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Engineering A Sustainable–and Sustaining–World Food Supply

July 29, 2002

Dennis T. Avery

This speech was given before the American Society of Agricultural Engineers in Chicago, IL

The Declaration for High-Yield Agriculture

On April 30, 2002, a new “Declaration in Support of Protecting Nature With High-Yield Farming and Forestry” was signed in Washington, D.C. The founding signers included two Nobel Peace Prize winners, a co-founder of Greenpeace, the famed British author of the Gaia Hypothesis, the President of the World Conservation Trust, the 2001 World Food Prize winner and two noteworthy former Senators—one from each major U.S. political party.

The Declaration says in part:

It is clear that modern high-yield farming – the Green Revolution – has been a significant environmental and humanitarian triumph. Since the 1960’s it has led to better lives and prevented the malnourishment of billions of people.

Additionally, the Green Revolution’s higher yields made it unnecessary to clear millions of square miles for food production, thereby saving large amounts of natural habitat and biodiversity from the plow. In short, producing more food per hectare helped save large areas of land for nature.

WHEREAS:

Therefore, we, the signatories to this declaration, hereby declare that additional high-yield practices, based on advances in biology, ecology, chemistry, and technology, are critically needed in agriculture and forestry not only to achieve the goal of improving the human condition for all peoples but also the simultaneous preservation of the natural environment and its biodiversity through the conservation of wild areas and natural habitat.

We invite all organizations and individuals concerned with human welfare and the conservation and preservation of our planet’s rich biological heritage to join us in support of high-yield agriculture and forestry by adding their names to this declaration.

The founding signers of the High Yield Declaration include;

I call these people ‘high-yield heroes,’ because they’re willing to put their enormous reputations behind a politically incorrect strategy. They argue for intensive farming and tree plantations. They’re worried about the negative environmental impacts of traditional, low-yield farming systems, and letting trees burn instead becoming timber. Most of all, they agree that high yields are vital for humanity and the planet.”

The Declaration doesn’t endorse any agricultural technology or system. It simply states that the world urgently needs higher yields based on sustainable advances in biology, ecology, chemistry, and technology.

The world must nearly triple its food production by 2050, for a human population that may reach 9 billion before it stabilizes. Wood is the most renewable and environmentally friendly building material, and paper will be vital for literacy and economic growth all over the world. Without higher yields from the farmlands and managed forests, the world could still lose much of today’s wildlands and biodiversity.

The Age-Old Search for a Sustaining Food Supply

Getting enough food has been mankind’s first and foremost concern for millions of years. Fortunately, mankind has shown enormous ingenuity in achieving food-sufficiency, from the early invention of clubs, spears and flint skinning knives through the development of agriculture, and right up to today’s pursuit of virus-resistant (and thus higher-yielding) crop varieties through biotechnology.

The problem for early man was that hunting and gathering provided a healthy diet rich in meat, eggs, fish and shellfish, fruits and vegetables—but not for very many people. Game animals were elusive, their travels unpredictable, and their populations cycled up and down. When the first human hunters arrived in the Western Hemisphere, they quickly wiped out dozens of huntable species, including North America’s versions of the elephant, camel, horse and ground sloth.

Mankind searched millions of years to overcome the limitations of hunting and gathering until about 10,000 years ago, when we finally discovered how to domesticate plants and animals, and created agriculture.

Farming created, for the first time, a stable, sustainable food supply for large numbers of humans, but there was still a problem: Farming didn’t provide a very good diet for humans who had evolved as hunters of meat.

“It’s easy to tell from the skeletons of our ancestors whether they were agriculturists or hunter-gatherers,” says Arthur de Vany, an expert on Stone Age diets at California State University. “The agriculturists have bad teeth, bone lesions, small and underdeveloped skeletons teeth, and small craniums, compared to hunter- gatherers.”

Experts now believe humans spent 2 million years as hunters and scavengers, eating diets that were about 65 percent livestock calories and 35 percent plant calories. Early farmers who ate mainly plants lacked key vitamins, minerals, and amino acids. This led to higher infant mortality, shorter life spans, more infectious diseases, widespread iron deficiency anemiam and bone mineral disorders.

The U.S. Council for Agricultural Science and Technology (CAST) reports “where intakes of animal products are low, increases in meat (in particular), milk, and eggs in the diets of toddlers and school children have resulted in marked improvement in growth, cognitive development and health.”

Only in the last century, through the high-yield wonders of modern plant breeding, industrial fertilizers, and integrated pest management, has society been able to broadly support high-quality diets for large groups of people.

The animal-plant balance in the American diet today is 38 percent livestock calories and 62 percent plant calories. It is roughly similar in Europe. This is probably the highest percentage of livestock calories in 10,000 years. Worldwide, however, only about 17 percent of the human calories come from livestock.

Supporting High-Quality Diets for the 21st Century

The world’s population growth is rapidly tapering off. Births per woman in the Third World have fallen from 6.2 in 1960 to less than 3.0 today, and are still declining strongly. Population stability is 2.1 births per woman. The First World is at 1.6 births per woman, and showing no sign of resurgence. It is entirely reasonable now to expect the world’s human population will peak at less than 9 billion people, about the year 2040, and trend slowly downward after that.

The big challenge for farming, and for wildlands conservation, in the 21st century will be supplying humanity’s innate hunger for high-quality protein. Reflecting the world’s strongly rising income trend, we will apparently need to provide high-quality diets for nearly 9 billion people by 2050, instead of today’s 1 billion affluent consumers.

There will even be a pet challenge. America has 112 million companion cats and dogs among its 270 million people. A rich, one-child China in 2050 may well have 500 million companion cats and dogs—and woe unto any politician who stands between Fluffy and her favorite food!

CAST expects world meat demand to rise about two-thirds in the next 20 years, with 90 percent of the increased consumption in the Third World. Ultimately, we must expect that Third World per capita consumption of livestock products will equal that in the First World today.

Sheep, goats, and cattle in the Third World produce more than a kilogram of human food for each kilogram of grain consumed. However, we’re already using most of the world’s grasslands, and they have limited potential to produce more grass, due to poor rainfall and/or soil quality. In the First World, it takes about three pounds of grain to produce a pound of meat, and a bit less than one pound of grain to produce a pound of milk or eggs.

Worldwide, there are only small amounts of additional good land that can be brought into production; for example, parts of Brazil and Sudan. There are low-yield farming systems that can be improved through economic and societal reforms in a few places such as the Ukraine and Bangladesh. Overall, however, it is appropriate to say that good farmland is the scarcest resource in the world.

Development economists say that the world will need at least 250 percent more farm output by 2050, and perhaps three times as much. Since the world is already farming 37 percent of its land area, we cannot contemplate simply extending today’s crop and livestock yields to supply tomorrow’s food needs. If we want to save the world’s wildlands for future generations, we should be thinking how to quadruple today’s yields on the high-quality land.

Agricultural Engineering and Sustainable Farming

An Historical Overview. The earliest agricultural engineers were probably the practical men in the Fertile Crescent of the Eastern Mediterranean who thousands of years ago invented the plow, the harrow and the irrigation ditch. Those three advances, along with selective plant and animal breeding, powered the early era of agriculture. (The harrow was necessary for weed control as early farmers used only half the land each crop season and clean-fallowed the other half.)

There were problems, of course. Irrigation built up salts in the irrigated fields. The famed Hanging Gardens of Babylon, after several centuries of careless irrigation, became what they are today—a salt-rimed swamp in southern Iraq. The plow led a surge of higher yields across much of the ancient world—but also encouraged the heavy soil erosion that plagued the Old World, especially in the Mediterranean Basin.

Famine, however, dominated the farming world from the inception of farming until after World War II. Any advancement that provided more food, immediately, got precedence over something that might protect future yields.

What rescued humanity from unsustainable farming and ultimate, massive famine was the development and application of science and engineering.

Engineering’s first and biggest contribution to a sustainable high-quality diet was the Haber-Bosch process for taking nitrogen from the air, invented in 1908. Until that time, nitrogen for crop growth was the key limiting factor in global food production. We could only sustain as much crop production as we could nourish with animal manure. There was lots of phosphate and potash in rich deposits around the world. The air we breathe is 78 percent N, but until the Haber-Bosch process, we couldn’t get the N out of the air and into our fields except through ruminant animals.

The American Dust Bowl of the 1930s represented in a very real sense the huge failure we must expect if we try to feed a modern society using traditional farming. America used John Deere’s new steel plow to break the rich soils of the Great Plains after 1870. But decades of farming gradually used up the nutrients that had accumulated in those soils under centuries of heavy grazing and defecating by bison, antelope, birds, and grasshoppers.

America had a severe drought in the 1930s—but we’d had severe droughts before, and have had equally severe droughts since. But, we’ve had only one Dust Bowl—when the natural plant nutrients in the Great Plains soils ran out. Soil organic matter declined with repeated plowing and cropping.

The Dust Bowl created the Soil Conservation Service, pushed farmers to use contour farming, and the new chemical nitrogen available because of Haber-Bosch—and launched agricultural science and engineering on a new path toward increasing sustainability for farming. The new rising yield trends produced by hybrid seeds and industrially fertilized fields began to be amplified by the more timely field work done with lightweight gasoline tractors and by millions of acres of horse pasture suddenly freed for food crops because they were no longer needed for draft animal fodder.

Urban American is currently suffering through an unrequited love affair with the traditional farming practiced in America before 1900, with its horse-drawn sleighs, wood-handled pitchforks, and big red barns full of loose hay. They somehow think modern life would be better if 90 percent of the population spent its time milking cows and pulling weeds by hand. (So long as they themselves remain in the urban 10 percent, of course, enjoying the computers, cars, entertainment centers and modern medicine.)

The reality, of course, is that the farming of 1875 could not produce enough food and fiber to sustain today’s world’s human population, let alone get high enough yields to save the wildlands. In fact, my peer-reviewed estimate is that high-powered seeds, center-pivot irrigation, tractors, fertilizers, no-till planters, pesticides, and confinement feeding systems have prevented the plow down of an additional 16 million square miles of wildlands to produce today’s food supply.

That number, 16 million square miles, is significant because it represents the world’s total forest area. What this means is that virtually every forest tree and creature on the planet today owes its existence to high-yield farming, agricultural researchers, and farm input suppliers!

The Soil and Water Conservation Society of America, no friend of agribusiness, has declared modern high-yield farming the most sustainable in history in large part because of its unprecedented ability to minimize farming’s land requirements while sustaining soil fertility, preventing soil erosion and controlling pests through integrated pest management.

Recent Science and Engineering Contributions to Food Sustainability

Saving Wildlands with Fossil Fuel. Eco-activists condemn modern agriculture for using “too much fossil fuel.” in agriculture. However, modern farming in the United States accounts for only 2 percent of the country’s petroleum use, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Office of Energy. Historically, farmers use the same energy sources as non-farm industries (horses, steam, gasoline, diesel). If engineering provides a cleaner, more sustainable power source in the future, farmers will adopt it. If we went back to horse-drawn farm equipment, we’d need to clear another 100 million acres of land for their fodder.

One of farming’s major fossil fuel uses is unique. Farmers use natural gas to capture 80 million tons of nitrogen fertilizer per year from the air. The U.S. Department of Agriculture and Environmental Protection Agency estimate that America has only about one-fourth of the organic N needed to support its current crop output. Countries like India, where the crop biomass is burned for cooking fuel and used as animal fodder, are even more seriously short of organic matter to maintain soil quality.

Vaclav Smil, author of Enriching the Earth (MIT Press, 2001), estimates that a worldwide organic farming mandate would require the manure from another 7–8 billion cattle to replace the elemental nitrogen high-yield farmers currently take from the air. The best-quality land could support no more than one animal unit per hectare, and low-quality land might need 15 hectares per animal unit. The forage needed for so many cattle would take most of the world’s scarce farmland.

The United States would need the manure from nearly one billion additional cattle to replace its current N fertilizer use. There are only 2.1 billion acres in the whole lower 48 states. The U.S. could not even feed that many cattle, let alone having land for food production, parks, and national forests. (The extra cattle might be used as draft animals, replacing tractors and lowering farm fuel needs—but at the expense of shortening the growing season because of the draft animals’ slower speed).

On the other hand, the world has no looming shortage of fossil fuels. It has perhaps 200 years worth of probable petroleum and orimulsion reserves. (Huge deposits of orimulsion, which can be burned in power plants, lie unused in Venezuela.) There are centuries worth of coal for clean-burn technologies.

African farmers use virtually no fertilizer on their food crops, and in many cases their bush-fallow periods have been cut from 15–20 years to two or three years. Africa is locked in a downward spiral of declining soil fertility, declining yields, and declining soil organic content. The International Food Policy Research Institute predicts that, unless their agriculture becomes more productive, sub-Saharan Africa will likely double its number of malnourished children (to 49 million) by 2020 and the reality could be even more disastrous. Is this the “sustainable” farming that the activists recommend?

Radically Reducing Soil Erosion. Modern farming has reduced soil erosion to the lowest rates in agriculture’s history. Today, it is primarily the world’s peasant and organic farmers who suffer the high rates of soil erosion. Peasant farmers get yields one-tenth or one-hundredth as high as the modern farmers, so they must extend their fields onto steep slopes and into tropical monsoon climates where erosion risks are ten times higher than in Iowa.

High-yield farmers increasingly use some form of conservation tillage, which eliminates plowing, cuts water runoff and soil erosion by up to 95 percent, retains up to twice as much water in the soils, and encourages far more soil microbes and earthworms. Conservation tillage is now being used on hundreds of millions of acres in North America, South America, Australia and, most recently, in Asia.

Dr. Stanley Trimble of UCLA recently performed ‘soil archeology’ on one of the worst Dust Bowl soil erosion sites, the Coon Creek watershed in Wisconsin. In the 1970s and again in the 1990s, he re-did an old 1938 Soil Conservation Service soil survey. Trimble concluded that, thanks primarily to chemical fertilizers and conservation farming systems, the Coon Creek watershed currently has only 6 percent as much erosion as it suffered during the Dust Bowl days. Its topsoil is now fully sustainable.

Dr. Trimble says his data show that the U.S. Department of Agriculture overstates U.S. erosion. He says anyone now claiming widespread unsustainable rates of U.S. soil erosion “owes us the evidence.” The high soil erosion claims of Dr. David Pimental, for example, are popular among activists, but Pimental has no field data to support them.

In Argentina, I visited a farm yielding four tons of wheat per hectare from no-till, with no erosion. Across the fence, a farmer who still plowed was getting one ton of wheat per hectare, with lots of erosion. Much of Brazil’s rolling acid-soil Cerrados Plateau could not be sustainably farmed without no-till. No wonder Latin America’s no-till acreage has expanded from 670,000 hectares in 1987 to more than 29 million hectares in 2001. The latest surge of no-till is in South Asia’s irrigated rice-wheat lands, where no-till lets farmers harvest their summer wheat three weeks earlier (before the fiercest heat can shrivel the grain) with half as much water used.

More Efficient and Sustainable Irrigation. Agricultural engineers have created a far more water-efficient and cost-efficient irrigation system than the traditional dams and ditches. The center-pivots put water from wells directly onto the crop fields, so no rivers are drowned. Whereas water efficiency with dams and ditches averages less than 40 percent, modern center-pivots with trailing tubes instead of sprinklers (less evaporation) can easily top 80 percent. With computer-controlled water application, high-efficiency center-pivots could irrigate the land with half the current water use, making the currently dwindling Ogallala Aquifer fully sustainable. The new computerized center-pivots would do this with half their current electricity use.

Such high-efficiency center pivots will take on even more importance in the years ahead to provide supplemental irrigation on current rain-fed land as we strive to quadruple the yields on the best soils.

Preventing Biodiversity Losses. Eco-activists complain that high-yield farming destroys biodiversity. Again, they ignore the largest conservation triumph in world history—the millions of wild species protected in the 16 million square miles of wildlands not plowed.

Dr. Michael Huston, an ecologist at the Oak Ridge National Laboratories and author of Biological Diversity (Cambridge Press, 1994) told a Hudson farm policy conference in 1995, “Fortunately for both humans and nature, the world’s best soils support the most productive agriculture, but relatively low biodiversity. The world’s poorer soils are terrible for crop production, but harbor our largest reservoir of wild plant species and their genes. There is no inherent conflict between sustainable farming and biodiversity conservation at least on a global basis.” Dr. Huston recommended that we farm the best land for the highest sustainable yields, and thus leave more of the poorer, more biodiverse lands, for Nature.

The activist complaint may be based on the fact that lots of small farmers, all over the world, have shifted from traditional low-yield seeds to high-yield Green Revolution-type seeds. Some activists demand that we keep the Third World half of the planet’s arable land as a gene museum—thereby sacrificing millions of wild species to preserve “man-made biodiversity.” Wouldn’t gene banks and small gene farms accomplish the goal without locking the entire Third World in perpetuity-poverty?

Organic farmers constantly brag that their fields contain somewhat more weed and insect species than high-yield fields. However, all farming is an intrusion on nature. Even an organic field has probably lost 98 percent of its wild biodiversity. If organic farmers need nearly twice as much land to produce the global food supply, then we would lose huge numbers of wild species to an organic farming mandate.

Confinement Meat Production. Indicting modern confinement meat production for water pollution is the most ludicrous element in the current activist litany against modern farming, though it is a popular theme with activists and the media. In the first place, feeding birds and animals in confinement saves millions of hectares of land that would otherwise be used for barren hog and poultry yards. Secondly, the confinement feeders save the creatures’ wastes and apply them to growing crops as organic fertilizer. Otherwise, they would wash into the nearest stream with every storm event—as the wastes from outdoor livestock and poultry producers do now.

The birds and animals suffer less from weather extremes. Hogs, for example, can’t sweat in the summer, or grow fur for the winter. Indoor hogs are far more comfortable, and this is reflected in feed conversion ratios about 20 percent higher than for outdoor animals. High feed conversion rates mean less land must be planted to crops to nourish them.

North Carolina’s Black River, which drains the most intensive hog production region in America, is still rated an “outstanding resource water” by the state. The nutrient spikes found in North Carolina streams are not associated with hog farms but with its urban sewage treatment plants. (Current sewage treatment methods take out only about half of the N from human wastes.)

The quarterly reports from North Carolina’s Department of Water Quality consistently show that 99 percent of the state’s hog farms have no discharges to surface waters at all. The total gallonage discharged is miniscule.

At a 1999 seminar, marine scientists reported that nitrogen, phosphorous and chlorophyll trends in North Carolina’s Tar-Pamlico and Neuse River Estuary Basins do not support a claim of increased eutrophication over the past 30 years, despite rising livestock numbers.

The best hog production facility I have ever seen used deep pits under concrete-slatted hog houses to accumulate the manure, phased feed rations to minimize odor-causing elements in the manure, and soil injection of the wastes to minimize both nutrient losses and odors. Fifty years away, downwind, I could not smell it was a hog farm!

Activist lawsuits against confinement hogs have now been thrown out of North Carolina courts and out of a federal court. The federal judge took the unusual step of requiring Bobby Kennedy, Jr. and his fellow “eco-lawyers” to pay the court costs of a big hog producer! The Federal judge said, “No reasonable attorney . . . could reasonably believe that [the lawsuit] had any reasonable chance of success.”

Desalinating Crops–The Latest Breakthrough in Food Sustainability. Forty percent of today’s food supply comes from irrigated land. For centuries, however, we’ve known that irrigated farming was unsustainable in the very long term due to salt buildup. Now, biotechnology has given high-yield farming the biggest sustainability breakthrough in 100 years. The University of California/Berkeley has created tomatoes and canola that not only grow in saline conditions, but also actually take salts out of the soil. The plants store the salts in their leaves during the growing season. After the tomatoes and oilseeds are harvested, the farmer can go back and harvest the leaves (and salts) for industrial use. One canola plant can remove 12 grams of salt, and there can be 20,000 canola plants per acre.

Biotechnology is also giving humanity its first victories over viruses, overcoming aluminum toxicity in acid soils, providing the gene maps to find useful genes from wild relatives of our crop plants, and generally promising to become a huge asset in creating the still-higher farm yields that will be needed in the next 50 years.

Low Yields From Alternative Agriculture

The Swiss Research Institute of Organic Agriculture just published in Science the conclusion that organic farming is “practical,” since their 21-year side-by-side tests showed the organic crops yielded “only” 20 percent less than the conventional crops.

However, a 20 percent worldwide increase in cropland requirements would force the plow-down of another 1.2 million square miles of wildlife habitat—equaling one-fourth of Europe’s land area.

Moreover, the Swiss organic results are actually much worse than reported: Their wheat averaged only 4 tons per hectare, compared to the Swiss national average of 6–7 tons per year. Their potato yields were even worse compared with the Swiss national average. Clearly, the yields from all the Swiss organic research center’s test plots compare poorly with the yields of conventional Swiss farmers.

The Danish government’s Bichel Committee reported several years ago, after examining dozens of yield comparisons, that an organic farming mandate would slash Danish grain and pulse production by 62 percent, cut pork and poultry production by 70 percent and reduce potato output by 80 percent. Virtually overnight, Denmark would cease to be a country producing an abundant, high-quality food supply for its own population, plus billions of dollars worth of high-value farm exports (pork, cheese, frozen French fries) for sale to the rest of the world.

With organic-only farming, Denmark would barely be able to feed itself. Danish consumers would be forced into lower-quality diets, with far less pork, poultry, and potatoes. Denmark’s current export customers would have to clear millions of acres of their existing forests for additional farmland.

Only Denmark’s dairy production would survive the organic shift with its output virtually intact—because dairy cows can eat grass, and they would need lots and lots of cows to create fertilizer for their remaining crops.

Britain’s Rothamsted experiment station has been growing wheat with inorganic fertilizer for 158 straight years now—and is getting twice the wheat yield the Swiss organic researchers recently reported in Science. Organic farmers claim that chemical nitrogen “poisons the soil.” When will this “soil poisoning” set in?

Britain’s Cooperative Wholesale Association, which farms about 80,000 acres in both mainstream and organic modes, told a hearing of the British House of Lords in 1999 that it gets 44 percent less wheat from its organic fields. If that is the valid yield number for organic field crops, then producing Europe’s current food supply organically would require clearing additional farmland land equal to all the forests in Germany, France, Denmark, and the UK. Current EU exports to arid countries in the Middle East would be eliminated, so still another cropland penalty would be incurred somewhere on the planet.

The Small Farmer Diversion

Some eco-activists assert that “sustainable” farms are small and diversified. This reflects either idealized nostalgia or ignorance. The size of the farm has nothing to do with sustainability or environmental value.

Farmers have been migrating to the cities for centuries to get better pay and working conditions. The proportion of farmers in the United States and Europe has dropped from more than 80 percent in the early 19th century to well under 10 percent today. Asia is repeating the same pattern as it creates urban jobs that takes farmers away from stoop labor in the rice paddies.

It is doubtful that enough First World people would accept the hard work, harsh weather exposure and low pay of small, labor-intensive farms in the years ahead to supply its food. Britain’s Cooperative Wholesale Association says most of its hired organic farm workers leave within a few weeks.

Modern farmers get incomes as high as city workers by increasing their output. They produce more food by farming more acres, and/or more animals and/or getting higher yields. Often, high-yield farmers buy land that would otherwise be sold to developers.

High-yield farmers have an outstanding record of good stewardship and good environmental husbandry. When Auburn and North Carolina State University assessed the hog industry in North Carolina, they found 95 percent of the farms fulfilling their environmental responsibilities. The erring 5 percent were almost all small farms, with older farm operators who had little interest in making new investments in manure handling and animal comfort. This “careless 5 percent” is characteristic of the farming community, and has been for generations.

Sustainability on a Broader Scale

Global Warming: Late in 2001, Gerard Bond and a team from the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University published their analysis of sediment cores from the floor of the North Atlantic Ocean going back 12,000 years. They were looking for iceberg debris, the little bits of rock ground off Canada and Greenland, and floated out to sea on icebergs. They found nine moderate global coolings and nine moderate global warming, in a cycle that averaged 1340 years. The cycle coincides exactly with a known cycle in the magnetic activity of the sun. By that evidence, we are about 200 years or so into another moderate warming like the Medieval Climate Optimum—the finest weather humanity can remember. It will be followed by another Little Ice Age, starting somewhere around the year 3100 AD.

Salmon Returning to Pacific Northwest. Last year, Oregon fishermen caught four times as many salmon as they caught two years earlier. The state manager of the Oregon salmon fishery says, “The ocean is alive with baitfish.” The return of the “disappearing salmon” to the Pacific Northwest has nothing to do with logging, dams, or irrigated farming. It’s part of a known 25-year cycle of Pacific Ocean nutrients. For 25 years at a time, the Pacific currents push nutrients toward Oregon and Washington (while the salmon fishery in the Gulf of Alaska declines). Then, for the next 25 years, the salmon nutrients go to the Gulf of Alaska, while the Oregon-Washington salmon fishery declines. The fish catch data clearly reveal four such cycles in the last 100 years.

Did the Sierra Club not know about the 25-year cycle when they predicted extinction of the Snake River salmon? Or did they know about the cycle and not tell us?

Letting the Forests Burn. For 30 years, the eco-activists have been against Smokey Bear and his campaign to prevent forest fires. Even after half of Yellowstone National Park burned up in 1988, they kept assuring us that fire was the best manager of forests. Yet wood is the most eco-friendly building material, and the most renewable.

If we leave the wood in the forest to burn, then we must make our buildings out of concrete and steel, while huge forest fires destroy millions of trees and the habitat for billions of wild creatures. The 3 million acres of U.S. public forest that have burned this year are a stark testament to the high environmental cost of the “let it burn” policy—yet the Sierra Club is now demanding an end to all tree harvest on U.S. public lands. They want even more fuel for the fires!

Witnessing for High-Yield Conservation

The Western world owes the environmental movement a debt of gratitude for alerting us to the potential loss of natural ecosystems much earlier than we might otherwise have recognized that danger.. However, we must also recognize that the policies recommended by the movement are skewed against the technological abundance that is the hallmark of the modern world. Their policies are biased in favor of the “mud hut” model of economic growth, which means suppressing human births and reducing our standards of living.

The eco-activists are not experts in agriculture, or climate science. Even their recommendations on fish and forest management are based on urban armchair idealism.

More than 17,000 scientists in climate-related fields have signed a petition sponsored by the Oregon Center for Science and Medicine denying any human-caused global warming on the planet today. We hope to gather a similarly impressive roster of witnesses to the high-yield conservation miracle wrought by science and engineering in modern agriculture. Please sign the High-Yield Declaration at www.HighYieldConservation.org and urge your colleagues to do the same.

Dennis T. Avery was formerly the senior agricultural analyst with the U.S. State Department. He holds outstanding performance awards from both State and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and won the National Intelligence Medal of Achievement in 1983. His book, Saving the Planet With Pesticides and Plastics: The Environmental Triumph of High-Yield Farming, is available for $19.95 from the Center. You can also get high-yield bumper stickers that say “Growing More Food Per Acre Leaves More Land for Nature,” for $3 each, $25.00 for ten.

Visit us on the web at cgfi.org or contact us at:

Center for Global Food Issues
PO Box 202
Churchville. VA 24421

Telephone: 540-337-6354
Fax 540-337-853; E-mail cgfi@rica.net

Dennis T. Avery is based in Churchville, Va., and is director of global food issues for the Hudson Institute of Indianapolis.

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