The Future Food Crisis: Our Solutions are in Nature!
It is the year 1669. An unbearable odour is rising from the cellar of a noble house in Hamburg, Germany. The alchemist Henning Brandt is obsessed with the idea of creating something precious from something worthless. Convinced that it would be possible to extract gold from a yellow liquid he had stored in large barrels, he spent days boiling urine in his underground laboratory. And now, a white, solid deposit emerged at the bottom of his pots. Nothing like the gold he had been dreaming of with gleaming eyes!
Still, he did finally get to see a spark – but not that of gold. When he transferred heat to the white solid that he had obtained, it immediately caught fire. Mesmerized by the bright flame emerging from his newly found element, he named it “Phosphor mirabilis”, the “wonderful bearer of light”.
Without knowing, Henning Brandt had just discovered phosphorus, a chemical element that is vital for all living beings. Phosphorus is part of the structure of our DNA, it is found in our bones and is essential for virtually every reaction in our cells. Without phosphorus, there is no life. And, just like we humans, plants need phosphorus to be able to grow, as well. We obtain phosphorus through the food we eat, while plants obtain it from the soil.
Boosting plant growth…
At some point in the 19th century, scientists discovered that phosphorus could be used to boost plant growth. They obtained it as a by-product from other chemical reactions or found it to be abundant in mines. Ever since, we have been using phosphorus fertilizers in agriculture.
And everything was “fine” until we discovered that phosphorus reserves were – finite! Four countries own about 80 percent of all phosphorus deposits. Those are Morocco, China, South Africa and Jordan. But these mines will be depleted in a matter of a few decades: something between 20 and 100 years. Until then, we will have to find alternative sources of phosphorus, because without phosphorus, there is no life!
…but at which price?
Or… could it be that we got something terribly wrong? Why did we suddenly even need to apply phosphorus, and other fertilizers, to agricultural fields? Why didn’t farmers lack anything before? Certainly, not everything was better in the past. Yields were much lower, and the intensification of agriculture has helped feed many people who would otherwise have gone to bed hungry. But we are now waking up to the fact that the basic assumptions of our modern agriculture are wrong. And this has had grim consequences on our environment: depleted mines, depleted soils, dependencies on finite resources and increasing pollution of our aquifers, soils, ecosystems…
Basically, our productive and “efficient” agriculture now might mean that others will go to bed hungry in a few decades, or already do so “elsewhere”.
It takes humbleness to step back and see what we have been doing wrong. It takes an open mind to learn from nature how to do things well. And then, it also needs a good deal of courage to change our basic assumptions and actions. Nature’s principles are correct – how could it otherwise have thrived for millions, even billions of years? Now is the time to align our principles with the principles of nature. Principles I believe to have been divinely instituted.
Let’s start with looking at nature and learning from her!
Role models
Imagine a century old forest. Look up at the wise old trees. Gently walk over the moss, fallen leaves and fir needles. Breathe in the aromatic air scented with the essential oils from the sap and needles and the decaying soil. Take in the peace and sacredness of that place. Such undisturbed, age-old forests are rare, but do try to imagine such a place. And now ask: how has this place been thriving for such an impressively long time? What’s its secret?
Perhaps you learned it in school: the leaves and branches from the plants fall on the soil. Through the work of rain, oxygen and billions of tiny microscopic creatures in the soil, the leaves eventually decompose to finally form rich layers of humus. Feeding on fertile soil, plants keep growing year after year. The simple, yet revolutionary process of photosynthesis continuously happens in the green parts of the plants. Photosynthesis uses the sun’s energy to convert water and carbon dioxide from the air into carbohydrates. These carbohydrates provide the plant with energy and building blocks for everything else it does. In the process, plants release oxygen into the atmosphere. Very simply, they provide us with the air we breathe!
Notice that everything involved in this process is completely free and abundantly available! Water, carbon dioxide, sunlight. I truly can’t think of a more ingenious and efficient process than photosynthesis. Can you see the fingerprint of an intelligent and loving Creator in all of this?!
The inventor of recycling
Of course, there are not only plants in our forest. We also have animals: squirrels, insects, birds, deers… … And I’ll take the liberty to declare you an animal, as well – I hope you don’t mind! And so, you are standing there, amidst of all these creatures, an intelligent animal who is able to understand the magic and complexity of these processes. What we do, as animals, is that we breathe in the oxygen produced by the plants. And we exhale carbon dioxide, the building block of plants.
The squirrel is jumping around the forest searching for hazelnuts, a bird is delighting in some berries. They eat their fill and, nourished as they are, excrete whatever their body didn’t need or couldn’t digest in the form of faeces and urine. These excrements end up in the soil, transformed once more into rich layers of humus. And I think you know the rest of the story. The cycle is continued endlessly, just as the nature of a circular process is…
We named it recycling, but it’s really just an ingenious principle of nature: Nothing ever gets wasted!
Closing the nutrient loop
Do you remember the beginning of this story? What did the alchemist use to obtain phosphorus in his laboratory? Exactly, urine. While our bodies take in enough phosphorus through food, some of it is also excreted through faeces and urine. Today, these excesses of phosphorus largely end up in sewage and wastewater instead of back in the soil.
Farmers of the past might never have heard of phosphorus or photosynthesis. But they intuitively did what they saw played out in nature before their very eyes. They spread human and animal manure on their fields as fertilizers. In this way, all the nutrients that were taken out of the farm as food, eventually came back in the form of organic manure and compost. Nothing ever needs to be wasted.
The mess we created
We seem to have forgotten the simplicity of nature’s principle when we started messing with mining and synthetic nitrogen fertilizers. A mess indeed we have created, as excessively used phosphorus and nitrogen fertilizers are washed out of the soil and into our seas, lakes, rivers… Here, phosphorus and nitrogen interfere with the finely balanced equilibrium of nature. For instance, nitrogen runoff from Germany alone released almost 12.000 tons of nitrogen into the Baltic sea in 2016.
These excesses of nitrogen and phosphorus boost the growth of algae in the water. When these algae decompose, they cause lack of oxygen and poison other living beings. This is called eutrophication. And it gets problematic for humans as well since excessive nitrates from fertilizers in our drinking water are cancerogenic for us. Ultimately, when phosphorus is washed off into rivers, seas and lakes, it ends up deposited at the ground of the oceans. In this way, we lose our finite reserves of phosphorus never to get them back!
Photo by Sora Sagano
To make matters worse, the increasing acidification of agricultural soils binds the remaining phosphorus to the soil. Unhealthy, acidic soil cannot release the nutrients, such as phosphorus, to the crops that need them. And so, farmers need to apply more and more synthetic and mined fertilizers to maintain the same level of production.
And that was not at all in the blueprint of nature!
Our solutions are in nature
Fortunately, now that we know the problem and have stepped back to learn from nature, the solutions are plain and simple! Our solutions are right before us, in nature.
As I wrote in another article on resource efficiency in farming, we need to recycle all the nutrients we take from the farm, and give them back to the soil, where they belong.
To achieve this, we need to do three things:
1. Use animal manure as fertilizers
Farmers have always been doing this, and still do today. The problem is that nowadays, we have specialized farms that focus either on growing plants or raising livestock. In this way, animal manure concentrates in certain areas where a lot of livestock is held. This manure is lacking in other areas. Ideally, a farm should have both livestock and crops. But it is also possible to give back animal manure to the plant growing farmers.
2. Compost
We need to compost everything we don’t eat: leftover greenery from vegetables, food scraps, fruit stones, peels… Ideally, if you have a garden or houseplants, you could set up a home composter to make fertile humus from your food scraps. On a bigger scale, we should be composting all of our food waste. Some towns already offer municipal composting sites. But we should do this with literally all our food waste. And then we should give back the compost that we obtain in this way to those who grow our food.
3. Use sewage as manure
All that we do eat, but don’t digest, should be used as fertilizer, too. Human manure in other words. It’s not often talked about, but given the urgency of our phosphorus crisis, we really can’t look away from this problem. Because, as I described above, nutrients that get lost in our sewage systems will lack in other places, create damage to the environment or be irretrievably lost. Today, we already have the techniques to kill off pathogens from sewage or even extract phosphorus from it. In nature, nothing is ever wasted, I have to repeat it again. And so, we should imitate nature and not waste anything.
Even if you are not a farmer, you can still do something about these problems!
Steps that everyone can take to end the food crisis
- First of all, you could compost your food waste. There are many useful YouTube videos on how to do that.
- Second, you can separate organic waste from other waste. Check your country’s regulations on that, and if there is no recycling system in your area, perhaps you could request your municipality to set up a composting system.
- If that’s not possible and if you have friends who are gardening or farming, you could ask them to compost your food waste, as well.
- You can make sure that you don’t pollute sewage systems with chemicals, medicine, frying oil… make sure to dispose of these things correctly!
- Very importantly, you can support a sustainable farming system by preferably buying organic food and animal products that are not from factory farms.
- Finally, the most revolutionary thing you could actually do is to start gardening yourself! Growing your own food is a real pleasure… Since you have control over what you do with your plants, be it that you grow them on the windowsill, balcony or allotment, you can really mimic nature in everything you do. I love this example of organic gardening with completely free, natural fertilizers. Want to get started with gardening? Read my guide on organic gardening here.
To get back to the alchemist’s story from the beginning: perhaps Henning Brandt was right all along. We truly can create something precious from something of seemingly no worth. In the ingenious Creator’s economy, “worthless” doesn’t exist. Nature is waiting for us to start imitating her again. Because, in the words of Dave Bookless, ‘God doesn’t do waste’.
Have you heard of the “phosphorus problem” before? What actions from this list have you already taken or want to take next?
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