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| Best of NAMA 2026 |
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PIVOT BIO CEO ON NEW DIRECTION FARM BILL NEEDS TO TAKE
Jul. 25, 2023
by Karsten Temme, CEO and cofounder of Pivot Bio as it appeared in Agri-Pulse
A lot has changed since President Trump signed the last Farm Bill into law. Our food system survived a global pandemic but remains strained by global unrest and uncertain input costs. A growing population, rising pressure on natural resources, and unpredictable weather mean farmers increasingly find themselves navigating extreme and recurring threats to their businesses.
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| Karsten Temme |
Many of agriculture's legacy tools and practices were not designed with these conditions in mind and no longer meet the needs of a rapidly changing world. However, the past five years have also seen the development and deployment of a new generation of innovative on-farm solutions that can deliver value on multiple levels and evolve quickly to meet these changing needs.
There is a growing understanding and belief that we need to look beyond simply the amount of food grown on an individual acre of land when assessing the effectiveness of on-farm practices.
New solutions offer something that existing polluting technologies cannot: the ability to continuously evolve to deliver value on multiple levels while maintaining or boosting yields.
Many farmers are now evaluating the effectiveness of on-farm tools and practices based on their ability to maintain yields and improve profitability, but also on their ability to actively build the soil health needed to ensure long-term productivity, improve plant uptake of critical nutrients, reduce nutrient runoff and more.
The Farm Bill is a critical opportunity to further unlock innovation, making that expanded value proposition more widely available to farmers to achieve the bipartisan goal of bringing stability and security to our global food system.
Take nitrogen as one example. Synthetic nitrogen fertilizers do only one thing - support yields - and the tradeoffs are enormous. Each year, synthetic fertilizers become less accessible and more problematic for farmers, while the industry continues to add new pollution to the natural world.
To read the entire Op-Ed click here.
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