ALL INPredictions
Last updated Nov 29, 2025
Prediction
Friedberg
← Back to hostEpisode
Friedberg @ 01:14:51Inconclusive
scienceclimate
In the coming years (on roughly a 5–15 year timescale from 2021), advances in engineering nitrogen-fixing microbes will move far beyond early products like Pivot Bio, enabling broad microbial nitrogen fixation that can significantly reduce or potentially eliminate synthetic fertilizer use and materially reduce agriculture-related greenhouse gas emissions.
the ability for us to engineer microbes opens up this universe of possibility, where pivot is kind of like, you know, kindergarten level of what's going to happen over the next couple of years where we can now engineer all these microbes to pull nitrogen out of the atmosphere and maybe reduce all fertilizer use and have a huge effect on greenhouse gas resulting from, from, from, from agriculture.View on YouTube
Explanation

The prediction explicitly allowed a 5–15 year window from 2021, so the earliest point to fully judge it is around 2026, which has not yet arrived. Since 2021 there has been clear progress in engineered nitrogen-fixing microbes: Pivot Bio’s gene-edited products (e.g., PROVEN 40 for corn, CERT-N for cotton) now supply atmospheric nitrogen directly to roots and typically let farmers replace about 35–40 pounds of synthetic nitrogen per acre (roughly ~20% of a typical U.S. corn nitrogen program) while maintaining yields, and have been deployed across millions of acres in the U.S. (newaginternational.com) A 2025 University of Illinois study using Pivot Bio microbes measured about 35 pounds of nitrogen per acre supplied from the air during early corn growth and noted that completely replacing synthetic nitrogen remains a distant goal, likely far beyond current technology. (sciencedaily.com) Research groups are also engineering nitrogen-fixing bacteria for cereals like wheat (e.g., enhanced strains of Kosakonia sacchari and Klebsiella variicola that excrete more fixed nitrogen even under high-nitrogen conditions), but these are still at greenhouse/field-trial stages, not yet widely commercialized. (emsl.pnnl.gov) At the system level, global fertilizer use has not fallen because of microbial nitrogen fixation; international outlooks show total fertilizer consumption rebounding to roughly 192–204 million tonnes of nutrients in 2023–2024, with nitrogen fertilizer consumption around 108 million tonnes in 2024 and expected to grow modestly through 2030, indicating no broad displacement of synthetic nitrogen so far. (ukragroconsult.com) While microbial products are beginning to cut some synthetic nitrogen and associated emissions on enrolled acres (tens of thousands of tonnes of N and CO2e avoided, which is material for participating farms but tiny relative to global agricultural emissions), this falls well short of the prediction’s vision of broadly reducing or eliminating synthetic fertilizer use. (pivotbio.com) Because (1) the lower bound of the stated 5–15 year horizon has not yet passed, and (2) there is meaningful technical progress but far from the transformative global impact described, it is too early to say definitively whether the prediction will ultimately be right or wrong, so it is best classified as inconclusive for now.