Archives

Books

Should Lincolnshire Be Farmed?

April 27, 2005

Dennis Avery

The short answer to the title question is: Yes, Britain’s farmland—including Lincolnshire—should be farmed.

Indeed, it must be farmed, to:

  1. Help save the world’s remaining wildlands and wild species, especially those in the tropics, from being plowed for low-yield crops as world population attains its peak of 8-9 billion mostly-affluent people.
  2. Minimize soil erosion, the most important threat to the sustainability of human society;
  3. Preserve Britain’s rural economy and its picturesque villages;
  4. Save Britain’s charming rural landscape, beloved of both native Britons and Britain’s overseas visitors. Without farming, the landscape would quickly become overgrown with the sort of deep, unbroken, species-poor climax forests that take over unfarmed land anywhere.

Why Farm Britain to Save the Environment?

The farmers of today are feeding 6.3 billion people (mostly with more calories and protein) from virtually the same farming acres that were inadequate to feed 1 billion people in 1900. They have used powerful seed varieties, irrigation, industrial fertilizer, and integrated pest management to triple the yields on the world’s best soils since 1960.

Some people blame modern farming for that population increase. In truth, however, the population growth began before the Green Revolution. It was originally triggered by the lower death rates of modern medicine. Vaccinations, sulfa drugs, antibiotics, and such public health interventions as clean water and sewage treatment dramatically decreased the death risks in much of the world.

If we’d had modern medicine without high-yield farming; the whole world would have been stripped as bare of forests and wildlife as Easter Island in the Pacific.

Instead, high-yield farming and forestry is primarily responsible for saving room for 16 million square miles of forest on the planet today, nearly one-third of the planet’s area, despite the larger human population.

The United Nations’ Environmental Program says we lost only half as many mammal, bird and fish species in the last one-third of the 20th century as we did in the last one-third of the 19th century. Indeed, UNEP says the rate of extinction in major species today is the lowest it’s been in 500 years. That’s mainly due to the high-yield farmers, and nowhere has that success been greater than in the temperate farming regions like Britain. In the United States and Sweden, forests have even expanded in the past 50 years, thanks to the high-yield management of the best farms and tree plantations.

Britain does not have massive farmlands, but it has significant farmlands. Without the production from British farmland, we’d have to clear more land for farming somewhere else.

Much of the land cleared for farming recently in Honduras is “steepland” with a slope of more than 30 percent. Farmers actually tie ropes around their waists so they won’t fall off their fields as they harvest the wheat crops with hand sickles. Every decade or so, a hurricane washes most of the soil into the valleys.

China is reforesting 12 million acres of recently-cleared hillsides in the Yangtze Valley; farming them produced huge floods and severe soil erosion.

In Indonesia, species-rich tropical forests are being cleared to grow chicken feed.

In India, the farmers are edging closer to the tiger preserves, so more farmers are eaten, and more tigers are shot as man-eaters.

The Food Challenge of the Future

Since 1960, births per woman in the Third World have dropped from 6.2 to 2.7, and are continuing to decline. (Replacement is 2.1 births.) Meanwhile, First World birth rates have dropped below replacement, to 1.7, with countries such as Italy and Germany at a scary 1.2. Naturally, their public pension systems are facing bankruptcy for lack of workers, and Italy is now offering a $1200 bonus for any family that has a second child.

The “Population Explosion” is virtually over, although its momentum will carry human numbers more and more slowly upward for another three decades or so.

The world’s farmers, however, still face the biggest challenge in world history. They must more than double farm output—again—to feed high-quality diets to more than 7 billion people in 2050. That compares to only about 1 billion people getting high-quality diets today. The children of 2050 will virtually all get milk and eggs, and most of them will get far more meat than today’s Third World children. The global demand for livestock products is likely to at least triple.

There will even be a pet challenge. Pets are among the first desires of newly affluent families with few children are pets. Brazil is building a pet food industry. China is already beginning to replace its traditional caged crickets with more emotionally satisfying cats and dogs (we expect China in 2050 to have 500 million companion animals). The expansion of pet numbers will take place around the world, and woe unto any politician who stands between Fluffy and her favorite food.

The world’s farmers must more than double farm output again in the next 50 years despite the fact that most of the world’s good farmland is already being farmed, most of it with high-yield seeds, fertilizers and pesticides. Most of the good irrigation projects have already been built.

If the high-yield farmers of the world cannot meet this challenge, then the poor people of the Third World will simply expand their bushmeat hunting and their slash-and-burn farming. The World Conservation Union estimates that there are a billion such people already living in the biodiversity hot spots of the world, and if we cannot feed them from modern farms, they will almost literally eat up the global biodiversity.

Winning the Battle to Save the Land

Modern high-yield farming is the most sustainable in all history, thanks to high-powered seeds, industrial fertilizer, integrated pest management, and low-till farming systems.

Better Seeds, Fertilizer, Pest Protection, Higher Yields, Less Erosion

Tripling the yields on the best land has avoided the need to farm more land and more risky land. When we triple the yields on a level, fertile acre of land, we cut soil erosion per ton of food by at least two-thirds. If we avoid extending farming onto a steep or wind-blown acre, we reduce the erosion per ton by an even bigger factor.

In the UK, the farming has become focused on the most level and sustainable croplands, with the rougher land shifted more heavily into livestock production. This has obvious soil erosion benefits. In America, the steep and rocky lands in New England and the Tennessee Valley have been put back into forests.

On both sides of the Atlantic, more of our cattle, hogs and poultry are being raised in confinement, which takes far less total land per bird or animal and produces far less soil erosion per ton of meat. Putting the birds and animals back outdoors could require huge amounts of land—and more feed per pound of meat. That, too, would take more land from Nature.

The Center for Global Food Issues has found that American farmers have doubled the meat production per acre over the past 30 years through a combination of higher crop yields, better bird and animal genetics, better veterinary pharmaceuticals, and confinement feeding.

The upshot is that today’s farmers in Europe and America are practicing the most sustainable and productive farming in all history. Without it, wildlife all over the world would be at far greater risk.

Conservation Through Fertilizer

The nitrogen fertilizer that conventional British farmers use is another major conservation tool. The world’s farmers use 80 million tons of nitrogen fertilizer per year to replace the nitrogen taken from soils by growing plants.

Without industrial fertilizer, the world would need to apply the manure from another 5-7 billion feedlot cattle to maintain soil fertility. That means we’d have to clear virtually all of the world’s remaining forests for cattle forage. I realize this is a startling statement, and one that is rarely presented in the popular press, but it has been validated by agriculturists the world over.

In 1999, the Bichel Committee, a high-level technical committee appointed by the Danish government, reported that an all-organic mandate for Danish agriculture would reduce its human food production by 47 percent. Most of Denmark’s land would have to be shifted to cattle forage. Denmark’s agricultural exports would also have to end, forcing more farmland to be cleared in other countries which have been buying Danish farm exports.

In America, during the Dust Bowl droughts of the 1930s, Midwestern farmers had used up the last of the nitrogen built up during the eons of wilderness years filled with grazing bison and antelope, birds, and grasshoppers. Yields declined, soil carbon became depleted, while less and less organic matter went back onto the soil. The advent of industrial nitrogen changed the direction of soil management, and this was soon augmented by soil testing. Modern farmers ensure that their soils get exactly the right amounts of nitrogen, potash, potassium, and 26 trace minerals, while the use of lime keep soil acidity at the right levels.

In Africa, where industrial fertilizers are rarely used on food crops, farming has entered a death spiral. Larger populations have demanded more food, so bush fallow periods have been cut from 15 years to three years. Soil nutrient levels have declined as a result, with lower crop yields and less crop biomass to put back on the soil. Lower yields mean still more land must be plowed, leading to still more erosion, and still-shorter bush fallows.

Conservation Tillage

For 10,000 years, soil erosion has been the most serious threat to the sustainability of human societies. The big problem with farming has always been weed control. In Medieval times, the best weed control system was clean-fallow, which left at least half of the farmland completely open to wind and water erosion all year long. The degraded soils of the Mediterranean Basin still offer mute testimony to the power of erosion under such a farming system.

In the constant fight for more crops and few weeds, farmers developed such bare-earth techniques as plowing and mechanical cultivation to stay ahead of the weed competition. But using these systems means the earth is open, at least part of the year, to the ravages of weather and the substructure of the soil is disturbed.

Today, many farmers around the world have eliminated the need for bare-earth farming through the use of herbicides. In the late 1970s, farmers were driven by high oil prices to try using chemical weed killers instead of the fuel-hungry process of plowing. They found that low-till and no-till farming radically reduced their fuel costs—but it also cut soil erosion by 65 to 95 percent, encouraged far more earthworms and soil bacteria, doubled the water retention capability in dry soils, and radically cut water runoff and pollution from fields to streams.

A recent study of the highly-erodable Coon Creek watershed in Wisconsin found it is suffering only 6 percent of the erosion the region endured during the 1930s. That’s well within the rate of natural topsoil creation. Coon Creek today is creating topsoil in the midst of the highest-yield farming in history. The region in 2004 harvested an average of 160 bushels of corn per acre, at least six times the yield they got before the Dust Bowl droughts attacked their farms.

Never before in history have any farmers produced so much food with so little erosion, or saved so much land for Nature.

Conservation tillage is now being used on nearly 500 million acres around the world, and radically reducing erosion even as it protects high yield potential. The erosion-prone use of clean fallow has virtually ended in the semi-arid regions of the American Plains and Australia. Most recently, no-till is being used to raise wheat yields with less irrigation water in India and Pakistan.

These chemical weed killers are very safe to use because they attack plant-specific enzymes, and people aren’t plants. Fish, birds and earthworms are not plants either. Glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup and one of the most widely-used herbicides, is so safe that I can spray it on my fish pond (if my formulation doesn’t contain a petroleum-based carrier.)

Conservation tillage has not been as widely used in Europe as in many other farming regions, perhaps because of Europe’s generally negative reaction to farm chemicals of all sorts. However, the Soil and Water Conservation Society in America regards conservation tillage as the greatest soil conservation advance in the last 100 years.

Changes Coming in Farm Subsidies and Trade

World agriculture is about to take the next logical step in high-yield conservation: liberalizing farm trade. Thanks to the varying climates and soils around the world, the comparative advantages in agriculture are bigger and more permanent in agriculture than in any other industry.

For example:

It is also clear that national food self-sufficiency is a poor idea for the 21st century, though it may have been highly important for the 15th century. During the cold of Little Ice Age, the 15th century was even more prone to bad weather and crop pests than the 21st century, but transportation was poor. Every city tried to keep its own grain reserves, and the city walls helped ensure that if food was short, the city’s own residents got first claim on the reserves.

Today, food production is far more ample and far more stable, at least on the global basis. Transportation, too, has improved wonderfully, compared to wooden sailing ships that could be blown off course for weeks while weevils atethe grain in the holds.

Most of the bad things that happen to food supplies still happen locally, so our food security is enhanced when we can reach out to other countries for needed supplies. Food self-sufficiency today simply means high-cost food, high farmland costs and a limited diet.

Japan, today, has virtually no farmland and has become the world’s largest food importer. Yet the Japanese keep only about one month’s supply of imported food and feed on hand, with another month’s supply headed for the Japanese islands on ships.

China and India have now joined the World Trade Organization, and will become much bigger food importers than Japan, due to their huge populations, rising incomes and limited arable land and water resources. If the world is to help supply their diet aspirations—especially meat and milk—it’s time to liberalize farm trade as we have already liberalized nonfarm trade.

Since 1948, the WTO has helped to cut the average tariff on nonfarm goods and services from 40 percent to 4 percent, unleashing a global wave of prosperity. The average farm tariff today, however, is still about 65 percent, and many countries virtually prohibit farm trade. Until recently, China and India have been among the farm import prohibitors.

Rapid Change in Farm Subsidies

It has long been clear, of course, that the old farm trade rules and farm subsidies needed to change radically. The old Common Agricultural Policy, for example, was conceived on the idea that farm production couldn’t expand much. But, under the stimulus of the CAP subsidies, farmers in the original member countries doubled their output, and dumped major farm surpluses into the world market.

American farm subsidies may have been even less well-founded than the CAP. America paid farmers to divert land from farming, in the obviously foolish hope that it would somehow raise farm prices worldwide. It didn’t, of course, although it did stimulate higher U.S. farm land values—and thus higher costs for American farmers. America today knows that the world is short of both good farmland and good wildlife habitat, so our foolish government is paying farmers to ensure that 38 million acres of land is neither farmed nor allowed to harbor wildlife. It is called, with enormous irony, the Conservation Reserve.

Farm subsidies have been enormously popular with farmers on both sides of the Atlantic, but they have probably cost the farmers more in higher land values and more intensive input use than they have been worth. The export subsidies have also created a heavy backlash in recent years among Third World farmers, who believe they are being unfairly shut out of markets that would otherwise be open to them.

Worst of all, the EU farm subsidies have helped call into question the whole idea of farming in the UK. They presented a false picture of farm surpluses, even as they encouraged should-be importing countries to ban farm imports.

In any case, the EU’s farm policy was bound to change radically even without pressure from the World Trade Organization. With 25 members instead of ten or twelve, the old EU farm subsidy funding arrangements have become totally inadequate.

In addition, the farm output in such places as Poland and Romania is set to double or even triple with the capital investment that is flowing from the other EU countries. There is no place in Europe to sell these additional commodities.

America’s farm subsidies are also on the way out, though the Agriculture Committees of the Congress are loathe to admit it. There are two major reasons:

First, the U.S. is trying to serve a huge unfunded obligation to its retirees, in the form of Social Security and Medicare. The trillions of dollars that must be spent under these programs have vastly more political appeal than farm payments to a few well-off farmers, and the “grey panthers” will crowd the farmers away from the public trough.

Second, the farm export expansion opportunity that the U.S. has long forecast has finally begun to emerge strongly. We used to look at Asia and see three billion poverty-stricken people. In 2050, however, Asia will have four billion mostly-affluent people who will want hamburgers, lamb, ice cream, cheese and a huge variety of other high-quality foods.

Affluence Stimulates Asian Food Imports

Thanks to foreign direct investment, China’s economy and its personal incomes are expanding by roughly 9 percent per year! (America has been averaging about 2 percent.) Twenty years ago, Chinese families were hoping to “someday” be able to afford transistor radios and one-speed bicycles. Today, those same families already have cell phones, color TV set, and refrigerators. Now they’re saving for computers and cars. China has already doubled its pork consumption since 1990, and its people are still far behind the affluent world in their consumption of other dairy and livestock products.

This same economic growth phenomenon is beginning to develop in India, which for several decades after 1950 essentially had no economic growth at all. Its economic growth rate of 3 percent just about matched its population growth rate. Now the birth-per- woman rates have fallen by half, from about 6 to 2.8; while the economic growth rate has doubled to 6 percent. India will be a very good source of goods and services, and a very good market for dairy products and meat in the future. Surveys indicated that three-fourths of the Hindus will eat meat—though not beef—when they can afford it. India already has more than 100 million Moslems who eat meat, though not pork.

India is a terrible place to raise dairy cattle, with little pasture, high heat and humidity, tropical pests and dreadful feed shortages. I see no reason why India will not import chilled concentrated milk, ice cream concentrate, cheese, and large quantities of other dairy products in the future.

Most of the First World’s consumers have already become addicted to a wide variety of imported foods, such as bananas, oranges and other delicacies that we cannot cost-effectively and attractively grow in our own climates. In addition, we want fresh seasonal foods in our off-seasons, such as strawberries in December. That’s another good reason for freer farm trade.

We are also becoming gourmet consumers, eagerly or reluctantly. I like French Roquefort and British Stilton, and fresh lamb that isn’t produced in the U.S. I want fresh raspberries in the winter, and so will billions of other people in the future.

What About Biofuels?

In a world that is short of good land for food production, why would we divert big chunks of it to producing biofuels that are more expensive and far scarcer than coal, oil or nuclear power?

Before you tell me that burning fossil fuels causes global warming, let me remind you of three things:

1) Virtually all of our recent warming came before 1940, and thus before the human production of CO2;

2) The Polar Regions, which are supposed to warm before the equator, have been cooling for decades, the Arctic since the 1930s and the Antarctic since the 1960s.

3) The lower atmosphere is supposed to warm the Earth’s surface, by trapping the extra CO2 and then radiating the heat back to Earth. The lower atmosphere is warming about one-third as fast as the Earth’s surface.

Finally, let me point out that we have know since the Greenland and Antarctic ice cores were brought up in the 1980s about a natural, moderate, solar-driven 1500-year climate cycle (plus or minus 500 years) on this planet. The Roman Warming of the First Century and the Medieval Warming of the 12th century are just the most recent of at least 600 such warming cycles that go back a million years.

We’ve found the cycle in the ice cores, in seabed sediments from four oceans, and in the cave stalagmites on all continents plus New Zealand. The North American Pollen Data Base shows nine complete reorganizations of North American tees and plants in the past 14,000 years, or one every 1650 years.

The burning of fossil fuels may be adding slightly to the natural warming cycle, but we have no good evidence to prove it. The warming we’ve had, in timing, suddenness, and extent, match very well with the historical record.

The New Farm Trade Regime

I foresee in the near future a global shift away from the farm subsidies and farm trade barriers that have pervaded the world for most of the past thousand years.

The EU has already agreed to phase out its use of export subsidies, a key demand from the Third World countries. The U.S. has already lost a WTO case against its cotton subsidies, and will lose more such cases on other commodities.

The end of surplus dumping, along with rising Asian demand, will mean higher market prices for farm commodities.

What Can Lincolnshire Supply?

What will be British farming’s role be in all this? Unquestionably, I think your key role in helping feed the 21st century will come in livestock production. Britain has already shifted some of its better land from pasture to grain, and I do not expect that land to go back to pasture. After all, if the world must double its farm output again, most of the good farm land must be used even more intensively in 2050 than it is today.

However, I see a very productive synergy in the UK between land that can produce high-yielding feed crops and the pastures that can produce good crops of calves and lambs. Moreover, Britain can cost-effectively supplement its home-grown feeds from a wide variety of eager exporters, to support its skilled livestock managers.

Most of China’s land is mountains or deserts. It has 20 percent of the world’s people, and 7 percent of the arable land. Its rice paddies and hog farmers must increasingly compete with its expanding factories, suburbs and roads. It will import massive quantities of dairy products, lamb, mutton, oilseeds, and grains.

India will become a massive market for dairy products, lamb, mutton and poultry products.

Egypt, Indonesia, Bangladesh, and Pakistan will follow in the wake of China and India as densely populated countries that will use their limited land and water increasingly for urban uses, and import more of their high-quality diets.

Why Shouldn’t England Abandon Farming?

Never before in human history have so many people bought into the romantic illusions about wilderness first popularized by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the 1700s. That is probably because never before have there been so many humans with no real experience of wilderness.

I’m not speaking here of a comfortable boat trips up the Amazon, hiking, and canoe trips into Montana, or well-funded attempts to climb the Himalayas with the latest insulated climbing togs.

I’m talking about humans trying to live in the primeval forest that characterized most of the planet a million years ago.

Here in Britain, 85 percent of the forest had been cleared by the time William the Conqueror landed at Hastings.

In America, Indians burned the forests frequently, to improve the hunting. Birds and animals don’t like the climax forests, because there’s not much sunlight and therefore not much for them to eat. Burning extended the range of the bison 200 miles farther East than the deep dark forests would have permitted.

When British colonists got to the New World, they wrote of the “deep, dangerous, gloomy forests.” They wrote of food deprivation. They complained of the “Herculean task” involved in creating safety and civilization out of wilderness.

If Britain decided that farming was just too messy and dangerous to the environment, and forcibly retired all its farmers, the woods would quickly retake the land. Today’s fields and pastures would quickly be invaded by brush and berries, which would be followed by junipers and other pioneer tree species. Then would come the oaks and bigger trees.

Soon, the vistas would be gone. Britain would have just its cities and dark, gloomy climax forests with few birds or hedgehogs. In the dryer parts of America, this would produce intolerable fire risks, but in England the dead trees would probably fall and decay rather than burning. Most of the time. With more deadfalls and less sunlight, the forest floor would become wetter, more swampy, and gradually less attractive to hikers. The villages, lacking any farmers and attracting fewer tourists, would begin to decay and disappear even more rapidly.

The losses to Britain’s tourist industry might rival the economic losses from agriculture.

Alternatively, of course, Britain could advance toward the organic vision of locally grown organic food. Denmark’s Bichel Committee, however, noted that the organic vision in their country would mean most of the forest cleared to plant more fields of cattle forage. To maximize the effectiveness of the manure, the cattle would be kept in feedlots, and the forage would be green-chopped and hauled to the animals, so their manure could be distributed liberally across the crop fields. The impact on the landscape and the water quality would be remarkable—and awful.

Britain has its choice, and I will have no vote in it. As of tomorrow, however, I will once again be a British tourist, and I ardently hope Britain will keep its farming and its landscape.

Posted in Materials and Publications, Speeches |