By Michael Grunwald | Dec. 13, 2024 | New York Times
“Industrial agriculture” is a phrase used to signify “bad,” evoking toxic chemicals, monoculture crops, confined animals, the death of the small family farm and all kinds of images people don’t like to associate with their food. Factory farms are a constant target of environmentalists, documentarians, animal rights activists, spiritual leaders like Pope Francis and the Indian mystic Sadhguru, and leftist politicians like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders.
Even the manosphere podcaster Joe Rogan has called for banning them, while Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Donald Trump’s pick for health secretary, has blamed industrial agriculture for making us sick and fat. The United Nations has pointed out that it does $3 trillion in damage to the global environment a year.
Agriculture in general does have real environmental downsides. It’s the leading driver of water pollution and shortages, deforestation and biodiversity loss. It generates one-fourth of the greenhouse gases that heat up the planet.
And it’s eating the earth. It has already overrun about two of every five acres of land on the planet, and farmers are on track to clear an additional dozen Californias worth of forest by 2050. That would be a disaster for nature and the climate, because the carbon dioxide released by converting wild landscapes into farms and pastures is already the most damaging source of agricultural emissions, worse than methane from cow burps or nitrous oxide from fertilizer.
But industrial agriculture in particular has one real upside: It produces enormous amounts of food on relatively modest amounts of land. And that will be agriculture’s most vital job in the coming decades. The world will need even more enormous amounts of food by 2050, about 50 percent more calories to adequately feed nearly 10 billion people. The inconvenient truth is that factory farms are the best hope for producing the food we will need without obliterating what’s left of our natural treasures and vaporizing their carbon into the atmosphere.
It’s true that if we ate less meat and grew fewer biofuels, we would reduce agriculture’s hunger for land. But the reality is we show no signs of doing that — meat consumption is only projected to rise in the coming years.
So we’ll have to make more food per acre instead of using more acres to make food. And that’s what industrial agriculture does well. Its fertilizers and irrigation systems turbocharge production. Its pesticides and herbicides kill bugs and weeds that stunt crop growth. Its GPS-enabled tractors help farmers plant high-yield seeds precisely where they want. And its factory farms — which exploit modern advances in genetics, nutrition and veterinary care to cram trillions of calories into billions of animals — manufacture prodigious quantities of relatively cheap commodities.
That, after all, is what factories do.
Ideally, Big Ag could make even more food with even less land while doing less to harm the environment. But these days, the politically correct stance toward Big Ag is not to reform it but to replace it. Environmentalists such as Al Gore and Jane Goodall, foodies like Alice Waters and Michael Pollan and even agribusinesses and food conglomerates like General Mills and Danone talk about supplanting industrial methods with kinder and gentler “regenerative agriculture” that revives the pastoral wisdom of our ancestors. The Biden administration has blasted more than $20 billion into “climate-smart agriculture” focused on regenerative practices. Mr. Kennedy has called for a Trump-led regenerative revolution.
But that’s a formula for agriculture to devour even more of the earth. Old MacDonald-style farms where soil is nurtured with love and animals have names rather than numbers may sound environmentally friendly. But their artisanal grains and grass-fed beef are worse for nature than chemical-drenched corn and feedlot-fattened beef because they require much more land for each calorie they produce. In 2021, Sri Lanka’s president banned agricultural chemicals in an effort to force its farmers to go organic, vowing to end industrial farming and get in “sync with nature.” Then farm yields crashed, plunging the country into a food crisis and forcing it to import calories it used to grow itself.
We tend to think of our transformation of the earth as a modern phenomenon wrought by industrial advances such as private jets and factory farms, but recent scholarship suggests it actually began with the invention of agriculture about 12,000 years ago. Early farmers didn’t need tractors or chemicals to reshape their environment. They subdued nature with fire and the ax, converting wilderness into crops and pastures that supported a much larger population. By the dawn of the fossil-fuel era, they had already cleared a South America worth of wilderness.
Scientists have used ice cores and ancient pollen samples to show that preindustrial farming and the deforestation that made room for it also changed the climate, likely emitting enough carbon to avert another ice age. Indigenous people deforested so much of the Americas to grow crops that when they mostly died out after European contact, forests on their abandoned farmland grew back so quickly and reabsorbed so much carbon that it created measurable global cooling. Their disappearance helped nature reclaim some territory, however briefly.
Agriculture didn’t change much until the 1960s, when the agronomist Norman Borlaug bred a higher-yielding variety of wheat. That was the beginning of the Green Revolution, a new era of disruption that brought farmers chemical pesticides, powerful fertilizers, advanced automation, large-scale irrigation and other innovations that helped triple their crop and livestock yields in half a century.
The Green Revolution made big industrial agriculture possible, and its productivity saved billions of people from malnutrition and starvation. It did create environmental problems — soil erosion, air and water pollution from pesticides and herbicides, mountains of manure leaching off overcrowded feedlots. But even though its soybeans and cattle have often invaded forests and wetlands, its higher yields have spared billions of additional acres of the planet’s ecosystems from destruction, by making more food on existing farmland. The Green Revolution didn’t end deforestation, but few forests would still be standing without it.
The key point, obscured by our cultural nostalgia for the quaint farmsteads of yesteryear, is that old-fashioned agriculture made much more of a mess when it replaced nature than intensive industrial agriculture makes when it replaces old-fashioned agriculture. Every farm, even the scenic ones with red barns and rolling hills that artists paint and writers sentimentalize, is a kind of environmental crime scene, an echo of whatever carbon-rich wilderness it once replaced.
Dirk Rice’s great-great-grandfather was one of the pioneers who converted the Grand Prairie of east-central Illinois from a soggy expanse of marshy grasslands into a breadbasket with their bare hands. Mr. Rice still grows corn and soybeans on 200 acres of the prairie his ancestors wrestled away from Mother Nature, but that ancestral land now makes up just one-tenth of his farm; the only farmers he knows with 200 acres or less work full-time jobs in town. He installs drains with a laser-guided tile plow, works his fields with a 320-horsepower tractor, and grows remarkable amounts of grain.
“Back in my great-great-grandfather’s day, men were men and horsepower was horse power,” Mr. Rice told me. “Got to say, though, we get better yields.”
The story of the Midwestern Corn Belt, and of agriculture throughout the developed world, is a story of steadily increasing efficiency and scale toward mega-yielding megafarms. When I visited his farm a few years ago, Mr. Rice showed me his father’s tricycle-red Farmall 400 tractor, a technological marvel from before the Green Revolution. It was about the size of a Kia Soul. Then he showed me his John Deere combine, which weighed as much as 10 Kia Souls. It looked like a Zamboni on steroids, with a yield monitor on a touch-screen and a grain cart that held more corn than a semi truck.
“My grandfather ruined his shoulder shucking corn,” Mr. Rice said. “This thing picks corn, strips it, sorts it, weighs it and measures the moisture content of its kernels. And this is probably the smallest one John Deere makes.”
That combine helps Mr. Rice harvest 220 bushels of corn per acre, five times the yields his grandfather got. And his operation is typical for the area; I visited a nearby corn grower with an even more advanced 500-horsepower combine who gets 25 percent higher yields. The more grain their farms can grow for the world, the less new farmland will need to be wrestled away from Mother Nature on the other side of the planet.
So we’re going to need to increase yields a lot. And since most of the Green Revolution’s advances have already spread across most of the planet, that will be much harder than it was the first time. Meanwhile, climate change itself threatens to drag down yields as extreme weather intensifies and pests and diseases invade new regions.
Somehow, though, our farms are going to have to become even more productive — especially our industrial animal farms. Just as Willie Sutton robbed banks because that’s where the money was, any strategy to reduce agriculture’s footprint will have to focus on higher-yield meat because three-fourths of agricultural land is now used to feed livestock.
Steve Gabel knows beef has a bad reputation, which is why an “I 🖤 Beef” sign greets visitors to his Magnum Feedyard in northeastern Colorado. He also knows factory feedlots where multitudes of confined cattle get stuffed full of grain before getting shipped off to slaughter have an even worse reputation, which is why he wanted to show me real industrial beef production. He drove me to the middle of his outdoor lot, amid a black and brown sea of ear-tagged cattle, and rolled down the windows of his mud-splattered Chevy Silverado. *Click here to read the original article in The New York Times)
This is the final essay in What to Eat on a Burning Planet, a series exploring bold ideas to secure our food supply. Read more about this project in a note from Eliza Barclay, Opinion’s climate editor. Mr. Grunwald is a journalist and the author of the forthcoming book “We Are Eating the Earth.”
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