The Fragile State of Food

By Alaina Baumohl, Social Media Editor
Artwork by Shonali Palacios, Design Lead

The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed great fragility in nearly every aspect of the global food system. Lockdown orders have prevented seasonal laborers from working, slowing harvests. Farmers have been forced to dump perishable produce due to their buyers’ inability to travel for purchasing. Ranchers have had to slaughter excess animals piling up in their barns because of meat processing plant closures. In the United States, food insecurity levels have doubled overall, and tripled in families with children, causing the demand at food banks to skyrocket.

While the fragile balance of our food system may be temporarily regained as the pandemic winds down, another looming threat will soon take its place. It is the consequence of several decades of unsustainable industrial-scale agricultural processes which have exploited the resources of the earth and stripped the land of nutrients. 

That threat is the destruction of our world’s soil.

Since the 1970s, approximately one third of the earth’s topsoil has been lost. And, if we continue these destructive practices—monocropping, intensive pesticide and chemical fertilizer usage, extensive tilling, the separation of plants and livestock into specialized operations—the UN predicts that the world’s remaining topsoil, the stuff we rely on to grow food, will be gone in sixty years. Not only will this have obviously devastating effects on global food production, but it will also exacerbate climate change. This is because soil plays a vital role in absorbing carbon from the atmosphere. As explained by The Scientific American, the destruction of soil creates a vicious feedback loop: When soil is destroyed, less carbon is stored and instead gets released into the atmosphere. This causes the earth’s climate to become more extreme, which further degrades the soil. 

One major cause of soil degradation can be traced back to the modern farming practices popularized by the surge in industrial agriculture after World War II. In an interview with Popular Resistance, Rashid Nuri (who formerly worked under Clinton’s Secretary of Agriculture, Mike Espy) explains the history and pitfalls of industrial agriculture and why we need to transition to regenerative farming practices. After WWII, the United States began selling surplus chemicals initially manufactured for weapons as chemical fertilizer. While chemicals such as ammonium nitrate, a key ingredient in gunpowder, create a successful and consistent crop yield, they kill the microorganisms that allow soil to function healthily and manage pests on its own. This initiated a dependence on fertilizer to produce food, and therefore the companies that produce it.

Nuri goes on to describe how chemical fertilizers gained even more widespread usage by American farmers after the US government began subsidizing grains like corn, wheat, rice, and cotton, as well as their hybridized varieties. Through selective breeding, hybridization standardizes the size and traits of a crop, making it easier for mechanical harvesting machines to operate and for an entire crop to be harvested at the same time. The surplus from this new technology was sold to countries ravaged by the war in exchange for raw materials that allowed the US to further industrialize. Additionally, Nuri points out that unlike normal crops, the seeds produced by hybridized varieties cannot be saved and used for next year’s harvest, which is the practice farmers have followed since the early days of agriculture. Instead, farmers must purchase these seeds each year. Other countries’ dependence on this surplus and the hybridization of key crops both created additional dependency on rapidly expanding industrialized agriculture systems.

Furthermore, hybridization lent itself to monocrop growing, a practice which inherently eliminates biodiversity. A lack of biodiversity makes crops much more vulnerable to pests and extreme weather events. Biodiversity loss is even identified by the World Economic Forum as one of the top five global risks with the greatest impacts, as well as one of the top five global risks that is most likely to happen. 

When you eliminate biodiversity in agriculture, you lose the balance of good and bad insects, and the variety of plants that repel insects and disease. Nuri explains that while “you’re always going to lose some, you don’t want to put yourself in a position of losing it all. And the easiest way to lose it all is to have one thing—one crop—out there. That’s the old nursery rhyme—‘don’t put all your eggs in one basket.’ And this is what we have done in commercial agriculture—we put all of our eggs in one basket. So, therefore, you have to keep coming in with chemicals and keep spraying it all with fertilizers to make it grow and with lots of water to keep it because you can’t do it without water. And it all becomes very precarious.” Or in other words, extremely fragile. 

Luckily, there is a type of farming known as regenerative agriculture which can help regenerate the soil already lost, prevent the loss of more soil, and mitigate the impacts of climate change. Regenerative agriculture, as defined by organic farming experts at The Rodale Institute, is a system of farming principles that seeks to rehabilitate and enhance the entire ecosystem of a farm by placing a heavy premium on soil health with attention also paid to water management, fertilizer use, and more. Some examples of these practices include low or no tilling of the soil, increasing biodiversity by mixing perennials and trees with other crops, crop rotation, cover crops, compost and mob grazing. Although subsidies and guaranteed prices for crops like corn and wheat currently stand in the way of this transition, regenerative farming could actually increase American farmer’s profits by over $100 billion annually. 

Our current farming practices are responsible for emitting roughly 25% of global greenhouse gases annually, whereas regenerative farming would help sequester up to 1.85 billion tons of additional carbon a year. This would transform agriculture from the second largest global emitting sector to a carbon sink.

Restoring soil health is a necessary part of any plan aiming to mitigate climate change. We do need to transition to renewable energy sources and to stop burning fossil fuels, but we also need to manage the effects of the greenhouse gases already in our atmosphere. A global transition to regenerative agriculture would do just this because of soil’s natural sequestration capacity. Regenerative agriculture not only eliminates greenhouse gas emissions from the agriculture sector, but also mitigates the damage already done by the energy sector.

Although I have primarily focused on the downfalls of industrial-scale agriculture, it is worthwhile to note that it has enabled us to feed more people than ever before in human history, a feat that should not be taken lightly. But we accelerated this growing capacity in a way that was unnatural, and therefore unsustainable for a prolonged period of time. The paradigm in which these farming practices were born is one in which the dominant belief is that humans can control nature and bend its resources to fit our desires. We must now face the consequences of this mindset, a reckoning which will happen in our adult lifetimes. The only thing left to wonder is whether or not we will realize the flaws in this thinking before it is too late. 

Perhaps the fragility of other aspects of the food system exposed by COVID-19 can provide the impetus for political leaders to take action on sustainable food security more seriously. We cannot wait much longer to act in the interests of the planet and ourselves. There is much work to be done, but I believe we are capable of shaping a world with healthier soil, healthier people, and a healthier planet. 

Alaina Baumohl ‘23 studies in the College of Arts & Sciences. She can be reached at abaumohl@wustl.edu.