Why agriculture is a tough climate problem to solve

It’s an actual downside, from a local weather perspective at the very least, that burgers style good, and so do hen sandwiches and cheese and absolutely anything that has butter in it. It may be laborious to persuade people to change their eating habits, particularly since meals is tied up in our social lives and our cultures. 

We may all stand to make some selections that would cut back the emissions related to the meals on our plates. However the longer I write about agriculture and local weather, the extra I feel we’re additionally going to want to innovate round folks’s love for burgers—and repair our meals system not simply within the kitchen, however on the farm. 

If we lump in all the things it takes to get meals grown, processed, and transported to us, agriculture accounts for between 20% and 35% of annual international greenhouse-gas emissions. (The vary is large as a result of estimates can fluctuate in what they embrace and the way they account for issues like land use, the influence of which is difficult to measure.) 

So when it got here time to place collectively our listing of 15 Climate Tech Companies to Watch, which we launched earlier this month, we knew we wished to signify the huge problem that’s our meals system. 

We ended up selecting two corporations in agriculture for this 12 months’s listing, Pivot Bio and Rumin8. My colleague James Temple and I spoke with leaders from each these companies at our recent Roundtables online event, and it was fascinating to listen to from them in regards to the issues they’re attempting to unravel and the way they’re doing it. 

Pivot Bio is utilizing microbes to assist disrupt the fertilizer trade. At the moment, making use of nitrogen-based fertilizers to fields is mainly like placing fuel right into a leaky fuel tank, as Pivot cofounder Karsten Temme put it on the occasion. 

Vegetation depend on nitrogen to develop, however they fail to take up quite a lot of the nitrogen in fertilizers utilized within the subject. Since fertilizer requires a ton of power to provide and might wind up emitting highly effective greenhouse gases if vegetation don’t use it, that’s an actual downside.