The New Alchemists

The name on the mailbox--New Alchemy Institute--suggests that the small Cape Cod farm is dedicated to the ancient quest for a way of transforming base metals into gold. In fact, the farmers are pursuing an equally elusive but more modern goal: alternative methods of feeding the earth's billions without excess use of fertilizers and pesticides, waste of coal and oil, or reliance on the new hybrid grain crops, which despite their high yield are often vulnerable to disease.

That is the heady dream of the institute's young founders, Marine Biologists John H. Todd, 35, and William O. McLarney, 34. Their crusade began in 1969 while they were teaching at San Diego State University. Between classes, they began looking into the prospects of cultivating fish and plants, and using wind and solar power directly instead of energy-wasting farm machinery. They called their experiment the New Alchemy Institute as a reminder of a time when science, art and philosophy were not considered separate or even antagonistic pursuits. Later Todd and McLarney moved to Massachusetts and joined the staff of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Now both have left, and are devoting themselves full time to the new alchemy.

Located on twelve acres of leased land near Falmouth, the institute focuses most of its attention on a growing scientific concern: that the Green Revolution may be failing. As Todd explains it, the use of pest killers to maintain the revolution's high-yield grains has triggered a vicious cycle: "Soils decline in quality, which in turn makes crops more vulnerable to pests or disease. This creates a need for increasingly large amounts of pesticides and fungicides for agricultural production to be sustained." As a result, says Todd, he shares "the disquieting feeling that we are witnessing the agricultural equivalent of the launching of the Titanic, only this time there are several billion passengers."

As one small lifeboat for some of those passengers, Todd and McLarney have created a prototype agricultural "ark," a self-sufficient food-producing complex involving greenhouses, fish ponds, solar heaters and a windmill. The odd layout is clustered around three greenhouse-covered ponds built on an incline. The lowest pond contains a variety of edible fish, mostly the tasty tropical tilapia (somewhat like the sunfish). Pumped by the windmill, the water from this pond is passed through a solar heater, then circulated through a bed of crushed, bacteria-laden shells in the topmost pond. The bacteria not only detoxify the fish wastes but convert the ammonia in them to nitrites and nitrates, which are used to fertilize algae in another part of the pond.

Full Diet. Then the algae-enriched water is fed into the middle pond, where the microscopic plants provide feed for tiny crustaceans called daphnids, or water fleas. Finally, water containing fleas and algae flows back into the bottom tank, where it provides a full diet for the tilapia. Nothing is wasted: in the warm greenhouse space above the ponds, the new alchemists grow vegetables even in the dead of the New England winter. The plants are fertilized by the nutrient-laden fish water. To protect their harvests against bugs, the scientists have brought insect-eating frogs, spiders and chameleons instead of pesticides into the greenhouses.

In its first year, the ark's main 8,000-gallon pond has produced two 50-lb. crops of fish--a better yield, says Todd, than achieved by China's successful aquaculture ponds. Not counting the $9,000-a-year salaries (plus $2,000 per dependent) that the institute has begun to pay some of its dozen full-time staffers the entire cost of building and stocking the ark was only $2,300.

Lean Years. Although the institute has gone through lean years, volunteer farmers now turn up in droves; the institute's journal, edited by Todd's wife Nancy, has a growing circulation. Money has begun to come in from foundations like the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Inc. A New Alchemy Institute West has been set up in Pescadero, Calif., south of San Francisco. The Canadian-born Todd plans to build a new ark on Prince Edward Island, Canada; another offshoot is being started up in Costa Rica, where McLarney is now looking for other varieties offish to raise.

Even scientists sympathetic with the institute's philosophy are highly skeptical that such techniques can make much of a dent in the world's enormous food needs. Nor do they all agree with the new alchemists' doomsday vision of the future of the Green Revolution. But, as the journal Science points out, there is no doubt that Todd and McLarney, in their idealistic quest, have shown that there may be a place alongside traditional agriculture "for the arks and other food-producing devices created in the new alchemists' crucibles."

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