PITY THE POOR MALTHUSIANS:

[W]hat if in addition to planting more trees and reducing emissions to rebalance the carbon equation, innovation took a page from fossil fuels, and concentrated the plant power itself? In the same way we figured out how to compress the power of 250 horses under the hood of a car and accelerate emissions, could we similarly concentrate the photosynthetic power of hundreds of acres of agriculture into an area the size of a football field, to speed up the reduction?

Something like this will need to be done anyway to meet the upgraded food requirements of a global population that is projected to reach almost 10 billion people by 2050, a task made more difficult since agriculture is one of the sectors already most hurt by climate change. We can't rely on our previous trick of throwing land, fossil-fuel-based fertilizers, mechanization, and irrigation at the problem either. For starters, we would need an estimated India's worth of additional farmland; our carbon credit card is clearly overdrawn; and water's local availability and over-availability (flooding) is becoming more unpredictable by the day.

There is an urgent need for new approaches for food production that can meet this future demand, be insulated from climate effects, all while using less carbon, land, water, and fertilizer. In short, it means moving a significant amount of food production indoors.

The good news is that there is already a rapidly emerging ecosystem around high-value products grown indoors, such as vertical farming, fermentation, and lab-grown alternative meat. The much higher energy and labor costs of moving the outdoors indoors remains an important barrier to wider deployment, but innovation is also not confined to the products found in the grocery produce aisle.

Microorganisms like algae and cyanobacteria are also a promising source of the industrial agricultural inputs that make up more than half of current agricultural production. We have only scratched the surface of their enormous biodiversity and potential for addressing needs ranging from animal feed to bioplastics. Advances in LED lighting, machine learning, and microbiology are well-suited to concentrated, lower-cost industrial configurations, and together can potentially yield as much "crop" per hectare in a day as is produced by a conventional farm in a year.

Not only could this help meet the future requirements of an expanding population, but many of these indoor farming innovations could be configured to be carbon neutral or even carbon negative, all while requiring a fraction of current land, water, and nutrients. In the same way land and fossil fuels underpinned the first Green Revolution, these emerging indoor platforms could be the foundation for the next one.

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