Creating Food from Thin Air

New technologies are transforming how we grow, process and think about food

Ric Edelman: It's Thursday, April 4th. On today's show, the latest in Agtech, innovation in food. I grew up in New Jersey, in a middle-class suburb outside Philadelphia. There weren't any farms anywhere where I grew up. I don't remember ever visiting one. So my view of farms and farmers was, well, it was about as accurate as anything is when you have no exposure and no history, no education on the topic. 

All I knew about farming was that that's where you grow crops and raise livestock. Like cows and chickens and pigs. What's so hard about that? You just stick some seeds into the ground. You wait for them to grow, and then you pull them out of the ground and you take what you got to a supermarket. That doesn't take a lot of skill or effort. 

And the animals, you build a pen to hold them. You feed them a couple of times a day and you sell them to a butcher. How hard is that? As a little kid on the East coast who spent a lot of time in big cities, thanks to my dad's business, I was in the center city, Philadelphia a lot. I was in New York city a lot. 

I figured that farming was a pretty low brain, low cost, low risk activity. The only contact I had with farmers was watching Hee Haw and Green Acres. I probably tossed the Beverly Hillbillies into there somewhere. That's who farmers are, right? Well, no thanks. I'm going to go to college one day because I have a brain. 

Jeez, talk about wrong. Of course, as I know now, agriculture is not only the most important of all industries, it's one of the most complex, expensive, and challenging of all industries. Not only are you dealing with living things, plants and animals, you're dealing with the weather. Too hot or too cold, too much water or too little, too long or too short a season, and all your efforts, everything you've done, is for naught. 

Insects, disease, none of that stuff has any impact on somebody who's trying to get a car to the market, but farmers and ranchers have one hell of a time. They only make money when they deliver the goods, which means they have to come up with the money to cover their operations for months until then, and then they have to hope that they will in fact have the harvest, or the herds, to sell, and that they'll be able to sell them for the price good enough to recover their costs, so they can start the process all over again. 

And those profits are pretty much capped. McDonald's was able to boost profits by opening for breakfast. They could expand their hours of operation. They could increase sales. Ford can decide to build more cars by speeding up the assembly line. But a farmer, they can't get cows to grow faster. They can't cram more crops into an acre. Plants need the space they need.  

All this means that farmers and ranchers are without question the gutsiest of entrepreneurs in the world. If you think you can be a successful entrepreneur without one hell of a lot of intelligence and experience and knowledge, then you don't know anything about being an entrepreneur. 

And all entrepreneurs have one trait in common. They want to make their business better. Innovation is key. That explains how we've gone from farmers using horses to plow their fields into using self-driving machinery that not only plows fields, but plants the crops, using drones that measure each individual plant to determine if it needs water or an insecticide. 

No more spraying entire fields, they now just treat them one plant at a time. And of course, some of the biggest and most prestigious universities in the world are devoted to agricultural sciences. University of Texas, Texas A&M, Oklahoma State, Kansas State, University of Georgia, North Carolina State, University of Illinois, Purdue, Virginia Tech, Iowa State, Clemson, Michigan State, Auburn, University of Minnesota, Colorado State, Texas Tech, University of Wisconsin, Ohio State, University of Idaho, University of Arkansas, Mississippi State. Did you notice that none of those top Ag schools are in New Jersey? Well, now we're into the world of exponential technologies, and agriculture is not being left behind. It's called Agtech, and you're familiar with a lot of amazing innovations that have already been put into place, and nowhere is the technology pushing the limits further then with the creation of food itself. 

Okay – name the country that is leading the way in advanced food innovation. It's Singapore. Singapore is a small place about half the size of London. Only 1% of its land is used to grow or raise food. In the US we have about 10% of our land. So since Singapore produces such a small amount of food, it has to import about 90% of it. 

The government wants to cut that figure to 30% within 5 years. They can't do that by increasing the amount of land it devotes to food production because it simply doesn't have the space. So Singapore has become a world leader in cultivated food. It's having laboratories create animal cells, meat, dairy, and eggs, all from plants, as well as microbial and gas fermentation. 

One company is using gas fermentation to feed microbes with hydrogen and carbon dioxide. The result is a powder that has the same nutritional value as dried meat. They're now making chocolate gelato with this process. Another company is using microbes to make milk, biologically identical to milk, but it doesn't need cows. That's not only cheaper, it's good for the environment, because cows produce a lot of methane. And a third company is making chicken cultivated by cells. Does all that sound impressive?  

Well, that ain't nothing. Try this. At Johns Hopkins University, scientists are creating food from nothing but air. This is truly a revolutionary project. Could even be a game changer. Think of soldiers in remote locations, or survivors of natural disasters, where roads have been destroyed, or are unpassable. It's one thing to make food, but it's quite another to get it to where people are. So DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, they gave $15 million to Johns Hopkins and three other research labs to figure out how to produce nutritious, appetizing food using only water, air, and electricity. 

At Johns Hopkins, their goal is to create a product that looks and tastes like vanilla pudding or Greek yogurt. The food will be packed with all the macronutrients, vitamins, and minerals that you need to survive. The technology uses electricity, water, and engineered microbes to pull carbon dioxide, nitrogen, and minerals out of the air. Minerals like magnesium, calcium, and iron. Then an electrochemical process using tin and copper converts the CO2 into acetate, and a chemical reaction causes microbes to convert the acetate into glucose. Add it all up, glucose, that's just sugar, along with the nitrogen molecules and minerals, they all form feedstock. And when you use specially engineered microbes to it, they eat the feedstock and they produce the building blocks of food. Protein, carbohydrates, fat, fiber, and vitamins. The result, in a word, yogurt. DARPA says all the gear to make this work has to fit in a Humvee, and it has to be able to feed a combat unit for 45 days or 100 civilians for 21 days. They hope to have this project finished in just a couple of years. Yeah, the invention of food is growing, and the worldwide market for it is only going to get bigger.  

On tomorrow's show. Guess what billionaires are buying now? Plus, if you missed my Wealth Management Convergence conference that I hosted in West Palm Beach, Florida last month, I'm going to let you listen in on a great conversation about the new spot bitcoin ETFs. 

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