AGRICULTURAL INNOVATION THROUGH PUBLIC POLICY INITIATIVES A GROWING PROBLEM Today our modern society is facing problems on so many fronts that it can be hard to pinpoint solutions. It is my belief that our interaction with the environment to create a balanced food production system is the key. By creating a solution based on technologies that are available today, we can solve a myriad of hurdles facing human life and the planet today. In a landmark work entitled Conquest of the Land Through 7,000 Years, published in 1942, Dr W C Loudermilk of the USDA observed the hardships and falls (redundant) of civilizations stretching back over an enormous time frame. He concluded that stewardship of the soil was the key in the decline of civilizations throughout recorded history. Also, in Jared Diamond’s recent best seller Collapse, he noted that a society's response to environmental problems is completely within its control and can be isolated as one of the most significant factors of a civilization’s collapse. Finally, in May of 2009, Jeff Rubin added Why Your World Is About To Get A Whole Lot Smaller to the discussion and speculates that through the current economic malaise we are setting the stage for a huge jump in the cost of oil, which will in turn create an entirely new phenomena, reversing the decades of globalization and creating again the local economies that can serve as the building blocks to refocus our efforts on innovation in agriculture to ultimately change the grim scenarios that we were marching towards. We are intimately intertwined with the global ecosystem and our failed stewardship has raised the stakes in our race to avert disaster. A generational change is necessary. By utilizing multiple tools and technologies available today, we can avert repeating history and becoming another chapter in the book of past civilizations. This will require breaking the recent cycle of disregard for the basic circle of life that has existed from the dawn of time. A FRESH SOLUTION Let me describe a system that I believe can help to solve the problems revolving around food, waste, and the environment. The system will first start with all sorts of waste that we currently dispose of in environmentally unfriendly ways; waste such as human wastewater treatment biosolids, animal waste, animal processing waste, agricultural production and processing waste and excess human food waste. This waste would be the basic feedstock to production system to provide a bio organic fertilizer and alternative bio based growing material that will allow healthier and more efficient food production. This food production will be further enhanced by using new satellite technology and forecasting techniques that will allow for the best use of land and resources when creating food both from a local and global standpoint. We will create a system that will take the raw data and provide guidance to farmers as to what may be best grown in their locale. Farmers have always been driven on past practices and at the mercy of weather related vageries. By using the new technology both to guide them as to the best crops to plant and monitoring of soil conditions, many of the variables that made it such an art will be reduced to best practice
recommendations. This will lead to farmers more easily able to sustain their efforts and produce both more efficiently and with greater impact to their economic success. There has also been extensive work done on the distribution side as new clearing houses have emerged to promote local agriculture and return to the family based farms of old. These “cloud� or web based services provide the ability to aggregate production of many farms into a single site that enables consumers, stores or restaurants to purchase food that is locally grown in a single place. By taking this to the next logical step, we would aggregate the demand side by introducing the entire vertical chain of consumption including exporters to provide feedback to the farmers on what is the best crop or crops for them to farm to create efficient sales for their efforts. By optimizing both the production and consumption of the farm we will use enable efficient and economically consulting advice to the entire food chain. A MYRIAD OF BENEFITS The overall effects of adoption have multiple primary benefits, but it is the unintended or ancillary benefits that truly yield impressive results. This unprecedented mash up of services and technologies will yield the following benefits upon adoption and implementation: Soil health will be returned with the reintroduction of nutrients, organics, and microbes via bio organic soil amendments from waste products. This soil healing can serve to remediate over-farmed land and even create new topsoil. Further use of the materials in urban sites can help remediate brownfield sites and allow immediate implementation of both vertical and urban farming initiatives to blighted urban environments. The plant growth nutrients (Nitrogen & Phosphate) will both remain bioavailable to the plants, but will be non-leachable to the runoff from irrigation and rainfall (storm water) which will provide relief for many of the polluted waterways and large bodies of water that are becoming increasingly commonplace due to current agricultural fertilization practices and field spreading of manures. Wastewater treatment biosolids along with animal waste and manures will be used in the process as we remove another problematic current disposal practice. Organics added to the soil will enable more efficient irrigation through significantly higher water retention. Added organics and carbon sources from our bio organic media will increase the carbon sink characteristics of land that is being farmed, addingto the mitigation of climate change by reducing green house gases. Couple this with the effect of growing more plants in an environmentally friendly manner, our process provides a positive step in the battle against climate change. Diversion of organics and other waste to landfills will mitigate methane production and toxicity problems from current landfilling. Food production will be optimized to promote the best return to the farmer and more efficient distribution to the consumer. By utilizing data derived from new satellite sources and reporting from the field, farmers will increase their probability of profitable farming along with creating a far better utility to land use.
The plants that are grown in our media will be stronger, have higher production levels, be more vital in content, and require less nutrients or fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides as the plants will be more disease resistant. The food produced by farming using our amendments will benefit from higher nutritional values, better vitality and less transportation to consumers. The loop from waste to food to distribution to consumption will be optimized and sustainable at every juncture. INNOVATIVE TECHNOLOGIES In order to create this proposed system we need to examine multiple technologies that exist today. We will combine: Invessal Composting System that will use as feedstock organic waste matter, biosolids from wastewater treatment, animal manure, animal processing waste, agricultural processing waste combined with waste generated from the processing of food grown with the help of our system. Add to this two additional amendments, one to bind phosphates and the other to add carbon to the resultant product. Precision Farming as proposed today that will target specific locations to isolate the best use of the land by profiles and data obtained to profile sites. In addition, a NASA satellite and soon to be launched European Space Agency Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity, will provide extremely valuable data on soil moisture that will take the precision farming effort to a new level. Vertical farming utilizing our bio organic media will serve to also remediate urban areas and contaminated soils. Urban farming to provide food in close proximity to population will be one of the aims of the urban renewal that local farming should produce. The urban farming along with the stimulation of small farm production will create a return to local food production and the stimulus for the reverse globalization that is envisioned in Rubin’s current book and provide one of the key components of food security for our population. “Cloud� services that have been developed by multiple parties involve the interface to provide a clearing mechanism for customers (individual, retail stores and restaurants, and distributors and exporters). We intend to extend the reach of this interface as a feedback mechanism that can serve to help the producers optimize their plantings according geotechnical data and demand obtained through our clearing mechanism. Creating a collaborative framework for all stakeholders will provide benefits to the group, the consumers, and to society as a whole. We believe this move to a sustainable model that reverses many of the environmental and social ills will add not incrementally but geometrically to the returns for the effort. STEPS FOR CHANGE Innovation can become reality by influence from public policy initiatives that address the environmental problems plaguing our society. There have been initiatives to stop field spread of manures which have been the source of agricultural nutrient runoff. With the mandate to stop field spreading the action will create a further problem of what to do with this animal waste. The the intiative would then create the opportunity for the treatment by bioconversion of the animal
waste and the production of the bio organic fertilizer replacement which would still be nutrient rich but would not pose an environmental threat to our water. There could be public policy initiatives from the other direction to mitigate both Nitrogen and Phosphate leaching into waterways which would allow for the distribution of our bio organic media to farmers for use to supplement current practices. Effective new standards can then limit the amount of leachable nutrients that could potentially damage our waterways and create over farmed and useless farm lands. Further initiatives to incentivize urban farming which would transform current EPA brownfield sites into economic food production facilities. Incorporating the urban renewal of abandoned buildings and lots to create farm centers and waste treatment facilities can be a best practice recommendation and funding opportunity for EPA efforts to mobilize community involvement and brownfield restoration. The USDA has already shown how food waste can create effective compost for creating more nutrient packed and stronger plants. This work can lead to policy initiatives for increased consumption of bio based nutrient sources and effective waste practices. The use of the relevant studies to prompt USDA recommendations on both farming practice and waste treatment would be an important public policy statement and best practice guideline. The establishment public policy initiatives to further the development of the necessary internet resources would create industry movement to help job creation in the private sector. Utilizing subsidies for sustainable farming practices and support for distribution infrastructure development either through public/private initiatives or subsidies to support the existing efforts can yield valuable dividends for society. Either broad based or focused public policies can serve to provide a framework to address problems and opportunities for the implementation of our cloud based system. By pursuing this integrated system, we would address global food security, climate change, competition for natural resources, and can be transferred to global economic development. This initiative would provide a basis for creating an economic framework to allow for nurturing opportunities by public policy initiatives to create distributed value and address pockets of influence negatively impacted by the current global recession.