grown all over these mountains is one of the weirdest plants you'll ever see it's a strange type of giant maze that grows up to 20 feet tall these disconcerting finger-like things are its roots suspended meters off the ground and they ooze with a gooey mucus and it's this mysterious mucus that could help feed the planet and end farming's toxic Reliance on chemical fertilizers this is the Holy Grail as long as scientists can crack its code this is the town of tatanta Peck in southern Mexico for centuries possibly even Millennia this maze has been meticulously cared
for by the indigenous Farmers there Salia but word about this Mysterious Giant corn eventually reached the ears of curious scientists one of those was Howard Yana Shapiro who was living in Oaxaca all the way back in 1980. I hear they have giant mates so the word giant maze you know kind of intrigued me the the maze that was growing was 16 to 18 feet tall you know a normal maze that you see Across America might be eight to ten feet tall but this was gigantic I just couldn't believe it seeing something that was mythical and
in many ways it was mythical on the surface of the roots and appeared with a Maize plant would need nitrogen for that explosive growth there was a mucilaginous material really thick very viscous and we would watch it and it would Auto dose itself essentially and this mucus appeared to be allowing the plant to self-fertilize meaning the farmers barely needed to add any artificial fertilizer the idea that a Maize plant could make its own nitrogen sounded like science fiction to virtually everyone we talked to and to understand the reason why you can have to get used
to a very important term nitrogen fixation nitrogen fixation nitrogen fixation nitrogen is essential to all plants it's a major component of all proteins and chlorophyll we're literally surrounded by nitrogen the air is 78 nitrogen great except it's not because almost all plants apart from legumes can't convert this lovely nitrogen from the atmosphere into the ammonia that can actually use and the reason this is such high stakes is about way more than corn the world's population is literally fueled by cereal grains wheat corn rice sorghum Millet barley these make up more than 50 percent of the
world's diet and none of them can fix their own nitrogen so we spray huge amounts of nitrogen-rich fertilizer to plug the Gap great for delivering bigger yields and helping to feed the planet's 8 billion people terrible for the environment unfortunately most plants when we apply the fertilizer only take up about half of it it pollutes the water table there's huge eutrophic sections of the Gulf of Mexico which are dead zones caused by nitrogen and that's not all fertilizer isn't cheap so in some parts of the world Farmers can't even use fertilizers at all meaning lower
yields and less food to feed people 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 particularly hell yes so you have a scientific motivation you have an ecological motivation you have a financial motivation all of these come together when you try to solve a systematic problem so that's the prize but it's time to go back to Mexico Mexico is the birthplace of corn home to more than 50 varieties but the one
with the ability to fertilize itself is called olaton and even in Mexico this remained a relatively well kept secret for centuries when Howard first came across it in 1980 it still took him nearly 30 years to get the right team together to study it so we started working with the community we started doing all the kind of research let's establish facts and we engage the community extensively we built the lab there we had people from the community actually working for us together with Mexican scientists and the town of Satanta Peck they studied how this slimy
musicel helps the plant to self-fertilize and grow so tall they found that it's packed with nitrogen fixing bacteria usually found in the soil the gel itself acts like a sort of Shield creating a low oxygen environment that allows the bacteria to convert atmospheric nitrogen into a form the plant can actually use this allows the plant to take up to 80 percent of the nitrogen it needs directly from the air finally after a decade of research there was proof of the Agricultural Holy Grail a self-fertilizing cereal crop but almost immediately some people started to ask who
owns the rights to an amazing plant like this some even went much further labeling it as an example of what's known as biopiracy so biopiracy is basically the idea that there is a misappropriation of biodiversity for research or the development of commercial products and I always talk about this by thinking about Indiana Jones right so the idea that then you know somebody could swoop in to uh you know biodiversity rich country take a few plants soap out and discover the cure for cancer and make a lot of money and yeah and it was kind of
that was a happy ending right well wrong and a lot of countries are saying actually this biodiversity is located within our countries and it's intrinsically linked to the culture and lifestyles of a lot of our indigenous peoples and local communities so what does all this mean when it comes to all a ton in in Mexico an agreement was negotiated between a company and a local community in a way to secure a prior and fund consent for This research and also to agree on sharing some of the potential benefits every time one seed is sold half
the value of the royalty goes to the community is the village has been instrumental gentle we could have never done what we've done without them they've been all in the whole way it's fair to say that some are still definitely wary especially because the agreement itself remains confidential but in a way all of this only matters if this scientific Marvel can actually deliver on its promise because it's not made any money just yet because for all the tantalizing promise of this self-fertilizing corn Farmers aren't going to grow it on a massive scale unless it can
compete with current industrial scale corn so researchers are currently cross-breeding it with other varieties hoping to transfer some of its unique properties they've already managed to almost half the amount of time it takes to grow and they've made huge progress on fixing nitrogen too we can now fix about 40 percent of the nitrogen from the air from just the local bacteria in the fields in the United States so this this plant is recruiting the bacteria to fix nitrogen from the air and 40 is a good amount probably three or four generations away from a stabilized
hybrid maze but the future of this is not just about corn so now this scenario is nitrogen fixing Maize nitrogen fixing rice what's next wheat then let's do Millet which is used in many parts of the world how about barley all of that is open now for discussion in a perfect world all crops would fix their own nitrogen and we would reduce the amount of fertilizer that we need so the future for nitrogen fixing cereal crops is looking bright hopefully in my lifetime nitrogen fixing Maize commercially available around the world but in our increasingly monocultural
world the fact that a little-known maze from a misty mountain in rural Mexico has been kept Alive by small-scale indigenous farmers and could now help tackle world hunger points to another inescapable thing we cannot talk about biodiversity as something separate than people people use biodiversity people care for biodiversity people depend on biodiversity and you know the idea that there is this wealth of knowledge and possibilities around biodiversity it's really such a wonderful connection between people and nature and we must find a way to be able to tap into this potential in a way that we
are all benefiting because as much as the science is amazing it's equally amazing that it's only thanks to this small community in the mountains of Oaxaca who have preserved this rare plant with such care they were even able to get excited about it at all [Music]
