Tripling of population
In my lifetime the world’s population has increased more than threefold (actually 3.47), and all those mouths have to be fed.
We have seen the massive increase in agricultural productivity—the Green Revolution—pioneered by Norman Borlaug and now often criticised as chemical industrial agriculture.
This has been highly successful from a simple criterion of volume of energy food produced. We are producing enough energy food to feed some thirteen billion people if it were equitably distributed. That is a social problem, not a technical or resource problem. That’s an increase of 4.5 times in my lifetime—spectacular.
Energy
How does this work? We need plants. Plants take carbon dioxide from the air and water from the soil and use the sun’s energy to make carbohydrates (while releasing oxygen). We can then eat these plants (or animals that eat these plants), burning the carbohydrates to release energy to power our bodies while releasing carbon dioxide and water back to the atmosphere as wastes.
Are there any problems? We are not short of sunlight. Enough sunlight falls on the earth in one hour to provide enough energy to power all humans on earth for the rest of the year.
Energy is not a problem.
Of course, to use that energy we have to make things to harness it. In my lifetime I have watched a spectacular expansion of our technologies. If you think that a 4.5 times increase in energy food is spectacular, it is nothing in comparison with our ability to make “stuff”.
With the digital revolution, automation, artificial intelligence, robots and so on, we would need to measure the increase in the tens. Labour used to mean manual labour. Now it often means sitting in front of a computer screen telling machines what to do.
Again, the wealth created is not equitably distributed, which is a social—not a technical or resource—problem. But most people are enjoying a better life, which we hope will continue into the future.
Focus on the real problem
Let us not waste our mental energies focusing on problems that are not on the critical path. Instead, we should hone in on the really serious issue. That issue is not energy, vitamins, or minerals as you might expect, but trillions of bugs. (I use the common word “bug” rather than the more technically correct term “microbiology” for clarity and emphasis.)
I don’t mean COVID—that is bad, but there is worse: the lack of well-being of the good bugs on which all our lives depend.
Bugs unfortunately hired the wrong PR company with disastrous consequences. Their public image is that bugs should be killed at all costs. That image could be the biggest hazard facing humanity.
Bugs
Bugs are simply everywhere. Clean any surface with the most powerful antiseptic until not a single bug is left alive, and within an hour the surface will be repopulated.
We are totally dependent on bugs. There may be a few dangerous ones, but the vast majority are either neutral, beneficial, or—more often—essential for our survival.
Whether we like it or not, the future of humanity lies with the bugs.
Evolution
To understand bugs we have to study evolution.
People often paraphrased Charles Darwin as “survival of the fittest”. That is not what he said, and it is not really true. A better phrase might be “survival of the randiest”. It does not matter how strong or swift a species is; it will only survive if it can breed and propagate—how fast and ferocious is a cane toad?
Bugs were the first living creatures on earth. No other creatures could exist without the work of the bugs. It started with bugs breaking down rocks to form the first soils; we can still see this today with lichens and mosses.
The process was incredibly slow, taking a billion years or so because it needed energy and the early bugs did not have an efficient way of harnessing energy. But eventually they made just enough soil for plants to grow.
The arrival of plants
Everything changed with the arrival of plants, which could harness the sun’s energy to produce sugars. They exude these sugars from their roots into the soil to feed biology—particularly bacteria and fungi—in the soil, which in turn feed the plants. This created the greatest deal of all time: the synergistic relationship between plants and soil biology, on which we still depend for our food today.
We are destroying our soil at an unsustainable rate. We need the bugs to regenerate the soil. Bugs are very fussy about water, and we are exhausting many of our aquifers, which have accumulated over thousands of years.
Our private bugs
We, like most animals, also have a similar synergistic relationship with our own personal bugs. They are everywhere on and in us, particularly in our guts, which do much more than help us digest our food.
For a long time, guts and their bugs were considered boring by microbiologists. Then along came DNA sequencing, which allowed them to study the trillions of cells and thousands of species that make up our guts.
Researchers discovered that each individual cell was communicating with its neighbours. This got me really excited because I realised we were looking at a supercomputer inside us taking critical decisions about how we were operating.
I was trained as an engineer but have spent much of my life writing code, and here was a computer which was the intelligent control system for our body. That is a really big idea, but unfortunately I could not find the code—let alone how it worked. However, I knew enough about how code works to make a pretty good guess.
Diabetes
I had a particular interest in diabetes. My wife is a medical doctor and diabetic—which should not happen, but did. Diabetes is the world’s fastest growing disease, affecting millions of people across the globe. It is easy enough to find out that diabetes is caused by fat in the pancreas shutting down insulin production and reducing the effectiveness of the remaining insulin in the rest of the body.
I could read about hormones like ghrelin and leptin, which control our appetite and whether we store fat or not, but what was controlling the release of these hormones?
Pooh parties
Then there were those experiments with faecal transplants where, simply by going along to a trendy inner-city “pooh swapping party”, you could swap pooh and make yourself skinny or fat according to your choice.
I was never invited to any of these parties, but I did learn of research into the gut biology of hunter-gatherer tribes and people living in the so-called blue zones, and found that they have a far healthier gut biome than most of us. Their gut biology changed from season to season as their diet changed.
This is clear proof that you can change your gut biology simply through diet.
It all starts in the soil
The obvious thing to look for is the difference between the type of plants they were eating and the plants we eat in modern society. While they were eating a much wider spectrum of plant species than us, what was really apparent was the difference in the soils—with their much higher levels of both micro and macro soil biology.
We may not know the exact pathway from the soil to our gut biology, but it is there.
Growing up and growing old
Babies are born weighing a couple of kilograms and will increase their mass by a factor of between thirty and fifty times. But all that time our body parts are ageing or wearing out. This varies from organ to organ, but we can oversimplify and say every two or three months we effectively have a new body.
This extra mass is made from very complex chemicals which must originally come from our food. Many of these are made in our guts by processing trace minerals.
The critical list
Our gut does three critical jobs:
- controls our appetite so we have enough energy but don’t overeat,
- manufactures the complex chemicals we need to replace our body parts as they age,
- hosts much of our immune system to protect us from infection.
Human survival depends on this synergistic relationship between us and our bugs, and sad to say our modern food system is damaging this relationship.
Modern chemical industrial agriculture is also destroying the soil biology that actually makes soil.
For our health today—and the food supply for our grandkids and their grandkids—modifying the way we grow our food is at the top of humanity’s “must do” list.
Innovation
I have spent my life in innovation. I was selected as one of the top one hundred innovators for my pioneering work on computer-aided engineering and later pioneered wicking beds as a way of saving water. It is natural that I should see resolving our food crisis as my next major challenge.
I understand the process of innovation. It is not sitting in an armchair waiting for some magic idea to appear out of the blue. There are four distinct phases, each one getting progressively more difficult.
The first stage is easy: studying everything that has been done before. In the days of the internet this is much easier and, in my case with food, meant travelling to remote places that still practise traditional agriculture—really quite pleasant (as long as you can handle rural loos).
The second stage is the thinking stage, trying to get all this information into some form of perspective. With a topic like food and diet, where there seem so many totally opposed views, this can be challenging, but hopefully leads to the experimentation phase.
The third phase is experimentation to test whether the ideas actually work in practice. They rarely do at first, so an ongoing cycle of failures and retries is needed. A bit of obstinacy is an essential requirement for an innovator.
The final stage is by far the most difficult and depressing: persuading other people—often saturated with vested interests or outdated paradigms—to adopt the new thinking and technology.
This is where we are now.
The Gbiota technology
The aim of the Gbiota technology is to grow plants which are natural pre and probiotics, providing our bodies with the biology we need and the food to feed those bugs, as well as essential minerals.
The answer is in front of us. Humans have been collecting or growing food in a sustainable way for hundreds of thousands of years—we already know the answers.
The challenge is speed and scale. It is easy to have a sustainable food system when there are just a few million people on earth, but doing it fast enough to feed the current eight billion—and growing—is the challenge.
This stage three of the innovation process (proving the technology) is solved. It is simple, people are already using it, and it works.
Of course, there are many scientific questions still to resolve, but these are typically resolved once the technology is proven practical and beneficial. The steam engine did not appear because Carnot discovered thermodynamic cycles; Carnot did his work because steam engines worked and were useful.
We now have to move on to stage four of the innovation process: persuading people they should be feeding their gut and head brains with Gbiota food. But first, let’s look at how Gbiota beds work.
How Gbiota beds work
The inputs for the Gbiota system are waste food and organics, manure, and minerals—particularly trace minerals which are essential for human health but which plants either do not need or only need in small amounts. There is nothing radically new about these inputs.
Then we need the real workers. I don’t mean the humans that work the system; I mean the bugs, worms, and creatures of the soil which do the real work. These may be added as inoculants but in many cases they will just appear if you make the conditions right, which brings me to water.
We are basically breeding beneficial biology in organic waste, manure, and minerals and then allowing them to move into our guts. We may be a bit light on some of the detailed pathways, but bugs seem to know a good thing when they find it.
Goldilocks water
The bugs and the worms and creatures of the soil are actually very fussy about water. It has to be not too wet and not too dry—just right. Goldilocks water.
Water is really funny stuff. It behaves like a normal fluid and will flow under pressure as we expect. But we don’t want a soil that is saturated; we want it just moist enough to keep the workers happy.
To do that, we have to exploit one of the peculiarities of water. Although it is nominally a fluid, it has the remarkable property of having tensile strength like a steel wire. That is how water rises to the top of tall trees—it is literally pulled up by tensile forces as the water evaporates from the leaves.
Making a Gbiota wicking bed
Full details of how to make a Gbiota bed are on my website www.gbiota.com. Go to the Videos, Blogs, and Growing sections in the menu.
Gbiota beds have a waterproof base; it could be clay, a plastic film, or a self-contained box.
Ag pipe (or pipes) runs along the base of the bed and then up and over a leaky soil dam before returning to a sump.
Initially, the base of the bed is filled with organic waste, then covered with soil.
A meshed basket (or just an augered hole) sits above the base pipe and is filled with a mix of food and organic waste, manure, and minerals (ecomix). Worms or biological inoculants may be added if needed, but if the conditions are right they may just appear (for example, sunflowers will attract mycorrhizal fungi which just appear).
Water is pumped from the sump and dispersed through the ecomix, forming a compost tea which floods the base of the bed. This tea wicks up into the body of the bed and any excess drains out through the leaky soil dam and back into the sump.
This partial flood-and-drain cycle expels stale air and sucks fresh air back into the bed so it is aerobic and the compost does not go putrid.
As the organic material in the bed decomposes and the surface drops, the ecomix in the basket is spread over the surface as a mulch and the basket refilled. This is a very effective composting system.
Plants are grown in the normal way except that no toxic chemicals are used that may harm the biology.
Pest damage can be minimised by “tipping”, just cutting the tips of shoots as in microgreens. See the video “Food for health tipping”: https://youtu.be/J1idf1tKO4k.
Labile compost
The ecomix should preferably be labile or young compost which is mature enough that any growth inhibitors, often found in plant roots, have decomposed.
Some manures, particularly human, may contain pathogens. These can still be used in a two-stage process. Gbiota beds using this suspect waste are used to grow specific plants (such as Easter cassia, Senna pendula) as green manure. These plants are then used as the organic input in the food production beds.
Innovation stage 4: changing the food paradigm
Profits versus community
The final stage of innovation is always the most difficult—particularly so in this case.
We are not trying to sell Cabbage A as opposed to Cabbage B. We are asking people to rethink what it is to live in a democratic and capitalist society, choosing a system in which short-term profits are replaced by considering what is best for society, both now and for future generations.
There is little doubt that the modern system of chemical industrial agriculture and supermarket distribution provides the cheapest and most convenient food supply. But is it really best for our health and the health of our grandkids? The answer is clearly no. How do we get people to make that paradigm shift and use the power of their wallets to support regenerative farmers?
Up-scaling
Gbiota beds are already being used by home growers who are happy to mess around in their backyards growing some food for their own use. This is simply not enough. We have to persuade the majority of people they should be eating Gbiota food.
The Anthropocene
We are now in the Anthropocene, when humans have the numbers, power, and technology to exterminate our species—or more likely make a lot of us very miserable. Just think of the problems we face today: COVID, global warming, autocratic rulers, refugees, food shortages, and chronic diseases like diabetes.
There is no doubt there are dangers ahead. Global warming receives the most publicity, but we are not all going to fry to death. There is an even bigger danger: if we don’t manage our soil, water, and bugs we simply won’t have the right type of food to maintain a healthy population.
Smart and cooperative
Humans are smart and generally cooperative—traits that have enabled us to become the most dominant creature on earth, by far. We may have innovation and technology, but these need to benefit the community as a whole and not just a few already wealthy individuals and corporations.
We are not allowing our natural willingness to cooperate to shine through and are instead clinging to last century’s economic philosophies that treat profit as the sole criterion for running a business, together with a relaxed attitude to the neo-monopolies that currently dominate our global economic system.
The massive and very clever advertising by the food industry may have convinced much of the population that modern food is healthy and that there is no problem. But if our grandkids and their grandkids are going to be fit and healthy from eating the right sort of food, we have to change that paradigm.
Bugs, soil, and water
We need to change the way we manage bugs, soil, and water.
If we mismanage these, then our grandkids and their grandkids will suffer. But this is not just a future problem. Failure to feed our gut brains means they no longer properly control our appetite, so we overeat and are prone to diabetes—the most rapidly growing disease—and compromise our immune system, making us more susceptible to infections. That is not good in the middle of a pandemic. This is totally avoidable if we understand the issues and have an action plan.
We have allies
We already have many home growers using Gbiota beds. We know they work, change gut biology, and reduce food cravings. We know that soil biology is aerobic and gut biology is anaerobic, so we assume that some of the anaerobic biology is moving from the guts of soil animals, particularly worms. We certainly need more research to understand the pathways.
We assume that having a healthy gut with essential minerals will lead to a longer and healthier life. We have no way of proving that, in the strict scientific sense, by conducting a gold-standard trial with a control group deliberately kept on a diet lacking the biology and minerals we believe are essential. Try getting volunteers for that, let alone getting it through an ethics committee.
We do not live in a perfect world with perfect knowledge and are forced to make decisions based on the best available evidence—even if far from perfect. COVID has taught us that, providing some valuable lessons.
Clearly, the right decision is to educate people about the importance of gut biology and trace minerals and hope they take the right decisions free from commercial pressure.
Regenerative agriculture
We do have one major factor on our side: the widespread understanding of the need to practise regenerative agriculture, of which Gbiota beds are a prime example.
Production capacity is not the problem. There are thousands of farmers practising regenerative agriculture who are perfectly capable of installing and operating Gbiota beds.
One issue with the Gbiota system is persuading people to eat food grown in a process dominated by recycling waste, manure, bugs, and worm poo. People have been indoctrinated to think food should be clean and sterile, and some seem to prefer getting fat, sick, and diabetic rather than eating the food we evolved to eat.
The wonderful world of the web
The modern food industry spends billions of dollars on advertising to persuade us that their food is healthy. It is a reality that no one—even governments—can afford to compete against this massive spending power.
The obvious solution is the web—but the web is not what it used to be. Once one of the greatest equalising forces on the globe, it has degenerated into a home for manipulative advertising. Clever and effective, but it has created a feeling of total suspicion and saturation which leaves people resistant even to reasonable arguments.
This is not my area of expertise, but it is impossible to avoid noticing the rise of influencers. It seems that people want contact with a real person they hope they can trust.
Maybe a global network of food influencers is part of the answer.
All the scientists with their arrays of carefully checked facts had little impact on governments to take effective action on climate change. I can only marvel at the impact of a tiny schoolgirl from Sweden. I hope that somewhere out there is a “Greta Foodberg”.
Or maybe it is something totally different—a group of “grumpy grannies” who feel it is their role in life to protect their grandkids from manipulation.
If you can relate to this, drop me an email.
Read Community Supported Agriculture
Implementing the Gbiota project: actionplan8june21
Community Supported Agriculture and co-ops: csa11june21
The battle of the bugs: battle
