Homesteading on the Moon with Kevin Espiritu

20:38Imagine that same five-gallon bucket, and we'll actually bring in sprayers that will spray or mist in like a nebulized sort of level, like very small droplets of nutrient-rich water. And they'll mostly be sitting in air most of the time. So it's not that there's not water used. It's just that the roots aren't sitting in water. And I don't know off the top of my head, like, is that more efficient than hydroponics or not?

21:01Neil deGrasse Tyson:Are you nebulizing the leaves as well as the roots or just the roots? I think most people would just do the roots, but then there's this whole concept of like, what's called foliar feeding or feeding the leaves, where some things are uptaken by the leaves and used in certain ways. But of course the roots are like the most common way that things are being uptaken. Doesn't nebulizer sound like some weapon on Star Trek? I love it. Yep. I will nebulize you.

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26:37let's go back to you mentioned the the zucchini and uh i think zucchini and the vertical farming Is that just another way of saying this is a space saver? Because we've got the old traditional, it's flat land, it's acreage. This now we can stack and stack and stack and stack, and you don't have anywhere near the real estate that you would otherwise have. 100%. Yeah, I mean, the zucchini method I was using was just in soil, like with a little steak growing it up. But you're totally right. Like some of the, so instead of like, imagine you have your soil like this. That's one plane. Horizontal. Yeah, it's just one plane that you can grow on.

27:11And of course, when you're out in the Midwest farming soy, that's fine. You can just do that forever. But in Manhattan or in Brooklyn, if you're trying to grow, I don't know, a very high-end basil or something like that, that'd be really inefficient use of probably the most expensive real estate on earth, right? And so what they'll do is they'll create, usually it's like a hydroponic or aeroponic type system because then they don't have to deal with the soil. And they'll create little channels or little grids or some sort of way of growing it. And then they'll just stack those on top of one another.

27:39The problem then becomes the light. Like you're blocking off. How to get light in there. Yeah, exactly. What about yields? Because do you get the same amount of yield from the same amount of space vertically than you do horizontally? Or does it change? Well, you'd get more yield on like a per square foot basis because you've got the Z dimension, right? Or the Y dimension now that you're dealing with. We'll take the Z. Z is good. Yeah, we took Z better. X, Y, Z goes straight up.

28:06Neil deGrasse Tyson:We're good. Z's up. Okay, great. We're good. And then you've also got the density at which you can plant. I'll just go back to my house, for example. Let's say I'm growing peaches and citrus in my yard. If I'm a commercial peach grower, I'm growing those trees out to 15 feet wide, 15 feet tall, basically expressing their full genetic potential. So I can only space these trees maybe 15 feet apart or so. But here in my yard, I've got my trees four or five feet apart, and I'm doing a little more active pruning, a little more active management. And so my yield per square foot probably beats out the orchard, but it's just a trade-off.

28:44Yeah, Chuck, the way you posed the question, I think you meant what's the yield per plant?

28:49Neil deGrasse Tyson:Yes. But that's not the metric of measure here. Right. It's what's the yield per square foot. Right. And that makes sense. And that wins. No, that wins. All the time. If you add a dimension to something, you win. You're always going to win. You win. I mean, it's not like they wouldn't try to squeeze out more yield per plant too. Like let's say hydroponics is going to get you a little more efficient growing. like that's also going to happen. But they're, I mean, you're talking like pretty raised within margins, I would imagine on some of those setups. Like I know that these companies have raised like a bunch of money, you know?

29:14So they're going to do everything they can. Is this more intensive in terms of your management or anyone's management if you're vertically farming? For sure, yeah. I mean, otherwise you just let mother nature do her thing and you can sit back and go read a book or whatever it is. Yeah, totally. I mean, I always like to say like, well, people will say, I grew this or I can't grow this. And the way I think about it, at least, is the truth is no one's really ever grown a plant. As a gardener, what you're really doing is you're putting a plant in the environment in which it knows how to grow best.

29:46And so you're not growing it. Of course, it's growing itself. You just have to kind of cultivate that right environment. So in soil, yeah, it's a lot easier. Right. So looking at the nutrients, the one thing we always think of is going to need some sunlight or light. You mentioned in your balcony you had your own little grow lamp. Why is it that you've got some plants that will flourish with less and some just won't flourish unless they have 12 hours a day? Yeah, this one is kind of interesting. So take like an eggplant. That's like a classic summer crop. It loves a lot of sun. And then take something like maybe spinach, which it's a leafy green.

30:23It grows low to the ground. If you were to give it a lot of sun, the leaves might actually bleach and get damaged. And you think about it, it's like, well, they're both photosynthesizing. So wouldn't more light just equal better growth across the

30:36Neil deGrasse Tyson:spectrum? Naively, that's exactly what I would think. Right. And that's, I think really that's what I would think too. But when you think about it, like all these plants that we grow in a traditional garden, like even take a salsa garden, which we think of as a group of plants that make sense together. Like you got your jalapenos, you got your tomatoes, you got your peppers, your onions, whatever. From an evolutionary perspective though, these plants did not just like grow up as a salsa garden somewhere in the world. You know, we sort of cherry pick them from around the world in all these different environments where they adapted to.

31:05Neil deGrasse Tyson:But you have to grow tortilla chips too. Do you have a tortilla chip? Well, you can just grit that corn, baby. Just grow that corn, you know? No, I want it to come out as chips. Right. I want it as chips. We might need to go into GMOs for that. Little triangle leaves. Little triangular leaves that you can just pull off. Become chips. All right. So if you think about that, like take that spinach. I don't know where it's endemic to, but regardless, wherever it evolved, it was low in the canopy. It was low in the entire hierarchy of the plants around it. It was basically fighting for photons to photosynthesize with.

31:37Whereas a nice tall banana plant or something like that that's growing in the tropics, it has no problem with that. Of course, it can tolerate more. What ends up happening with a shade plant that gets too much sun, if you put it in the wrong spot, is what once was good, the light, actually starts producing... I forgot what it is in the plant. But basically, it starts producing too much of a certain compound that starts damaging the plant's ability to photosynthesize. So basically, too much of a good thing.

32:05Neil deGrasse Tyson:So what you're saying is, if the plant wanted to survive but didn't have much light, it evolves to use that much light. Right. And then it has less or more light than what it evolved to have that can't be good for the plant because it didn't evolve that way. Absolutely. And you see that even in some flowering plants, not even for consumption, but when you plant certain flowering plants that need what they'll say partial shade. That's where it grows best. I've seen them say that. They'll say a partial shade. And the reason is you end up kind of frying the plant if it's in the sun all day long. So tell me, switch over to LED lights.

32:42Neil deGrasse Tyson:Has this changed the response of the plants to the light? because the sun, at least what the sun gives off that gets through our atmosphere, includes some infrared, some ultraviolet, and the pure LED lighting systems we have today, you have the blue, you have the green, you have the red, the RGB, but it's not giving you infrared and it's not giving you ultraviolet. Whereas the sun has some of that reaching Earth surface. So are there plants that will not do as well under your LED grow lights? than they would out under the authentic sunlight? I mean, I wouldn't go as far to make a bold claim to say like all of them would do better under normal sunlight, but I kind of do think that's the case because there are studies that prove not only do plants use far red, so like above the 700 nanometer range.

33:35Neil deGrasse Tyson:Just to be clear, the 700 nanometers is like the accepted edge of the visible spectrum where we would identify it as red light. And you can have light energy beyond that. And we call it infrared, but your eye can't see it. Right. But of course, the animal kingdom and the plant kingdom, they have different sensors than we do. So we should not be defining what they care about and what they want. Don't tell me what I can see and what I can't see. I'm a plant. Yeah, I mean, yeah, you're right. The first sort of LEDs that came out back when I was growing cucumbers, Chuck, back in my old place, they came out and they were called like blurple lights, blue, purple, red, because basically whoever was designing them back then was like, well, plants mostly use light between 400 and 700 nanometers, kind of like the visible spectrum.

34:24So they'll use blue light for vegetative growth. They'll use red light to signal flowering and stuff like that. So whoever was designing the lights back then was like, well, let's just give them exactly these ranges, like 450 nanometers or 660 nanometers, whatever it is. And then these days, lights that are coming out LED or otherwise are trying to express, like put out more of that spectrum because it's been proven, like you said, Neil, like they're using light in the far red spectrum. They're even using green light, which we didn't know for like a century. Because, you know, you always hear like, well, plants are green because they reflect green and it's not entirely true.

34:59Neil deGrasse Tyson:Yeah, just to put some punctuation on that. So if we see a plant and it's green, it means it's sending green light back to you. And it's not using the green light, by and large, right? which is a fascinating, we think green as nature, green is the color it's rejecting. So what you're saying is not all plants are rejecting all green. Not all plants are rejecting all green. So if you take red and blue, just colloquially, those ranges, I think the plant is using somewhere between like 91 % and 95%, depending on which color it is. Green, you would think like, well, it's reflecting green, so it's using like 0 % or maybe 10%.

35:38It's still absorbing in the range of like 70 % to 80 % of green light. Are we talking mood lighting here for plants? Pretty much. Pretty much. Because we hear about plant stress. Are we now creating the right kind of light bath for specific plants? Are we at that point? Yes, yes. Should we also allow them to have a little Marvin Gaye while we're at it? Play him a little music, man. Why not? Now I know if he talks to his plants. Now I need to know if he talks to his plants. I don't. You know, I get it all the time. Like, do you talk to them? Do you name them? to get, I don't, I'm a little bit brutal to them sometimes.

36:15All right. Yeah. I mean, if you're going to eat them, there's no sense in like, you know, getting to know them. Serenading them. Right. Yeah. No.

36:23Neil deGrasse Tyson:So are you saying or implying that even though plants are green, they're not reflecting back all the green that they're receiving, they're keeping some of it. Yeah. I mean, that whole leaves, like normal plant leaves are absorbing maybe about 80 % of green light or so. So they're reflecting back a 20, which is pretty much what we're seeing. But the way it ended up working in the study that kind of turned everyone on their head, realizing that we actually do use green light with plants, is that it's penetrating deeper into the canopy. So like the red and the blue light is getting used up first, absorbed at a really high efficiency.

36:57The green light gets deeper into the leaf, gets lower into the canopy. So it is being used. It's just that it's not being used as efficiently.

37:04Neil deGrasse Tyson:Okay. All right. Again, plants just doing the best they can in this situation. They can do with what they got. Do with what you got. Plants are like black people. I don't have no money, but we're going to make the rent, baby. Don't you worry about it.

37:21All right, we hear about plants being able to adapt and survive in extreme conditions. I suppose it wouldn't be the same unless we asked you about growing plants in space and the extremes of the environments that would be encountered.

37:38Neil deGrasse Tyson:And before you answer that, can I tell you, when I was in high school, I grew a plant upside down. Was it Australian? Because I said to myself, well, does it really know which way gravity is? And does it really know which way the light is in advance? Because if I take a plant, turn it upside down, hold it with saran wrap, the soil, so it doesn't come out. And I have all my light at the bottom. From behind? From behind. That's correct. So the plant, it kept trying to go up, but the light kept it coming down. So it didn't grow in a straight way. It was like confused on its way in. What plant was it?

38:19Do you remember?

38:19Neil deGrasse Tyson:I have to look. I'm sure I kept the notes. And then were you growing it in like a chamber where the only light source was below it? It was the only light source. It was a box. It was a box. Oh, that is interesting. Because I'd grown peas upside down and I grew tomatoes upside down. The same thing happened, but my experiment was not one in which there was a controlled light source at the bottom. So it was just outside. But it did basically, gravity was pulling it down, and then it kept pulling itself back up towards the stronger light source. It was almost this weird stair-stepping type effect.

38:48Neil deGrasse Tyson:Nice. Yes. That's basically the results I got. And I got an A-plus on it, too. Oh, very nice. Did you mark your own word? No, just to be clear, in high school, you normally take biology, then chemistry, then physics. Right. But in my high school, I took physics first. And then I took chemistry. And I took biology as a senior with all of these freshmen. Right. So I was like the oldest kid in the biology class. Neil deGrasse Tyson, biology bully.

39:18All right, Kevin, we're going to throw you into space. Let's go back to space. Yeah, metaphorically. Are we going to just take what we do here on Earth and just say, yeah, we can do that in space? Or are we going to have to think a lot differently?

39:30Neil deGrasse Tyson:Because, Kevin, you know, we speak of the lunar surface. It's not soil. No. It's what the geologists call regolith, which is powderized rock created by micrometeorites that on Earth would be what? Burnt up in the atmosphere. Exactly, as a shooting star. Right. No such thing on the moon. Oh, right. And they pulverize the rock. And it's been doing that for a billion years. So all you have on the moon is rock soil. And as I understand - Rock soil. I'm sorry. So as I've come to understand it, the good earth is rich in microbes that the plant needs. So how are you going to grow something where you don't have the microbes or the fertilizer?

40:18Neil deGrasse Tyson:What are you going to do? I mean, I honestly think you just can't. Like, you're right. Bummer, dude. Okay, we're stuck on earth here. Go on. Regolith. Like that's basically dirt, right? And the difference between dirt and soil is dirt is soil. Soil is dirt plus the life that you talked about, the microbes, the fungi, the bacteria. And so if you can't do that on the moon, well, first of all, there's no oxygen. There's no atmosphere, right? You'd have to figure that out too. Well, if we're growing plants here on Earth. That's a side detail. I think we buried the lead here, guys. So if you're growing plants without soil here on Earth, we just replicate that kind of practice.

40:56I think you'd have to grow them hydroponically or aeroponically in like a pressurized chamber. And I think you'd have to use artificial light because what's the moon's like night cycle?

41:05Neil deGrasse Tyson:Moon's got light. No problem with light. Oh, moon. Sorry. Moon has a moon-thly cycle. So a day on the moon lasts a month. Yeah. So then you're in trouble because plants evolve for a 24-hour light cycle, right? And so you would need to supplement with light. They can't, they wouldn't survive for what, like 14 days of time? It's a 14 days in darkness. Right. Okay, so you have to like phase that somehow. Yeah. Well, just bring grow lamps. I mean, come on. I think you just got to bring grow lamps. I mean, you basically just have to replicate. Well, that's what they do in every sci-fi film. It's the, you know, the horticultural deck.

41:38Okay, yes! They all have the horticultural deck.

41:41Neil deGrasse Tyson:Thank you. But aren't we going to just take genetically modified plant material with us? Yeah. Why not? That has been built, constructed to grow in extremities to maybe deal with moont. I've learned a new word. A moon? Well, that's where the word month comes from. Yes. The moon. But let me tighten that question. So as far as I know, plants like carbon dioxide. So if we're on the moon and we're all exhaling carbon dioxide, why don't we just capture that and stick it in the - The chamber where it holds the plant. Where it holds the plant. Do we exhale enough carbon dioxide to serve plants? And then it's a cycle of life.

42:18Neil deGrasse Tyson:We exhale, they absorb our CO2, they give us the oxygen. Can that be sustained? In fact, let me ask another way. How much plant life do you need to satisfy your daily ingestion of oxygen? That is such a good question. I wish I knew. We want to know that, right? I wish I knew. I don't know it, but I think there's definitely an amount on a per-person basis. Is it one tree per person? That's a lot of, because a lot of trees on earth. I just learned there are 3 trillion trees on earth. I said, I don't believe that. I ran some math on it. It was like, yeah. 3 trillion? Yeah. Not for long. That's right.

42:57We'll be cutting them down. You know what else you could do on the moon? I just thought about it. You could go aquaponics. We talked about hydroponics and aeroponics. We didn't talk about aquaponics yet. You don't have the soil, so you don't have the nutrients. You need to input those nutrients synthetically. If you go aquaponics, though, you have fish in that water medium. Those fish excrete ammonia. that converts to nitrites and nitrates, which is used as nitrogen by the plant. So basically the fish become the fertilizer. So on the moon, you could feed the fish, the fish excrete, they feed the plants and you can eat the plants and the fish.

43:35Neil deGrasse Tyson:Wait, so the aqua refers to what in that context? Good question. I think just - Just the water. Yeah, but you just said hydroponics, the hydro referred to the water. That's probably why they made it aqua because they're like, you know, Aquaman talks to fish. Okay. I think that's actually scientifically why. Aquaman solved the data. That's the idea. Okay, so that's interesting. So you bring some fish with you. No, you've really got the circle of... Circle of lunch. Thank you, yeah. Okay, that's interesting. I don't think NASA's thought about that. No, it's a pretty cool idea. I wonder, however...

44:05Neil deGrasse Tyson:Water and weight. Everything is about weight. Wait, has a fish ever been brought to space? Do you guys know? I don't know, and I'd hate to be that fish because fish align themselves vertically because they're skinny and long, vertically because they know which way gravity is. Yes. in zero G. Oh, you're going to mess with that fish. That fish is going to be totally. Oh, man. It's hard enough when you pull them out of the water and they have to explain what happened back to their friends. That's why they all look surprised. With their eyes on the face. You ain't never seen a fish that doesn't look surprised.

44:34It's like, what?

44:41Neil deGrasse Tyson:So now you take a fish, not only out of water, you put them back in water in zero G. They'll be flopping. They wouldn't know which way. Yeah, they wouldn't know which way is up. There is no up. They wouldn't know which way is up. They don't know which way is up. But what you could do, this is all kind of pointless conversation because sci-fi people have figured this out forever. Right. You just rotate the spaceship. Rotate the spaceship. There's your gravity. There's your gravity, yeah. Okay. Okay. That's that. So Kevin, if they use your recipe for cucumbers on the moon, is there going to be a mutiny on the first moon colony?

45:14I'll cut you off right there, yes. It's going to be terrible.

45:17Neil deGrasse Tyson:Because you're making nasty cucumbers. I mean, I grew the worst cucumbers of maybe anyone's ever grown. They were yellow. They were deformed. Like, they had all these deficiencies. I still ate it, but, you know, it was bad. I mean, are we going to have to just, if we're interstellar travel, just come to the conclusion that, you know, flavor's something in the past? No, you get a flavor capsule. Flavor's just chemistry. Thank you. It's just a flavor thing attaching to your taste buds. Who cares what's delivering the flavor? So basically, flavors become a condiment. Yes. Oh, flavor as a condiment.

45:51Yeah. All right. Put some more flavor on it. Yeah, maybe you just grow like the most efficient vegetable you can grow and just flavor capsule it with, like grow potatoes and just flavor capsule it.

46:00Neil deGrasse Tyson:Oh, no, done. That's true. We're back to the potatoes. Back to poop potatoes. Always comes back to poop potatoes. So before, I want to take this into a sustainability question. And maybe the transition to that is, tell me about the plot of land that you experimented on where you fed yourself for 30 days and that was all the food you ate. So did you get your protein? Did you lose weight? Did you look pale and sickly? Did you look healthy? How much land and what was the mixture of fruit and vegetables that was on that land? Okay, let me lay this out for you guys. And were you the only one consuming that food?

46:38I have to tell you the set of rules I gave myself to start the challenge. So I came up with the idea, it was like February of 2019.

46:46Neil deGrasse Tyson:Love it. Brilliant idea. Love it. Right. I go, can I do this? And remember back then I was in a 15 by 30 foot gross space with like some raised beds and containers and stuff like that. So I gave myself that amount of space. And then I also utilize like one of my friends, little terraces. And I say, okay, I want 30, I'm giving myself 90 days of lead time. So by June, I'm going to start the challenge. So I have to survive from June 1st to June 30th off of everything I can either grow, fish, or forage for. Because I knew right away, just off the quick math, I was like, there's no way I can get enough calories out of this space for a man of my size.

47:21I think I needed 78 ,000 calories for the month.

47:24Neil deGrasse Tyson:What do you mean by fish? Use the fish as a verb. What do you mean? Like literally go fishing. Well, that's allowed? I allowed it in the challenge. If you can fish, then - No, but hold on, hold on, hold on. This is why, this is why. Because, okay, name a plant with a ton of protein. Well, you know, what's interesting - Legumes. What's interesting is that potatoes are like one fourth protein. The problem is they're a way higher percent water. So if you took the water out of potato, they have - You have a dense protein source? So it just, potatoes are just full of water. That's the problem. But otherwise, yeah, so - Well, you look at nuts for protein.

48:04Neil deGrasse Tyson:Yeah, so you didn't grow nuts. San Diego, that's a nut country, isn't it? I mean, but I had 90 days. So I can't grow a tree from scratch, right? So it had to be produced from that moment on, right? Oh, okay. Gotcha, gotcha. So here's where I go. I go, okay, I need 78 ,000 calories to live for 30 days and not lose weight. I even got a DEXA scan before just to see like what I was at, even my body comp to the point of losing muscle. And so I said, okay, well, I basically have to grow calories. I can't really worry about the macronutrients of it, protein, fat, carbs. I just need literally calories.

48:37And in 90 days, the only things you can do that are going to get you enough calories are going to be beans and potatoes. And so I maxed out on potatoes like crazy. I think I ended up - The starches. Yeah, yeah. It's like carbohydrate heavy. Beans have protein too. Yeah. But anyway, so I grew about 80, 100 pounds of potatoes and some amount of beans. I forgot what it was. Because the protein and fat, specifically fat, actually harder than protein to grow quickly. You think about plants with a lot of fat, you're thinking about like there's like a coconut or an avocado or something you can't grow those in 90 days and so i did allow myself to fish just because i was like i think i will seriously struggle nutritionally if i don't get enough fat in in san diego there's and actually along the whole um western coast of california there's a fish called the grunion and they'll do something called a grunion run and they'll they'll basically flop themselves like hundreds of thousands of them on the beach and you're allowed to go harvest them with your hands you can't use like tools And that was happening in June.

49:32So I was like, okay, I'm going to bank on the grunion run for my fat.

49:35Neil deGrasse Tyson:What kind of dumbass species is this to say, let me go on and flop around so people can take me, eat me? Life is too hard. I think it's one of those where like there's just so many, it doesn't matter kind of approaches. Yeah. Because there's like tens of thousands of them. And do they flop around only because when the tide pulls out? Or they just purposely do this? I think it's the full moons or something like that. Well, that would be at the tide. You get a strong tide. They beach. Yeah. Maybe they beach, yeah. Well, what happens is the females come up and like dig a hole and like lay their eggs in it.

50:06And then the males come up and drop their sperm on the hole. Yeah, exactly. Look at that. Always sex that is the end of a man. 100%. He's in sex. I scooped him up. So yeah, I mean, a huge part of my meals that month were what I called grunion potato pancakes, where I like mash the potatoes and put them in a pan and like put the fish in that and then just ate that. and that's pretty much what I ate the whole month. I ended up losing 13 pounds in 30 days and nine of the pounds, this is the part that made me so mad, nine of the pounds were muscle. I just ate my muscle away. Although I did make it to the end of the challenge.

50:45Basically what I learned is that you need way more time than that and honestly being fully self-sufficient on your own property is sort of a fool's errand. It's much better to have a community anyways. I grow this, you grow that, I get my eggs from you, that kind of thing. I mean, that's the way it was before we had our modern-day capitalist society. It was agrarian and trade. Totally. And about the system.

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54:24Take Cheers Restore after your last drink or before going to bed and wake up feeling at least 50 % better or your money back. For a limited time, our listeners are getting 20 % off their entire order by using code StarTalk at cheershealth.com. Just head to cheershealth.com and use code StarTalk for 20 % off. After you purchase, they will ask you where you heard about them. So please support our show and tell them that Chuck sent you. And by that, I mean StarTalk. Hey, this is Kevin the Sommelier and I support StarTalk on Patreon. You're listening to StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson.

55:10Are we just screwed when the apocalypse comes? We're just screwed, right?

55:15Neil deGrasse Tyson:Yeah, and what about the victory gardens that people had in the Second World War to show your solidarity with the rationing? So in apocalyptic Earth, you're one of the survivors, right? I would make it, yeah. I mean, you'd put me in your apocalypse crew, I think, because I could feed you. Oh, absolutely. Yeah, okay. Give us your address again. Where are you going to be? Yeah. Because, yeah, no, I mean, canned food can last essentially forever until at least the next civilization comes around. Right. But you can dry your grunions if you have a cool, damp basement and salt. Just hang them out, you know?

55:50Hang them out and dry them.

55:51Neil deGrasse Tyson:Yeah, back in the salt. Yeah, you need the salt. Okay, so tell me about sustainability going forward. With mega ag, what do you call it, farming? Big ag. Big ag. Big ag farming. Yeah. You know, that is the solution to our own problem, yet people are saying we shouldn't do that. It's feeding everyone. No longer is anyone saying one day we'll run out of food. That is gone. Whereas in our childhood, I don't know how old you are. I think we're older than you. In our childhood, that was a worry. The big fear with the population explosion would strip us of all of food on the planet. Very Malthusian thinking at the time, but science has cured that.

56:35Neil deGrasse Tyson:We can produce more food on less land with fewer farmers than ever before. So how should people think about this problem? Should we cheer the fact that everyone is being fed? Or should we lament the fact of what it's doing to the environment in order to accomplish this goal? Man, I think it has to be a both, right? I mean, you're right. We grow corn, soy, wheat across most of the Midwest of the USA. California grows like 80 % of the produce of the country. I did not know that. We grow such an incredible amount here. So Kevin, my whole life I've heard about topsoil, but I don't have any understanding of it, even as a scientist, because the seed grows up into the air, goes down with roots into the soil.

57:24Neil deGrasse Tyson:Who cares about the top three or four inches? Yeah, I mean, we should all care about the top three or four inches. The top three or four inches is basically where everything actually happens for the plant. So you're right, like the roots are down in the soil, right? And yes, sometimes those roots go pretty deep and they can mine for specific minerals or nutrients that they might need. But in contrast to like hydroponics, like we've been talking about, in the soil, there's basically what's called a soil food web. There's bacteria, there's fungi, there's insects. There's all sorts of creatures that are mobilizing the organic matter.

57:56Because think about like a forest floor. Things are going to fall from the forest. Animals are going to die. Insects are going to die or be consumed and defecate and all that kind of stuff. All of that material needs to be broken down to smaller and smaller particles to the point where it's effectively at the elemental level to be used by the plant roots. That's happening in a natural ecosystem by the environment in the topsoil. All of that is in that first three, four, six inches or something like that.

58:22Neil deGrasse Tyson:Why isn't it in the six inches below that? I wouldn't know the exact maybe evolutionary ecosystem reason for this, but my hypothesis, I guess, would be that it's because it's efficient for the plant roots to not have to go that far to get the nutrients. That makes sense. That kind of feels right. That makes sense. That feels right. So what's happening to the topsoil? So we're losing it dramatically faster than it's being regenerated. Why? Why? Because the way that we farm in industrial agriculture is we're effectively, it's almost like you're growing hydroponically in the soil. Let's say you've stripped all the topsoil, just hypothetically, right?

59:01Well, now you're growing in effectively dirt. There's not a lot of life in it. There's not a lot of nutrient content in it anymore. So what do you do? Big, huge machines come in and till in the synthetic nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium that you need. So you're basically saying the dirt's now the growing medium, and I'm taking these synthetics that I've maybe mined from some cave somewhere, and transported with fossil fuels, right?

59:22Neil deGrasse Tyson:Does that include the phosphates too and things? Yeah, it can, yeah. And so, we're sort of taxing the earth and not repaying it enough. And there will be a point at which you've crossed the horizon of being able to do that, and then you may actually see yields fall off like crazy, because we're just losing it way too fast. But you just said we can manufacture what the topsoil would have done if we till it back into the soil. So who cares at this point? We've outsmarted nature. But no, what he's talking about is sustainability because what happens once you get dirt is now you must do that all the time.

1:00:01So what? I'll do it all the time. So what? But that's solving one problem to create another whole load of downstream problem.

1:00:07Neil deGrasse Tyson:I just solved that problem. What's the downstream problem? So the downstream problem with that is We're going to let the man? Oh, I'm sorry. The one who has a YouTube channel on this? Okay, okay. I was going to go to an ecological climate and sustainability. But Kevin, go ahead. Well, we'll riff off of it, Chuck. I've got one for you. So California grows a ton of almonds, right? We grow most of the almonds in the country. So the way to do it efficiently in the industrial, you know, Neil method, I'm going to call it for now. I'm just being, I'm just trying to put it out there. He's devil's advocate.

1:00:36Neil deGrasse Tyson:Yeah, I know, I know. Go ahead, go ahead. is you're going to put only almond trees in the orchard, right? You're going to strip away everything else. And what do almond trees need to produce the almonds? Well, they have a flower. That flower needs to get pollinated. How is that flower going to get pollinated? By the bees that are native to that area, typically. Well, there are no bees anymore because there's no other crop in that area that the bees would naturally forage from. So what has to happen as a result? This is just one example of a second-order effect. There's a whole industry now called managed bee pollination where people will produce bees, put them in hives, drive them around the country.

1:01:10And allow them to pollinate. Exactly. But the bees are no longer naturally there because what you did was the other flora, you eliminated. Okay, I get it. And that's what keeps the bees in the place.

1:01:21Neil deGrasse Tyson:Okay, so now it created an industry. You know, have bee will travel. Have bee will travel. Okay, so that's all. So here's another reason why. But here's another reason why. Because when those chemicals go in, a lot of times they run off as well. So what you get is farm runoff of all of these chemicals that you put in. And everything's a chemical, so you know what I mean when I say it. Where's it going to go? It's going to go into the ecosystem. When I say chemicals, I mean the stuff that's needed. And what that does, it goes into our water systems. It goes into our groundwater. I mean, you know, it's not— Because now I filter the water, so then it's back to the— So now what?

1:01:57Now we've got another industry, right? So now you've put another industry in there. This goes into groundwater. It goes into the rivers. The rivers will go into the sea. Right. And then we're just moving stuff into the ocean. We have a mouse problem. That's okay. Let's get some hawks. All right. Now we've got to, let's get the snakes. All right. Well, now we need mongoose. Like it never ends. Yeah. It never ends. And then in the end, you end up like manually reinventing what nature already was doing. Right. Is the way that I think about it. Oh. You know.

1:02:29Neil deGrasse Tyson:And how do we. Wait, wait, wait. We have to. That's a profound thing. Could you just say that again? Okay. Okay, give that to me. Sure, so if you try to solve every problem that you created from these large-scale agricultural systems, you end up basically just recreating what nature already was doing. Right. Ooh, that's a great way to put at it, I mean, to look at it. I mean, you go around in a circle and come back to the point you originally were to realize you had it good, and then you just changed it. Kind of like the war in Iran. man.

1:03:01So what did they do before we did this commercial farming, which is commercial agro? Did they just rotate fields and not use them? And then you come back to them and, you know, totally. And so, yeah, please. I mean, in the past, I guess you're kind of right, Neil, like a hundred years ago, you would have spent part of your actual life producing the food, right? Let alone, let alone buying it. But, you know, in the past we, we used effectively like regenerative agriculture principles where you're not taking more from the land than you are putting back into it, which right now we are doing. And when I say taking more, putting back, what are these things that we're taking and putting?

1:03:40It's the nutrient inputs. It's the topsoil loss. It's the organic matter that you're taking. Because if you think about like a garden, you're growing, let's say you grow a plot of corn. That corn, when you harvest it out, you're taking mass from the system. You're taking it out. And yeah, some of that is being generated by photosynthesis and carbon that's being sort of sequestered from the air. From the CO2 in the air. From the CO2 in the air, yeah. But what people will do these days, or stuff that we'll do in our backyard or we'll promote, is regenerative practices where you are adding back as much as you are.

1:04:15And yeah, maybe you are leaving something for a crop called a cover crop, which you're basically just growing to generate biomass that you will cut and leave in place. Leave in place.

1:04:26Neil deGrasse Tyson:Right. So with corn, lately I've noticed, by the way, I was astonished, forgive me for even being so ignorant, that every stalk of corn makes only one ear of corn. That felt so wrong to me. I didn't believe it until he made me go look at a stalk of corn. You didn't believe it. I did not believe it. We were driving down the road. A whole thing near your house. Yeah. Where all that corn grows? And he goes like this, you know, each one of those stalks is only one piece of corn. I was like, no, that's not true. It's one thing. Okay, so now what I see them doing is you harvest up the ear of corn, and the rest of the stalk gets sort of mulched back into the field.

1:05:04Neil deGrasse Tyson:Because all of that came out of the field at some level, right? Yes, of course. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, I mean, I think corn's an interesting one because corn is one of the crops, of course, that we've modified, right? So most of the corn that you're seeing in those fields is like a single-ear hybrid corn variety that is only going to produce one per stock. There are corn that produces more than one. Like two. Like two. But yeah, people will do that. I mean, we'll do that sometimes. You'll cover crop and you'll let barley or rye or oats or something like that or some sort of legume because legumes do something called nitrogen fixation where not only will they take CO2 like every plant will from the air, they'll fix atmospheric nitrogen into the soil.

1:05:46Into the soil. Which is great. And so you grow something like that.

1:05:49Neil deGrasse Tyson:So that's called nitrogen fixation. Yeah. They're like a pump. Okay, because the atmosphere is 78 % nitrogen. Yep. So we got the nitrogen. And so it takes that and puts it back into the soil, which serves in some way as a fertilizer. Well, yeah, nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium are the three major elements that plants need to grow. Nitrogen being probably the most needed. The most, right. And so - I love that. I never heard that term cover crop, but it makes sense. That makes complete sense. Kevin, I mean, way back when the agricultural revolution took hold, they would leave a field fallow to let it rest.

1:06:24I remember that. We don't hear about that anymore. Right, and I'm going to get to that follow-up question. When you say cover crop, would that be you'd plant that crop in that field and then that would then become absorbed back into the soil? You wouldn't harvest it? You wouldn't harvest it. Are people out there still practicing these old, old traditional farming methods, or is that just gone, just give it chemicals and let's grow everything? The group that's doing it the most are these urban farming folks who are farming on maybe a third of an acre like me, although I'm not traditionally farming.

1:06:57I've got a buddy here in San Diego. He farms on an acre. I think he makes about 150 grand a year selling his produce at market. He loves that lifestyle. Give us his address too. Yeah, I got you. Will you ever come down? We'll do a whole tour. Yeah. But he'll do a lot of that stuff, Gary. He'll run his chickens through, which of course they're going to be eating. They're going to be eating insects, right? They're going to be taking a little bit of forage here. What are they doing? They're making droppings. Those droppings are extremely high in nitrogen, right? So you're using animals. People will do something called like, I think silvopasture where they'll run like pigs through forests.

1:07:31There's like all these weird combinations people are coming up with to try to get - Sympathetic and a symbiotic relationship between maybe animals, the plants, and growing other crops around other crops. Oh, yeah, yeah. What's that called? Nature?

1:07:50Yeah, I mean, that's where I get to. I go, nature's kind of doing it already, but you can come up with really creative techniques, like running the chickens through the field, right? Instead of solving the problem that you created by creating this problem, by creating that problem, you know?

1:08:05Neil deGrasse Tyson:So Jonathan Swift, who's famous for authoring Gulliver's Travels. Oh. Okay, one of Gulliver's Travels, this 1726, I think it was. One of his visits was to the Legato Academy, which was an academy where there's just scientists doing completely batshit crazy things. Okay? But one of them was, you read their experiment, it sounded kind of like, but then you think about it, it's like, no. So one of them was, they didn't want to have to till the soil. So they said, let's bury apples in the soil and then send pigs out onto the soil. They'll sniff, find the apples, dig up the apples, poop, and they'll keep doing this, and that way they can till the soil and fertilize the soil at the same time.

1:08:51Neil deGrasse Tyson:Okay. And how'd that work out? It didn't. How about that? They were already tilling the soils to dig up the soil to plant the apple. See? So at first, it sounds clever. at first. Right. But it's not. So you were saying try to double duty on the chickens. If they just poop on the top, does that get down into the soil or does that get washed away? Well, they'll scratch through. So like, you know, my hens will, they'll come out in the garden and they'll scratch through like three, four inches deep sometimes hunting for little bugs and grubs. And so, yeah, it's not like the most efficient method. My hens, you heard that?

1:09:22Neil deGrasse Tyson:These are my hens. My hens. Well, they are. Thank you. Don't come at my hens, Neil. You can come to my address for some produce. You're not getting my hens. Do you name your hens and then slaughter them and eat them? I don't eat them. If I ate them, I probably wouldn't name them, which probably sounds irrational, but it just is what it is. That's what we're just checking here. They do give eggs though, right? Oh, yeah. Okay, cool. Yeah. So obviously not everyone has a plot of land to grow food, but everyone who pays rent has some household square footage and in principle can buy a grow light for not much money.

1:10:03Neil deGrasse Tyson:So how much of a difference can everyone growing something to eat make in this world? It's such a good question. I mean, you brought up Victory Gardens earlier. I think back in those times, we produced something like 15 to 20 % of our produce as a nation from the Victory Garden movement. But that took like a world war to galvanize everyone to do. You know, so like, what would it take? I'm not really sure. If everyone did it, what do I think would happen to the food system? I mean, it would meaningfully change, but then you got to remember like, what are most of the crops being produced in America?

1:10:38It's like soy, corn, and wheat. Even though like those aren't probably going to be grown a ton, even for if like tens of millions of people started home gardening, they'd probably be hitting the tomatoes, the basil, the this, the that. I would say what you'd see the biggest impact is, is probably like the entire culture's attitude toward sustainability and food systems would change for the better in a meaningful way. I don't necessarily know you'd solve the popsoil crisis by doing that.

1:11:03Neil deGrasse Tyson:But it could create a sea change in how people think about the environment that could have other beneficial decision-making consequences in people's lives. Completely. I mean, before I started gardening, like I said, I was addicted to playing video games. I didn't know anything about this. Now, I have changed my entire life and habits because of just getting into coffee. Because your mother kicked you out of the basement. Yeah. We've established that. That too, that too. All right, well, let's - We've got to land this planet. Yeah, but before we do, Neil, let's wrap it up with the final question.

1:11:35So, Kevin, what's the question about plants or food systems, if you like, that you think science hasn't answered yet?

1:11:43Neil deGrasse Tyson:Ooh, I like that. Yeah. What are you waiting for scientists to figure out on your behalf? There's a lot of them, man. But the one that just selfishly I'd be interested in is how to impact flavor at a deeper level. Because when you think about crops that are like wine, right? People get very snobby about their wine. Oh, the terroir of this land, this or that. It's true for all crops though. You know, just because it's wine, of course, that's a high value crop. I would love to know like what is impacting the flavor, let's say of a tomato. I actually went to Bayer Monsanto once in the belly of the beast and I did a 50 tomato taste test and there's this whole wheel you're tasting these tomatoes on.

1:12:19I would love to know, like, what can I do as a home gardener to impact the acidity of that tomato more or bring out certain flavonoids?

1:12:26Neil deGrasse Tyson:You need a home genetically modified organism laboratory. Or something. Or something like that. Or something. Wow. Yeah, so flavor. And by the way, the counterpart to that in the grown meat movement. Right. I don't know where that is now, but last I checked, there was a lot of investment money going into the, what's it called? Grown meat. Laboratory meat. Laboratory. Yeah. Synthesized meat, but it's actual meat protein. It's meat protein. It's meat protein. It's just grown in a dish. Grown in a dish that you didn't have to kill an animal to provide. All right. Maybe the first one to get the stock.

1:13:04Neil deGrasse Tyson:Right. But after that, you didn't have to. All right. What they found out is all the flavor is released when you kill the animal. So it doesn't work without killing the animal. But if I, in my laboratory, develop a cocktail of flavors that I infuse into those meat fibers, and then I sell it as my, you know, the first of these would probably be a ground beef substitute. It's going to be a burger. It's going to be a burger. It's definitely going to be a burger. It's going to be a burger, right? And so I'm going to have a proprietary burger flavor. Right. And I think that's the next frontier. Because like I said, flavor is just chemistry.

1:13:38Neil deGrasse Tyson:It's true. It's just what is the flavor molecule intersecting with your taste buds? It's so true. That's all it is. That's the way I am. And in fact, there's one molecule. I learned this, and I think it's true, that the molecule for mint, it has a certain chirality to it. Chirality is a... A mirror image. It would be opposite of a mirror image of it. It turns in a way that the mirror image of that molecule is not the same. It's not the same. It's just a mirror image of it, okay? All right. All right. that mint tastes one way on your palate. If you make the mirror image molecule of mint, you get the flavor of caraway.

1:14:21Neil deGrasse Tyson:Really? Okay. So the caraway and mint are flavor profiles of the same molecule written. Just flipped. Flipped in a mirror. Right. So we need a flavor wheel, like you get a color wheel. Yeah, and you get two of this and three of that and put it through this. Can I have a cotton candy burger, please? Wow. That's so interesting. Because caraway's in the carrot or parsley family and mints in its own. Yeah, but I'm just talking about the flavor. Just the flavor. Yeah, yeah. Just the flavor, not the rest of its substance, right. Still, that's still fascinating. Now, just to be clear, I heard that multiple times, but I've never officially read it in a journal, and I've never seen anything to counter it.

1:14:59Neil deGrasse Tyson:So I'm putting it out there. But whether or not what I just said is true. No, it's true, because there's the same thing with banana, and I forget the other flavor, but it's the exact same thing. Okay, our crack team of - researchers just verified what I just said. Yeah, definitely. I believe it. Same thing with banana. What? The banana molecule, which gives you the flavor of banana. The other - It's the same thing. The flip of it, it gives you something else. Like what? I can't remember what it is. Cheese. You know, I don't know, Roquefort.

1:15:31Neil deGrasse Tyson:Well, Mr. Espiritu, you've been highly illuminating and enlightening to this conversation and we're delighted that such as you exist in this world and you have an ever-growing YouTube channel on this topic. And tell me about your second YouTube channel real quick. Yeah, that one's called Epic Homesteading. It was just the story of building out that property that I've been telling you guys about. Okay, all right. So we can find you in two ways there. Mm-hmm. Yeah. And so we can find you, what's the name of your YouTube channel? Epic Gardening. Epic Gardening and Epic Homesteading. There you go.

1:16:05Neil deGrasse Tyson:That works. Yeah. That totally works. Well, congratulations on your following and the success that you've produced. And I love people just getting the job done themselves. Yeah. And now with YouTube and other platforms, we can all participate vicariously with your experiments and your successes. And vicarious is the word because I'm going to Whole Foods. Buy your food. All right, dude, we got to call it quits there. But this entire show, you kept saying we. So who's behind the scenes there? or are you a puppet? I'm simply the face, Neil, the beautiful face. The face of what? Well, who do you have behind the scenes there?

1:16:46Well, no, I mean, Epic Gardening, it started as a little blog back in the day, became a YouTube channel. It's now a team of 55 people. We actually, yeah, we own a seed company. So we sell 750, 800 varieties of seed around the whole country. And so when I say we, I mean like the team of gardeners at Epic, which includes master horticulturists, master gardeners, et cetera, and me, the guy who -

1:17:07Neil deGrasse Tyson:Wait, we got stuck with you when we could have had a master horticulturist? You could have. I know, I know, I know. They just put the face on for you guys. Nice. All right, dude. Keep up the good work. Keep it up, keep it going. It was a delight to have you. And good to see that it's become an empire, a seed empire. Yeah. We're all behind you on this. And next time, give us your address. So in the apocalypse, we're bunking at your place. I'll send you guys an email. I got you guys covered. All right, take care. All right, guys. Bye. Peace out. Bye. Mm-hmm. So this has been another installment of StarTalk Special Edition.

1:17:40Neil deGrasse Tyson:You're coming up with these special editions. I love them. Yeah, I mean, you've got to credit the lane over in L.A. Yeah, we have our L.A. office as part of this special edition portfolio. But there's still so much to land on. Yeah. Amazing. All right. Well, Chuck, good to have you always. Always a pleasure. This has been StarTalk Special Edition, all about farming in your back 40. Nice. Except if you don't have 40, you do it in your back one-third of an acre. And if you don't have 40 acres in a mule, don't expect it.

1:18:11Neil deGrasse Tyson:As always, Neil deGrasse Tyson bidding you to keep looking after.

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