Modern agriculture, particularly in grain production, is incredibly stupid when it comes to energy.
I'll tell you what our energy is currently based on. We consume oil and natural gas to produce synthetic nitrogen fertilizer to make crops. We consume those crops. Then humans produce solid waste, which is rich in nitrogen and phosphate; then we spend huge sums of money in municipal waste treatment plants to burn off that nitrogen. Ecologically speaking, it's completely stupid in terms of energetics.
We need to do two things. First, as I mentioned earlier, people who grow soybeans or know about soybeans also know that they're rich in protein. The reason they're rich in protein is that protein requires amino acids, and the building block there is fixed nitrogen. Soybeans are able to associate with the microbes that I discussed earlier and convert atmospheric nitrogen gas into ammonia fertilizer; therefore, we need to take better advantage of the microbes I discussed earlier, not only for soybeans but for cereals and other crops. There's a lot of potential in that area.
The second thing we need to do is at the waste treatment level or the toilet level. We need to recycle human waste. People laugh when I talk about this, but we could solve the nitrogen energy problem overnight by doing a better job of recycling human waste.