I’ve spent more than a decade covered in mud, my hands wrapped in the seaweeds and cut by the razor-sharp edges of the shellfish that I grow. My days are dictated by the weather and tides, the oceans nutrient abundance, my ability to protect my crops from natural predators, and success at increasing market demand for my farmed products. I’ve sat patiently in countless meetings and working groups helping to shape the future of agriculture, working with farmers and policy makers to overcome natural and political challenges before they erode our food supply, but lately, the environment and the farmers who must produce from it are facing challenges of a different magnitude.

The waters are warming, harmful algae blooms are flourishing, invasive species are migrating to new environments, storms are growing violent and unpredictable, agriculture zones are shifting, climate is becoming less reliable, and the resources we depend on to produce our food supply are quickly dwindling. It’s no secret that the way we produce food is unraveling.

How to Feed the Future; AI, Bio-Tech and the Blue Revolution begins with that unraveling by invoking deep history, scientific breakthroughs, personal experience and cutting-edge technologies to take readers across a mind-blowing journey of Earth’s 4.5billion history which recaps how the climate operates, the natural evolution of life toward the advent of agriculture, how the climate is likely to shift due to global warming, and how our fossil fuel dependent modern food industry will be unable to feed the estimated 10billion humans in the next 75 years. And yet, within the resilience of the aquatic species that I farm and the Blue Revolution sweeping the planet, compounded by the advances in farm Bio-Tech and AI technologies, and the shifting focus onto resource distribution and conservation, multiple solutions toward a prosperous future have presented themselves.

The book opens with the birth of the Earth, the formation of our climate, and an examination of the mechanisms which create the climate ebbs and flows throughout the 4.5billion year history of the planet. We follow the emergence of life to the Miocene epoch, the last period when no permanent ice covered the Earth’s poles. This era is considered by climate scientists as the closest example of what our future in a warmer climate will be, and sets the stage for understanding humanity’s place in a rapidly warming world. After the Miocene, the Earth plunged into the modern-day ice age, Homo sapiens emerged and established traditional hunting behaviors that defined our early survival strategies. Over millennia, these practices led to the advent of agriculture, and as humans spread across the globe, so did their chosen foods, each shaped and refined through human-guided evolution.

The greatest advance in food production coincided with the great world wars, as the Green Revolution dramatically accelerated agricultural productivity through the use of fossil fuels, fertilizers, and biotechnology, creating the modern industrial food complex of today, which uses roughly 15% of all fossil fuels, 50% of the planet’s land, and 70% of accessible freshwater. Malnutrition and hunger are rising around the world as food productivity and exports dwindle year over year as the climate changes and population growth places pressure on an antiquated food system built on a 12,000-year-old foundation. Yet this is only half the story. Before exploring how climate change threatens to unravel our fragile food system, we must first understand the most often overlooked pillar of human sustenance: the oceans.

Covering 75% of Earth’s surface, the oceans have fed humans since the dawn of civilization. We briefly explore this relationship with the sea, from ancient fishing origins to the evolution of our modern-day fisheries and discover the Blue Revolution; a wave of ocean farming spreading around the globe, now the fastest-growing sector of agriculture on Earth. We examine the history, techniques and technologies used to produce the three leaders of this ocean farming movement; shrimp, shellfish and seaweeds.

With at least 3°C of warming expected, an ice free Miocene-like future looms. Fossil fuel supplies, productivity and the natural resources needed to produce the foods we rely on today have just an estimated 50 years of supply remaining, and so a redesign of our food system is necessary. We explore how aquaculture must form the foundation of this new food system, bearing the brunt of the global nutritional needs, to reduce competition for land, water, and fossil fuel energy, as our traditional land-based agriculture industry evolves. The target of this evolution is already underway in the Netherlands, where we learn about the history of the greenhouse and how the Dutch have become the world’s second-largest food exporter by combining biotech, AI, and precision systems to grow more food with fewer resources. We analyze how future climate-controlled stadiums and vertical farms are able to shield crops from the expected climate chaos while relocating food production closer to cities. China’s multi-story indoor pig farm is highlighted as an example of highly efficient production, yet explores questions about animal welfare and the role of biotechnology advances, lab-grown meat, CRISPR designed foods and AI in the future of food production.

Remarkably, the indoor environmentally controlled technologies being developed to secure our food supply against climate change are nearly identical to those needed to feed our off-world ambitions. At a cost of roughly $20,000 a day to feed an astronaut in space with Earth grown food, the need for growing food on the International Space Station, the Moon, or Mars is one of the last challenges standing in the way of mankind’s permanent leap into space. The book concludes with a look into the experiments, technologies, and the foods being chosen for off-world cultivation.

In the end, the story is not just about Bio-Tech, AI or the Blue Revolution, it’s about choosing a pathway forward. Deciding whether we cling to the comforts of the present system and follow a trajectory which inevitably leads off the precipice, or embrace a reimagined food production system that gives priority toward climate, sustainability and the balance between land, water, and our finite resources.