quarters of nitrogen emissions, while plant foods contribute far less. 

Look, none of this is easy to shift. If it was, we’d be in a much better position with respect to nitrogen use than we are today.

Here’s 4 takeaways on how to optimize nitrogen use efficiency, in about 30 seconds.

1. If using synthetic N, apply the appropriate level of N fertilizer at the right time. This helps you maximize Nitrogen uptake and reduce overuse;
2. Add more legumes and biological nitrogen into cropping systems;
3. Use ecological farming practices to recirculate and reduce nitrogen losses from the system.
4. In high income countries, shift towards more plant-forward diets.

Next, we look at the promise and reality of what some are calling green fertilizers.

PART 4: Should we invest in a Green hydrogen future?

Lisa 

So today, almost all of the nitrogen fertilizers are based on fossil fuels. We need fossil gas or coal to synthesize the ammonia. And the promise now is to decarbonize the industry to get off the fossil fuel addiction by replacing fossil fuels as feedstock with renewable energies. So that would happen via green hydrogen.

Matthew

This process of turning the hydrogen into a liquid fuel or fertilizer, was relatively new for me. But not for everyone, this was hypothesized 150 years ago by the science fiction writer Jules Verne. He wrote “water will be the coal of the future.” So how does this process work? 

To make a hydrogen based fertilizer, you first need to split a water molecule, which is 2 parts hydrogen, one 1 part oxygen. Using electrolyzers, you extract the water molecule, keeping the hydrogen and releasing the oxygen back into the atmosphere.

If you’re making a fertilizer - rather than a fuel, you then take this hydrogen gas, and through combining it with Nitrogen, you produce ammonia, which is an essential nutrient for crops. This still requires the haber-bosch process, like we spoke about in the last episode, but there is potential to run all of this using renewable energy. So here’s a best case scenario.

LIsa

So the promise is to make fertilizer production fossil free. The production process would then be decarbonized because all you need is renewable energies and fresh water. You would reduce the dependency on fossil fuels. However there are a few problems associated with this green fertilizer approach.

Matthew 

So I want to first understand the viability of the technology itself.

Lisa

There's definitely a big hype around green hydrogen, which is not justified because it is not a panacea and it is very expensive and will remain expensive to implement in for many decades to come. The technology per se, however, is like from a technical standpoint of view, viable. It is working. The thing is just that the physical properties, which you cannot ever change, make it a very energy intensive process. So you need a lot of renewable energies to run these electrolyzers. And you also need fresh water. 

So if you use ocean water, you need to desalinate that. And that is again, adding to the very high energy needs. The technology is there, we have it, there's already some green hydrogen production out there, it's working, but it is and will remain energy intensive. And we should only do it for very specific purposes and not think of green hydrogen in terms of like a magic silver bullet that can solve all our energy and feedstock problems.

Matthew

Christine Delvanis of SystemIQ, back from the first episode, has also been thinking about the long-term goals and how they match up against the next few years of the green fertilizer story.

Christine 

The scaling of green ammonia is going to take time. And the reason for that is today it is just not economical, and it’s therefore not at scale.

The problem we have in this transformation is that we all want it to go faster, reach scale faster, but the lessons suggest that that only happens once the new solutions are as economical or profitable as the old solutions, which is why we have scaling in wind and solar today. But we don't yet have scaling in green ammonia. So in green ammonia, there I think are 15 plants globally, whereas we need to get to like 500 to be able to service demand.

Matthew

I can see how green fertilizers made from renewable energy look like a really attractive solution.

But like most things labeled a “perfect climate solution,” there are some costs upon closer inspection. Right now, these fertilizers aren’t fossil free, and they aren’t affordable.  One can imagine scaling out this production and reaping these benefits in the future, but even when they’re applied at scale, there are still some pretty strong limitations. 

Christine

This is a bit of a mathematical answer. But if we look at the emissions from the fertilizer system, right? I think it's roughly 20% that comes from the production of fertilizers and roughly 80% that comes from the application of fertilizers. And so green fertilizer isn't going to solve the problem of over application.

Matthew

Did you catch that? Most of the greenhouse gas emissions related to Nitrogen, like nitrous oxide emissions, come from fertilizer application. Not from the actual production. 

Technological innovation is important. But so is understanding the limitations of any technology.

So in this case, even after scaling the technology, it only solves a minor part of the problem. This is why Christine Delivanis strongly advocates to cut back excessive fertilizer use.

Christine

We should be more focused on coaching, technical assistance, training to farmers. 

Matthew

She suggests to put more emphasis on farmer education, which is needed across the world, but especially in India and China, where there’s significant over application.

Christine

In many instances deploying less fertilizer is economical for farmers but there needs to be coaching on how to do that, there needs to be training on how to do that and you know in many parts of the world they can be difficult to reach. So I think it's that side of things that I think needs more attention and certainly the companies involved in those value chains have a responsibility to do that.

Matthew

Companies and food businesses have a responsibility, as do governments.

Take the country of Denmark as an example. Denmark cut its Nitrogen use in half across the 1980s and 1990s. They used both the carrot and the stick approach, to reward good behavior and punish bad behavior. They incentivized reducing or eliminating synthetic nitrogen, like offering support for organic farming, as well as penalizing and fining over use. 

Lisa Tostado reminds us there are other big hurdles in transitioning to green fertilizers made from renewable energy.

Lisa

So you can see fertilizer companies talk a lot about green fertilizers. However, the reality is that today less than 1% of the global hydrogen production is green. And it is easier for them, so to speak, to retrofit existing fossil fuel plants with carbon capture technology than investing in new electrolysers.  So what we can see is still  a fossil build out today instead of all investments going into green.

Matthew

So to wrap up, I want to come back to the question I posed at the beginning of the episode, which is, do we need agrochemicals to feed the world?

PART 5: A shift in mindsets

Jennifer

Do we need agrochemicals to feed the world? Obviously, different people are going to have different answers to that question.

Matthew

Jennifer Clapp, professor at University of Waterloo and panel expert for IPES-Food.

Jennifer

The industry is going to say, of course, we need them. And they also will say, we don't have a counterfactual to prove that we can do it. 

Matthew

Modern agriculture has really successfully maximized crop growth. Mostly through identifying and managing every factor that limits a harvest. From pests and weeds to nutrient supply. Innovations like the Haber-Bosch process for nitrogen have allowed for the production of enough food calories to support billions more people.

However, let’s take stock of where we are, after a century of living within this productivist paradigm. 1 in 11 people are highly food insecure, and over 2 billion people are malnourished. In most cases, this isn’t because of a lack of access to calories, but a lack of access to affordable and nutritious diets.  Not to mention the list of environmental problems that come with overproduction.

Jennifer Clapp highlights growing evidence that challenges the belief that industrial, input-intensive farming is the only way to feed the world.

Jennifer

There are growing numbers of studies saying that we actually can produce sufficient calories to feed the world using these other methods. The challenge isn't just shifting technologies, it's shifting our mindsets. 

In a way, it's rethinking how we do agriculture away from this embeddedness of fossil fuels in every aspect of the way we farm today in a modern industrial farming system. 

Matthew

On both an individual and societal level, this requires a mindset shift. And it also requires a global restructuring. Of course none of this won’t happen overnight.

Swati

I want to make this very clear. It is not a radical change that you approach a farmer and he or she will transform from day zero. It doesn't work like that. It's a trust-building exercise.  

I am Swati Renduchintala, an associate scientist with World Agroforestry Center, CIFOR, ICRAF.

Matthew

Swati is also deployed to the government of Andhra Pradesh - India’s fifth biggest state working with a statewide agroecological program that involves over 1 million farmers.

Swati

Which is called the Andhra Pradesh Community Managed Natural Farming Program. Number-wise and the area-wise, it's touted as the largest agroecological program in India and also the world.

Matthew

This program began in 2016, and has significantly scaled over the last 8 years, following similar practices that we heard about earlier. Covering the soil

Swati

The soil should not look at the sun. The should not talk to each other.

Matthew

Caring for and not disturbing the soil.

Swati

We have realized that farmers don't do farming. It's the microbes who do farming. Farmers' job is to aid the microbes.

Matthew

And making the best use of local resources.

Swati

In India we have cows. So cow dung, cow urine, lentil powders, you know, these are all recipes, local recipes that are derived after this principle of increasing microbial function.

Matthew

A big part of their success is based on building farmer’s trust. Instead of asking a farmer to transition their farm into brand new practices, the program engages in a multi-year process. And they start off small, so the farmers can see the results themselves. 

Swati

I'm wanting you to visualize a small farmer with half an acre of land or one acre of land and just imagine that it's the livelihood. We say, you know brother. My program has approached a farmer. Brother, let's do one thing. Of this one acre, you do 0.1 acre in what we are suggesting, right? We are talking about behavioral change here. 

Matthew

Behavior change is hard. Changing one’s mind is arguably harder.  

Now let’s review the options for cutting back fossil fuels on the farm.

We’ve heard there is enormous potential to reduce synthetic fertilizer use, that there is minor potential in replacing fossil inputs with greener sources of energy, and we’ve heard alternative ways of farming that don’t require these synthetic inputs in the first place. 

While some regions in the world have much less reliance on agrochemicals for their food production, that vision of no synthetic fertilizers or pesticides seems pretty far removed from how most people in middle and high income countries grow and eat their food today.

For Jennifer Clapp, it's crucial to expand and scale out these agroecological practices across the food system—promoting regional and seasonal eating while minimizing the use of external inputs. But she also will acknowledge that there are significant hurdles to achieve this vision.

Jennifer

The problem of getting there is what's really troubling for me. It's what keeps me up at night. How do we make that shift given that we have huge technological lock -ins, we've got institutional and political lock -ins, we even have behavioral lock-ins that make it really hard for us to think outside the box and change the whole mindset. 

The catalyst that sparks that shift, climate change is a big catalyst and I think it's getting a lot of people thinking about it. But also the power of the big companies that dominate and control technologies, they're influencing policies, they're making it very difficult to make that shift. I would argue that these marginal improvements in efficiency could actually be holding us back from making the complete mind shift.

Matthew

Are we just rearranging the deckchairs on the titanic? Are all these small tweaks and efficiency improvements not addressing the fact that we’re still heading towards an iceberg?

We know we need to phase down fossil fuels in the food system. But how do we prioritize and where should we be putting our resources? 

In next week's episode, we take an in-depth look at another link in the food supply chain: the fossil fuels powering the farm

Darrin

We've doubled the use of liquid fuels in our machinery. Overall just doubled the fossil fuel inputs into the system over the last 30 years, and it's a pretty durable exponential upward trend.

Matthew

We know. This episode had a lot of research and information in it. You can visit our website: https://fueltofork.com/ to follow more of the studies, resources, and programs that our wonderful guests talked about. 

If you're enjoying this podcast and want to help it reach more people, please rate, review and share this podcast with friends and family. We’re hosting a webinar on November 4th with some of these podcast speakers to discuss the policy implications of phasing out fossil fuels from our food. We’ll drop a link to register in episode show notes.

This podcast was made possible by IPES Food – the international panel of experts on sustainable food systems, Global Alliance for the Future of Food, and TABLE. The series was produced by Matthew Kessler, Anna Paskal and Nicole Pita. Episode was edited by Matthew Kessler. Audio engineering by Adam Titmuss. Special thanks to Robbie Blake, Chantal Clement, Jack Thompson, Jackie Turner,  Tamsin Blaxter, Tara Garnett, Amanda Jekums, Patty Fong, Pablo Thorne, Rasmus Einarsson and Elin Roos. We’ve received funding from the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation. Cover art and design was done by the Ethical Agency.  Music by Blue dot Sessions.