Towards Sustainable World Agriculture

In 2008, author and activist Michael Pollan wrote an open letter to President Obama, the new “Farmer in Chief,” advocating for a sweeping agricultural reform. Pollan argued that reform would make our food healthier, less oil-dependent, and more environmentally friendly. Seven years later, the Obama administration has done little to address this issue. Though typically far from the public spotlight, agriculture may become the most important issue of the twenty-first century. The industrial system of agriculture practiced by most countries today relies on chemical fertilizers, tractors, pesticides, and hybrid or genetically modified seeds. Some agriculturists also hire Salt Lake Pest Control to control the amount of pests and insects breeding on the plants. Events in the next century will put great strain on this system. A growing world population, overreliance on scarce and diminishing resources, and global climate change threaten to upset the delicate mechanism that brings us food each day. Currently, analysts from the U.S. government expect the world to meet its food needs by farming more land, using technology to increase crop yields, and spreading modern, industrial farming methods from the U.S. to developing countries.

The U.N. estimates that the world’s population will increase to between 8.3 and 10.9 billion people by 2050, with a commensurate 70 percent increase in the demand for food. Growing populations are also increasing in affluence, demanding higher quantities of food per capita and higher energy use foods, such as meat or processed food. Most of this population and food demand increase will take place in developing countries, so ideally solutions would increase production in those countries, rather than proposing that they rely on Western agricultural surpluses.

In addition to population growth, farming faces two key problems in the long run: loss of soil fertility and pest management. Visit https://www.bugsbegone.com.au/ to find out the best pest management solutions that are eco-friendly and also doesn’t affect the crop productivity in any manner.

In nature, a previous year’s decayed plant matter fertilizes the next year’s growth, preserving the nutrients in the soil. Farms have to make up for the harvest of plant material with fertilizers. Likewise, pests in the wild are balanced by a complex ecosystem of predators and prey—competition restricts insect and weed populations, and biodiversity limits the spread of plant diseases and the domination of any particularly destructive species of insect or weed. Insects and weeds typically exploit the weakness of a single type of plant; a field of cotton will be decimated by a boll weevil, but a boll weevil is harmless to a field of corn.

Nowadays, it is been found that farmers using industrial agricultural methods apply oil-based chemical fertilizer, herbicide, and insecticide to deal with these issues, are basically sterilizing a field so only one species can survive there. According to Pollan’s research, the use of chemicals and machinery require that U.S. industrial farming expend “10 calories of fossil-fuel energy to produce a single calorie of modern supermarket food.” Fossil fuels exist in a finite quantity, meaning eventually we will have to use something else in their place. In the meantime, however, burning fossil fuels pollutes the atmosphere, increasing the greenhouse effect, and farm chemicals pollute our rivers and oceans, causing huge dead zones off our coasts—as seen in the Chesapeake Bay or the Mississippi River Delta. To extend available arable land and improve yields, farmers use approximately 92 percent of the global water footprint for irrigation While the atmosphere replenishes fresh water, many areas already face water shortages where water usage exceeds its rate of replenishment.

Global climate change has a wide variety of predicted effects, but for agricultural concerns, it will drastically affect water availability. Some areas will receive far more water than before; others will receive far less. Needless to say events such as the ongoing extreme drought in California and severe floods across the world, notably last year’s massive flooding in Pakistan and India, will happen with increasing frequency. A warmer earth increases the amount of water vapor the atmosphere can hold, intensifying severe weather events and changing precipitation patterns. Adaptation to a new warmer climate will shift U.S. agriculture north, and will likely require new water storage techniques to deal with high variability in yearly rainfall. We lack the ability to accurately predict the effects of climate change, but we can be sure that climate change will complicate the other problems facing our fragile food system.

How can we adapt to these problems? Presently the world produces enough food to feed everyone; the one billion that today suffer from food insecurity could be adequately fed with a more equitable distribution of our current resources. However, growth in demand in the next century will require increased production, not just better distribution. This production can be achieved by greater land usage or more intensification (growing more food on the same amount of land). Transferring the current technology of industrial intensification—i.e. the use of chemicals, machinery, and modified seeds—to developing countries could dramatically improve their yields, but at what cost?

Conversion to industrial agriculture is how we plan to meet future challenges to our food system, but is the industrial food system the best system? If we want the rest of the world to emulate U.S. farmers, we should first consider the merits and flaws of the U.S. agricultural system. Industrial agriculture produces huge quantities of food using small amounts of labor at a low monetary cost. But the price of food and its high “efficiency” excludes the environmental cost of agriculture—fertilizer and pesticide pollution, depletion of soil fertility and soil erosion, and greenhouse gas emissions from clearing land, chemical production, machinery usage, and growing livestock. Some of this cost can be reduced through more efficient methods as most chemicals are overused, most crops are overwatered, and soils are overworked by plows. Smarter farming methods, could include the targeted application of fertilizer at specific times and in specific quantities tailored to each plant. Plants can be genetically modified to reduce fertilizer, pesticide, and water requirements.

Ultimately though, the U.S. system of agriculture is unsustainable due to its reliance on a diminishing stock of fossil fuels. Technology can save us from many problems, but eventually agriculture will have to return to a natural cycle of fertility instead of substituting oil for organic wastes. Food is harvested from farms and shipped off to cities, a one-way flow of fertility that we make up for with artificial fertilizers. To be sustainable, we need to restore the natural cycle; returning the “wastes” created by food consumption in cities and livestock production—specifically concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs)—back to farms. Cities produce millions of gallons of toxic sewage and CAFOs produce huge lagoons of toxic manure (manure becomes toxic due to the use of hormones and antibiotics on livestock) all of which is eventually dumped into our rivers and oceans. To repair this rift in the fertility cycle would simultaneously reduce our fossil fuel reliance and cut our air and water pollution.

The USDA has consistently worked to produce large quantities of cheap food for America. This has proven to be extremely successful—a recent Bloomberg article showed that Americans pay a smaller percentage of their income for food than virtually those living in every other country in the world. This goal has come at the costs outlined above, but what can the USDA do to continue to provide lots of cheap food while mitigating environmental costs?

Consider the problem of soil fertility: the law could require that all waste be captured from cities and livestock operations and processed until it could be used on farms. Such a policy could perhaps be financed by giving producers the net profit or loss from processing and selling their manure and organic waste. This suggestion sounds expensive, but actually even with today’s prices (not factoring in environmental costs) this could be profitable, as it takes something we previously dumped as waste and turns it into a product. Cities already process their waste, although usually not to a high enough quality that it could be reused, the extra effort of which could be profitable given the sunk cost of waste management. Charging livestock producers for processing their waste would incentivize them to reduce the toxicity of their waste—grass-fed, medicine-free cattle don’t produce toxic manure, instead they can sell manure for a profit.

A few more possible government solutions: we could tax chemical fertilizer pollution (not merely fertilizer usage) encouraging smarter, reduced chemical application. We could reform agriculture subsidies to subsidize only those calories that are actually eaten; cutting out subsides for crop production that goes to ethanol or other nonfood uses. We could refocus government-funded agricultural science to study farming methods other than monoculture (planting a single species in a field), such as intercropping (planting multiple species of crops together) or permaculture (modeling crops after a natural ecosystem, with perennial plant varieties, like an orchard).

Alternately, we can rely on consumers instead of government to reform the agriculture system. Consumers can vote with their dollars by changing purchases to organic food and chemical free meat. But this approach forces consumers to bear the cost of agricultural reform rather than producers.

However we decide to reform it, however, the U.S. industrial agriculture system cannot continue forever as is, nor can it be scaled up to meet the needs of the rest of the planet without adapting to the problems of the future.