Planting a seed for the future
- Shaun Smillie
A chemical engineer intends to revolutionise the nature of agriculture.
For thousands of years humans have farmed and manipulated a handful of crops that now dominate the agricultural landscape and feed the majority of the planet’s population.
Through this evolution has emerged monoculture agriculture, where a single crop is grown year after year – most of them under the strict control of large international companies who manage access to the seeds and fertilisers. While monoculture agriculture is profitable and for the moment highly productive, the effect it has on the environment means that it is unsustainable.
To continue to feed the world’s population and even provide new energy sources, we need a new agricultural revolution, believes Dr Shehzaad Kauchali. This revolution will be built on plant species which were ignored by our ancestors thousands of years ago.
Breaching the silos
Kauchali supervises the Master’s programme in Clean Energy and Sustainable Technologies in the Wits School of Chemical and Metallurgical Engineering, so why is he calling for an agricultural revolution?
“I'm a chemical engineer sitting in an engineering department trying to solve the energy problem, but I came to realise that we may be able to design a solution that can satisfy most of our needs – including food, energy and water security which are all interconnected – at the same time as conserving the environment,” he explains.
Kauchali is calling for a move to replace monoculture with perennial polyculture farming using a variety of perennial crop species to restore ecosystems and enhance biodiversity.
On a knife edge
Perennial plants, whose lifecycles extend over several years, are more resilient than annual monoculture crops and because they are hardier, they are more likely to deal with the growing threat of climate change.
In South Africa, we are already facing serious agricultural challenges. The country is currently losing arable land to erosion and drought and climate change threatens to collapse the nation’s agricultural industry in the not too distant future.
Using the Lengau supercomputer at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research's (CSIR) Centre for High Performance Computing, Professor Francois Engelbrecht from the Wits Global Change Institute has identified a tipping point – an event that will cause irreversible changes to South Africa’s climate system. This tipping point would be the collapse of the maize industry caused by a series of prolonged droughts that may occur over the next two decades.
Back to the future
Drought resistant perennial crops would fare better during these periods of water scarcity and across the globe researchers are looking for these plants and working on creating hybrid perennial crop species.
“What they are trying to do is find a distant cousin perennial and then go into a hybridisation programme,” explains Kauchali.
One such crop scientists are working on is Kernza, a relative of wheat that has a deep root system, which can be used for baking, cooking and beer brewing. In South Africa, sorghum is a candidate crop because it is drought resistant and has a long agricultural history.
The problem is that for now, many of these perennial plants don't have the yields of annual crops. However, they can help power the future through the production of oil and biodiesel and also act as carbon-sinks and restore biodiversity to marginal, non-arable land.
Fields of castor beans spanning 130 kilometres across – approximately the distance between Johannesburg and eMalahleni, in Mpumalanga - could produce enough biodiesel to power Eskom’s open cycle gas turbines which can consume as much as nine million litres of diesel a day, believes Kauchali.
“Imagine how finding a perennial-hybridised version of castor that can grow on marginal lands, requiring less water, fertiliser and pesticides could change our lives,” says Kauchali.
Breaking monopolies
There is another advantage to the perennial polycultural revolution and that is the restoration of autonomy to farmers who would no longer be beholden to the global seed monopolies which require them not only to repeatedly purchase the seeds of patented annual crop varieties, but also fertilisers and pesticides.
Wes Jackson, a pioneer in the development of perennial grains, believed it would take half a century for the world to adopt this new way of farming, but it could take less time than that, according to Kauchali – perhaps only a decade or two – if AI is used, the government gets behind it and the necessary funding is found.
However the biggest obstacle could be unwiring a mindset that has evolved over millennia and weaning us off crops that are now harming ecosystems.
“We need to convince farmers that there is a better way of doing things,” says Kauchali.
- Shaun Smillie is a freelance writer.
- This article first appeared in?Curiosity,?a research magazine produced by?Wits Communications?and the?Research Office.
- Read more in the 19th issue, themed #Disruption, which explores the crises, tech, research, and people shaking up our world in 2025.