ARPA-Ag: America Needs a Manhattan Project for Food Security
Congress will pass a new Farm Bill and USDA budget in September, let's put breakthrough ag tech on the wish list.
With the release of Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer biopic, we are reminded of the ever-present existential risk of nuclear conflict. But there is another category of insidious risks that are begging for the spotlight: food security and biosecurity, both inherently tied to our increasingly fragile agricultural system. Oppenheimer follows the titular physicist, J. Robert Oppenheimer, “father of the atomic bomb” as he earns his moniker during the Manhattan Project in the 1940s. His story mirrors that of another consequential scientist, Normal Borlaug, who became the “father of the Green Revolution” for his breakthroughs in agricultural yields twenty years later. These men simultaneously provide cautionary tales and models for radical change in dire times.
Oppenheimer’s invention of nuclear weapons is credited with ending the Second World War, at the cost of thousands of Japanese civilians and sparking the Cold War. Borlaug’s revolution in agronomics—including crop genetics, controlled irrigation, and pesticides—is credited with saving over a billion people from starvation during a global population boom, at the cost of creating a more fragile agricultural system. That system is finally at a breaking point: America is in desperate need of a “Manhattan Project for Food” or at least a project on a similar scale and structure, though with safeguards against its weaponization.
The risk of mass hunger in the developed world is not gone. We need only look back a generation or two to the American Dust Bowl or Irish Potato Famine, both of which were the result of bad agricultural policy allowing catastrophic crop failure. Though crop yields did drastically improve since, the risk of system failure has worsened. Our current agricultural system is a stool built on three legs: monocultures of row crops, chemical fertilizers and pesticides, and intensive animal agriculture. In other words: the vast majority of US agricultural resources are devoted to growing chemically-dependent, genetically-identical corn and soy to feed to chicken, cows, and fish. Come to the Midwest and you’ll find fields collectively the size of California for growing corn and soy for animal feed. This system is cost-efficient, but is not resilient, sustainable, or safe. Any of the stool legs are susceptible to disruption by disease, energy cost spikes, supply shocks, and climate change. Bird flu drove up egg prices over 200% last year. The Ukraine War doubled global fertilizer prices. COVID-19 ravaged slaughterhouse workers causing meat shortages. Georgia will produce no peaches this year due to the weather. Rising grain prices are a portent of war. Foodborne illness and the risk of antibiotic resistant zoonotic epidemics silently menace humanity while livestock farming drives freshwater shortages in the West. These are just a few examples; the writing is on the wall.
Feeding 10 billion people by 2050 is possible, but only through new breakthroughs in agriculture like alternative proteins, regenerative agriculture, or vertical farming, and not through more of the status quo. Such breakthroughs historically happen mostly outside of the echo chambers of bureaucracy or corporate self-interest. If we’d asked Boeing how to win WWII, they probably would have said “buy more airplanes”. Innovation happens best in institutions dedicated to it, such as startups, universities, and government labs such as Oppeheimer’s Los Alamos Laboratory or Borlaug’s “Office of Special Studies” in Mexico.
So, let’s call for a “Manhattan Project for Food” to disrupt agriculture, again. It could be modeled after DARPA, the Department of Defense’s (DOD) wildly successful tech innovation lab founded in 1958, which played a role in the invention of the Internet, GPS, personal computers, and drones. In 2009, owing to DARPA’s success, the US launched ARPA-E, the Department of Energy’s (DOE) long-term R&D program. In 2022, the Biden Administration created ARPA-H within the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to transform medicine. In 2023, the budgets of DARPA, ARPA-E, and ARPA-H are about $4B, $0.5B, and $1.5B, respectively. The Department of Agriculture (USDA) has a similar budget for scientific research in 2023, with $2B for its internal R&D via the Agricultural Research Service (ARS) and another $2B for grantmaking via the National Institute of Food & Agriculture (NIFA). The USDA has also launched a $3B “Climate-Smart Commodities” grantmaking program.
This makes it sound like there is plenty of money in agricultural research already (though public agriculture R&D spending has been falling steadily for the past 20 years). However, looking at the 14 major grantee’s of the “Climate-Smart Commodities” program tells the story: it’s the three-legged stool again. The funding is going predominantly to large agribusinesses to marginally improve their practices with supply chain software, financial intermediaries, cover cropping, and the like. It’s a hammer begging for nails. The creativity of the USDA’s research and grantmaking is constrained by regulatory capture, red tape, and its stated mission to support the incumbent industry (like the US Dairy Export Council that of which current USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack was formerly CEO). Just last week, four members of the House of Representatives introduced shamelessly-pandering amendments to the proposed 2024 USDA budget that would ban funding for alternative protein research.
One attempt to create such an organization, called AGARDA, was designed by USDA per the 2018 Farm Bill but was ultimately not funded by Congress. That was a massive missed opportunity.
We need to support disruptive technologies with massive potential for upside, even if there is a risk they won’t work or will work imperfectly, like the early days of the Internet. There are so many exciting opportunities to radically improve food and biosecurity: cellular agriculture of treeless chocolate or cow-less burgers, living biofertilizers, year-round urban vertical farming, automated farm robotics, ultra-healthy algae proteins, mushroom mycelium meats, syntropic agroforest permacultures, a “second domestication” of microbes, and novel crops like Kernza perennial grain, to name a few.
So many of these technologies struggle for resources, failing in the infamous “valley of death” between fundamental university research and commercialization. Take cell-cultivated meat, a promising but nascent concept to “brew” meat cells in steel tanks. The first cell-cultivated meat products were just approved as safe for consumption by the USDA and FDA in June, but needs serious investment in technology and infrastructure to scale. That endeavor has been almost entirely privately funded by venture capital funds, which are rapidly drying up in the tight capital markets and which were never designed to finance capital intensive industry. The federal government has provided nearly the bare minimum of support to cell-cultivated meat—under $14M in grants to University of California and Tufts University Labs. Meanwhile, China’s central agricultural planning document has explicitly called for cell-cultivated meat. And when the Chinese government embraces an industry, it devotes tremendous resources. In 2022 alone, China invested half a trillion dollars in green energy initiatives to cement its status as world solar energy leader.
It’s not too late for the US to become the leader in the next generation of agriculture and secure its food supply, but it must act soon—as soon as the current Farm Bill, the half-trillion agricultural bill currently being re-negotiated in Congress. Congress or the President should carve out a program for the next Oppenheimer or Borlaug. Perhaps it could be called “APRA-Ag”. We must approach modern challenges with courage and creativity, but also humility. We must remember the lessons of Oppenheimer; that some technologies inevitably change the world’s structure, that humanity can be incredibly clever, powerful, and sometimes cruel, and that ethical questions often resolve in shades of gray. However, inaction is not an option. Let’s take a model that works and apply it to creating a new agricultural system that is safe, sustainable, and resilient by design. Let’s call for a “Manhattan Project for Food”.
Hi, this is the 10th edition of Fifth Industrial, a blog scouting emerging environmental biotechnologies. See the posts on plant cell culture, cellular agriculture, mycelium materials, synthetic silk, microbiomics, deep space food, alt cheese, alt protein CPG, and biophilia.