Soaring Farm Demand, Mutating Plant Diseases and Scientific Backlash

Over the next 50 years, human society and plant science will face the greatest conservation challenge in history: supporting a peak population of perhaps 8 billion mostly-affluent humans—and their pets—without taking the rest of the planet’s land away from nature. Then, with their spare land, the farmers are expected to free the world from its “addiction to fossil fuels” by producing billions of gallons of biofuels. Finally, the farmers are told they should produce this abundance organically, with half the yields per acre of conventional farming. Together, these are impossible demands based on a touching faith in the past successes of plant science. As in all things human, hard choices must now be made.

Plant science overcame the challenge of 1 billion starving Asians in the 1960s. In the process, it saved 16 million square miles of global forests from being plowed for low-yield crops, and earned a Nobel Peace Prize in the name of Dr. Norman Borlaug.

Today, however, the world is at risk of losing those millions of square miles of forest that were saved by the Green Revolution and may even lose the agricultural research momentum that made that revolution possible. The stakes—for humanity and the planet—have never been higher.

Opponents of globalization say freer trade in farm products will encourage the spread of alien species and plant diseases. They say “sustainability” requires us to depend more and more heavily on local food production. We cannot.

• The world will more than double its demand for food and feed in the next 50 years. That will put a premium on national agricultural comparative advantages: the ability of the Corn Belt to grow lots of corn per acre; Brazil to grow highly efficient sugarcane; and, France to grow high yields of wheat. Free trade will increase the challenges to plant health, but the production advantages are too great to ignore. We will just have to do the protective science.
• Black stem rust is spreading in wheat around the world again, even without much trade in wheat.
• Energy sources to move food and feed around the globe after harvest will be a good investment. The energy requirements, per ton of food, for transport will be smaller than the energy required to grow food in low-yield circumstances. The energy may well be nuclear power, which produces no CO₂ emissions.
• Unfortunately, due to fears of man-made global warming, world governments are now mandating almost unlimited amounts of biofuels made from farm crops. This will prove to be a costly waste of the world’s scarce land and water.
• Simultaneously, due to a backlash against science, the consumers of the First World are demanding that the world’s farmers give up the very high-yield farming that has saved the 16 million square miles of forest—so far—and go back to organic and “natural” (primitive) farming systems. The low yields from these farming systems will ultimately mean failure for the strategy, either due to hunger for huge numbers of people or the destruction of most of the world’s remaining forest to get more cropland.

Losing the Gains from the Green Revolution?

World demand for food, feed, and pet food will more than double by 2050. Total human numbers will likely stabilize at less than 9 billion. However, instead of today’s 1.5 billion affluent consumers, we’ll have perhaps 7 billion affluent. Their surging demand for meat, milk, and eggs—which require roughly 3 times the farming resources per calorie—will hugely amplify the demand for farming resources.

There will also be a massive increase in pet food demand as incomes rise for billions of people. Humans’ desire for pets is nearly as strong as their desire for good diets. If China reaches America’s pet ownership density, that will mean 500 million additional cats and dogs, none of them vegetarian.

The Green Revolution of the 1960s achieved a near-miraculous tripling of crop yields on much of the world’s high-quality land, with its plant breeders leading the effort. Thanks to the momentum from the world’s past investments in education and agricultural research, farm productivity has continued to increase significantly in the years since 1970. U.S. corn yields, for example, have increased from about 5 tons per hectare in the early 1970s to about 9 tons per hectare today. U.S. meat and milk production per hectare has doubled since 1970, thanks not only to higher crop yields but to such advances as more complete feed rations and veterinary medications.

In addition to saving a billion people from starvation, the Green Revolution produced a startling side effect: the end of the population explosion. Peasant farmers have historically had large families as their only available “social security.” The Green Revolution not only allowed vastly more food to be produced on less land, but it released many rural workers to take ultimately higher-paying urban jobs. In cities, where large families are an expensive ego investment, birth rates voluntarily fall below replacement. In 1960, Third World women averaged 6.2 births. Today, their birth rate is probably about 2.8, and stability is 2.1. The poor countries have come more than 75 percent of the way to population stability while First World birthrates have dropped to below replacement at 1.7 and are still falling. Worldwide, human numbers are expected to decline after 2100. [i]

Back in 1995, the Hudson Institute invited an ecologist named Michael Huston, of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, to address its farm policy conference. Dr. Huston had written a book titled Biological Diversity: the Coexistence of Species on Changing Landscapes, published by the Cambridge University Press.[ii] He summed up his advice on conservation and biodiversity very succinctly: He noted that all over the world the best farmland had little biodiversity. Instead, the good land had big populations of just a few species, such as the bison on the American Great Plains and the kangaroo on Australia’s grasslands. Meanwhile, the poorer-quality lands had most of the wild species. He told us that the object of the world’s farm policies should be to encourage the production of as much food and feed as sustainably possible on the good land, so that we could save the lands rich in biodiversity from human impact.[iii]

Dr. Huston’s advice is still the only visible strategy to save wildlands for nature.

The Biofuels Wild Card

The Green movement has encouraged public fears that burning fossil fuels will “overheat the planet,” despite the fact that our modest warming since 1850 has no correlation with human CO₂ emissions. Public policy in the Western countries is now gearing itself to radically reduce the production of so-called “greenhouse gases.” At the same time, the Greens are maintaining their opposition to nuclear power. No country has yet shifted heavily to the costly and erratic solar panels and windmills so long recommended by the environmentalists.

This leaves the world’s governments in the odd position of demanding that their farmers produce additional crops to create billions of gallons of biofuels. President Bush has mandated 35 billion gallons of alternative fuels by 2017. Corn ethanol is currently the only U.S. source of such fuels. Unfortunately, when we factor in the fuel required to produce the corn, and ferment the ethanol, and the 35 percent fewer Btus in a gallon of ethanol compared to gasoline, the corn produces a net yield of only 50 gallons worth of gasoline per acre per year—against an annual gasoline demand of 134 billion gallons. [iv]

How many million acres of trees are we willing to clear for corn ethanol? What will happen to the soils in the Ozarks and the ecological services of the drained wetlands if we press them into crop production? Biofuels are truly a strange policy outcome for an environmental movement that was founded on protecting forests and wildlife. And for a plant science establishment that assumed it was protecting wildlands through higher food yields.

Neither the U.S. nor the world has the spare land to grow significant amounts of biofuels—except Brazil. Moreover, Brazil can grow lots of sugarcane, which produces three times as much ethanol per acre as corn. In the future, if biotech can produce engineered bacteria that will cost-effectively turn switchgrass and wood chips into auto fuel, well and good. Otherwise, we should import sugarcane ethanol from Brazil.

Can We Feed the World Organically?

Agriculture is by far humanity’s most dramatic impact on the planet and its ecosystems. Including pastures, about 37 percent of the earth’s land area is being used for agriculture. We are farming perhaps half of the earth’s land surface not covered with ice or desert. More than two-thirds of human water use is also for farming.[v]

Unfortunately, just as pressure to save the unfarmed land as wildlife habitat has reach historical intensity; the First World is undergoing an anti-science campaign just at a time that people are living longer, healthier, more prosperous lives. This drive is spearheaded by relatively small, but loud and effective, groups ranging from anti-technology activists, population growth opponents, fans of government control and global warming alarmists to organic food believers—all encouraged by journalists who otherwise would have little bad news to boost readership.

A recent article in Science claims that no more than 17 percent of the earth’s land area has so far escaped direct impact from humans, and calls for a “more durable stewardship” to manage tradeoffs between ecosystem services so nature and people can thrive simultaneously.[vi]

I had thought that such a “durable stewardship” was being achieved over the last 45 years.

We are using very little additional land to supply more than twice the world population of 1950 with much higher-quality diets—and the population gorilla has now been tamed through voluntary means.

• Nitrogen fertilizer has broken the food production bottleneck that existed until 1908. The much-touted downstream problems associated with nitrogen fertilizer are relatively trivial; seabed sediments show the Gulf of Mexico had a “dead zone” associated with Mississippi floods before Europeans settled the American Midwest.

Conservation tillage, using herbicides instead of plows to control the weeds, has tamed the soil erosion on millions of hectares all over the planet—even as it doubles soil moisture to increase crop yields still further.

• Food processing breakthroughs, such as aseptic packaging, have radically cut the post-harvest losses that used to spoil a huge percentage of world farm production.

• Confinement feeding is protecting the world’s consumers against new livestock and poultry disease mutations that historically have emerged when people, livestock and poultry lived closely together. The WHO is urging Asia’s poultry indoors to prevent new global outbreaks of influenza, which could attack millions of birds (both domestic and wild) and millions of people.

We have all watched the dramatic increases in demand for organic foods over recent decades. Some of this was stimulated by European subsidies for organic production, offered in the hope that the lower-yielding organic fields would reduce the expensive crop surpluses that high-yield farming produced in Europe after 1960. Today, as the newspapers never tire of telling us, organic and “natural” foods are the fastest-growing segment of the food industry. They’re fashionable, and we can afford to be silly.

There is danger in this, however—especially for the environment. The total crop yields from organic fields are little more than half as high as the yields from comparable high-yield farms. The measured yields per acre are typically 15 to 40 percent lower than from conventional farms. Organic farmers also suffer bigger losses to weeds, fungi, crop disease, and insects. The big penalty comes, however, because organic farmers refuse to use nitrogen fertilizer. They force themselves to get their N from cattle manure or green manure crops. Both strategies require land, lots of it. [vii]

The high-level Bichel Committee in Denmark reported in 1999 that an all-organic farming mandate for that country would cut human food production by roughly half.[viii] Most Danish land would have to be put into forage crops, for feedlot cattle, so the manure could be spread thickly over the countryside to maintain soil fertility.

Vaclav Smil, author of Enriching the Earth, estimates that giving up industrial nitrogen taken from the air would require the manure from 5–7 billion additional cattle worldwide. The U.S. would need the manure from an additional 1 billion cattle, at perhaps 5 acres of forage per beast.[ix] The world simply doesn’t have the extra land for organic, unless we starve billions of people, or clear the rest of the world’s forests for low-yielding crops.

There has been a “smokescreen” of press coverage this summer for claims from the University of Michigan that the world could supposedly increase its farm output per acre by going organic. This ignores the fact that the world has no more than half enough animal manure needed to support current farm output if it were grown organically. The University of Michigan claims rest on one question in a survey sent to “experimental organic farms” in various countries inviting them to speculate on how much output they could supposedly generate using green manure crops planted between crop rotations. [x]

However, land in green manure crops is not growing food, and it is using water and sunlight and time that are not producing food. The “gains” from organic farming are as problematic and illusory as the “free” energy from solar panels and windmills.

My son, Alex Avery, has recently published a remarkable deconstruction of the organic industry titled The Truth about Organic Foods. Alex notes correctly that there is no evidence that organic food provides any consumer benefits in terms of nutrition, health, or food safety to offset its lower yields. He quotes organic believers own words, bemoaning their inability to prove any of the good things they believe about organic.

The Organic Trade Association and the British Soil Association admit that they can find no provable benefits, but repeat their claim, of 80-years duration, that “the evidence is just now coming in.” And an amazing number of First World people want to believe this.

So few of us have been personally troubled by weeds, crop diseases, and dangerous fungi that we can afford to worry more about the way we control pests than about the pests. In 1991, Oakland, California, suffered a massive wildfire that fed on alien plants, especially eucalyptus trees and French broom, destroying 3,000 buildings and killing 25 people. Subsequently, Oakland attempted to control the fire-prone plants with shovels, hand weeding, and even herds of goats on the hills. Inexorably, the fire risks kept mounting. It took years of debate before the city finally approved the “emergency” use of glyphosate to get quick, complete control of the fire-prone vegetation—but thanks to technology that opportunity was always there.

Can Humanity Afford to Reject High-Tech?

The Green Revolution was led by plant science, supported by industrial fertilizer, pesticides, and irrigation. The eco-movement has opposed all of these strategies. More recently, they have led a campaign against genetically modified crops that has been highly successful in well-fed Europe.

BASF actually dropped plans to test-plant biotech blight-resistant potatoes—in Ireland, the country where more than a million people died, and an equal number forced to emigrate, during the blight-induced starvation of the Potato Famine in the 1840s. If the even the Irish can’t remember the Potato Famine, the public has short memories indeed of past disasters.

In America, no-till farming which cuts soil erosion by up to 95 percent has expanded by more than 25 million hectares since biotech crops were introduced in 1996—with all of the expansion using the genetically-engineered seeds that make no-till weed control more effective. The Conservation Tillage Information Center reports that the no-till fields gained 590 pounds per acre of soil carbon, increased their earthworm numbers by 3-6 fold, and provided improved habitat for birds.[xi]

Sadly, the anti-biotech campaign has also been successful in Africa, where low crop yields are a major and immediate threat to both the people and the wildlife. Only South Africa is permitting the planting of biotech crops. This in spite of the fact one of the intriguing new developments is genetically researched corn for African farmers, which contains a natural tolerance for the herbicide imazapyr. This development can help suppress the endemic, parasitic witchweed that lurks in some 40 million hectares of African farmland, threatening to take half, or all, of the small farmers’ crop.[xii]

The imazapyr tolerance was found in a corn sample collected by Pioneer Hi-bred, and was made available to the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center in Mexico for cross-breeding into African farmers’ varieties. The corn has produced a four-fold yield gain in field trials—and an even bigger gain in farm families’ food security. The irony is that, without the pressure and misinformation from Greenpeace, African farmers could have begun suppressing the witchweed with Roundup-ready corn seed 10 years ago.

Science Backlash and the Third World as its Victims

I have a neighbor who thinks the First World is too rich. She thinks we have too much throw-away technology, eat too much food, burn too much gasoline, spray too much pesticide and otherwise conduct ourselves like resource gluttons. She may be right, but if the affluent West is denied energy and high-yield farming, so, too, will be the poor of Asia and Africa.

Everybody can think of clever ways to reduce our food and fuel consumption by 15 percent—but the Green’s solutions would reduce energy supplies by perhaps 75 percent and food production by more than 50 percent as we renounce nitrogen fertilizer. Those cuts in resource availability could not be overcome with today’s technologies.

The anti-technology push is not just lies about the health benefits of raw milk, while dangerous bacteria reproduce unseen to cause listeriosis; it’s not just the few Americans who died from tainted spinach last summer, harvested from a field being farmed in organic transition and thus almost certainly being fertilized with uncertainly-composted manure.

This Green Anti-Science is responsible for the deaths of the 30 million Africans and Asians who have died of malaria in the years since Rachel Carson lied about DDT causing cancer and thinning the eggshells of birds. How proud can we be that, after first world countries eliminated malaria from our shores, we denied DDT to the third world?

The anti-biotech propaganda doesn’t cause Americans much inconvenience, but what about the tens of millions of children suffering blindness from severe Vitamin A shortages in Third World rice cultures? It could be prevented by biotech “Golden Rice,” if and when it ever completes its long and uncertain approval process.

In the energy field, it’s not just buying a hybrid car. It’s about the energy for the lights in the hospital, and the “clean room” that produces the computers. It’s about powering the fertilizer factories without which we could not retain the forests in the face of global famines. It’s about helping Third World women get rid of the wood fires burning in their huts, which create the lung disease risks of heavy smoking for the women and their children.

The only strategies the world has with which to meet the challenge of soaring commodity demand are: 1) freer world trade in farm products, so that each country can produce the farm products for which it has the greatest comparative advantages, and so that densely populated regions can import any food products that they are unable to grow at home; and 2) applying even more science and technology, to turn high-yield farming into higher-yield farming.

Neither is a popular policy, in either the affluent countries or the poor ones.

Nevertheless, massive changes must be made in the world’s farm policies, or humanity will soon be undergoing the agricultural equivalent of California’s “rolling blackouts.”

• Food price inflation will begin robbing the world’s poor of their claim on food supplies as organic mandates are forced onto production farmers around the world.
• Biofuels will begin forcing the clearing of more forests, from Indonesia’s islands to the American Midwest. Along with the lost forests will go their ecosystems and wildlife species—to produce trivial amounts of low-grade auto fuel at ultra-high costs—without making a dent in “energy independence” for any country except Brazil.
• Soil erosion will again threaten the productivity of the fields, not just in primitive African countries but in the Ozarks and on marginal croplands throughout the planet.

As our Center’s contribution to the renewed debate, we are launching, with the help of CAST, a new white paper, titled Saving the Great Rivers and Their Valleys. This is sort of an agricultural travelogue, which focuses on how high-yield farming and low-till farming systems are both feeding people and saving room for nature around the world. We hope it will be widely used in college curriculums.

Plant scientists need to fight for their right to help prevent needless and heedless ignorance.

• They must help restore the scientific objectivity of professional journals, which have become virtual cheerleaders on Green issues.
• They must help restore the credibility of the peer review process, which has too often of late been subverted by a study’s unquestioning allies. Claims of “consensus” have no place in science.
• We may even have to review the current pattern of government research grants, which favor scares and fashionable trends.

Where is “political correctness” taking us?

They say: 1 million species will go extinct due to global warming—when not a single species has been lost to the “unprecedented” temperature increase of the past 150 years. (Remember that all of our species alive today have gone through multiple “global warmings” during the last millions of years.)

They say: Malaria will spread because of warming—though the disease was endemic in Minnesota and Montana until we got window screens and DDT?

When will the UN Millennium Ecosystem Assessment admit that the low yields from organic farms are a far greater eco-penalty than using the safety-tested pesticides and chemical fertilizers that have demonstrated their ability to help us keep 16 million square miles of wildlands?

Unthinking antagonism to technology and science carries a very high cost.

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