Sustainable Agriculture's Inconvenient Truth

Industrial agricultural practices and the continued use of chemical fertilizers have degraded the soil microbiome to a fraction of its nutrient-recycling capacity. This creates a vicious cycle where using more fertilizer to maintain yields only further harms the soil microbes.

Compounded by a warming planet, this cycle threatens to collapse the world's major food-producing regions within 25 years, destroying our ability to feed a growing global population.

Agriculture Must Act Now To Avert A Global Food System Collapse

Since 2015, experts in soil and climate sciences have known that applying living microbial nutrient recyclers acts as a biological catalyst, optimizing plant-soil nutrient exchange to expand the Microbial Biomass Carbon (MBC) pool and, ultimately, Soil Organic Carbon (SOC). This is the biological blueprint for regenerative agriculture.

Chemical fertilizers degrade up to 40% of MBC in conventionally farmed soils ‒ and virtually all MBC in no-till systems ‒ rendering microbial products less effective and undermining their value.

A warming planet compounds microbiome degradation as the world moves toward a 2°C world. At our current emissions rate, we are on track for 2°C warming by the early 2050s. Frequent 40°C+ heat spells will multiply stress on chemically degraded soils, triggering cascading biological failures and simultaneous agricultural disruptions in major food-producing regions that gains elsewhere, if any, will not offset.

Agriculture Must Act Now to Avert a Food System Collapse. We have time to eliminate chemical fertilizer use and restore the soil microbiome before the inevitable impacts of a 2°C world - but we have to begin now, as it will take decades.

Timelines for reaching a 2.0°C range from the early 2040s to the late 2050s, depending on emissions. Today's 1.5°C matches the middle-of-the-road scenario, which reaches the threshold in the early 2050s.

Current Trajectory: Reach 2°C in the early 2050s (25 yrs).
High Emissions: Mid-to-late 2040s (20 yrs).
Optimistic Scenario: Warming could be held just under 2°C, assuming rapid, deep greenhouse gas cuts, net-zero emissions, and removing carbon from the atmosphere.

The most affected regions ‒ Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and parts of the U.S. Midwest, home to 1.6 billion people ‒ face recurring agricultural disruptions across all 2°C warming scenarios, and crop losses are unlikely to be offset by gains elsewhere.

As global food production falls and demand rises, the world faces a rising risk of systemic food shortages. This widening gap between supply and need could become a resource constraint that slows or reverses global population growth.

Plant Protein Biofertilizer Is the Antidote to Chemical Nitrogen Fertilizer. One option is to replace chemical fertilizer with a carbon-negative, superior-performing alternative that heals and feeds soil microbes, rebuilds the rhizosphere and its water-holding capacity, and increases MBC /SOC to remove carbon.