Open Letter to Newly Confirmed U.S. Agriculture Secretary

Secretary Tom Vilsack has the chance to make the Department of Agriculture a creative partner in advancing innovations that will drive the future of rural economies.

Dear Secretary Vilsack:

You are now in a position to oversee a revolution in agriculture as profound (and as profitable) as the industrial revolution. This opening has been created by three dramatic developments.

• First, spectacular advances made in bioscience are driving down the cost of decoding DNA and the cost of converting the insights gained into practical manufacturing operations. This is happening at rates comparable to those set by Moore’s law for price declines in semiconductors.
  
  

  

• Second, global recognition that we will need to cut greenhouse gas emissions to zero by 2050 to have any hope of keeping global warming within tolerable limits. The climate goal will require sharp changes in agricultural practices but will also open up enormous new markets for agricultural production using innovative technologies. 
  
  
• And, finally, electricity available from wind and solar facilities in rural areas is rapidly becoming the cheapest in the country.

One major target of opportunity is the chemical and petro-chemical industries that now make agricultural chemicals, plastics, fibers, and many other products mostly from fossil fuels. Taken together, these industries have incomes more than five times greater than U.S. agriculture and forestry. Production using biological inputs offers one of the few practical ways to make chemical products without fossil fuels. The basic strategy is to design microorganisms like bacteria to convert simple organic inputs into complex chemical products. Research has been underway for decades, but the technical revolutions, and new demand, have transformed the landscape. Pioneers in fields that can sell costly products, such as pharmaceuticals like insulin and lab-grown tissue for medical applications, have led the way.

This production strategy can be extended to even the most complex organic materials—including food. This can mean producing flavorings or additives that can make artificial hamburgers plausible (such as the heme that’s used in the new Impossible Burgers) or producing direct substitutes for conventional agricultural products such as whey, a key ingredient in cheese. In the longer term, it could also mean providing feedstock for factories that grow actual animal cells—a major challenge since this requires matching the texture and taste of fats and other animal products. It is even possible that completely synthetic systems can be designed that convert air, water, and minerals into useful products more efficiently than plants. These systems typically reduce the greenhouse gas emissions of standard production methods by enormous factors, and all but eliminate the health risks of animal waste, meat packing facilities, and the potential for animal-to-human disease transmission.

The rural development opportunities of using agricultural resources to produce chemicals are not new. Forty percent of U.S. corn production goes for ethanol production and nearly as much is used to feed cattle. There’s interest in using inexpensive natural gas in rural areas to produce ammonia. But both markets face trouble in the next few years. Electric vehicles are likely to all but eliminate gasoline in world markets in the next two decades. Aircraft continue to need liquid fuels but it can’t be ethanol. Natural gas can not be a long-term solution because of its climate impacts. Low-cost renewable electricity and new biotechnologies can more than offset these losses.

The urgent global demand for climate-friendly chemical and food production has the potential to drive major manufacturing investments in rural America. Infrastructure for delivering corn to ethanol plants is in place and there may be opportunities to use this resource to produce products of much higher value. Markets would be even greater if converting non-food materials (wood waste and other waste, non-food crops) can be made economically competitive for a wide range of products. Income lost to a decline in conventional meat and dairy production could be more than offset by income from using land much more productively.

There is understandable skepticism that “biomass” energy could play a significant role in supplying the enormous energy markets now provided by fossil fuels without impacting food supplies. It’s painful, but most earlier efforts to develop advanced biological processes have largely been failures in spite of significant investment. Falling fossil fuel prices and our reluctance to tax greenhouse gas emissions made it difficult for them to compete. But technical revolutions and the prospect of serious climate policy are changing the game. We’ve learned a lot from the earlier failures. It proved much harder to scale laboratory demonstrations to commercial scale than anyone imagined at the time. Scaling requires a range of practical engineering skills not found in typical research laboratories. The Europeans have recognized this and built facilities that allow innovators to test their systems at enormous scale.

Ambitious national plans in Europe and Asia are far outstripping U.S. investments, opening the possibility that the U.S. will find itself struggling to maintain a competitive position in international markets for key commodities—including rapid growth in global demand for meat substitutes. The U.S. has no equivalent strategic vision.

Private investment in the bioeconomy is growing rapidly. Revenues from bio-based manufacturing for industry and for drugs are now nearly equal to farm income. What’s been missing is a coherent federal program. Your department has a unique set of tools for accelerating innovation: a superb research infrastructure, experienced extension services, regulatory and incentive authorities, and many other tools. You have the chance to make the Department of Agriculture a creative partner in reimagining the potential of rural economies. I hope you seize it.

Dr. Henry Kelly is a Senior Fellow at the Boston University Institute for Global Sustainability. Previously, he served in senior positions in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and the Department of Energy during the Obama Administration.

The opinions expressed herein are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of the Boston University Institute for Global Sustainability.