The World Changing Slime

One of the most peculiar plants you'll ever see grows all over these Mexican mountains. It is a peculiar kind of 20-foot-tall giant maize. Its roots, which resemble unsettling fingers and are a few meters above the ground, ooze with a mysterious mucus that has the potential to feed the world and eliminate the use of harmful chemical fertilizers in agriculture. As long as researchers can decipher its code, this is the Holy Grail. South of Mexico, there is a town called Tatanta Peck. The local farmers have meticulously maintained this maize for hundreds, possibly even thousands of years.

Curious scientists eventually learned about this Mysterious Giant corn. One of them was Howard Yana Shapiro, an Oaxaca resident in 1980. The phrase "giant maize" kind of piqued my interest because I've heard they have giant mates. The growing maize stood 16 to 18 feet tall. A typical maize in America might be eight to ten feet tall, but this one was enormous. I simply could not accept it. Observing something that seemed mythical and in some ways, was actually mythical. A Maize plant would need nitrogen for that rapid growth, according to the surface of the roots. The mucilaginous substance was extremely thick and viscous, and as we watched, it would essentially auto-dose itself. This mucus appeared to allow the plant to self-fertilize, meaning the farmers hardly needed to add synthetic fertilizer. Almost everyone we spoke to thought it was science fiction that a maize plant could produce its own nitrogen. To understand why, you need to become familiar with the concept of nitrogen fixation.

Every plant needs nitrogen to survive. It plays a crucial role in the formation of chlorophyll and all proteins. The gas nitrogen is all around us. N2 makes up 78% of the air. This is fantastic except that, with the exception of legumes, almost all plants are unable to transform the lovely nitrogen in the atmosphere into useful ammonia. It's about much more than just corn that makes this a game with such high stakes. Cereal grains—wheat, corn, rice, sorghum, millet, and barley—constitute more than 50% of the world's food supply, but none of them can fix nitrogen on their own, so we must spray vast quantities of nitrogen-rich fertilizer to fill the gap. This is fantastic for producing higher yields and assisting in feeding the planet's 8 billion inhabitants. Unfortunately, it has terrible environmental effects. Only about half of fertilizer is absorbed when applied to most plants. The water table is contaminated by the excess. Not only that, but fertilizer isn't cheap in some places of the world, so farmers can't even use fertilizers, resulting in lower yields and less food to feed people. There are large eutrophic sections of the Gulf of Mexico, which are dead zones caused by nitrogen. Wouldn't this be great if you didn't have to apply nitrogen in ammonia form? Wouldn't it be great if this impacted the production in the global South where they don't have access to fertilizer? Hell yea!

You, therefore, have a financial motivation in addition to a scientific, ecological, and social one. When attempting to resolve a systematic problem, all of these come into play. That is the prize, but it is now time to return to Mexico. Mexico is the birthplace of corn and is home to more than 50 different varieties, but only one of them, known as Olaton, has the ability to fertilize itself. Even in Mexico, this property was a relatively well-kept secret for centuries before Howard discovered it in 1980. Even so, it took him close to 30 years to assemble the proper team to investigate it. Therefore, research was conducted to learn how this slimy mucus aids the plant's self-fertilization and tall growth. It was discovered that it is teeming with nitrogen-fixing bacteria that are typically found in soil. The gel itself functions as a kind of shield, generating a low-oxygen environment that enables the bacteria to transform atmospheric nitrogen into a form the plant can actually use. This enables the plant to directly absorb up to 80% of the nitrogen it requires from the atmosphere. After ten years of study, the self-fertilizing cereal crop—the "Holy Grail" of agriculture—was at last demonstrated.

Because farmers won't grow it on a large scale unless it can compete with today's industrial-scale corn, researchers are currently breeding it with other varieties in an effort to pass along some of its special traits. By now, local bacteria in American fields can fix about 40% of the nitrogen from the air, demonstrating the enormous progress that has already been made in nitrogen fixation. The future of this is not just about corn so now this scenario is nitrogen-fixing Maize and nitrogen-fixing rice. This plant is recruiting the bacteria to fix nitrogen from the air and 40% is a good amount. We are probably three or four generations away from a stabilized hybrid maize. Wheat is expected to follow, then let's move on to millet, which is used all over the world. Barley would be nice.

In a perfect world, every crop would fix its own nitrogen, and we would use less fertilizer overall. As a result, the future of nitrogen-fixing cereal crops appears promising and may last a lifetime, at the very least. As amazing as the science is, it is equally amazing that we are only able to be excited about it at all because of this small community in the mountains of Oaxaca who have preserved this rare plant with such care. We must find a way to be able to tap into this potential in a way that benefits us all.