Sustainability Videos & Lecture Series

Mindy Kinnard: All right, good afternoon. Thank you all for joining us today for today’s sustainability series. The Global Institute of Sustainability hosts this series, brining visitors to ASU’s campus to discuss a range of environmental, social and economic topics.

Our next sustainability series will be next Tuesday on Valentine’s Day, in this room, featuring Jose Guzman, who is the chief of population and development branch for the United Nations Population Fund. You can visit our website with all of our great upcoming events. Make sure you RSVP because we serve yummy food and we want to make sure we have enough for everyone.

Now, to introduce our speaker, Mark graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy with a B.S. in mechanical engineering, oceanography and meteorology. He holds an MBA and PhD in marketing and consumer behavior. He has taught strategic marketing sustainability leadership and entrepreneurship here at ASU since 1978.

Mark’s teaching has focused on adding value through sustainability, marketing customer relationships, organizational relationships and entrepreneurship. His recent work focuses on revolving around world hunger and sustainable energy and green solutions.

He has taught several interdisciplinary courses in engineering, psychology and sustainable world future. Mark has an international reputation as an executive trainer, author and innovator of metrics that help people to learn and develop faster, to take actions to improve performance and grow human capital. Today, we welcome professor Mark Edwards.

Mark Edwards: Thank you, Mindy.

Kinnard: You’re welcome.

Edwards: Welcome. We’re going to talk about the next generation of food and the way we’ll produce food so that your children will have food to eat and abundant food and food that’s affordable and sustainable. This is quite different from anything else you’ve ever seen, so stand by.

Abundance looks at sustainable fossil-free foods that are superior in nutrition and taste, but without the pollution and waste we have with our industrial foods. We’re going to be talking about a new way to grow the foods that you like, including falafel that we’ve had here for lunch.

Flight plan here, we’ll do a little environmental scan. I’m going to be very light on the environment scan. I’ve come to many of these sessions. I’ve heard that we are short of just about every natural resource on the planet and getting shorter. I don’t have to convince you of that. We’ll go to solutions quickly, and the solution will be focused around food.

But, as we think about where we’re going here, I’m going to ask–and this is my MO. I ask questions to make sure you’re engaged. I encourage you to answer some questions, because we move along quickly there, but if we think about what’s the most important energy stored on earth, what is that stored energy? No, it’s not fossil fuels, no it’s not coal and gas. Nope, nope, light is not stored, nor is solar energy directly, no. It’s food. It’s what’s exactly on your plate. That’s the energy.

I have a question. How do we measure the energy stored in food?

Audience: Calories.

Edwards: And how do we measure calories?

Audience: Heat burn.

Edwards: Exactly right, heat burn. We take that falafel you have, we burn the sucker and see how many BTUs it gives off. That gives us our energy value. When I’m talking food, but if you want to think biofuels, of course biofuels is the foolish game of burning the food that we grow. If you want to read a whole book on that, my book, Biowar 1, gives you the whole shebang on ethanol and the biofuel issues.

By the way, a biowar is the foolish game when a country burns its own food, which I think is probably the most stupid thing that America has ever done. I’m a student of military history. I happened to go to a service academy. I’ve read hundreds and hundreds of book on military history. The worst thing that you do in war is burn the enemy’s food, but I can’t imagine burning our own food to put it in gas tanks, especially when it’s so trivial.

But, we’re going to talk about the food component and how to do that in a way that’s really quite unique. These are the primary three issues that we’re going to look at. Our industrial foods, we’re going to look at the health impacts on humans, animals and plants, but especially us people, humans. We’re going to look at sustainability issues of the fossil resources that are primarily used for food production today. Industrial foods use massive amounts of soil, fresh water, fossil fuels, fertilizers, inorganic fertilizers, poisons, pesticides, herbicides and fungicides. We’re then going to look at also the massive cropland erosion and degradation.

On this one, crop land erosion and degradation, anybody know, in the last 40 years, what percentage of the world’s fertile soils have we had to abandon because they were so degraded they’re no longer productive? Anybody have a number for that one? It’s around 33 percent of the world’s fertile soils have been abandoned because of degradation.

Audience: What is it for the U.S.?

Edwards: Good question. It depends on what part of the U.S., but overall in the U.S., it’s under 18 percent, so we’ve got a much better–we are blessed with much richer soil, much deeper soil in most of the U.S. than most other countries in the world. If you were going to idealize the best place on the planet to grow food, that would be the United States. We are very, very fortunate in that sense.

But, I’m going to argue that if you look at the research on our food, we have created genetic monocultures. What’s a genetic monoculture? Yeah.

Audience: That’s when you’re just growing the same plant over and over again.

Edwards: You’re growing the same plant over and over, but these genetic monocultures are GMO. What percentage of our food today, our food grains, corn and soy, come from genetically modified organisms?

Audience: [Inaudible 07:05]

Edwards: 92 percent, thank you, Monsanto, 92 percent. How much, in 1997, what percentage of our food grains came from GMOs? Zero, zero, so today, 92 percent. We can change that. We can change the empty calories and our foods that are full of fat, salt and cholesterol.

I want everybody to count off, I know you’re eating, but everybody count off from the left side and I want every third person to stand up, please. Third person, every row, come on, every row. I want you to look around. From the left end of the row. It’s not a hard challenge, not a hard challenge. Okay. Now look around. In the American public, this percentage, you may sit down now, this percentage of people will have children who will be obese and diabetic in their lifetimes. Isn’t that horrific? That ought to be front page news, Center for Disease Control, and if my math is right, and I’m known as Dr. Metrics, so I’m a measurement guy. If my math is right, it’s closer to one out of two of our children, born after the year 2000, will be obese and diabetic. Very serious problem.

From the military, four out of five people right now are not eligible for military because of physical incapability, and it’s getting worse every year, largely because of our food system, empty calories. We can change that. I’m not going to go through all these things. You know the downside of all of our stuff, the resources, but I want you to think about, what are the consequences of basing our food supply on eroding foundation of fossil resources? What are the consequences? Those fossil resources we talked about earlier, fertile soil, fresh water and such. What are our children going to do with food, because we’re going to need more food now between now and 2050 than the last 8,000 years combined. Tremendous amount more food.

What percentage of Americans are severely impoverished? This has been all over the news the last two weeks with the presidential debates. What percentage are impoverished?

Audience: 15 or something?

Edwards: No, we’re up to 18 percent, but if you look at the people who don’t have enough food–how many people on food stamps? 44 million. How many people on food support in the United States? Food support in the United States, the most richest country on earth, the best food production system on earth, what percentage of Americans are on food support because they can’t afford food?

Audience: [Inaudible 10:05]

Edwards: Higher.

Audience: [Inaudible 10:07]

Edwards: Higher. It’s about 68 million people that are on food support today, so it’s really unfortunate and we need to change that. We’re talking peak oil, you know about that, you know our price index, food price index. This is Arab Spring, caused largely by food price, food availability and prices. Oil rising is direct, modern fossil agriculture uses massive amounts of these fossil resources, and we have at Arizona State University, a whole sustainable phosphorous initiative. I hope you’ll get engaged with that through the School of Life Sciences and GIOS, and that’s a marvelous initiative that we put together, because we believe we’re the number one university in the country on phosphorous and we’re looking at all the issues about how to make phosphorous sustainable, because we believe that only 20 to 30 years of phosphorous reserves are left, and that’s worldwide and even worse in the United States.

We’re running out of fresh water. What’s it take to grow a ton of grain? It’s about 1,000 tons of water. Look at this. When we’re doing food grains, wheat, corn, rice, that’s still a lot of gallons of water, but look what happens when we grow beef. The water cost of beef is just horrific. It’s just hugely out of proportion, and we’re using up our fresh water far too fast. We simply won’t have enough left for our future generations.

Our fossil footprints of our agriculture, 50 percent of greenhouse gases comes from agriculture. About 70 percent of water pollution, so we’re really up there. Who is paying for fossil foods? Those are the foods we eat today and they seem so darn expensive, but if you really look at it, we’re not paying for the subsidies. The taxpayers are paying that. We’re not paying for the natural resource consumption. Our children will pay for that. We’re only paying about a third of the cost of the true cost of food today of our fossil foods, because these two things are subsidized, or actually this is hidden and simply we’re not accounting for this.

What’s the situational analysis? Well, we’ve abandoned 36 percent of our fertile soils, our fresh water’s increasingly scarce, fuels are peaked, fertilizer prices are rising. The price of phosphorous fertilizer rose 800 percent over a 14-month period recently. That’s unsustainable. Pesticides, of course, huge medical impacts, tremendous waste, recycle and pollution.

Why not reverse all these trends? Why not take all these things and turn them around, just flip them? Our fossil food legacy, even though we have great food production, we still have over half the planet is hungry. Many Americans are hungry, one out of six Americans are hungry daily, and worldwide it’s one out of two.

Our road ahead. I propose that we change our food system and we move to freedom foods that are produced with abundant resources, and we can do this. Everything you’re going to see, we’ve done. Now, we haven’t done it on massive scales, but we have produced these foods using these procedures.

We have three food types. Industrial foods are full of empty calories, they create massive amounts of fossil resources, they use genetic monocultures and they have tremendous pesticide residues and they systematically degrade crop land and pollute ecosystems. This is what we have today.

Of course, then we have organic foods. What percentage of foods in America are grown organically? What percentage of our food supply? I’ll give you a book for anybody who can name this.

Audience: 30.

Audience: Four and-a-half.

Audience: Two, two percent.

Audience: 15.

Edwards: One, bingo. Mr. America, come up and, here. One percent. It’s actually half of one percent. It’s that terrible? Yeah. Organic production, and I’ve heard at these lectures, I’ve heard the value of organics and oh wonderful, wonderful, wonderful, but if you think about it, I came from a farm. I’ve been a gardener all my life and I raise organic vegetables, I love gardening. Yet, when you think about helping farmers with organic production, if it were easy, they’d all be doing it, but 99 percent of Americans do not produce organically.

Even if they did, it is even heavier fossil resource consumption than our industrial foods, so even though the foods are better for us, we’re still using more crop land, more fresh water, more fossil fuels. We’re not using the inorganic chemicals and we’re not using nearly as many pesticides, herbicides and fungicides, but we still are massively consuming fossil resources and our organic foods are extremely weather insensitive. What’s weather insensitive mean?

Audience: Rain and–

Edwards: Right, so you have rain, you have drought, you have wind, all of those things decimate foods, and temperature spikes can absolutely zero out your production, independent of whether you’re industrial or organic.

Let’s go to freedom foods that are free of all these things, that gives us healthier foods, and I’m going to give you a new word, new word. These foods are high nutrilence foods. You’re familiar with succulents. Succulents are plants that absorb water. High nutrilence foods are foods that absorb nutrients. Instead of empty calories, we have foods with three times more nutrients per bite, or per calorie. Yes?

Audience: How are you actually measuring that, just the presence or absence of specific–

Edwards: No, we send it to a lab and find out how many micronutrients we have. I mean, that’s really the scientific way to do it. We send it to an independent lab to have them look at the full micronutrient profile.

The story is very simple. When we grow a field tomato, how good does it taste? It’s awful compared to growing up.

Audience: These days.

Edwards: These days, yeah. When we were growing up, tomatoes tasted great. What’s the difference? Well, when we were growing up, there were still plenty of micronutrients in the soil, but the farmers replaced NPK, nitrogen phosphorous and potassium, they don’t replace all the micronutrients. Consequently, as soon as those are extracted from years of growing, pretty soon you don’t have the micronutrients. No micronutrients, no color, no taste, no texture. You can change all that, and we have, with high nutrilence.

Nutrilence is simply getting nutrients into the product. We have no or minimal fossil resource consumption. Again, we have done this. This isn’t theoretical, we’ve done it, we’re doing it. We can create naturally bio-diverse foods with no residual poisons. We can systematically regenerate soil, so instead of extracting, extracting, extracting, as we do with industrial agriculture, we can actually leave every field better than we found it, actually regenerate the air, the water and the soils, and we can prove that. Again, with microbes and so forth, we can prove that, and we can be weather independent and geographically independent.

We want to improve all these health economics, resources, environment, social, climate, footprint, social, is Sally here? Sally here? We have some people working on social justice and women, and one of the neat things about freedom foods is we can grow it anywhere in the world and we grow it without heavy physical labor, and without exposure to heavy mechanical equipment and without exposure to poisons and pesticides. That means people of both genders, and even people with disabilities, can grow these foods, because it’s not heavy physical labor, and we leave a footprint of a butterfly. That’s this book, Freedom Foods, we leave the ecological footprint of a butterfly, which means no footprint.

We’re not using those fossil resources, that way the fossil resources will be there for our children, and we’ll improve our ecosystems. We can create freedom foods that are just like the foods we have today. I’ll be straight with you. If we’re using meat, we’re still going to end up using some, it’s a hybrid process, it’s not a pure process, but we can create vegetables, fruits and anything from food grains and flowers that are like corn flower, wheat flour, rice flour. We can do all those with pure freedom foods that are free of all those resource consumptions.

Here’s the value proposition. We grow a food that might come out to be like your falafel or a piece of bread, and compared to traditional foods, it has about 85 percent less fat and no cholesterol. You can have a cake. Imagine, chocolate cake, just like we had chocolate brownies here, 85 percent less fat, no cholesterol. Pretty sweet, huh? Okay, and we can have naturally bio-diverse, no pesticide residue. We have a footprint that’s very, very positive. We have substantially more nutrients. I use 100 percent more nutrients to talk about nutrilence. Typically, we shoot for three times, 300 percent improvement in nutrilence. That’s nutrients per bit, and then we have climate independence.

Theoretically, we can grow climate-independent foods if we grow all of them in a greenhouse, but that’s tremendously expensive today and very, very slow, cumbersome and it doesn’t handle heavy storms, it doesn’t handle heat and drought, and it doesn’t handle salt invasion, as a matter of fact, and it doesn’t handle sea level rise. Freedom foods do.

This is tiny idea. We’re growing microorganisms, and the microorganism of choice is algae, this guy. I’ll pass around some pictures, because I’m sure you’re wondering what algae looks like. It’s the most bio-diverse plant on the planet, and this is how we grow it. The second page is how we grow it, so I’ll just pass these around and you can look at those, guys. Each day, algae produces 70 percent of the oxygen on the planet, far more than all the forests and fields combined, every day. Every day, about 40 percent of the biomass globally is produced by algae.

Now, most of that biomass is consumed, thankfully, otherwise, we’d be overrun with algae, but 100 times more animals eat algae than any other plant on earth. They eat it, in fact the smallest microorganisms like phytoplankton and krill, all the way up to the largest mammal on earth eat algae. What’s the largest mammal on earth?

Audience: Whale.

Edwards: Great blue whale, right. Yeah, she loves algae. In fact, how many people take fish oil? Fish oil omega 3? Why?

Audience: Krill.

Edwards: Krill. We take good fish oil because it gives us EPA and DHA, improves our brain, our sight, our heart, our lungs, our circulatory. Every major body function, fish oil helps. Question. Where do fish get their fish oil? Fish do not synthesize omega 3 fatty acids. They don’t do it. No animals do. Where do they get it?

Audience: [Inaudible 22:48]

Edwards: Smaller fish, okay, all right. You’re right, you’re right. Where do the smaller fish get it?

Audience: Algae?

Edwards: Got it, algae. If I ask you a question, probably the answer is green and it’s probably algae. It comes from algae. Why not just go to the source? Algae Biosciences, for example, in Arizona is growing algae in Northern Arizona by Holbrook with the purpose of harvesting the omega 3 fatty acids, so we’ll have a vegetarian source of fish oil. The good news about that, besides not depleting the fish stocks in the ocean of the little fish, we’ll also have a fish oil that you don’t burp fish, which is good if you don’t like the taste of fish. Okay. Beautiful little guy, those beautiful little plants.

We’re going to use abundance methods that mimic nature, abundance. Producing foods and other forms of energy with plentiful resources that are surplus, cheap and will not run out. Does that sound like a good model?

Audience: Yes.

Edwards: Good. That’s what we’re doing. We are going to use solar energy to transform into green biomass using photosynthesis, and we’re going to create freedom foods, and freedom foods do three things. This goes right back to our first slide on health. Number one, it gives people a choice for healthier foods. These foods are not available today. Nobody is yet producing them commercially. We will in the near future. We’re going to pass a taste list and produce and nutrient dilution. It will free growers from having to do genetically engineered crops with lots of pesticides and lots of fossil resources to make those genetically modified seeds grow.

The genetically modified seeds are maximizing their seed head, that’s the fruit of the vine, and they’re not putting their energy into the roots. Consequently, it takes lots more water, lots more pesticides, herbicides and fungicides to keep them alive. Farmers have had to magnify those things at our detriment and our ecological detriment as well as our health detriment. We can eliminate all of those things for our growers, and we can free our planet from loss of biodiversity and extinction.

All we’re doing with abundant agriculture is using plentiful resources. What’s it cost in solar energy? Zip. Co2 and nutrients, most of these we can get from waste water. Co2, where can we find Co2?

Audience: Smoke stacks.

Edwards: Smoke stacks, any carbon emission, cement plants, even burning botanic wastes. In fact, we have the Zoo Poo people here who were talking about–Zoo Poo’s exactly what it sounds like. Using the zoo waste and recycling the zoo waste back into feeds and fertilizer at the zoo. We can do all of that. Where is all that waste currently going today?

Audience: Landfills.

Edwards: Landfills, so we can recycle that, and this is the way we’ll do that. Oh and by the way, when we produce algae, we’re producing lipids, protein and carbs, and lots of co-products, but that’s predominately what we’re producing. We’re growing foods and a protein about 70 times faster than traditional feed. How many crops of corn do we get per year?

Audience: [Inaudible 26:23]

Edwards: One, one. Now, you almost cannot do two crops a year. Corn, it’s too brutal on the soil. You have to change it out with something else, but generally, almost 90-some-odd percent of all corn is one time a year. How often do you harvest algae?

Audience: [Inaudible 26:41]

Edwards: Every day, every day. Half your biomass daily, 360 approximate days a year, every day you have sunshine. In Arizona, that’s 360 days. Okay, we’re using 100 times fewer fossil resources, we eliminate waste and pollution. When we grow this guy, this is my algae on steroids here, when we grow this guy, what do we give off? What’s the ecological–

Audience: Oxygen?

Edwards: All we’re doing is giving off oxygen, exactly right. That’s the only thing we’re giving off, and it’s pure oxygen. We can harvest it and sell it as pure oxygen, if we choose. We can clean and regenerate air, soil and water and we can grow anywhere on earth. This is the protein potential here, and we’re talking corn 211 pounds per acre per year, versus 15,000. Tremendous delta, and by the way, the protein is far better profile from algae than it is from land plants.

Why is it that algae can grow so fast? Well, look at the physics. Anybody taking physics here? I heard some people, I know we have at least one, but look at the physics of the plant. You’ve got our land plants–by the way, where did land plants come from? They evolved from?

Audience: Oceans.

Edwards: The ocean–

Audience: Algae.

Edwards: Got it, algae, right, right, so 500 million years ago, if you go over to the botanic gardens, you’ll see a plaque. In the succulent garden, 500 million years ago they came out of the oceans. When they came out of the oceans, they had to make huge compromises. They had to create roots and put 30 percent of their energy into their root structure, 20 percent of their energy into their cellulosic stems and leaves and such and 35 percent into sex, sexual apparatus.

Now, if you’re spending all this energy on all these things, what do you have for food? Not a lot of energy left for growing your food. That’s why you get one crop a year. One crop, and it’s a measly, small crop comparatively to algae, where you have no roots, no structure, no sexual apparatus. By the way, algae can produce sexually and it’s happy. When it’s happy, it produces like a million offsprings in one day. That’s pretty slick, huh?

Algae is the most amazing plant on earth. Not only is it the most beautiful plant, but also, it is so smart. Three to five millions old, if you want to read the story on algae, that’s Tiny Mighty Al, the children’s book here, and that won the award for the best children’s book this year. But, Tiny Mighty Al, three to five million years ago, algae began changing our planet and getting us oxygen. It took the Co2 out of the planet, gave us oxygen and then other plants began to grow, but we still didn’t have food.

Algae also stepped forward and became the bottom of the food chain, and today, algae is the bottom of the food chain, which means everything on the planet eats algae, including humans. It is such a smart animal that–it’s not an animal really, it’s a plant, but any case, organism, that it figured out a strategy, and this is a brilliant strategy.

If everything around me is a predator, how am I going to solve that dilemma? I’m going to figure out how to propagate myself so fast that I can out-propagate my predators. Isn’t that neat? That’s exactly what it does. That’s why it grows so fast, and the fact that it doesn’t have to waste energy on all these things that land plants have to waste their energy on.

When we grow algae, we can maximize the oils, the lipids, and use those for biofuels, nutriceuticals or cosmoceuticals. We can maximize the protein which, of course, we can use for feed, food and medicines, and by the way, algae has proteins that stop the spread of SARS. It’s the only protein on the planet that stops SARS. Recent trials at John’s Hopkins also stopped HIV AIDS, different protein.

Now, with land plants ,we have how many species of land plants? Land plants, we have about 300,000 species of land plants. With algae, how many–by the way, we only use about eight species to grow our foods, so that’s the monocultures. How many species of algae do we have? I’ll give you a book if anybody can name that. 10 million, 10 million species of algae, so we have huge biodiversity naturally. Everywhere on the planet, algae grows. Go outside here at the GIOS building, pick up a handful of dirt, you’ll have probably a billion cells, but you’ll probably have at least 1,000 different species of algae in that soil. Away from the oceans, most of the algae grow in the top six inches of the soil. They grow in trees, on trees, in the roots, and of course, algae are breaking down the nutrients in the soil so that plants can uptake them.

We can create algae with maximal carbohydrates, 85 percent carbohydrates, and then we can make carbohydrates to make anything, just about anything we use, including the seats we’re sitting in, the fabrics of your sweaters, just about anything. We can make a lot of different things.

From the green energy stored in algae, we can create energy for people, animals, fowl, fish, about 35 percent of world’s algae grown today goes to feed fish. When you feed algae to fish, you get better production, healthier fish, a lot less issues with digestion than with food grains. Why?

Audience: That’s what they’re designed to eat.

Edwards: Yeah, that’s right. Exactly what they’re designed to eat. They evolved eating algae, not food grains. It’s their natural food and it’s great. It sounds silly, but there is less fecal waste when you feed algae to animals, including fish, which is a huge deal if you’re a farmer, because managing that waste is a huge, huge cost.

What’s the benefit of less fecal waste? I know, it’s just after lunch, we’re talking poo here, people, poo.

Audience: The animal has more energy?

Edwards: The animal’s able to absorb more of the nutrients, therefore has more energy, exactly right. You’re getting more of the nutrients from the plant into the animal, and that’s the beauty. It’s all down to size. This guy, five microns small. Typical algae cell’s five microns, very, very small. Easily absorbed by the human gut, skin, but if you put it on trees, leaves, stalks, trunks, all can absorb algae as well, of course, as the roots. It’s so small it’s immediately absorbable.

We can create H2 fibers, energy for trucks and tractors, clean, polluted water, all kinds of good stuff. We’re talking about abundance micro farms where we have micro farms, and one of my personal life goals is to create these micro farms that we’re able to put in your backyard and you can grow all these things for your family and community locally. These are all scalable, so you can put them in your backyard and do it for your family, or you can scale it up to fit your community, your community garden.

Audience: How about indoors?

Edwards: Indoors, you simply need some kind of grow light, but now we’re working with all kinds of neat LED lights that have very short angstrom, that take very little energy so we’re able to be very efficient with grow lights. Algae is happy. Algae’s agnostic to where the photon comes from. It doesn’t matter. You can reflect it, you can put it through anything you want, a laser, anyway you get it into the culture, algae just absorbs it. It’s a very easy way to convert solar energy using photons, and that’s the story.

All the things we’ve just talked about, but again, we’re doing this abundantly so we can use waste water and farm waste stream or even the community waste stream, so that people have the inputs for sustainable food. By the way, sustainable medicines as well. I believe that in the longer term, the meds are going to be 10 times the value of the food, but of course, medicines are a food in one sense.

When we look at food, not only can we do foods, dips, chips, pasta, snacks and all the good stuff including all the drinks that have three to five times more nutrients per sip, but we can also do the packaging with algae, and I’m going to give you a new term. First time you’ve ever heard it. You know about biodegradable packaging, right? The story on that, if you look at the detail, after 60 years, it biodegrades. That’s not very biodegradable to me, but I’ll give you a packaging that’s called bio-edible, and there, with the bio-edible packaging, we eat the contents and we grind up the packaging and we eat that and we get nutrients from that. Now initially, that will go to ruminants with four stomachs, they’ll get the nutrients out, but eventually we’ll be able to do–yes, question?

Audience: I do have a weird question, because you’re talking about the packaging. I understand a plant creates these long fibers that we can use to make textiles. How do you take something four microns and make–what’s that process that you’re connecting the dots, so to speak?

Edwards: Magic, green, green. That’s why I use my green pointer, yeah. Flax, why do you suppose–I think I have a picture of–oh, rats. I do have a picture of flax in a moment, but a lot of people take flaxseed or flax in their cereal for what purpose? Fibers, right.

Audience: Fiber.

Edwards: Compared to flax, the highest fabric solution from land plants, a gram of algae has how many times more fibers than flax?

Audience: 12.

Edwards: Eight, eight times. You’re right, ballpark.

Audience: [Inaudible 37:13] probably the structure of the cell [inaudible 37:18]

Edwards: You’re right, well, and we’re probably going to create a carbohydrate here, and we’re probably going to use it with a microalgae, which is a seaweed. About 10 percent of algaes are seaweed, and if you remember, let’s say the kelps, the kelps are individual cells but are all tethered together, but they don’t have the transport that normal plants have, so they don’t have all that overhead. But, we can take those carbohydrates and make building materials out of them or fabrics.

I did the 100-year Starship for NASA, NASA and DARPA selected me to design the habitat for the 100-year Starship. You get in a Starship, you go out 100 years, so I presented that this last October in Orlando, and there, the fibers we used in the Starship from algae, we recycled everything at the Starship, including the walls of the Starship, and every time we needed some new, we just recycled it and reused it. In that case, we actually had some bio-edible materials, so somebody pointed out that if you really get in trouble in the Starship, you could actually eat your–thank you, yes.

Audience: Then you have no ship.

Edwards: [Laughter] Then you have no ship. That’s a good point, so you have to be thoughtful about that. But you’re right, that’s a good question. What we find with algae, there are lots of ways to fabricate, and that’s why we need our geniuses here with physics background and so forth. Bruce Rittmann is working on some neat technology, and his poster’s right outside here over at Bio Design. You’re going to see lots of nano products that are coming out, algae-based, where they’re picking up nano one cell at a time and building it up, and they’re going to build it just like plywood, except it will be much stronger than plywood. That’s the way. Good question, very good question.

This is the tale of two trips. This is freedom foods, this is your tale of the two. Industrial corn chip is high on saturated–all these negatives. High cholesterol, loaded with empty calories, GMO material, pesticide residue. It’s going to be low on protein, low nutrients, no omega 3s, very few vitamins and minerals and almost no trace elements. Conversely, we’re going to have hugely higher all these things, and the corn chips are going to taste better. Why does it taste better? Answer, it has the full range of micronutrients which gives us our taste, which brings up the question, oh, Lacy, would you please pass out the algae food? I want you all to–talking about it is one thing. Tasting it–open that and pass it around.

Audience: We’ve had this. We have this all the time.

Edwards: You have it all the time?

Audience: [Laughter]

Edwards: Okay, this is a testimonial. They have it all the time. It’s a great snack food because why? Because of these reasons. I just did a post of my algae blog. You can read my algae blog, it’s the most popular blog in the algae space called Algae 101. What is the reason the number one rated restaurant in the world serves algae, and by the way, the top 10 restaurants, I think, all serve algae in one way or another. But, why does the number one restaurant in Copenhagen, Denmark, why does it serve algae? Does anybody know?

Audience: [Inaudible 40:47]

Edwards: Because it’s good, that’s why. Our tongue has five taste buds. Can anybody name the five taste buds? Sweet–

Audience: Sour.

Edwards: Sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and then the fifth?

Audience: Umami.

Edwards: Umami, good, who got that?

Audience: [Laughter]

Edwards: Great, Umami, good. Umami. What’s Umami? What is Umami?

Audience: That’s a good question. [Laughter]

Edwards: Yeah, it’s hearty, your savory taste. Now, why would we have that Umami taste bud? Why would we have that?

Audience: Is that MSG?

Edwards: Well, MSG is a form that brings out a taste that’s savory, but that’s only one form and that’s a commercial synthetic form. It’s not a natural form. I have a post, I have a whole theory that we are humans because of algae, because our long-time ancestors happened to camp on the leaf side of one of the lakes in Ethiopia in the Riff Valley, and the spirulina was blown across the lake, almost all the algae grows in the top two inches of the water column, and our ancestors happened to drink, either cupping their hands or directly into the water, but as they drank the water they got a rich amount of spirulina, omega 3 fatty acids. That enabled 2 million years ago, between two million and 1.5 million, I have a whole paper on this if you’re interested, but that 500,000-year period, our brains went from 400cc, the size of a chimpanzee, to the size they are today, 1,600cc. It moved from a chimpanzee to a human brain today in 500 years.

How did we do that? Well, the leading theory is that we went to the savannah and harvested meat, impossible. Lucy, at the time, was 3.5 feet tall, we were slow, we had poor eyesight, terrible hearing and we couldn’t smell, and by the way, we didn’t have fire yet for another million and-a-half years and we had no weapons. There’s no way we could have harvested meat.

The only way we could have gotten these brains, is nutrients from omega 3 and algae, so that’s why we have the taste bud. Here’s the fiber I mentioned earlier, and these are functional foods. We’re seeing functional foods today, they’re advertised all over the place. This came from an article in the New York Times a few weeks ago, and we’re seeing these and they’re very, very popular. They’re putting nutrients from algae, or in this case, this is a flax-based fiber. Eventually, it will be algae-based. We’ll have the same thing for other foods.

Four paths to abundant foods. One, is we grow algae directly, and that’s this green biomass here. Secondly, grow it and flow it to fish. Another, we can grow it and flow it to vegetables, hydroponics, or this is what I worked on, smart cultures, and this has been my focus for the last several years, and smart cultures are sustainable microalgae regenerative technologies. Smart cultures actually grow algae near the field.

Down in Yuma, we took algae out of the field, cultivated it, put it into algae production system right next to the field, put it in the irrigation water, sent it back to the field and we got 30 percent higher yields from the fruit, and the fruit, we did an ASU taste test, the fruit, 17 to 1 preference for the algae-infused nutrients compared to the typical field crops. That’s where we did the lab test and found we have three times more nutrients in every bite in almost every melon that was tested. That’s the story.

Again, it’s because algae, in that case, is the nutrient delivery system, and that’s what is true here at aquaculture and hydroponics, and of course, we can feed fish but we can also feed animals of any sort, including pets. When we do feed all these different animals, we get all these benefits that you saw earlier. It’s more digestible, less fecal waste and its superior protein profile over meats.

What has more energy per kilogram, meat–what has more protein per kilogram, meat or algae?

Audience: Algae.

Audience: Algae.

Edwards: Algae, double, double, and the nutrient profile of that protein is far superior to animals meats, which means we can make bacon, hamburgers and steaks and all that sort of stuff.

These are smart cultures that I just mentioned, where I’ve put a lot of time into growing algae near the field using waste water to create bio-fertilizer, plant growth hormones, soil conditioner and targeted nutrients. This is their algae-infused field, this is the control. There’s a difference there. We’ve got all kinds of statistics showing–the metrics are just very, very compelling. We’ve got on the order of five times more germination in the algae-infused than we did in the controls.

Cantaloupe per acre, about 38 percent higher yield, and of course much better taste. Look at the size difference, and these guys, a lot more color, texture, four days more shelf life because of the micronutrients. All these improve the germination rates, improve market value, reduces costs by about 30 percent for the farmer, except for fertilizer, reduced that 50 percent and reduced fungicides 80 percent. This is a traditional field. Yes?

Audience: What role does the organic matter in the algae have in retaining soil moisture?

Edwards: Magic, magic. Industrial agriculture, we extract and extract, not just the nutrients but the organic materials. It’s pulled out along with the plant. You lose the organic material, which is typically less than three percent of typical fertile soil anyway, the organic matter. That organic matter absorbs and holds moisture, and the moisture is what allows the plant to then absorb the nutrients. If you don’t have moisture, you get the plant, you know, looks like this. The plant bows over. It basically looks like its thirsty and it–sorry about that.

Any case, when algae goes into the field, algae actually continues to grow in the field, and by continuing to grow, remember how fast it grows? A million offsprings a day, it grows several generations as soon as it hits the field, and when you pull up the black plastic that we grow in these melon fields, the soil is green. Why is it green? Because the algae is growing like crazy. It’s really happy. The algae grows there, and then we put organic material back in the soil which holds more moisture.

The big deal there, was the organic material enabled us to have 500 percent improvement in porosity. Porosity is simply the looseness of the soil, and when you have industrial agriculture in Arizona, you have these big tractors that go over this soil, often it’s wet, after irrigation, and it compacts it. 500 percent improvement means you have a lot more room for roots. We had roots that were five to seven times deeper in our fields than the controls. Good question, thank you.

This is what it looks like to grow algae in micro farms. This is Ben Cloud in Gila Bend. I take it back, Casa Grande, Casa Grande. This is Gila Bend. Desert Sweet Biofuels, somebody was mentioning that. We’ve done a couple of tours down here, and here this is Gary Wood and he’s growing algae. He’s burning botanic waste from the field, and he’s putting that back in the algae to feed the algae.

Robert Hendrickson and I created Algaecompetition.com, which is a world collaborator. I hope you all go to Algaecompetition.com to see some extraordinary pictures of algae landscapes, production systems and great algae foods. Here are some examples of some of the landscapes from the algae competition. Open-source collaboratory, so everything is shared here. Here’s some micro farms. These are algae farms, spirulina farms, around the world, and there are a couple of neat videos on Algae Competition.

Let’s leave a fabulous legacy for our children, give them food security, healthy foods, affordable foods with abundant natural resources. Let’s practice abundance and leave our world better than we found it. That’s the value proposition. Thank you very much.

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The above transcript provided by Landmark Associates.