The Haber-Bosch process, which converts atmospheric nitrogen to make ammonia fertilizer, revolutionized agriculture and helped feed the world's growing population, but it also created huge environmental problems. It is one of the most energy-intensive chemical processes in the world, responsible for 1-2 percent of global energy consumption. It also releases nitrous oxide, a potent greenhouse gas that harms the ozone layer. Excess nitrogen also routinely runs off farms into waterways, harming marine life and polluting groundwater. In place of synthetic fertilizer, Pivot Bio has engineered nitrogen-producing microbes to make farming more sustainable. The company, which was co-founded by Professor Chris Voigt, Karsten Temme, and Alvin Tamsir, has engineered its microbes to grow on plant roots, where they feed on the root's sugars and precisely deliver nitrogen in return. 'The way we have delivered nutrients to support plant growth historically is fertilizer, but that's an inefficient way to get all the nutrients you need,' says Temme, Pivot's chief innovation officer. 'We have the ability now to help farmers be more efficient and productive with microbes.'...

As the firm noted in an announcement post published Tuesday, plants are incredibly efficient and impressive systems. 'Plants are solar powered, carbon negative, self-assembling machines that feed on sunlight and water,' Heritable wrote. Yet agriculture puts a massive strain on the planet and its resources, accounting for around 25% of anthropogenic greenhouse emissions. It's the planet's largest consumer of groundwater and can lead to soil erosion and water pollution via pesticides, fertilizers, and other chemicals. The newly independent startup is approaching these global issues by doing what Google does best: analyzing massive datasets through artificial intelligence and machine learning. Data collection is the easy part, relatively speaking. The hard part is transforming all that data into actionable instructions for growers to help bring the 12,000-year-old industry into the 21st century. Heritable Architecture's seeds were planted by founder and CEO, Brad Zamft. The physics PhD served as a program officer and fellow at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation before spending a year as the chief scientific officer at a venture-backed startup called TL Biolabs. Eight months later, in late 2018, Zamft joined Google X, quickly becoming the project lead of what would become Heritable....

Two years after President Abraham Lincoln created the Department of Agriculture in 1862, he nicknamed it 'the people's department' because half of all Americans lived on farms at that time. Today, fewer than 2% of Americans farm, but the Agriculture Department still touches people's lives in many ways. The modern U.S. Department of Agriculture is a sprawling bureaucracy with a US$231 billion annual budget. Although it is headquartered in Washington, D.C., about 90% of its employees work in field offices nationwide. Others serve in nearly 100 embassies around the world as part of the Foreign Agriculture Service, promoting U.S. food and farm products. The most common misconception about the USDA is that it's mainly focused on supporting farmers and ranchers and conserving agricultural land. These are critical missions, but as a former deputy secretary of agriculture, I can attest that they represent only a small slice of what the department does. For example, nutrition assistance programs help tens of millions of people escape food insecurity annually. They consume 70% to 80% of the USDA's total annual budget, depending on the year, and include school meals, nutritional support for women, infants and children, and food benefits for low-income families. In contrast, only 13% of the agency's budget goes to farm, conservation and commodity programs....

After 200,000 years of hunting and gathering, a history-defining decision was made. Starting roughly 12,000 years ago, at least seven different groups of humans independently began to settle down and begin farming. In so doing, they planted the seeds for modern civilization. This is traditionally told as a straightforward story of human progress. After humans made the switch, population growth increased, spurring innovative and creative endeavors that our ancestors couldn't even imagine. One counterintuitive strain of thought has treated this decision as 'the worst mistake in the history of the human race,' as the popular author Jared Diamond once put it. The argument largely rests on research that shows our nomadic forebears were healthier and had more leisure time than those who chose to farm. Diamond, who wrote this article in 1987, when overpopulation concerns were rampant within the American environmental movement, argued that, 'forced to choose between limiting population or trying to increase food production, we chose the latter and ended up with starvation, warfare, and tyranny.'...