Don’t industrial farms produce most of the world’s food?
No. There are more than 570m farms worldwide; more than 90% are run by an individual or family and rely primarily on family labour. They produce about 80% of the world’s food.
The Guardian
One of the most persistent arguments for modern, mechanized agriculture is that it produces a lot of food per acre, leaving more land for other purposes. I’ve often wondered how solid this argument is, and when a debate broke out recently, I decided to look closer.
It started with a paper from a think tank. The Breakthrough Institute study, called Nature Unbound, argued that, by embracing technology, humanity could shrink its footprint and leave more land for “nature.” (I don’t like this way of defining nature as something apart from humans, but that’s a different issue.)
The Breakthrough people call themselves Ecomodernists and have a long history of pissing off environmentalists. Their paper caught the attention of Guardian columnist George Monbiot, who took the Ecomodernists to task for favoring big industrial farming over small. Monbiot pointed out that in many poor countries, the smaller the farm, the greater its yields. This is true: When people only have a small amount of land to support them, they pour all their efforts into that land and eke more food per square foot than their neighbors with more land.
But the Breakthrough guys fired back. Sure, small farms tend to produce more than bigger farms in poor countries, they wrote; but both produce way less than modern industrial farms in rich countries. “One widely cited study found that the smallest African farms produced about 25 percent more yield per hectare than the largest African farms. But the average American farm produced about 10 times more yield per hectare than either. Yield gaps between farmers in rich nations and those in poor countries are profound,” they wrote. This, also, is true.
Both sides here are right in their own way. The Ecomodernists are right in an abstract, thought-experiment way: We could grow more food on less land if every farm were as big and efficient as those in the U.S. Monbiot is right in a pragmatic, best-next-steps way: In reality, the path to higher yields starts with farms getting smaller, rather than larger. That’s what’s happened in Asia — farms are getting smaller, using Green Revolution pesticides and fertilizers, and getting bigger yields.
Both sides of this argument agree that plopping down big industrial farms in Africa or Asia would probably be a disaster. Linus Blomqvist, one of the authors of Nature Unbound, told me this would be a terrible idea, because it would mean that all those small subsistence farmers would have no way of supporting themselves.
But so what? After reading these pieces I was shaking my head. Size just doesn’t matter (when we are talking about farm yields). You can have small farms with high yields, or big farms with low yields, and vice versa. Really, the whole debate was beside the point.
If we are chiefly concerned about environmental impact, farm size matters a lot less than the techniques and technologies those farms use. What I want to know is this: If we choose to eschew the practices of industrial farming, does that mean we’ll have to expand our land base to grow the same amount of food? Can organic yield as much as conventional farming?
Organic versus conventional
In 2007, a group of researchers led by Catherine Badgley made a big-picture estimate of how many additional acres we would need to switch over to 100 percent organic. The number they arrived at was startlingly low: 0 acres. That is, they projected that we could go all-organic without increasing the amount of land used for agriculture one bit.
But then a lot of other researchers chimed in. Wait, wait, wait, they (more or less) protested: Are you really looking carefully at where you are getting your nitrogen?
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Article (2): 3 Big Myths about Modern Agriculture
Myths get in the way of our ability to restore degraded soils that can feed the world using fewer chemicals
The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research.
One of the biggest modern myths about agriculture is that organic farming is inherently sustainable. It can be, but it isn’t necessarily. After all, soil erosion from chemical-free tilled fields undermined the Roman Empire and other ancient societies around the world. Other agricultural myths hinder recognizing the potential to restore degraded soils to feed the world using fewer agrochemicals.
When I embarked on a six-month trip to visit farms around the world to research my forthcoming book, “Growing a Revolution: Bringing Our Soil Back to Life,” the innovative farmers I met showed me that regenerative farming practices can restore the world’s agricultural soils. In both the developed and developing worlds, these farmers rapidly rebuilt the fertility of their degraded soil, which then allowed them to maintain high yields using far less fertilizer and fewer pesticides.
Their experiences, and the results that I saw on their farms in North and South Dakota, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Ghana and Costa Rica, offer compelling evidence that the key to sustaining highly productive agriculture lies in rebuilding healthy, fertile soil. This journey also led me to question three pillars of conventional wisdom about today’s industrialized agrochemical agriculture: that it feeds the world, is a more efficient way to produce food and will be necessary to feed the future.
MYTH 1: LARGE-SCALE AGRICULTURE FEEDS THE WORLD TODAY
According to a recent U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) report, family farms produce over three-quarters of the world’s food. The FAO also estimates that almost three-quarters of all farms worldwide are smaller than one hectare – about 2.5 acres, or the size of a typical city block.
Only about 1 percent of Americans are farmers today. Yet most of the world’s farmers work the land to feed themselves and their families. So while conventional industrialized agriculture feeds the developed world, most of the world’s farmers work small family farms. A 2016 Environmental Working Group report found that almost 90 percent of U.S. agricultural exports went to developed countries with few hungry people.
Of course the world needs commercial agriculture, unless we all want to live on and work our own farms. But are large industrial farms really the best, let alone the only, way forward? This question leads us to a second myth.
MYTH 2: LARGE FARMS ARE MORE EFFICIENT
Many high-volume industrial processes exhibit efficiencies at large scale that decrease inputs per unit of production. The more widgets you make, the more efficiently you can make each one. But agriculture is different. A 1989 National Research Council study concluded that “well-managed alternative farming systems nearly always use less synthetic chemical pesticides, fertilizers, and antibiotics per unit of production than conventional farms.”
And while mechanization can provide cost and labor efficiencies on large farms, bigger farms do not necessarily produce more food. According to a 1992 agricultural census report, small, diversified farms produce more than twice as much food per acre than large farms do.
Even the World Bank endorses small farms as the way to increase agricultural output in developing nations where food security remains a pressing issue. While large farms excel at producing a lot of a particular crop – like corn or wheat – small diversified farms produce more food and more kinds of food per hectare overall.
MYTH 3: CONVENTIONAL FARMING IS NECESSARY TO FEED THE WORLD
We’ve all heard proponents of conventional agriculture claim that organic farming is a recipe for global starvation because it produces lower yields. The most extensive yield comparison to date, a 2015 meta-analysis of 115 studies, found that organic production averaged almost 20 percent less than conventionally grown crops, a finding similar to those of prior studies.
But the study went a step further, comparing crop yields on conventional farms to those on organic farms where cover crops were planted and crops were rotated to build soil health. These techniques shrank the yield gap to below 10 percent.
The authors concluded that the actual gap may be much smaller, as they found “evidence of bias in the meta-dataset toward studies reporting higher conventional yields.” In other words, the basis for claims that organic agriculture can’t feed the world depend as much on specific farming methods as on the type of farm.
Consider too that about a quarter of all food produced worldwide is never eaten. Each year the United States alone throws out 133 billion pounds of food, more than enough to feed the nearly 50 million Americans who regularly face hunger. So even taken at face value, the oft-cited yield gap between conventional and organic farming is smaller than the amount of food we routinely throw away.
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This is a four-page fact sheet showing a side-by-side comparison of sustainable and industrial agriculture in relation to the twelve steps to sustainable agriculture.
http://kerrcenter.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/howtheycompare.pdf
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Article (3): What a 40-year experiment can tell us about organic food
Takeaways from Rodale Institute’s Farming Systems Trial.
In Eastern Pennsylvania, fields of corn that stretch endlessly towards the horizon are a common sight. But 12 acres in Kutztown are nothing like the rest.
It’s the site of Rodale Insititute’s Farming Systems Trial (FST), the longest running side-by-side comparison of organic and conventional farming in the world. There, neat rows are being treated differently than their neighbors, while scientists measure and track their performance on several different metrics.
This year, Rodale—a trailblazing force for organic and regenerative farming in the US—is celebrating the trial’s 40th anniversary. Over those four decades, the experiment has produced a wealth of data and has had a broad impact. It influenced the creation of the United States Department of Agriculture’s organic certification program and inspired other research trials around the world. (Side note: FYI, George Washington Carver was pioneering organic soil-building techniques 70 years earlier, and his contributions are often left out of organic’s history.)
Even if “fertility sources” and “crop yields” make your eyes glaze over, the research could affect how you eat. For instance, it might impact the amount of organic food that is produced and available, the price of organic food, and what we know about whether or not organic is better for your health and the planet’s.
“It was really important that we create a uniform certification standard and have a federal law to support it,” said Jeff Moyer, who has worked at Rodale for almost the entire length of the FST and is now CEO. “Now we’re saying that we can use the same data sets to drive the conversation around water quality, carbon sequestration and climate change, and also human health. There are so many opportunities there.”
To acknowledge the anniversary, Moyer spoke with me about some of the most significant findings from the FST.
Plenty of food, healthy soil
Rodale researchers launched the FST in response to a USDA survey in the 1980s, Moyer explained. The survey found that one of the main reasons farmers were reluctant to transition to organic was that they worried about sources of nitrogen. Nitrogen is the most essential nutrient for plant growth, and conventional farmers use chemical fertilizer to deliver it. That’s not allowed in organic, and organic sources—manure, compost, or plants that fix nitrogen into the soil—are trickier. Farmers didn’t think they’d be able to provide enough or that it would be more expensive. And at the time, they weren’t being paid more to produce organic food.
Rodale researchers decided to measure how crops given nitrogen in different ways—via chemical fertilizer in a typical conventional system or via manure or planted legumes in an organic system—performed. According to Moyer, they chose to focus on grains in an attempt to influence the maximum number of acres.
“We could have worked on a vegetable experiment, but quite honestly, if you impact the way rutabagas are grown, you’re only impacting a really tiny amount of acres, whereas if you can demonstrate positive changes around corn or or even wheat, you can impact millions and millions of acres,” he said. (Among organic advocates, this is one approach. Others believe making changes to a system set up to grow too much of the wrong crops can prolong the life of that system, when it would be better to disrupt it and replace it with diversified organic operations that operate from a completely different paradigm. In a story I wrote about Rodale’s latest partnership for Civil Eats last week, you can see that tension surfacing.)
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Article (4): Can we ditch intensive farming – and still feed the world?
Why do we need to grow more food?
Food production around the world must rise by half in the next 30 years to sustain a global population expected to top 10 billion by 2050.
Compared with 2010, an extra 7,400tn calories will be needed a year in 2050. If food production increases along current lines, that would require a landmass twice the area of India [https://interactive.guim.co.uk/charts/embed/jun/2017-06-22T10:11:42/embed.html]
These are the findings of a report published in December by the World Resources Institute on the “food gap” between current production and growing consumption.
So we need to find more land to cultivate then?
Bringing more land under agricultural production is one answer to filling this gap, but it cannot solve the problem alone. Finding that amount of land in suitable conditions would spell the end for many of the earth’s remaining forests, peatlands and wild areas, and release the carbon stored in them, hastening climate change.
Intensive farming has already had a huge effect on biodiversity and the environment worldwide. Pesticides, which have helped boost cereal and fruit production, have also killed bees and myriad species of insects in large numbers.[https://interactive.guim.co.uk/charts/embed/jan/2019-01-27T17:54:19/embed.html]
Fertilisers that have improved poor soils have also had unintended harmful consequences. The largest ever maritime “dead zone” was discovered in the Gulf of Mexico last year, the result of fertiliser and manure from the meat industry running off the land. Chemical fertilisers also contribute directly to climate change, through the greenhouse gas nitrous oxide, and to air pollution through ammonia.
So what are the other answers?
The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation, the world’s leading body charged with care of our future food supply, has called this year for “transformative change in our food systems”.
The most obvious alternative to industrialised intensive farming in the developed world is organic farming. The label organic, or bio, is a familiar one in many supermarkets, but makes up only 2% of food sales in the UK and about 5.5% in the US.
Organic farmers must adhere to strict rules on how they grow their crops and raise their livestock. These include using antibiotics on animals only when necessary, cutting out chemical fertilisers and pesticides almost completely in favour of natural alternatives such as manure and wood ash as fertilisers and plant-derived pesticides, and managing land to provide habitats for wildlife.
Rob Percival, head of policy at the Soil Association, says organic farming can feed the world, if consumption patterns are adjusted to encourage those who can afford meat to eat less of it. “We need an urgent shift in both production and consumption if we’re to avert the worst consequences of climate change, including a dietary shift towards less and better meat,” he says.
He adds that the productivity of organic farming is greater than previously thought, “and when the environmental and other damage caused by high energy and chemical inputs in non-organic farming are factored in, organic food is cheaper for society and better for the planet”.
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Article (5): Sustainable Farming, Soil and Big Agriculture
Corporate farming has disrupted an independent economic model and a way of life that was common just a few generations ago. Things were different when America’s farming economy was based on countless small, independent producers who then sold their products at rural cooperatives or directly to markets.
Today, a few large food producers including Cargill, Archer Daniels Midland and Tyson, and a few large (mostly) chemical companies, including Dow Agro Sciences, Cargill and, yes, Monsanto, have a corner not only on our food supplies but the products used to raise them.
In the last few years, we’ve seen a reversal of this trend with independent, often organic farmers not only raising healthy food but being good stewards of the land. Yet the acreage involved is still minuscule compared to the vast miles of commercial farmland in the midwest, the south, and in California, where big corporate agriculture has a grip. But here, too, there are signs of change. We were reminded of this recently with the passing of Dick Thompson of Boone, Iowa, who early on saw that the chemical laden ways of big agriculture weren’t all they were cracked up to be and set about trying to find ways to grow his crops more efficiently and more successfully.
Thompson first embraced industrial farming on his 300 acres when he started out in 1958. “We purchased everything the salesman had to sell,” Thompson told the Rodale Institute in 2002. “The rotation was continuous corn, with high rates of anhydrous, herbicides and insecticides. We were building a kingdom where enough was not enough. When sickness became the rule and health was the exception on our farm, we knew things had to change.”
That change came in 1968. Thompson gave up on pesticides and herbicides. He started rotating crops for nitrogen replacement and soil building — corn-soybeans-corn-oats-hay — rather than planting corn year after year and saturating the ground with fertilizer (or simply rotating corn with soybeans). He developed a system of ridge planting that contained weeds naturally. After harvest, he planted a cover crop of rye. At the next spring’s planting, his cover crop was returned to the soil between the ridges, smothering weeds and improving the soil. He reintroduced farm animals into what is now mostly a monoculture of single crops, using humane breeding and raising practices as well as hormone and antibiotic-free feed.
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