Grown all over these mountains
is one of the weirdest plants you'll ever see.
It's a strange type of giant maize that grows up to 20 feet tall.
These disconcerting finger-like things are its roots,
suspended metres 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 fertilisers.
This is the Holy Grail.
As long as scientists can crack its code.
This is the town of Totontepec in southern Mexico.
For centuries, possibly even millennia,
this maize has been meticulously cared for by the indigenous farmers there.
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 maize.
So the word 'giant maize', you know, kind of intrigued me.
The maize that was growing was 16-to-18 feet tall.
You know, a normal maize that you see across America might be 8-to-10 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, at a period when 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 fertilise,
meaning the farmers barely needed to add any artificial fertiliser.
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're going to have to get used to a very important term...
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 it 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% of the world's diet, and none of them can fix their own nitrogen.
So we spray huge amounts of nitrogen-rich fertiliser 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 fertiliser, 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.
Fertiliser isn't cheap.
So in some parts of the world, farmers can't even use fertilisers 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 fertiliser 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 fertilise itself is called Oloton.
And even in Mexico, this remained a relatively well-kept secret for centuries.
When Howard first came across it in 1980,
it still took 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 engaged the community extensively.
We built a lab there. We had people from the community actually working for us.
Together with Mexican scientists and the town of Totontepec, they studied how this slimy mucigel
helps the plant to self fertilise 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% 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-fertilising 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,
labelling it as an example of what's known as biopiracy.
So biopiracy is basically the idea that there is a mis-appropriation 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 somebody could swoop in to a biodiversity-rich country,
take a few plants out, swoop 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 Oloton?
In Mexico, an agreement was negotiated between a company and a local community
in a way to secure prior informed consent for this research and also
to agree on sharing some of the potential benefits.
Every time at one seed is sold, half the value of the royalty goes to the community.
The village has been instrumental, 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 tantalising promise of this self-fertilising 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 halve the amount of time it takes to grow,
and they've made huge progress on fixing nitrogen too.
We can now fix about 40% of the nitrogen from the air,
from just the local bacteria in the fields in the United States.
So 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 stabilised, hybrid maize.
But the future of this is not just about corn.
So now the 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 fertiliser 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 maize
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
is 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,
that we're even able to get excited about it at all.