A Scientific Breakthrough That Could Transform How We Produce Food: David Friedberg (Transcript)

Here is the full transcript of TED conversation titled “A Scientific Breakthrough That Could Transform How We Produce Food” with entrepreneur and investor David Friedberg.

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TRANSCRIPT:

The Evolution of Agriculture and Its Impact on Humanity

CHRIS ANDERSON: Hello, everyone. We’re going to spend the next 45 minutes or so exploring one of the biggest issues impacting our collective future. I think you may end up pretty amazed at what you’re about to hear. Like almost all animals, much of our time on this planet has been spent trying to figure out how to eat enough food to survive and thrive, while avoiding becoming food ourselves. For most of the first 300,000 years of our existence as Homo sapiens, we lived as hunter-gatherers, hunting food, gathering food.

Then we discovered a different way, agriculture, just growing it ourselves. That discovery, of course, changed everything for better and also perhaps for worse, arguably. Agricultural land now is taking over huge swathes of our planet, endangering our forests and contributing massively to climate change. But today, there are a number of truly remarkable changes that just could possibly transform the way that we produce our food.

I have with me someone who’s been pioneering one of the most exciting of those changes. David Friedberg is a highly successful entrepreneur and an investor with a strong scientific background on the popular All In podcast, which he co-hosts. He’s known as the Sultan of Science. For several years, he’s been running a funding partnership for the production board that has pumped large sums of money into startups that can increase the resilience of our planet. One of those startups got him so excited at his potential to transform agriculture that he’s now focusing most of his time on that as we’re here. So, David, welcome.

DAVID FRIEDBERG: Chris, thanks for having me. Good to see you.

CHRIS ANDERSON: So why don’t we start with this? Why don’t you give us like a whirlwind tour of just the big picture of agriculture in humanity’s past?

The First Human Technology: Agriculture

DAVID FRIEDBERG: Well, I mean, I would argue that agriculture is the first human technology. You know, the origins of humans, as you pointed out, as hunter-gatherers is we would eat and have food available to us based on what the earth gave us, what was found lying on the ground, what was growing, where nomadic tribes found themselves. And at some point in human history, humans made the observation that they could put seed in the ground and grow a plant so we could start to engineer the earth around us to make things that we could then consume to increase our ability to thrive and populations began to swell.

And as farming kind of grew and became a better understood system, a better understood technology, more investment was made in improving the productivity of that technology, improving the output and new systems started to support agriculture like fertilizer production or the tractor or the plow. And eventually in this modern era, the understanding of the genetic sequences that make up the seeds that we’re putting in the ground to help guide and direct our ability to do things like plant breeding and to make decisions about which crops to, you know, which plants we want to kind of continue to cultivate.

And so agriculture went from being, you know, something that humans didn’t really grasp, to being this tool that allowed our populations globally to swell without making enough calories, we would not have been able to survive and grow our populations, to this tool that started to become, call it a critical factor in some of the issues we’re facing with carbon being put into the atmosphere, and now increased investment in productivity at all levels of agriculture that are really transforming how we have a relationship with planet Earth as a species.

CHRIS ANDERSON: I mean, for most of history, the large majority of humans, this is basically what they did, right? We tried to grow enough food one way or another to survive. That was what, there were people in power who didn’t have to do that and who lived off the bounty of that. But this is what most humans did. And in fact, even today, in many parts of the world, half of the world’s population is basically doing some form of smallholder agriculture.

The Transformation of Society Through Agricultural Technology

DAVID FRIEDBERG: That’s exactly right. And in the United States, we were largely an agrarian society. If you go back 150, 160 years, 60% plus of the US population worked in agriculture, they worked the farms. Today, less than 1% do. And so that has freed up a large percentage of society to invest their time in the development of other industries and other systems of economic prosperity, which we’ve realized in this country through the Industrial Revolution.

And that was unlocked because of technologies that arose in agriculture, for example, the tractor. The tractor gave one man the ability to do what it took 50 men or women to do prior to that. And it really unlocked this kind of productivity. So, so much of agriculture can be measured in this productivity equation, which is how much input and how much output do we get? And it’s really transformed society as we’ve made these technological leaps in agriculture.

CHRIS ANDERSON: And there’s almost always been this dance of agriculture has allowed us to thrive and to grow population therefore, but then that is often brought with it risk of catastrophe. There were moments in the middle of the last century, where it looked certain that hundreds of millions of people would die from starvation because we had overpopulated and would not be able to feed that growing number. And then you had Norman Borlaug and others founding the Green Revolution, which at least for a while, seemed to solve that problem.

I mean, I think a lot of people today don’t worry or think about agriculture at all. It’s like that is a thing that used to be what we were all about. But we’ve kind of solved it. We’re growing food. It’s all okay. My supermarket’s full. Why isn’t business as usual, okay?

The Haber-Bosch Process and Agricultural Crises

DAVID FRIEDBERG: Well, yeah, I mean, I’ll just double down on the point you made in the late 19th century, most of the fertilizer that fertilized the farms in Europe, and fertilizer we discovered was this critical input to farming. If you put fertilizer on the ground, which is nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium, the plants can grow bigger, faster, healthier. So we started applying fertilizer at some point in the history of agriculture. And we sourced all this fertilizer from the kind of region in South America called Atacama, the Atacama deserts and the guano fields off of the coastline.

And that region started to run dry. And there were all these clipper ships, it was the most valuable real estate on earth was these like guano fields off the coastline of Chile. And when the guano fields started to run dry, there was a theorized crisis brewing in Europe that we were going to run out of food and the whole world was going to die, the whole of Europe was going to end up malnourished. And this incredible discovery invention was made called the Haber-Bosch process.

And the Haber-Bosch process allowed humans to make fertilizer from atmospheric nitrogen. Nitrogen makes up 70% of the air around us. They figured out how to compress the air to 200 times atmospheric pressure, run it over an iron catalyst with a spark of electricity and boom, out precipitated ammonia, which we then use as fertilizer. And that is the technology we use today to fertilize farms all over the world. And that crisis was resolved.

The Consequences of Industrialized Agriculture

And similar to your point in the mid 20th century population was exceeding food production, particularly in South Asia. And Norman Borlaug came along and used sophisticated techniques and plant breeding to solve that crisis. So the industrialization of agriculture has largely supported these crises and resolve these crises for humanity. But the industrialization of agriculture has also driven us into a higher carbon footprint, a higher energy footprint, a higher land footprint, biodiversity declines, when we move into the Amazon, take away acres and try to plant more farmland.

So there’s a lot of adverse consequences to the kind of growing industrialization of ag, particularly without enough gains in productivity. And so as productivity gains started to stall out and are still stalling out a bit, we have a very hard time keeping up with the economic demands of food. Remember, today on planet Earth, there’s about 800 million people worldwide that still live on less than 1200 calories a day. They are technically deemed malnourished by the UN by the FAO.

And so the FAO tracks these stats, we got it down to five or 600. Now it’s spiked back up since COVID. And so there’s still a significant demand to increase production. Populations are continuing to grow, particularly in regions where people are not getting enough calories today, like South Asia and Africa. And so by the year 2050, the UN estimates we’ll need to increase global food production by north of 50%.

So the way we’re doing that is we’re eating into the Amazon, we’re taking up more land that otherwise has these kind of diverse ecosystems. And we’re turning them into these monocultural kind of agricultural systems. That’s not a bad, the monocultural concept is not a bad one in the sense that if we can be very productive with the land, we don’t need to go in and destroy biodiversity that exists. So the big push in agriculture needs to be around how do we increase productivity? How do we create a technology that unlocks the ability to not have to put more in or take more land and get more out? And that’s the big driving equation.

The Impact of Agriculture on Land Use and Climate Change

CHRIS ANDERSON: Yeah, when you look at the numbers, it really does get scary. I mean, already today, I think nearly half of habitable land, which includes forests, and so it’s basically everything except like glaciers and deserts is devoted to agriculture already. So if we did a 50% food increase, that’s just really wiping out so much of what is precious to us and that we don’t want to wipe out. And spell out a bit more clearly the connection to climate. I’ve heard it claimed and what the numbers seem to suggest is that when you look at the overall emissions issue of too much carbon being emitted, that agriculture is said to be 25 to 30% of that problem. How is that? How is it contributing to emissions?

DAVID FRIEDBERG: Well, I mean, to your point, the whole of planet Earth is about 100 billion acres, so I’ll speak in acres for a minute. 70 billion of those acres is the oceans, okay? And about 30 billion is the land. And of that 30 billion that is the land, about 15 billion, as you point out, is used for either growing crops or growing animals, about 12 billion acres, roughly for growing animals, about 3 billion for growing crops.

And so much of that 12 billion is not as carbon intensive as the small amount of the cropland that we use to grow crops for industrialized animal agriculture, which we then feed to animals. And to grow those crops, we do use a lot of carbon to make the fertilizer that gets applied to those crops to then get fed to the animals. So we’re taking a large number of calories and reducing it to a small number of consumable calories in the form of animals.

And the calories that we’re growing takes a lot of carbon to make. And it’s not well offset today, although that is getting much better actually, because if you can get the plants to grow bigger, faster, healthier, they suck up more carbon from the atmosphere than it takes to make the fertilizer that is used to grow them. That’s the big unlock in the equation. Does that make sense?

CHRIS ANDERSON: That makes sense. And that just ties into why people, so many people care a lot about people eating less meat. If we got most of our calories from plants instead of animals, you would need far, the agricultural footprint overall could shrink because you need to grow a lot more calories in plant form to turn into animals essentially. And then there are other issues like the methane emissions from cows.

The Impact of Animal Agriculture on Climate Change

DAVID FRIEDBERG: That’s a hot button topic. As soon as I say it, the ranchers come after me, like that’s it. But it is true that growing cows for human consumption is a disturbing amount of impact on the carbon footprint of human agriculture, both because of all the land we have to use to grow all of the feed that we give to the cows, plus because of the methane emissions of the cows.

And a lot of people will dismiss it and joke about it, cows farting or causing climate change, yada, yada. But the truth is the carbon footprint of growing cows is pretty significant. It’s obviously not the focus of our conversation here today, but I’m a lifelong vegetarian. So it’s also something I kind of subscribe to as being an important step for humanity going forward is that we move off of industrialized animal agriculture. I think it’s really important, both from a footprint perspective, but I also personally believe from an ethical perspective.

CHRIS ANDERSON: So there’s many different pieces to this puzzle. But what’s clear is that if we need 50% more food than we have now, it’s pretty concerning. If that just means agriculture as we’re currently doing it, it’s going to be devastating for the rest of the planet. So there have been speakers who’ve come to TED who’ve argued that this crisis is absolutely extreme, that we have to act pretty radically.

George Monbiot gave a TED Talk a couple years ago where he said that, and he almost apologized for saying it, but he said that actually the worst thing that humans have done to the planet is farming. He’s not anti-farmers, he loves farmers, but farming as it’s currently done has had these unintended consequences. And he’s argued that we need to have a massive move away from farming as it’s traditionally been done to much more productive farming done inside industrial scale facilities. That seems like a stretch to a lot of people. Before you talk about your own amazing new company, just talk about some of the other things that are happening right now that give you hope. Talk for example about precision agriculture, what that is and what that is allowing.

Technological Advancements in Agriculture

DAVID FRIEDBERG: I’m very optimistic about what’s going on, and I’ll walk through the four categories as I view them of technology and agriculture, and then I’ll leave the one that’s related to my business till the end. But the first is this digital system. So my company that I started before is called the Climate Corporation, making software for farmers, helping farmers make better decisions on the farm that will optimize outcomes relative to inputs.

And so that company today, that software is used on over 200 million acres globally. There’s iPads that sit in tractors and in harvesters for row-cross farmers in the US and Europe and Africa and Brazil that tracks every seed that’s put in the ground, how deep the seed is, how far the seeds are spaced from one another.

Precision Agriculture and AI

And then we get all this data at the end of the year about what the yield was. We see the type of soil, the terrain, the elevation, the topography. We know exactly how much rainfall fell, what the temperatures were at every day during the growing season. All of that feeds a large simulation model that allows us to understand what variables drive what outcomes on the farm, and underlying that model we can then make predictions about what’s going to happen in the future and make recommendations to farmers back on what seed to plant where, what’s the right amount of fertilizer.

A lot of farmers, for example, over apply nitrogen fertilizer, 30% of its volatilizes into the atmosphere, or runs off into the Gulf of Mexico in the US and creates this big hypoxic zone for fish. So if we can be more precise about when we apply nitrogen fertilizer, exactly how much you need, don’t over apply, put the right amount down to maximize yield, and you’ll save money, you’ll make more profit. So precision agriculture is the digitization of all the variables of farming, and then the simulation models being used to make recommendations to farmers to optimize their decisions.

CHRIS ANDERSON: One of the fundamental problems about farming is that it depends on things that are varying hugely every year, like the weather, for example.

DAVID FRIEDBERG: That’s right.

CHRIS ANDERSON: And in addition to the variability of weather, year by year, the nature of your own soil may change because you had a cycle of crops and so forth and for other reasons. And so it’s therefore, it’s impossible to, in general, give a general answer to the question how to farm. It varies hugely where you are and what the climate is and what the year is, et cetera, et cetera.

So precision agriculture is an attempt to give people the actual data they need here and now to make the right decisions.

DAVID FRIEDBERG: Personalized recommendations. So based on the data from your farm, based on the understanding of the genetics of the seed and the way that water flows on the soil and all these other factors that go in, here’s the specific recommendation for you about what to do as a farmer on your particular farm. That allows the farmer to make more money and it allows a higher output per unit of input.

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CHRIS ANDERSON: Typically, how much higher output do you think precision agriculture is?

The Impact of Precision Agriculture

DAVID FRIEDBERG: Yeah. So I think that there’s, because what we care about as a species is aggregate output, aggregate input. The farmer cares about profit per year, right? How much am I getting out? How much can I sell? And how much do I have to invest to make that? And there is easily 30 to 50 percent improvement, up to 100 percent improvement and more, depending on the crop and the region and the farmer and his practices in the profitability, significant upside in productivity.

One example is in row crop agriculture, you have many choices of what seed to buy. And a lot of farmers will buy the seed that their seed salesman tells them to buy. But they don’t really have a good sense of what seed will work best on my farm. So that’s a good example of the data can inform them on what seed to buy for their particular farm that would work best in their soil and their climate and their region for this particular weather year, for example.

So there’s a lot of different variables that can increase the productivity of farming by dozens of percentage points, which is a big driver for adoption. So digital is one kind of area of technology that there’s a lot going on there.

CHRIS ANDERSON: And I presume, by the way, AI is adding to the potential here.

DAVID FRIEDBERG: It is. I mean, I don’t like the generalizations of AI, right? So we’ve been using statistical modeling to build, to make recommendations in farming for a while. And I’m not sure that having a chat interface changes that equation much. And I’m not sure that there’s a back and forth of dialogue that…

CHRIS ANDERSON: No, I wasn’t suggesting that. A deeper database of data so that you can explore a deep set of possibilities.

DAVID FRIEDBERG: Yeah. A lot of people kind of conflate a lot of these terms, but exactly. Yeah. So more data improves the outputs, improves the recommendations, and that’s hugely valuable. So that’s a continual kind of improvement for sure.

Biologicals in Agriculture

The other area that’s super interesting in agriculture is biologicals. So historically, we’ve made a lot of synthetic chemicals, meaning manmade chemicals, that we apply to farms to fertilize the farms, that’s number one, and then to protect the farms, that’s number two. That’s called crop protection. Within crop protection, there’s three categories, herbicide, insecticide, and fungicide. Killing weeds, killing insects, and killing fungus. Those are three big issues that destroy farms.

And so farmers have fought since the beginning of agriculture to get rid of those things so we can grow the things we want to grow without the animals, without the insects eating them, without the fungus eating them, and without the weeds taking over. So within that industry, there’s a ton of synthetic chemistry, a lot of chemicals, many of which have proven to be not good for the planet, not good for human health. There’s been a lot of agricultural chemicals that have been banned. We’ve got a long history in agriculture and our relationship with synthetic chemistry and what it’s done to human health and to the planet.

And that’s because a lot of these synthetic chemicals are permanent in the environment, and we don’t understand the off-target effects until many years later. There’s an effort underway in a lot of companies and a lot of success to use biological, little microbes, microbial organisms that are living organisms that can actually, for example, replace fertilizer by fixing nitrogen out of the atmosphere and attaching it to the roots of the crops. So you can use up to 30% less fertilizer.

And you don’t need to use the fertilizer because the little bug will suck the nitrogen out of the atmosphere and replace the fertilizer. And then in the herbicide, fungicide, insecticide world, there’s all these microbes and microbial proteins. So these are little proteins made by the microbes that can be used in place of synthetic chemistry. And so that whole world of products is called biological, and it is taking off. It is really replacing a lot of synthetic chemistry in agriculture, which makes the footprint, the environmental footprint of agriculture smaller because we’re not using all this carbon to make the synthetic chemistry, and we don’t have all this permanent toxicity in the environment and impact of human health.

Advancements in Agricultural Technology

And so this is a burgeoning industry, biologicals. Many, all the big ag input companies are investing in it. All of them have departments in this. And we’re finding amazing proteins because of DNA sequencing and gene editing and all these other tools that humans have developed that allow us to make proteins and make microorganisms that can replace all of that traditional stuff. So super powerful, big shift. So that’s the second big category I’d highlight is a big one in agriculture that’s underway.

And then the third one is autonomous equipment. So this is your question about, it’s sort of a relationship with the digital stuff, but there’s a lot of camera systems and vision systems going on farm equipment now. The farm equipment drives itself through the field. It looks at the field, it zaps weeds, precision placement of stuff using cameras. So we’re not just kind of blindly doing stuff in the field, but we actually put intelligence at the edge of agriculture, the edge of the network.

And so a couple of little camera-based systems can replace manual harvesting, for example, of strawberries. And so the cost of strawberry production goes down by 20%. That’s a huge savings to consumers and it makes strawberries more available. That’s just one little example, but autonomous and machine vision-based agriculture equipment is also this amazing kind of burgeoning industry that’s happening right now. And then the fourth is genetics.

CHRIS ANDERSON: And some people are combining them. We had a great TED Talk this year from a guy called Hiroki Koga. His company, Oishii, makes strawberries in indoor facilities, but using precision, using all this data and mechanized harvesting is exactly the right moment. But yeah, by doing lots of experimentation and so forth, they figured out how to automate growing of strawberries that are actually incredibly delicious. And it’s a very compelling and exciting…

I think the question in a lot of people’s minds, certainly in my mind, is can that break out of niche? There’s lots of things that you can do effectively at the niche level, but then can you scale them to actually impact the planet? And I think that’s the big question a lot of companies are asking.

The Scale of Agricultural Challenges

DAVID FRIEDBERG: Let me just zoom back for a second. Humans get about 60% of our calories from carbohydrates. So there’s a couple of crops, the starches, that make up our carbohydrates. Rice, wheat, potatoes, some corn, that’s kind of it. Those are the major calorie sources for humans. So we have about 1.5 billion acres dedicated to growing those crops. And so those are big fields. We get free solar energy from the sun to grow those crops. We get free water for most of those acres from the sky. So the natural ecosystems of earth fuel our ability to grow 60% plus of the calories.

Then we get about, call it 20% of our calories from fats. And we get about 10% of our calories from proteins, which again, we’re using a chunk of farmland to grow food that we feed to animals to get the proteins. And then we get about 10% of our calories from everything else, which is the vegetables and stuff. And so a lot of these markets where there’s been a lot of investment, they’re high value markets, but they’re really luxury markets. Wealthy consumers, wealthy people around the world can buy strawberries. The vast majority of the world’s population cannot afford strawberries. And it doesn’t solve a calorie problem.

And I’m not dismissing that company. I think strawberries are a $25 billion a year market. So it’s a great market. And it’s a great, there’s a lot of consumers that care deeply about it. But in terms of like the impact on the carbon footprint and calories, we’ve got to think about the major crops where most of our calories, most of our energy, most of our resources are going in to have these kinds of big unlocks for humanity.

CHRIS ANDERSON: And I think I heard in that argument that a bit of a pushback on the idea that we couldn’t do all of this indoors in industrial facilities, because you’re turning down a lot of the free bounty of mother nature, the solar radiation, the sun, the rain, even though it’s unpredictable, it is so vast that you would need unbelievable gains in efficiency to justify letting go of all of that free bounty.

DAVID FRIEDBERG: Yeah, there are high value crops that you can make an economic argument, you could make money growing indoors, because consumers will pay more, you can make enough of it. But I mean, just to give you a sense, you’re probably spending over $1 million per acre equivalent to create an indoor farming setup. Like, let me just say that again. So you have an acre of land, right? And we’re farming 3 billion of them, you got to go spend $1 million per acre to get the same amount of output.

And sure, maybe that number comes down by 10x, and we get it to 100,000. But then you’ve got to put energy into it. And where are you going to generate that energy from? You got to put water into it. How are you going to get that water? So you know, the economic and the unit efficiencies don’t quite solve our calorie problem. And they don’t necessarily solve our big environmental footprint problem. But they certainly can create great businesses in other in some of the markets.

CHRIS ANDERSON: And the other piece I just took away from that notion, if one and a half billion acres accounts for most of the calories that we need, that is a small fraction of the total farmland we have right now. Again, this goes back to the plants versus meat equation, but you could get 50% more calories.

DAVID FRIEDBERG: You’ll always come back to the animal agriculture problem. Yeah.

CHRIS ANDERSON: Right. Yeah, right. But even that, but I think you want to argue that even that one and a half billion acres that are just for those plants, those basic crops that give us most of our carbohydrates, that we could see significant yield increases on those if we did all that we could do. Talk about the genetic story.

The Evolution of Plant Genetics

DAVID FRIEDBERG: So the way humans have improved the genetics in plants, going back tens of thousands of years, is through selective breeding, meaning you put a bunch of seed in the ground. And then we would physically visually observe the crops that came out of it, the plants that came out of it, we pick the biggest ones or the healthiest ones. And then we take the seed from that one, and we put them in the ground, and we take the seed from that one. And that’s how we have evolved the plants that we farm is through selective breeding.

At some point, a couple hundred years ago, someone made the observation that there were traits, and you could start to break up those physical observations into traits. Is it taller? Is it bigger? Does it grow deeper roots? Those are called traits. And generally, when we talk about the traits of a plant, we talk about phenotyping the plant, the physical characteristics of the plant.

The Evolution of Plant Breeding

DAVID FRIEDBERG: And then we figured out that there was this Mendel’s box, you know, there was these genetics that were underlying the inheritance of traits, that there was something going on. And we didn’t understand DNA until much later. But there was something going on that was causing some of the plants to be good and some of them to not be good with respect to the traits we were trying to breed for.

In 1914, a guy named George Shull came up with a breakthrough system called hybrid breeding. And he realized that certain plants, you could breed them with themselves, you could actually self-cross them. And you do that over and over. And then when you brought two of those, what are called inbreds together, it creates a hybrid. And the hybrid suddenly had this explosion in yield, the yield went up like crazy. And it was a bigger, healthier, faster growing plant than either of the inbred parents.

And what he realized he had done is he had doubled the traits on each of the sets of chromosomes in each of the parents. So it turns out like humans, we have two sets of chromosomes, corn is the same. And there’s some genes on one chromosome, some genes on the other chromosome. And when you bring two corn plants together, when you cross them, what you’re getting is a random sampling of half of the genes from each chromosome. And we don’t know which half we’re going to get. That’s how nature works. It’s called meiosis. It’s basically like roulette. There’s a random wheel that spins around, half the genes come from the mother, half the genes come from the father, and it creates an offspring.

DNA Sequencing and Marker-Assisted Breeding

And then years later, when we identified DNA and were able to observe it and then sequence it, we began to more deeply understand how this worked. DNA sequencing unlocked this new era in plant breeding, which is called marker-assisted breeding. So instead of crossing two plants and looking at the physical characteristics, we could DNA sequence all the plants and figure out which genes they had, and that we knew the relationship between genes and traits.

And then we started to breed plants for their genes, not necessarily because we knew what the traits would be. And we started to cross plants that had the right set of genes. And that became molecular breeding, this ability to use genetics to guide the breeding that we were making in agriculture. And it significantly improved humans’ ability to breed plants by reading the DNA across nearly every plant species we cultivate, from vegetables to trees to grains to specialty fruits and vegetables. And it unlocked this incredible ability.

The CRISPR Revolution

So that brings us to the last 10 years. 10 years ago, there was this new tool invented, and this tool was called CRISPR. And CRISPR unlocked this new ability where these plants will have specific genes that you want to make sure show up, but they don’t always show up. CRISPR would allow you to make sure that they showed up because you could apply a protein to a plant cell. And that protein would cause one specific gene to be exactly what we want it to be.

And, you know, let’s say we want the letters, we want to change one specific letter in that genome to make sure that it has the right physical trait. And we were able to do that. And suddenly this era of leveraging these sorts of tools was upon us. So that brings us to Ohalo. And if you want to talk about Ohalo, but…

CHRIS ANDERSON: Because you’ve been tracking all this for a long time, and you funded a company that got you excited. And in the last year or so, it’s got you really, really excited because it looks like it may be able to do something really remarkable. So tell us about the company.

Reproductive Biology and Ohalo’s Approach

DAVID FRIEDBERG: Okay. So I’ll go back to plant breeding. In reproductive biology, in humans and plants, biological organisms make sex cells, right? In humans, we’ve got sperm and ovaries, right? Just to bring it to the table for everyone. Every sperm is half the DNA of its father. It’s a random half. So of the two sets of chromosomes, there’s a fusion that happens. And that fusion creates one chromosome that ends up in the sperm. And that fusion randomly picks segments of each of the two sets of chromosomes.

Same in the ovaries. It’s a fusion of the mother’s DNA to one chromosome. Now you have one chromosome in the sperm, one chromosome in the ovary, they come together, you have a new human. And that’s why every sibling is different. Because every sibling gets a different half of its mother’s DNA and a different half of its father’s DNA. Because every sperm is different. Every ovary is different. That’s how reproductive biology works in plants as well. There’s pollen, and whatever other kind of sex cells are produced by the plant. Each one of them has half the DNA of the mother, half the DNA of the father.

So we asked the question a couple of years ago, what would happen if we could get the sex cells to have all the DNA of the mother and all the DNA of the father, the complete genome? And it turns out, this is not an unfounded crazy concept, because it exists in nature. Sometimes there’s spontaneous creation of sex cells that have all the DNA of the mother, all the DNA of the father. When they come together, you end up with a plant that has double the DNA. It has all the genes of the mother, all the genes of the father. And then the plant goes on and does its thing and it goes through traditional reproductive biology.

Ohalo’s Breakthrough Technology

But what if we could control that? What if we could turn on the ability for the sex cell to have all the DNA of the mother, all the DNA of the father, combine two specific plants that we think have great traits? Like let’s say this plant is disease resistant and drought resistant. This plant is big and has deep roots. We want them to come together. Every time we try and do that with traditional breeding, we lose some stuff. So it takes forever. It doesn’t always work. We lose other traits. What if we could get them all together at once?

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And that was the idea. The idea was we could turn off the process that causes the fusion, the reduction of the DNA, and have it have all the DNA. And so we did this, it started to work. We did another cross, it started to work. And to do this was very difficult. We apply a protein to the plant that switches off those circuits in the plant. And when it works, the plant contributes all its DNA, and the offspring has double the DNA.

And that’s not unhealthy. It actually, the way plants work, genes, segments of DNA in a plant are sort of like tools in a toolbox. The more tools they have, the more usefulness they can have in any given second to grow faster and be healthy. Mammals are a little different. Humans are a little different because we have all these regulatory things that make it hard for us to double our DNA. So it wouldn’t work in humans or in animals. By the way, there’s a couple of animals that do have this, but I’ll talk about that later. But all plants can handle this.

And so we started to do it and the results were incredible. We saw 50 to 100% plus gaining yield in the offspring.

CHRIS ANDERSON: So that’s remarkable. So say typically, what, 70% increase or something like that. I mean, if that was actually applicable to, say, a billion of those acres you were talking about, that changes everything. I mean, it’s an astonishing change. Here’s the puzzle, just hearing that. So you do this, the plants are bigger, healthier, more yield, and also fight off diseases and bugs better, apparently. There’s a feeling that a lot of people have when they think about nature, which is, there’s no such thing as a free lunch.

We think of evolution as being this incredible tool for looking at all possibilities and finding the best ones. And if this possibility was there in the armoury, why hasn’t evolution produced these sort of super breeds of amazing plants with these sort of multi-deployed architecture that does what you achieved?

Evolution and Polyploidy in Nature

DAVID FRIEDBERG: Yeah. So it has happened. And it happened spontaneously. It doesn’t happen recurrently. Because if it happened recurrently, meaning it kept happening every generation, eventually the plants have too much DNA, and their yields will go down, and they stop being more productive. So evolutionarily, having the full DNA from the mother and the father for every generation would overcrowd the DNA circuitry of the plant at some point down the future, and the yield would actually go down.

So evolutionarily, it’s not a good result. But for it to happen spontaneously in nature has allowed certain crops to thrive. For example, modern wheat is a hexaploid. It has six sets of chromosomes. So it’s got three times what diploid wheat has. Modern potato is tetraploid. It has four sets of chromosomes. All the potatoes you and I eat, French fries, potato chips, table potatoes, they’re all tetraploid. They have four sets of chromosomes. So there was a doubling that happened at some point, or an inheritance of all the genes that happened at some point. Modern strawberry is octoploid. It has eight sets of chromosomes.

So we do see this in nature having happened at some point historically spontaneously. But from an evolutionary perspective, it’s not a great recurring system because if it happened all the time, the DNA would get too crowded. So nature is very good at trimming and optimizing the genes that the plant has. But plants are hungry for genes. They want to have more tools. So they have this incredible ability to handle having genes combined and having more genes in the system.

CHRIS ANDERSON: If I said it right, there’s something else special about these plants, which is to do with the seeds they produce. So talk about this. Talk about what is different between… What is your vision for what’s going to happen here and how it can actually make a material difference to agriculture?

Ohalo’s Boosted Breeding System

DAVID FRIEDBERG: So this system we created, we call it boosted breeding. And so again, we apply a protein to two parent plants, and it causes those parent plants to give all their DNA to their offspring rather than half their DNA. So there’s three things that happen.

The first thing that happens is we can combine traits. So rather than randomly getting half the traits from the mother, half from the father, we can combine all the good traits together. So we know that there’s lots of corn plants, there’s lots of rice, there’s lots of potato plants that have great genetics. But when we try and cross them with other plants that have great genetics, we lose a bunch of traits. And it takes forever for breeders, sometimes they never get there in being able to get this all together. So we can get them all together combining traits, so huge unlock.

And a trait, like I mentioned, could be resistant to drought, the plant could be resistant to insects, it could grow… So it can adapt to climate change, it can adapt to new environmental conditions. That’s an incredibly important point about agriculture is we have to adapt to a changing climate.

The second thing it does is it’s increasing genetic diversity in the plant. This guy that I mentioned, George Shull, who developed hybrid technology, he identified this thing called heterosis. Heterosis means that the yield of the plant, progressive heterosis, the yield of the plant goes up when you have more genetic diversity. And that’s because the more genes in a plant, there’s this interesting thing that happens, which is the genes start to regulate each other, turn each other on and off in a more efficient way.

The Benefits of Genetic Diversity in Plants

So when the genes are needed, they’re turned on, when they’re not needed, they’re turned off. So more genetic diversity actually causes a network effect in the plant that causes, for some reason, a massive boost in yield and health of the plant. The plant grows faster, it’s healthier, it’s bigger. So that’s a powerful unlock, and it’s a big part of the reason that we’re able to drive yield up in our boosted plants, as we call them.

And then the third feature is, remember how I mentioned that every sperm is different, every ovary is different? The same is true in plants. Every seed is different. So when you end up with a fertilized plant, you get seed. And every one of those seed is genetically unique in most plant species. So you can’t really use those seed in agriculture because every plant in the field would be different, they grow at different rates, they’d have different features, some of them would be drought resistant, some of them would be… So the whole seed industry is built around, how do we get genetically uniform seed?

With this system, every seed is the same, that we can then use to sell, you know, for farmers to plant in the ground, they can sow it in the ground. So that creates an unlock in making a seed industry for crops where there is no seed industry today, like potatoes.

The Potato Industry and Its Challenges

So potatoes are the third largest source of calories to humans on earth today. Around the world, people spend $100 billion on potatoes. Potatoes are put in the ground every year by chopping up leftover potatoes, and they vegetate if we propagate. We all did this in high school. So potato has a little eye, you know, it grows a new root and then potatoes grow. That’s how potatoes grow. And that’s how you… So when you chop up the potato, you preserve the genetics.

The reason that we do that, and the reason that’s how we farm potatoes, is because if you took the seed of a potato, so potatoes actually make seed in their flowers, the flowers grow, they become berries, and the seed, every seed is different. So if you took a potato at home, and I encourage people that are listening to do this, grow a potato, grow the flower, take the berry with all the seed in it, and then put all those seeds in the ground. You’ll get yellow potato, purple potato, red potato, small, big, they’ll be all over the map. The genetics get jumbled up. So that’s not useful for agriculture.

So in agriculture, we’ve still been farming Russet Burbank in the US for 100 plus years. That’s 100 year old variety. We have not improved the genetic performance of the potato very much. And we don’t have seed. So farmers use warehouses and warehouses the size of football fields to store leftover potatoes, chop them up. They got to fumigate them and spray all these toxic chemicals to keep all the mold and stuff away because it’s, you know, bunch of biomass sitting there. Then they hold that all back out with trucks and bulldozers, and they put it back in the ground.

You have to use 10% of your potatoes to plant potatoes next year. So it’s a huge, you know, economic cost. It’s a huge carbon footprint. So if we can improve the genetics of potato and make seed available, it’ll create a massive improvement in how humans are accessing this important calorie. Most potatoes around the world are used as table people eat them at their meals. Smallholder farmers in India and Africa are farming one acre plots of potato. That’s where most of the potatoes are actually grown. And they’re chopping up leftover potatoes and putting them back in the ground and using a bunch of chemicals to try and keep them from going bad.

CHRIS ANDERSON: Does that mean that the farmers themselves will be able to harvest seeds from those crops? Or is there a reason? Is it more that you will be able to you or whoever you partner with will be able to provide them with a reliable supply of fresh seeds each year?

The Seed Industry and Annual Improvements

DAVID FRIEDBERG: Yeah, so that’s a great question. They will want to buy fresh seeds each year because just like it happens in corn and wheat and other crops, there’s an improvement in the seeds every year. So every year, our job as breeders is to make better and better potato. And so we’ll bring better potato seed. But the second is because getting the seed out of potato is very hard. It comes out of a berry and then you got to like blend it up and get the seeds out.

And the third is that those seeds are all going to have different genetics than what they planted because you still have this thing that happens in the field. Whereas with our system, we can make uniform genetics and they can take it back out. And so you want to come back and buy your seed every year. The reason the seed industry took off in the early 20th century was because of the system of hybridization that I mentioned earlier.

When you can create an inbred and you bring two inbreds together, you end up with a hybrid seed, that launched the seed industry. And that’s why farmers go back every year because when they buy seed, they get better yield than if they replant. They can still replant if they want to, but they’re going to do better by buying the seed every year.

CHRIS ANDERSON: So at what stage are you at, David? Are you saying that right now you have potato seeds that will deliver 50%, 100% bigger yields than current potatoes?

DAVID FRIEDBERG: Yes. So we have these all in trials in potato. We’re working on a lot of different crops right now. We’ve shown some of our results on potato publicly. And we are running a system of breeding new potatoes and producing seed from those potatoes for farmers to try and see the results for themselves and then start to kind of adopt these seeds. So we’re going through that commercialization phase now that we’ve talked publicly about what we’ve been doing for five years. We’re going through that commercialization phase now.

CHRIS ANDERSON: And do they just provide much bigger potatoes or more potatoes or a combination?

DAVID FRIEDBERG: So a lot of farmers don’t want bigger potatoes. They want potatoes that are the same size. They just want more potatoes. So the measurement of yield in potatoes is how many kilograms per hectare you’re getting or how many pounds per acre you’re getting. And so you want to try and breed for a potato that grows deeper and faster and makes more potatoes faster. And so the total yield is what matters.

You also want them to be disease resistant. You want them to deal with drought. You want to deal with heat. You want to deal with cold. There’s all these traits that farmers care about because for their particular region, there’s something that’s keeping yield down and the system can solve that.

The Potential of Ohalo’s Technology

CHRIS ANDERSON: So you’ve been investing in this company for the last five years getting it to where it is. Of the many companies that you’ve been supporting, this is the one that you’ve made a move to actually focus full time on this. Talk about what you see as the potential here.

DAVID FRIEDBERG: Well, my investment company, we’ve made a lot of investments and we started a bunch of companies and we’ve basically run this thing called a foundry where we start a business, we put money in and we fund it until it’s proven or it’s real and then we’ll bring in outside partners to invest in it with us. So we started Ohalo in 2019 and I started it with a guy named Judd Ward who previously ran molecular breeding at Driscoll, the big berry company. That’s why we know that the strawberry industry fairly well. We have a lot of folks from that company that work with us at Ohalo and we weren’t sure if this crazy idea would work.

We weren’t sure if it was real. We weren’t sure if we could do it and then we weren’t sure if we would see the results that we predicted. We finally did it and it finally started to work. We got it to work. We got the results that we predicted and we were blown away. It’s like consistently positive results, consistent performance. It was really incredible.

So last year, as more and more of this data started coming out, I said, my God, like this business, we could boost everything. We could apply the technology, the system to nearly everything that humans grow from rice to wheat to corn to potatoes to berries to fruits to vegetables, even to seaweed and kelp, even to trees that we’re growing for timber, which would increase carbon uptake and increase the productivity of our timberland.

That’s the set of opportunities that emerged when we started to think about what we could do with this. That’s when I started to say, my God, what else am I going to do with my time? I got to make sure this thing works. I swore I would never be a CEO again because of the heartache and the tension and the pressure. I got very unhealthy being a CEO last time around. It’s such a talented team and it’s such an incredible opportunity.

CHRIS ANDERSON: If the upside is providing billions of humans with the calories they’re going to need over the next 30 years, that is a pretty good motivation. I think one could say, but what would skeptics say that about? There’s an aspect to this.

DAVID FRIEDBERG: Don’t mess with nature, Mr. Monsanto. Don’t mess with nature, Mr. Monsanto.

CHRIS ANDERSON: It feels too good to be true. This is a genetic modification. These I presume will be considered by people who hate GMO crops as an example of GMO. What would you say to them?

GMOs and Ohalo’s Technology

DAVID FRIEDBERG: These will actually not be GMO. That’s an important thing to understand. GMO as a definition is actually transgenic, meaning what happened? I’ll talk about GMOs for a second. The concept with GMOs was that you could take DNA from somewhere outside the plant and stick it into the plant’s genome. That DNA didn’t exist natively in the plant’s genome. By sticking it in there, you would get that plant to make that protein that that gene codes for. That was the basis of GMOs.

There was all these great, save-the-world ideas with GMO technology. We could put a gene that could make proteins that could kill bugs, so you don’t have to spray insecticides anymore. Super powerful idea. We could put a gene that makes vitamin A and put it in rice, and we would have rice that now has vitamin A so that people that are subsisting on rice wouldn’t go blind anymore because they’re not getting the nutrition they needed. There were all these great, save-the-world ideas of GMOs. People got freaked out about this concept, and the anti-GMO rhetoric really won the day.

The concept of GMOs is to take foreign DNA and put it in the genome of a plant. One of the first big breakthroughs is what I described, which is the gene that was discovered in a bacteria that makes a protein that kills worms that eat corn. Let me just go through that again. There’s a protein that kills worms. It doesn’t affect humans, doesn’t affect any other animal or species. It just is a protein that kills worms because it binds to a particular site on the worm’s belly inside their intestines.

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This protein was discovered. They were trying to figure out how do we monetize it. They said, you know what, why don’t we take the gene that makes that protein and put it in the corn plant, and then the corn will make that protein. Now the worms that are trying to eat corn will eat this corn, and they’ll die, and we don’t need to spray insecticides to kill the worms anymore. Get rid of all that synthetic chemistry. It’s actually a very great product. It’s called BT corn, bacillus thuringiensis corn, and it’s widely adopted. Most corn farms around the world use this gene in the seed that they’re buying. It’s reduced insecticidal use. Farmers used to go out and spray chemical insecticides seven times a year. Now they don’t need to spray it anymore to get rid of this worm. It’s super, super powerful.

CHRIS ANDERSON: Did you say that that is not GMO?

DAVID FRIEDBERG: Right, so that is GMO. That is all what I described. So anytime you’re bringing foreign DNA into the plant, that’s GMO.

Ohalo’s Technology and GMOs

DAVID FRIEDBERG: There’s this system called gene editing or new breeding technique is what it’s being called, NBT, where you can apply a protein that causes the genome to change in a way in the plant that is native to the plant. You’re not bringing foreign DNA in. You’re just turning genes that are already in that plant on or off. You’re basically activating or introducing the inheritance of a gene that’s native to the plant. That’s what our boosted system does. It doesn’t bring any foreign DNA in. There’s no GMO. It’s not transgenic. It’s a protein that induces this change in the plant that’s got all the native DNA of the plant.

CHRIS ANDERSON: It feels like psychologically it’s going to trigger some of the same reactions in some people, people who don’t like humans intervening in nature as if we weren’t already reshaping the planet.

DAVID FRIEDBERG: If we didn’t intervene in nature, you’re exactly right. If we didn’t intervene in nature, we wouldn’t have antibiotics. We would sit here and we’d let the bugs kill us. If we didn’t intervene in nature, we wouldn’t have agriculture. We’d be sitting here waiting for food to drop off the tree and when it falls to the ground, we’ll eat it. We wait for the animal to drop dead and then we’ll eat its carcass. That’s how humans started. Our intervention in nature or our involvement in nature allowed us as a species to progress.

The company Ohalo is named after a site discovered next to the Sea of Galilee called Ohalo II. It’s an archaeological site. Twenty-three thousand years ago, the villagers that lived in this little site, they were actually cultivating seed. They found little clay pots with seed and they had organized the seed in a way that they were keeping seeds so that when they moved, they could go plant the crops they wanted to plant in different regions. It totally changed our idea of when humans understood what agriculture was and how we were creating seed and planting seed and nomadically kind of moving our crops around. That’s what we named the company after was this big discovery that happened at the Ohalo site.

That is the nature of humans’ involvement with nature. We are either going to participate in it or we are going to be absent in it. I think that if you think about plant breeding going back 10,000 years ago, there isn’t an organic crop or anything that humans eat today that wasn’t involved in, wasn’t touched by the hand of humans doing breeding. Humans selected the crops we wanted to cultivate and we progressed them. We kept selecting, kept selecting. We just didn’t know what the DNA was at the time.

Then when we got DNA sequences, we suddenly knew what the DNA was that was driving those changes. Now we actually have the ability to influence which of those genes are getting inherited as we select those plants. This is part of a continuum of humans’ relationship with nature. I wouldn’t argue messing with nature.

CHRIS ANDERSON: Right. You would argue that you’re taking an accelerated step forward in doing what humans have been doing for thousands of years and in a way that the planet urgently needs.

The Urgent Need for Agricultural Innovation

DAVID FRIEDBERG: Importantly, because the planet is changing, whether we like it or not, we have created changing climate conditions on Earth. It is happening right now. We have to create agricultural systems that can succeed and thrive or else people will see calorie reduction. Right now, we are on the wrong side of the malnourishment curve. Malnourishment is increasing on Earth. We spent 30 years getting it to decline. It’s now going back up.

Climate change is making things more difficult in Brazil. They had a massive heat wave, a massive drought this year. We see it all the time, all around the world, that things are becoming more difficult for farmers. This is an important tool that we need to embrace. We are moving down a class five rapid. I need to use an ore to maneuver myself as I move down that rapid in the boat that I’m in.

CHRIS ANDERSON: Two other questions I think some people will have. One is that people are rightly wary of vast monocultures in agriculture and the unintended consequences that have come from that. Some people may hear what you’re saying, even though you’re saying that there’s more diversity of genes in the plant. Nonetheless, every seed that comes out is the same. It feels like you’re changing nature’s way of deliberately jumbling things up to create diversity in the next generation. Isn’t there a risk of unintended consequence from that?

Addressing Concerns About Monocultures

DAVID FRIEDBERG: We’re not changing anything about the seed industry where farmers want to buy a seed that causes the plants to all pop out of the ground at the same time, to all grow to the same height, so you can use a tractor to farm. You can use one field to get the same thing, and you don’t have to have 60% of the human population involved in farming.

The fact that we have a seed industry, that we have seed, this farmer’s plant that allows uniform fields, is what’s allowed us to reduce the cost of food, increase the availability of calories, and have fewer people involved in agriculture. That’s important because we’re not going to go backwards. The concerns about monoculture is an important one that can also be addressed with systems of regenerative agriculture, that can also be addressed with systems of crop rotation.

There are other systems and techniques that can be used in agriculture that farmers are separately rapidly adopting to ensure that there is greater biodiversity, that there is a rotation in crops, so that we’re improving the quality of the soil, the soil microbiome. All these other factors are a different part of the farming equation, but we do need to have uniform seed so farmers can farm 60 acres with one person. That’s the way farming works. I think that it’s a little bit misguided to think that everyone should farm one acre and have three cows and two sheep and a goat in their backyards.

People don’t have the real estate to do that. We have centralized agricultural production because it’s unlocked prosperity for humanity. People can spend their time in a house. They can walk down to a market and pick up food. That’s increased our prosperity as a species. We can’t go backwards to everyone farming one acre that’s different.

CHRIS ANDERSON: Let’s think for a minute though about those people who are farming one acre because there are probably, what, a billion of them plus on the planet still.

DAVID FRIEDBERG: By the way, it’s the number one job on planet Earth. People don’t realize. What’s the number one job on Earth? The highest job in terms of total number of people is farming.

CHRIS ANDERSON: Those people have a long and kind of tragic history, I think, many people would say, of having to be on the brunt of Western farming practices that basically crash prices and bring in cheaper imports. The West and North have farming productivity tools that make it incredibly hard to compete in a global market. And so farmers in Africa, parts of Asia, and so forth, are constantly fighting to get any economic value out of what they are growing. Isn’t there a risk that something as sophisticated and powerful as this is going to end up, again, benefiting the farmers in the North who have access to it, potentially at the cost of the billion plus one acre farmers?

Addressing Global Food Security

DAVID FRIEDBERG: The bigger problem we have right now is this calorie availability problem where we make about 3,500 acres per capita on Earth every day. But 800 million people are living on less than 1,200 calories a day. So there’s something wrong with the way that system works. And a big part of it is we’re not able to grow crops in regions where people want to consume them. We import a ton of wheat into Africa, from Ukraine, from Russia. That wheat import dependency finds its way all the way through the African continent to produce all the bread products.

And in the absence of that, particularly during the spiking at the beginning of the Ukraine war, there was a significant malnourishment episode, famine episode that took place. And I think it’s a big part of what’s driving the current inconsistency in the supply chain. So we need to give local farmers the ability to grow crops in these regions that they can’t grow them today.

Separately, I would encourage everyone who has found one of these anecdotal stories about some smallholder farmer who’s feeling distraught about Western industrialized ag to actually go to these regions and meet with these farmers and ask them about improvements in technology and agriculture. And you will see them cry with unlocking value stories about how their small farming operation had this incredible improvement in profitability. So they could live, they were no longer subsistence, but they now have a business, because they could plant less, they could spend less and get more out of their farm. That’s what they care about.

Like a really great case study for this is cotton farmers in India. There was a technology that was brought over for cotton farmers in India, that was like a GMO technology. And there was like, all this up in arms. Oh, my God, it’s so bad. Farmers, it absolutely improved the condition of the cotton farmers in India in a way that was like, so impactful, a lot of people rose out of poverty because of it.

I think that it’s very easy for everyone to tell a sad story about one side or a good story about the other side. But I think if you look at the aggregate statistics, improvements in agricultural productivity, look at China, right, the majority of those people, over a billion people were brought out of poverty. The majority of them were farmers. The improvement in these technologies in farming has allowed an improvement in the condition of life on earth for the majority.

CHRIS ANDERSON: Is there anything you can do, David, to accelerate the process, though, by which the magical seeds that you are creating, it would seem, can get distribution, you know, to somewhere like Africa, to something, someone like the One Acre Fund who presents, like, there’s all these interventions where we’ve shown that by giving even small, smaller farmers, one acre farmers, better seeds, and few other things that their yields can go up. Is there anything that limits the ability to get there? Are these going to be radically more expensive? Are they going to be affordable?

DAVID FRIEDBERG: No, this is going to make everyone more money. So all these small farmers, and we’re working with NGOs, and we’re working with nonprofits to find ways to get these products distributed into these regions where they’re mostly needed. And I think that there’s a lot of opportunity to do this in a cost-free way for some of these markets. So I don’t want to share too much now, but that’s a big motivation for us. Absolutely. There’s plenty of ways to build a business. I don’t need to think about, you know, the smallholder farmer having to pay and invest and so on if there’s ways to get them access to something that’s going to improve their livelihood and you can make a business elsewhere.

CHRIS ANDERSON: Well, this has been an amazing conversation. I mean, I’ve been amazed, just like personally, I was never remotely interested in agriculture and farming. I didn’t, you know, seemed a world away from technology. Over the last few years, it’s often seemed like the single most exciting stories about the future have come out of this space. I should let you say something, by the way, about farmers themselves.

Like often I think the environmentalists tell a story that almost presents farmers as villains of the piece, that their destructive practices are destroying the planet. I don’t think that’s what you would think. How do you think we should think of farmers? How do you think of farmers themselves and the role that they need to play in all this?

The Role of Farmers and Sustainable Agriculture

DAVID FRIEDBERG: Well, first off, I’ll say I’m an environmentalist, so I’ll start there. And I think that if people take the time to understand these systems that we use in agriculture and what we’ve used and how these systems have evolved and allowed us to progress as a species, I think we can be really thoughtful about the fact that technology and agriculture can be both more productive and more sustainable and better for the planet. So I’ll start with that.

Now, the average farmer has a family. They want to take care of their family like everyone. They want to make more money. That’s their motivation. They’re not farmers because there’s some esoteric philosophy they have about farming being the thing that God sent them here to do. Many of them relate to that concept, but they’re trying to make a business. Whether they’re a smallholder farmer in South Asia or they’re a 600-acre farmer in the Midwest of the United States, they’re trying to take care of their family.

And the great thing about increasing yield and reducing cost is that there’s an alignment between profitability and sustainability in this agricultural system. If you put less in the ground, you put less synthetic chemistry on the ground, you spend less and you get more out of the ground because you’re leveraging that amazing solar resource we have in the sky and the amazing water that falls out of the sky and you can get more food produced because of it, you’re going to be aligned in adopting that.

So there’s a relationship where technology unlocks this beautiful relationship between the productivity in farming and sustainability in farming. And that’s what farmers focus on is how do I improve the condition of my family? How do I make sure that I’m not going bankrupt every year? And so that’s why these systems have been adopted over the last couple of thousand years as a species.

CHRIS ANDERSON: Well, this has been a really exciting conversation. Is there any final thing you’d like to, any seed you would like to plant in people’s minds, David, as we wrap this up?

Final Thoughts on Understanding Agriculture

DAVID FRIEDBERG: I’m really glad we’re having this talk, Chris, because a lot of people, I think the only way to get people to really understand rather than allow themselves to be trained by some short-form narrative on agriculture is to really spend the time to understand it, to take it into context, to take into context the macro and the micro, to understand what is the system of plant breeding and technologies that have been used? What are the big drivers for agriculture?

And when you take this all into context, it becomes a little bit more nuanced that it’s not just about everyone growing a one-acre farm in their backyard with two goats and a dog and a couple acres of wheat and corn, that there’s a system here that evolved, that actually drove human prosperity for millennia. And when you take that into account, we can still address the environmental issues, we can still address the sustainability issues, and in fact, improvements in these systems go hand in hand.

So yeah, I just want people to take the time to understand that and not allow themselves to be trained by a five-minute kind of short or real, which has unfortunately, I think, really damaged agriculture.

CHRIS ANDERSON: All right. Okay, so we’ll wrap things up there. I think if people want to know more, they can go to, for example, your company website has some interesting videos on there that explain pretty well. That is ohalo.com, is that right? O-H-A-L-O.com.

DAVID FRIEDBERG: Yeah.

CHRIS ANDERSON: And on TED, there are plenty of other resources on many, many aspects of agriculture, including these issues like what might replace meat, how meat could be produced more efficiently, whether there’s ways of, you know, interventions with cows, for example, that can make them more climate-friendly. Many, many different things are there. It’s an absolutely fascinating topic. David, good luck. I think this work is incredibly important, and it’s been an absolute delight to speak with you.

DAVID FRIEDBERG: Great, thanks. Talk soon. Bye.