“This is the best time ever to be alive and to be in agriculture,” Lowell Catlett, Ph.D, an economist and futurist, told the lunch session at the North Carolina Biotechnology Center’s AgBiotech Summit 2016 in Chapel Hill Tuesday.

It was a refrain Catlett repeated often as he traced how agricultural science has met the challenges of feeding the world’s ballooning population and how it will continue to do so.

Catlett retired in July 2015 from New Mexico State University as an award-winning regents professor in agricultural economics and agricultural business and extension economics and the dean and chief administrative officer of the College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences.

“The past is prologue.” He explained, quoting Shakespeare. “If you want to understand the future, frame it in the past.”

Agricultural science has met the challenges that caused past gloom and doom attitudes toward the world’s ability to feed its billions and is helping combat carbon-influenced climate change, he said. Despite dire predictions of the past, “The world’s economy did not go to hell.”

In 2014, the world’s economic output was the largest ever at more than $72 trillion, up $2 trillion from the previous year, he said, citing an article in New York magazine. At the same time, the report noted, “For the first time since records were kept, carbon emissions went down.”

Why? In part, he said, because, “For 21 years in a row, the U.S. planted more trees by number and by acre than we harvested. Those trees sure helped, don’t you think?” The same was true in China, India and elsewhere. “In a carbon-rich world, who can help pull it out [of the environment]? Only agriculture.”

Prescription agriculture brings more precision

But not only by planting more trees than we harvest. “We now have prescription agriculture,” he said. “We farm each field by the linear inch now and plant it by the number of seeds it can support.” New advances will allow even more precision by planting both the best number and variety of seeds.

“In a prescription ag world, we can sequester up to eight times more carbon than nature does on its own. Who owns a carbon-rich world? Agriculture.”

The Australians gave us a model on how to pay for it, he noted. “These plants clean up so much carbon, pay the farmers. Get ready, because ag is at the forefront in this world,” he said.

Back in 1970, he noted, a car sitting dead in a parking lot emitted more harmful things into the atmosphere than the average car going 65 miles an hour today. Lost gas caps and emissions from other parts of that parked car were responsible. In one of many humorous asides, he said, “If you drive a foreign car like I do, one of the first jokes you hear is, ‘Why can’t the UK make good TVs? They can’t figure out how to make them drip oil.’”

A history of hunger, a future of hope

In the 1970s, the world could not provide the average daily 2,400 calories for its then-3.6 billion population, and that prompted futurists into gloomy forecasts. In most of Europe at the time, 20 percent of the population couldn’t get enough calories daily to get out of bed and work.

“To the rescue came ag bio,” he said, with its mechanical and chemical revolutions. As economies grew, people escaped the “nutritional trap,” which gave them the ability to become even more prosperous. “We did our job in agriculture. Now, instead of not being able to provide 2,450 daily calories, we can provide 2,900 to the world’s population,” he said.

“The world is getting wealthier and better-fed. What happens to the pressure on the healthcare system? People get bigger and healthier.”

Also, he said, recently the Economist magazine had a rare positive cover statement pointing out that the number of people living in poverty dropped from 2 billion 10 years ago to 750 million now. “That’s still too many but it’s the fastest drop in history,” Catlett said, considering that in 1947 half the world’s population was near starvation.

If we hadn’t gone through the “green revolution” of ag biotechnology, we would need 3 billion hectares of land to produce the food to feed the people we have now. That would require all the arable land in the U.S., China and other countries.

Population, prosperity require protein

Prosperity creates its own problems, though. More money makes people change their diet. “The first thing they do is add meat protein. So to meet a projected population increase to 9 billion, we need a 50 percent increase in meat protein.

“It won’t come from pastoral agriculture,” he said. “The best we can come up with using pastoral ag is 20 percent of that, and it’s not going to contribute more with the best use of technology we know today.”

Instead, it will come from intensive animal ag with the most efficient use of feed and healthcare options.

“We live in a fabulous, unbelievable time,” he said, and ag biotech helped create it. “How many craft breweries did we have in 1970? None. Craft distilleries? One in North Carolina now makes 90-proof organic vodka and the producer sells all it can make.”

In the future — one already evolving, the Internet of things is one of several technologies that will change things in ag biotech further, he said. “In 2015 there were 5 quintillion transistors in things other than computers.” How much is that?

A quintillion is a million trillion. If you taped dollar bills together, 5 quintillion would create a wall around the earth 8,000 feet high, he said.

And 99.9 percent of all “things” are not connected to the internet yet.

In healthcare, telemedicine and hospital beds at home are reducing costs.

Gene engines are going to “rapidly profile and do things we never thought possible. Do your own DNA. Scan every food item for prescription foods. Get ready. Ag owns healthcare, too.”

Other technologies coming down the pike include advanced robots, and 3D printing of organs.

Get ready for the revolution, he said, repeating his refrain, “It’s the best time ever to be alive and be in agriculture.”

(C) N.C. Bioctechnology Center