Karsten Temme

This jar contains a few ounces of soil, but what you can't see is that it's teeming with life.

The microbes inside are poised to become farmers' greatest tool and transform how we feed humanity.

I'm Karsten Temme, founder of PivotBio, and I have dedicated my career to studying these microbes.

They can and will revolutionize agriculture.

So from the plow to the grain combine, humans have invented tools to grow more on the same amount of land.

Fertilizer is the greatest of these, all those nutrients that a plant combines with sunlight to grow.

Here's an example.

In the 1950s, American farmers produced 2,600 kilos of corn per hectare.

Today, there are yield competitions where the winners can generate more than 32,000 kilos on the same amount of land, in a large part because of the fertilizers they can use to fuel that crop.

It's just amazing.

But for all the good it does, fertilizer is an inelegant solution.

Last year, farmers around the globe spent more than $200 billion on nitrogen fertilizers alone.

they spray it on their fields and then pray that roots can find it before it's lost.

Because if that fertilizer is lost, the crop can end up starved of its nutrients and stunted in its yields.

Those losses also translate to unintended consequences.

Some becomes nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas that's 265 times more potent than CO2.

Some seeps into our groundwater, and some runs into our rivers and oceans, creating more than 500 dead zones around the planet.

So there's got to be a better way.

And I'm here today to tell you that there is, and it's rooted in biology.

You see, 78 percent of the air around us is nitrogen gas.