Reap, Baby, Reap – Agriculture’s opportunity to rebuild a nation

March 29, 2022 |

It has been a long winter in the bioeconomy, companies and technologies laboring to convert promise into production, and unlock agricultural surplus to make sustainable energy and materials. Now the bioeconomy’s hour has arrived.  

Perhaps it was COVID, when biotechnology produced vaccines in record time. Perhaps it was the supply-chain crisis that come with economic recovery, demonstrating that domestic manufacturing has an important role. Perhaps it was the invasion on Ukraine, when we saw that regimes based in fossil-dollars could harm the world in ways not measured solely in prices at the pump or climate statistics. 

The bioeconomy has the opportunity, as Washington state governor Dan Evans put it in his 1968 Republican National Convention keynote, “to rebuild a nation from within and re-shape its policies toward a new world without.”

Not every vehicle can be sustainably lifted and propelled by energy stored in metal batteries, and the bioeconomy has the ability to provide all the fuels that cannot be supplied by electrification of the fleet. 

The bioeconomy has the ability to provide all the materials and chemicals that are made from petroleum. To provide meat without the cow, milk without the cow, leather without the cow, eggs without the chicken, silk without the spiders, fish without the fins, for those whose diet or preferences require it. Much of this can be supplied by the capture and conversion of waste — crop waste, timber slash and trimmings, greases and fats, CO2, garbage, recovered plastic and wastewater. The filth of our economy can become the engine of it. 

Let us not listen to those who say we do not have enough material, or land. Common sense tells us that rising agricultural demand, or rising demand for anything else, spurs innovation and land intensification. We didn’t run out of sand making transistors to power computers, we put more transistors on the chip. US corn acreage has dropped fifteen percent in the past hundred years despite corn prices rising by a factor of 10. 

What we have learned from the past weeks and months is that the world doesn’t need less sustainable and nearby manufacturing capacity, it needs more of it. 

The world needs millions of pounds of renewable fuels and materials to ease a demand squeeze that has been building for years. We have been relieving that squeeze by blinding ourselves to the unsustainable military and labor practices of some of our neighbors. We looked only at the price tag until the cost of everything else became too high, and we are paying out for our folly.

There is another price tag. Repression in the Middle East, rising inflation, pandemic, a climate crisis, an Iron Curtain once again threatening to descend over Eastern Europe, a trade war with China threatening the stability of Asia. Are we so very sure that we have built our society on rock, or on the sands of oil? Have we tired of funding our adversaries with our petrodollars?

Recently, I heard the idea expressed that the United States and Canada can pump their way out of their troubles, that the crisis brought on by too much petroleum and fossil gas production can be solved by more production. American petroleum is not cheap, it is expensive, which is why people point to it now, but when prices fall, fracking crashes, as it did six years ago. It is not a sustainable model, in the same way that you cannot win basketball games with one player, no matter how great.

The bioeconomy will not supply all our energy or material. Energy is a team sport. Biomass should take its place next to wind, solar, hydro, geothermal, fossil fuels, and any other technology that comes along that is proven to be close to zero carbon and safe to deploy. We need more sources, more ways to market, more ways to refine.

Let a thousand flowers blossom. It is the blossoms that will be the sign that spring has arrived, a spring time for our people and our way of life.

Reap, baby, Reap. As we sow, so shall we reap, and if we sow well, we will reap the rewards and the great days of bioeconomy’s spring will result in a harvest that is bountiful, and will sustain us through the winters that always come.

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