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Engineering A Sustainable–and Sustaining–World Food Supply

By cgfi | 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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Dennis Avery’s UC Berkeley Commencement Address

By cgfi | May 21, 2000

Dennis T. Avery

Leading a 21st Century Global Triumph for the Environment

Commencement Address, University of California, Berkeley, College of Natural Resources,
May 21, 2000

” . . . farms obliterate empty places, ploughed fields vanquish forests, herds drive out wild beasts, sandy places are planted with crops, stones are fixed, swamps drained, and there are such great cities where formerly hardly a hut . . . everywhere there is a dwelling, everywhere a multitude, everywhere a government. . . . We are burdensome to the world. The resources are scarcely adequate to us; and our needs straiten us and complaints are everywhere while already nature does not sustain us. Truly, pestilence and hunger and war and flood must be considered as a remedy for nations, like a pruning back of the human race becoming excessive in numbers.”

– Quintus Septimus Florence Tertillianus, Roman citizen, about 200 A.D., when the world population was about 200 million.

“. . .the Western World today is on the verge of the greatest ecological renewal that humankind has known; perhaps the greatest that the Earth has known. Environmentalists deserve the credit for this remarkable turn of events. Yet our political and cultural institutions continue to read from a script of instant doomsday. Environmentalists, who are surely on the right side of history, are increasingly on the wrong side of the present, risking their credibility by proclaiming emergencies that do not exist. . . . It’s time we began reading from a new script.”

– Greg Easterbrook, A Moment on Earth, 1995, p. xvi, with the world population 30 times as large and still increasing.

The students at this commencement must take up a critical responsibility–helping the societies of the world adopt true conservation strategies for the 21st century.

Population growth is no longer threatening the planet. Quintus Tertillianus could not have known that, when modern medicine cut death rates and lengthened life spans, humans would respond (for the first time in history) by lowering their birth rates.

During my working lifetime, births per woman in the poor countries of the Third World have dropped from more than six to less than three–and stability is 2.1. The Third World today is unquestionably headed toward a fertility rate of less than 2.0 per woman. Before 2050, world population will peak at less than 10 billion people followed by a slow population decline.

Thanks to technology, trade and democracy, the world of 2050 will have little of the poverty that much of the world still knows too well today. Democracy and free trade are spreading rapidly. Education and communications are improving worldwide. We are unraveling the secrets of the human genome, and proving that gene therapy can cure many human diseases. We are making exciting progress with such technologies as diesel-electric cars and fuel cells.

Virtually all environmental-quality measurements in the affluent countries are much higher than 20 years ago, and getting better year by year. Thanks to affluence, virtually all of human society will be able to invest in environmental preservation during the coming half-century.

However, there is still one critical threat to the world, its people, and its natural resources. It is a threat that could undermine the stability of our society in the next few decades and ultimately bring on the collapse of natural resources predicted by pessimists for the last 2000 years. It is a threat particularly relevant to this college, to this year’s graduates, and to the students who will pursue knowledge here throughout the coming years.

That threat is low-yield agriculture and forestry in a more populous and affluent world.

The question is whether we will meet urgent human needs through the use of the best technologies and systems that our societies can develop to produce high yields on a small amounts of land or destroy the forests for low-yield production of crops, livestock, and paper pulp.

There is a clamoring element of First World societies that measures current human progress by how closely we can return to the wilderness of prehistory. This is the element of society that demands organic or “natural” farming; which demands that we continue the lavish waste of natural resources involved in low-yield traditional agriculture. This is the element of society which would turn half of the world’s scarce cropland into a gene museum, not for millions of wild species, but for a relatively few human-bred landrace varieties of crop plants. In short, this is the element which wants fewer people in the world and wants those people to live less well than we do today.

In today’s mostly well-fed world, it is hard to remember that humanity’s greatest fear until the past 40 years was famine. For ten thousand years, farmers were heroes because food was scarce. It’s hard to remember today that the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 went to a plant breeder, Dr. Norman Borlaug, as a living symbol of the Green Revolution that had finally banished the specter of famine through new knowledge.

Just 30 years later, the best-educated and most sophisticated societies in the world are attempting to promote low-yield farming and forestry. The fashion today is to worship the “natural” almost as did the Druids of ancient Europe.

Tripling Output Per Acre by 2050

Such an irrational worship of the natural would be a desperate mistake for conservation. It would throw humanity back into direct conflict with Nature, a war Nature would lose. No matter how keenly the urban intellectuals of today revere wild things, humanity will never commit suicide to protect them–nor even permit its children to suffer malnutrition on their behalf.

The well-educated 9 billion people we can expect on the planet in 2035 will understand good nutrition. They will have the affluence to pursue it, for their children and for their pets. (America today has 113 million companion cats and dogs. A reasonable projection for China in 2050 is at least 500 million house pets, and woe to any politician who stands between Fluffy and her favorite food.)

Despite the publicity about vegetarian diets, there is no vegetarian trend in the world. There has never been a voluntarily vegetarian society in all history. Humanity seems to have an urgent hunger for the high-quality protein found in livestock products, and the world is currently in the greatest surge of meat and milk consumption ever seen. These high-quality calories take two-to-three times as many farm resources as cereal calories.

This means that the world will demand nearly three times as much farm output in the year 2050 as we harvest today. And we are already farming about 37 percent of the world’s land area. The Green Revolution allowed the world to save at least 15 million square miles of wildlands from being plowed for low-yield food production. Think of it in these terms: high-yield farming has saved wildlands equal to the total land area of the United States, Europe, and South America combined. Without continued advances in knowledge and farm yields, all the wildlands saved will be lost to the plow.

The Fabulous Conservation Success of Knowledge

Plant breeding, chemical nitrogen fertilizer, irrigation, and pesticides have been critical to this massive high-yield conservation triumph. Therefore, it is reassuring to know that during the past half-century of manipulating genes (often with chemicals and radioactivity) and spraying pesticides widely in the atmosphere, we continued to lengthen the average human lifespan. The average lifespan in Roman times was 25 or 30 years. That was still the average lifespan in 18th-century London, even though they were eating only “natural” foods. Since 1900, America has added 30 years to the average lifespan–eight of them since we began the pesticide spraying and genetic manipulation of the Green Revolution. First World babies being born today can expect to live into their 80s, and Third World lifespans are rapidly catching up to that fast-moving First-World target.

Yet an important element of modern society says we should rein in plant breeding, reject nitrogen fertilizer, blow up irrigation dams, and ban pesticides.

They say modern farming is not sustainable. Soil erosion has been the underlying sustainability threat to human society throughout history. We could only farm if we could control the weeds; and our only weed control came through “bare earth” farming systems such as plowing and fallow. Last year, a sediment expert from UCLA finished a “soil archeology” project in the Coon River watershed of Wisconsin. He found that the modern farmers working there today are suffering only 6 percent as much soil erosion as did farmers during the Dust Bowl days of the 1930s, thanks largely to conservation tillage, which was introduced after 1970. Yet conservation tillage demands chemical weed killers, and the urban intellectuals are telling us to abandon the use of herbicides.

High yields are critical to saving wildlands and the yields on organic farms are little more than half as high as the yields on mainstream farms. This is primarily because organic farmers reject the chemical nitrogen that we take from the air through an industrial process. Even America, the most agriculturally blessed country in the world, has only about one-third of the organic nitrogen to support today’s farm output, let lone tripling output for the future.

In India, the crop residues must be fed to their draft animals while the animal dung is burnt as fuel, so there is no organic N to replenish the soil. China already uses every bit of organic N–including nightsoil–and also far more chemical fertilizer than any other agriculture.

I calculate that, with an organic farming mandate, the world would immediately have to clear at least 10 million square miles of wildlands for green manure crops like clover and rye. Yet, urban intellectuals tell us that organic farming is better for Nature.

We are also told, by urbanites, who don’t raise livestock or poultry, that confinement feeding is cruel for the birds and animals, and bad for the environment. Yet the birds and animals are more comfortable in confinement, grow faster on less feed while their wastes are handled under “zero discharge” management as organic fertilizer for feed crops.

If the world goes from its current 1 billion breeding hogs to 3 billion, and the animals must be raised outdoors, it will take another million square miles of land from Nature to house them and raise the extra feed. Meanwhile, the wastes from outdoor hog and poultry producers wash into streams with every storm event.

There is a furor now over biotechnology in farming. Europe, which has more food than it needs, is trying to block the use of biotechnology for Africa and Asia, which have less food than they need. We are told that biotechnology in food is “playing God.” (The same critics seem to believe that the use of biotechnology to cure genetic diseases for First World children is just fine.)

Yet biotechnology has already produced virus-free sweet potatoes and bananas that will produce higher yields to enhance the diets of Third World families. Genetically engineered “golden rice” can prevent the Vitamin A deficiency that causes blindness and even death for millions of small children in low-income rice cultures. As a bonus, “golden rice” will also prevent the iron deficiency that puts millions of women and their babies at risk of birth complications.

The world of the 21st century will not only demand more food, but also far more paper and forest products than today. Some analysts predict that forest harvests must increase as much as ten-fold. America’s wild forests produce only about 1.4 cubic meters of industrial wood products per hectare, per year. With such low yields, it is important to know that post-harvest technology–computerized saws, fiberboard, laminated lumber–have increased the utility of the trees cut by perhaps eightfold since World War II. It is also comforting to know that plantation-grown Georgia yellow pines can produce 15 cubic meters per hectare per year. And that cloned and tissue-cultured Georgia yellow pine planted under optimum conditions in Brazil can produce up to 50 cubic meters of industrial wood products per hectare per year.

Just 5 percent of the wild forest area planted to high-yield trees might protect the other 95 percent from even being logged, let alone clear-cut. To achieve such high-yield conservation, however, we must be willing to accept a substantial acreage of “unnatural” forests (which would be, in themselves, pretty good wildlife habitat).

The Enemy of Conservation Is Ignorance

Ignorance on the world’s farms and in its forests was the enemy of Nature in past centuries. Without higher yields, more people meant more and more land had to be taken from wildlands to provide even meager human subsistence. Gaining higher yields meant searching the world for higher-yielding species such as potatoes and corn from the New World, and the turnip, discovered in Asia.

Then agriculture moved on to such advances as hybrid seeds, herbicides and precision farming.

Traditional logging cleared huge tracts of forest to make charcoal for low-efficiency cooking fires, or even to smelt iron. Today, we use more intensive carbon sources as fuel, and replant harvested forestlands with fast-growing species.

Today, the ignorance that threatens nature is not on the farms or in the forests, but in the cities that have lost their understanding of good resource use. Since the massive urban migration of the 1940s and 1950s, First World city folk have lost touch with how their food and forest products are produced. All they have heard about the farms is that there’s a “farm surplus;” they have no understanding that the farm surpluses are local, not global, or that they result from farm trade barriers, not overproduction.

City folks do not understand that we can save tropical forests most effectively by raising farm and forest yields on the good-quality temperate soils of America and Europe, and exporting food and timber to Asia. They do not understand that three square kilometers of tropical forest contain more wild species than the entire continent of North America.

The city folks are attempting to save Nature by retreating to farming and forestry systems that proved inadequate and unsustainable when the planet’s population was one-sixth as high. They are refusing to support new farm and forest research, and they are attempting to eliminate new knowledge from the farms and forests through narrowly focused government regulation. Thus we see the demands for an end to logging in America, for a regulated reduction in American farm inputs, and for a European-inspired attempt to prevent biotech farming anywhere in the world.

Along with the other knowledge-based institutions in the modern world, the College of Natural Resources at Berkeley must continue to pursue better ways to produce farm and forest products, and to more effectively protect the wild resources of the planet. The school has done a marvelous job of that in the past.

In addition, the school and its graduates must do something they have never attempted in the past: they must find ways to communicate effectively with an urban public that does not know much about modern farming and forestry and has been told that both are bad for the planet. We must weigh in to support high-yield conservation with people who don’t understand it and may feel hostile toward it.

This challenge of communicating true conservation to urban audiences may be even more difficult–and more important–than finding appropriate high-yield technologies and fully sustainable production systems.

All the recycling and car-pooling in the cities will do little to preserve wildlands or wild species. As Aldo Leopold told us more than 60 years ago, wildlands conservation can only be done by the farmers and foresters who manage most of our land surface. City people can only provide the research and incentives. Lately, they have done too little of either.

Caring is not enough. Even caring intensely about the environment is not enough. Our Roman writer, Quintus Tertillianus, cared deeply about the environmental degradation of the Mediterranean Basin–but he lacked the knowledge to stop it. Only in the last 150 years, as we have combined caring with science, have we gotten past the awful choice between caring for our children and protecting nature. Only with caring and knowledge can we do both. Only with caring and knowledge can we move forward in rewarding compatability with the wildlands.

This must happen within your working lifetimes, or it can never happen at all.

Good luck, and Godspeed.

###

Dennis T. Avery is Director of Global Food Issues for the Hudson Institute, a non-profit public policy “think-tank” headquartered in Indianapolis, Indiana. He was raised on a dairy farm in Michigan and studied agricultural economics at Michigan State and Wisconsin. He has done agricultural policy analysis for the U.S. Department of Agriculture and served on President Johnson’s national Advisory Commission on Food and Fiber. He also served for nearly a decade as the senior agricultural analyst for the U.S. State Department, where he won the National Intelligence Medal of Achievement in 1983.

He is the author of Saving the Planet with Pesticides and Plastic: The Environmental Triumph of High-Yield Farming. The Center’s web site can be visited at www.cgfi.org

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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High-Yield Conservation: The Only Global Sustainability for the 21st Century

By cgfi | March 28, 2000

Alex A. Avery

Humanity faces a daunting task as we enter the 21st century: Feeding a larger, more affluent world a better diet while at the same time conserving wildlife habitat, biodiversity and ecological integrity.

The world is in the midst of the largest surge in global population in human history. Population growth rates peaked in 1996; however, the inherent momentum of population growth will drive the global population to 8-9 billion people before it stabilizes. This represents a 50 percent increase over the current population of 6 billion. Based on recent trends in fertility rate, current predictions call for a peak world population of 8.5 billion reached about the year 2040.[1]

While population growth has been the focus of world attention over the past 30 years, it alone will not be the greatest challenge. Affluence will also increase global demand for farm resources. As living standards rise, a shift occurs from subsistence diets comprised mainly of grains, roots/tubers, and low animal protein consumption, to high-quality diets comprised mainly of varied grains, meats, dairy products, eggs, and consumption of diverse fruits and vegetables. The critical difference between the two is that it takes many more farm resources to produce a single calorie of meat or dairy products compared to cereal grains or tuber crops. Thus, the shift to a more affluent diet, higher in proportionate levels of animal protein, increases the demands on farm resources.

When the expected population growth is combined with the expected shift in dietary preferences, farm product demand will increase at least two-fold, and perhaps as much as three-fold by the year 2050.

There can be little debate about this. I’ve used the most conservative estimates for population growth—mainly because so many past population predictions have been wildly inflated. If population growth is higher, than the food challenge will be even greater. There can be little doubt, as well, about a significant dietary shift in developing countries. China, for example, more than doubled its meat consumption in the 1990s.

Despite this massive increase in national meat consumption, the average Chinese consumer still eats less than a third as much meat per capita as the average Japanese consumer. As economic growth spreads further and deeper in these economies, the dietary shift will increase in both scope and pace.

Nearly half of the world’s population lives in Asia. As Asia continues to grow, both in population and economically, we can look to Japan as a model to see what to expect from the region.

As recently as the late 1950s, Japan was a food aid recipient. Today, Japan is the world’s largest food importer. And the economic growth in Japan brought about a fundamental shift in Japan’s dietary habits. Since 1965, Japanese consumers have reduced their rice calories by 37 percent while they have increased their dairy consumption by 123 percent and their meat calories by 220 percent.

In all, the average Japanese consumer now eats about 55 grams of animal protein per day. And if Japan would reduce its import tariffs, they would probably be eating closer to 65 grams of animal protein per day. For comparison, Americans eat about 75 grams per day. These farm products take three to five times as many farming resources to produce as a calorie of cereals—but there is an innate human hunger for them.

Meat demand in Asia has been skyrocketing alongside the rise in personal incomes:

  1. Besides the massive increases in Chinese meat consumption, India’s consumers have been adding 1-2 million tons of milk and dairy products to their national diet each year—despite feed shortages, high prices and poor quality.
  2. Indonesia expanded its broiler flock by 25 percent (and 150 million birds) in 1995 alone!

And despite these recent trends, Asians still consume an average of less than 20 grams of animal protein per day. By 2025, it is likely that the world will have to supply at least Japan’s current 55 grams of animal protein per day for 4 billion Asians. That’s nearly a 400 percent increase in the region’s total meat consumption!

Thus, the world’s biggest food gap is opening in the region least able to meet that demand—the densely populated nations of Asia. That region will have eight or nine times as many people per acre of cropland as North America.

So how will the world meet the 21st century food challenge? There are but three options: intensify food production on existing farmland, increase the amount of farmland, or reduce consumption.

The prospects for reduced consumption are decidedly dim. Vegetarian activists have campaigned for decades on the health and environmental benefits of a vegetarian diet and reduced meat consumption. However, at the same time, the most vegetarian cultures in the world—China and India—have been moving away from a vegetarian diet. More than two-thirds of Indians stated in a recent poll that when they can afford it, they would eat meat (although not beef). McDonald’s now has many outlets in India selling mutton burgers. In the developed world, less than 3 percent of American’s identify themselves as vegetarians, and many of these still eat chicken and fish occasionally. Besides, most vegetarians rely on dairy and egg products as key sources of much needed protein, and both of these products require nearly as many farm resources per calorie as meat itself. Vegetarians who are not vigilant in maintaining a high variety of foods in their diet and back this up with dietary supplements risk such problems as blindness from optic neuropathy, such as the case with a 33-year-old vegetarian man in France reported in latest issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.

What about increasing the amount of farmland? Already, more than one third of the planet’s total land area is devoted to agriculture (11% crops, 26% pasture/rangeland, United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, 1998 Production Yearbook). However, even this number underestimates the amount of useable land devoted to agriculture. When the planet’s permanently-ice-covered land area is taken out of the equation, essentially half the total land area is currently devoted to agriculture.

We submit that if we are to save wildlife habitat, ecosystems and biodiversity in the 21st century, we must meet the food challenge by raising yields on existing farmland. Taking more land from nature is simply not a viable, sustainable option.

I’m proud to say that this assessment, the core message of the Center for Global Food Issues for the past 5 years, has recently been corroborated by a team of ecologists writing in the March 10 issue of the journal Science.[2] The group’s conclusion is that “agricultural efficiency must be improved in any nature conservation scenario in Africa, Asia, and Oceania.”

The group calculated the minimum amount of agricultural productivity growth needed to feed the region’s population in 2050 using only existing farmland in the regions, as well as the amount of agricultural productivity growth needed to feed the 2050 population a high-protein diet using only existing farmland. This gave them a minimum and maximum food productivity growth rate.

Worldwide, agricultural yields need to increase between 0.7 and 1.4 percent annually for the next 50 years to feed the world’s expected population in 2050 a minimal and high-protein diet from existing farmland. Asia needs between 0.6 and 1.5 percent annual productivity growth. However, Sub-Saharan Africa needs between 1.8 and 3 percent annual growth while North Africa and the Middle East need between 1.5 and 1.9 percent annual food productivity growth.

It is finally dawning on ecologists and conservationists that in a world that already takes nearly half of the planet’s non-permanently-ice-covered land area for farming and still faces at least a doubling of food demand, high-yield agriculture is critical to biodiversity conservation. Finally we have come far enough along in the biodiversity debate that the reality of land use and productivity can no longer be ignored. Will the environmental establishment follow these brave ecologists’ lead and take an honest look at the challenges ahead and the options at hand? I don’t think so, but it doesn’t matter, as long as those who are most serious about biodiversity conservation do their jobs and speak out about the critical links between agricultural efficiency and biodiversity conservation.

Along with higher yields, the world must find a way to embrace and integrate global free trade in agricultural products too. A truly sustainable global food system must use the world’s agricultural resources as efficiently as possible—especially in light of the magnitude of the challenge ahead. This means allowing comparative advantage to work to its fullest. There is no industry where comparative advantage is greater than in agriculture. Why should India attempt to produce all of its own dairy products when its dairy herds are plagued by a hot climate, high insect pest populations, and a critical feed shortage? Dairy production is much more resource efficient in the cooler climates of Northern Europe and North America. Conversely, why should the U.S. attempt to be self sufficient in sugar by growing sugar beets in the Northern Midwest? Tropical countries can produce sugar with vastly greater resource use efficiency through sugar cane production.

Desperate Regions: The Food Gaps in Africa and Asia

The world’s traditional patterns of agriculture have always featured small farmers supplying nearby consumers with seasonal fresh foods. Unfortunately, tripling the world’s farm output on this model for the 21st century would likely mean sacrificing at least half of the world’s tropical forests to slash-and-burn farming. Such farming is cheap and effective for low levels of population density. But Africa’s population is projected to grow from 200 million to at least 400 million in the next half century. Asia’s population will rise from 2.75 billion to 4 billion during the same time span. Neither region is yet fully providing its consumers with the high-quality diets they increasingly demand and can afford.

India is getting one-third of the fodder for 400 million dairy animals by literally stealing leaves and branches from its richly biodiverse forests.

Africa has already dangerously shortened its bush fallow periods, from the optimal 15-20 years down to as little as 2-3 years in some regions. It cannot support the expanded population and rising dietary expectations.

None of this is environmentally sustainable. The world must have still-higher yields of crops and livestock, and free trade, or it will lose most of its tropical forests, and perhaps three-fourths of its 30 million wildlife species.

Thanks to biotechnology, the prospects for tripling the world’s crop yields are much better. In fact, biotechnology may be the only compassionate answer to the world food challenge in the 21st century—for poor people, for children, and for the billions of wild creatures on the planet.

Land Area and Competition Between Opposing Needs

The increase in productivity ushered in by the Green Revolution was achieved almost entirely through intensification. Essentially the world’s farmers tripled the yields on the best farm acres through increases in irrigation, better crop varieties, and increased use of fertilizers and pesticides. Environmentalists often claim that these gains are illusory—that we have simply exchanged fossil fuels for food. This is valid only in the sense that the vast majority of the world’s cropland is fertilized with nitrogen fertilizer extracted from the atmosphere using energy-intensive methods, mostly natural gas. However, this accounts for less than 1% of humanity’s overall energy consumption, and the alternatives (fertilizer from legume crops or animal manure) are land intensive and have a higher ecological price.

In fact, research has clearly demonstrated that the current varieties of crops utilize the nutrients and other inputs more efficiently than older varieties.[3] In essence, our agricultural car is getting much better gas mileage for us, allowing us to produce more food with less resources.

Tripling the Crop Yields Again

Ecologists are also telling us the big environmental threat is neither population nor pesticides, but the loss of wildlands with their unique species, food webs and contributions to climate patterns.

Moral concerns aside, famine is not an option for saving the environment. Poor people in the newly-emerging countries are clearly willing to chop down forest and kill wildlife to get adequate calories—or even to get high-quality protein.

Forest requirements will rise even more sharply than food needs. Industrial wood demand is likely to rise ten-fold, unless we shift toward more environmentally-damaging wood substitutes such as steel and concrete.[4]

Land is the Scarcest Natural Resource

The world’s population today is 80 percent bigger than in 1960. The environmental wonder of the 20th Century is that today’s farmers are feeding better diets to almost twice as many people from virtually the same cropland base. We used 1,394 million hectares of land for crops in 1961—and only 1,441 million hectares in 1992 to get twice the grain and oilseeds.[5],[6]

In addition, the average Third World citizen is getting 28 percent more calories, including 59 percent more vegetable oil (twice the resource cost of cereal calories) and 50 percent more animal calories (three times the resource cost of cereals).[7]

Producing today’s world food supply with 1960 crop yields would probably require an additional 10.9 million square miles of land, or more than the total land area of Europe and the U.S. combined! This is no precise estimate—but it underscores the enormous environmental importance of continuing to raise crop and forest yields if we are to have wildlands in the future.

In forestry, Roger Sedjo of Resources for the Future says the world should be able to provide the industrial wood needs for 9 billion people from less than 6 percent of the current wild forest area, planted to high-yield tree plantations.[8] But eco-activists oppose “unnatural” monoculture forests, and we aren’t planting enough tree plantations for the wood we will need when today’s tree seedlings are ready for harvest in 20 years.

The Best Land Has the Fewest Species

For biodiversity, it is even more important to save poor-quality land than prime cropland. Ecologist Michael Huston points out in his book Biological Diversity that the poorest lands harbor the greatest variety of wildlife species, all over the world.[9] Good quality land typically has thriving populations of a few wild species. In rain forests and swamps, the tough conditions force wildlife into narrow niches—producing lots of species.

Huston notes that America cleared about 100,000 square miles of wild forest in Ohio and Indiana during the 19th century, and apparently lost no wildlife species. Neither Ohio nor Indiana today harbor any unique native plant species. In contrast, Florida has 385, Texas 389 and California 1517—because those states have lots of poor-quality land.

The world’s big reservoir of biodiversity is the tropics, where tropical forests harbor 60-80 percent of the world’s various wild species. (Estimates of tropical species keep rising.) This is hugely important for agricultural policy, because the world’s big food gap is in the fast-growing, densely-populated tropic countries.

Sustainability from Technology

Agricultural research is the most important sustainability component under humanity’s direct control—and we are failing to make the appropriate investments. Remember, we don’t have to keep tripling farm output every 50 years into the future. We only have to do it once more.

Can we realistically expect to triple farm productivity again? The accepted expert on the theoretical crop yield limit is C.T. deWit of Wageningen University in the Netherlands. He estimated the limit at about 15-22 metric tons per hectare of cropland. The top U.S. corn yields are already over 20 tons per hectare. However the current world average crop yields are far lower—only about 2.6 tons per hectare of wheat, 3.5 tons per hectare of rice, and 3.7 tons per hectare of maize. Crop yields in the Third World have recently been rising by roughly 3 percent annually and in the U.S. by more than 4 percent.

We can expect that biotechnology and other technologies will continue to raise the yield potential of more of the world’s land toward their full potential. Moreover, as more countries become more affluent, we can expect more of the land to be supported with the capital, fertilizer menus and intensive management which have already produced high yields in the U.S., Europe and China.

deWit saw agriculture not as a matter of diminishing returns but as the serial elimination of constraints. When we can plant early in the season, using seeds with high potential, provide the complete roster of nutrients, eliminate weed competition, control insects and diseases, and take fuller advantage of the sunlight and moisture, then a high proportion of the world’s cropland should come far closer to deWit’s maximums.

To show how this plays out in the real world, new U.S. corn hybrids can tolerate being crowded at 50,000 plants per acre, five times as densely as we used to plant. This raises yield potential to 19 tons per hectare (300 bushels per acre). It also helps shade out weeds and reduce soil erosion. The new varieties have shorter stalks that put more of their energy into grain. They also “flex”—in dry years they produce smaller ears instead of barren stalks. At such high yields, researchers are finding they must add more chlorine; the chlorine that normally comes with the phosphate is not enough.[10]

When we can feed the resulting ample supplies of grain and forage to livestock and poultry that have added growth hormone, comfortable surroundings, and protection from diseases, the resulting feed efficiency will have the effect of raising crop yields still further. Bovine growth hormone will safely increase the world’s dairy feed efficiency, making it possible to provide more milk for India without plowing down wildlife. Pork growth hormone will cut feed grain requirements per pound of lean pork by more than 25 percent. This is exactly what a more crowded and affluent planet will need!

Nitrogen Pollution and Environmental NIMBYism

Francis Childs of Manchester, Iowa, became the world’s all-time champion corn grower in 1999, with a record yield of 394 bushels per acre.

However, the afterglow didn’t last long. Mr. Childs picked up a recent copy of his local paper, the Des Moines Register, to find a story headlined “Nitrogen Use Clouds Corn Crown.”

It seems Mr. Childs is now being blasted by the Iowa Environmental Council for using too much fertilizer. He used 400 pounds of nitrogen per acre on his record-setting competition plot. The Iowa average is 127 pounds, and the experts at Iowa State normally recommend only 100 to 200 pounds of nitrogen per acre

Linda Applegate, who heads the Council, said, “I know he isn’t putting this much nitrogen on all his land, but farmers are looking to him for an example. We have serious problems in Iowa with over-application of nitrogen. Our water suffers, and so does the water of our downstream neighbors.” (Mr. Childs uses about 200 pounds per acre on the rest of his corn acres.)

But high levels of nitrogen fertilizer don’t risk public health and don’t automatically mean downstream damage to our streams—but they do mean saving huge amounts of forests and other wildlife habitat.

Bob Aukes, a farm management consultant in Des Moines, says, “Mr. Childs is using only one acre to produce 394 bushels of corn, while his Iowa neighbors require 2.27 acres. If all Iowa corn growers mimicked Mr. Childs’ championship performance, more than 63 percent of Iowa’s 12 million corn acres could be set aside for wildflowers and pheasants…while holding total corn production constant. Or consider what more nitrogen fertilizer and other yield-enhancing inputs (including biotechnology) could do in terms of Iowa exports saving rainforests overseas!

Bob then challenges the Iowa Environmental Council to answer three questions:

  1. Regarding nitrogen runoff, where do we get more runoff, from one acre of Mr. Childs’ cornfield, or from 2.7 acres of average Iowa cornfields?
  2. Regarding soil erosion, where do we get more soil erosion, from one acre of Mr. Childs’ cornfield, or 2.7 acres of average Iowa cornfields?
  3. What is Iowa State’s recommended rate of nitrogen application for producing 394 bushels of corn per acre?

I’m not in favor of wasting fertilizer by letting it run off into the streams. Nor do I favor creating algae blooms and eutrophying lakes and reservoirs with excess N. But the current eco-frenzy about nitrogen is wildly overplayed.

First, doctors in 1945 made a mistake when they blamed nitrogen in drinking water for causing the famous Blue Baby Syndrome. Today’s medical evidence says Blue Baby is caused by severe gastroenteritis not nitrates. High levels of nitrate may aggravate Blue Baby, but won’t cause it. (See Alex Avery, Infantile Methemoglobinemia: Re-examining the Role of Drinking Water Nitrates, Environmental Health Perspectives, July 1999).

Second, nitrogen is absolutely vital to growing food. It takes 25 kg of N to produce a ton of wheat. You can put 400 kg of N on one hectare of land and grow 18 tons of wheat. Or you can spread out the fertilizer at 25 kg per hectare, and get the same wheat from 18 hectares of land. The major difference is that with low yield production you take 17 times as much land away from Nature.

Third, nitrogen in the water is not a soil erosion issue. The nitrogen mostly comes down drainage tile. A recent study of the hilly Coon Creek watershed in Wisconsin found that its farmers are suffering only 6 percent as much soil erosion as they lost in the Dust Bowl days of the 1930s. And the Coon Creek farmers don’t even use much conservation tillage. Iowa farmers have probably improved their soil conservation even more than Coon Creek.

How does the Iowa Environmental Council suggest we feed a peak population in 2050 that will be 50 percent larger than today’s? With organic farms that yield 80 bushels of corn per acre? Where will that leave our wildlife?

Can Biotechnology Permit More Compassion in the 21st Century?

Much of the productive power of nitrogen and hybrid seeds has already been applied to get today’s farm output. Tripling yields again will require us to apply more knowledge, more effectively.

Biotechnology seems to be the most promising way to ease the land conflict between people and wildlife in the 21st century. Biotechnology is the big new knowledge breakthrough that is just beginning to be applied to agriculture. It apparently has more conservation potential than any agricultural technology in human history.

To mention just a few of the exciting new developments in agricultural biotechnology:

§ Swiss researchers, funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, have announced the development of a high iron, vitamin A rich rice variety. Vitamin A deficiencies affect 400 million people worldwide and contribute to blindness in an estimated 14 million, mostly in rice cultures. Because rice contains phytate which inhibits iron uptake, 4 billion people in these cultures are also anemic. This new rice variety, which should be available in 2-3 years, would combat both of these deficiencies simultaneously.

(Sadly, the activists are already demonizing the golden rice as a mere ploy of agribusiness corporations to monopolize the global food economy. Vandana Shiva insists that the world doesn’t need golden rice. She recommends that chronically malnourished Asians just eat more chicken, dairy products, liver, and green leafy vegetables. This is the 21st century equivalent of Marie Antoinette’s purported “let them eat cake.” Ms. Shiva/Antoinette even has the audacity to suggest that golden rice could poison people with excess Vitamin A, never mind that the golden rice provides only Beta-carotene, not vitamin A. Never mind that a person would have to eat huge amounts of golden rice per day for months to the point their skin turned orange well before any vitamin A toxicity set in. Their opposition reveals their true anti-biotech colors.)

§ Canadian researchers have discovered that they can confer tolerance to salt in plants simply by engineering the over-expression of a single natural gene. Because the work was conducted in Arabidopsis thaliana, the plant equivalent of the laboratory mouse, the work will be easily repeated in virtually all of the major crop plants in use today. The degree of salt tolerance is remarkable, with the engineered plants able to cope with salt water 40% the salinity of sea water. The implications for better utilizing salt-contaminated areas or reclimating areas previously damaged by poor irrigation practices are clear, however, this technology must await viable strategies to ensure that the plants do not become opportunistic weeds, crowding out native flora of saline environments.

§ Two researchers in Mexico have found a way to unlock the productivity of billions of hectares of acid-soil lands in the tropics. The acidity liberates toxic aluminum ions which cut crop yields by up to 80 percent, on 30 to 40 percent of the world’s arable land, most of it in the tropics. Huge tracts of otherwise-good land in Brazil and Zaire have simply been left unused, growing only stunted brush and poor-quality grasses. But a gene from a soil microbe has given crop plants (tobacco, papaya and now rice) the ability to secrete citric acid from their roots. (This is a success strategy used by some of the wild plants growing on the acid soils.) Apparently, the new biotechnological intervention will overcome much of the “tropical disadvantage” which has kept regions like central Africa and South Asia so poor for so long. Moreover, they higher yields should help preserve tropical habitats.

§ Genes from wild relatives of our crop plants appear to be one of the most promising avenues for achieving safe, sustainable yield gains for the 21st century. Scientists have gathered hundreds of thousands of such wild relatives for the world’s gene banks. However, these wild relations are too different from the crop plants to cross-breed. The wild-relative genes can only be used through biotechnology. But what promise they contain! Researchers from Cornell University have recently used wild-relative genes to get a 50 percent increase in yields of tomatoes! (Tomato yields in standards cross-breeding programs have recently been rising by only about 1 percent per year.) The implications for phytopathology are obvious and enormous.

§ The same Cornell research team inserted two promising wild-relative genes into the top-yielding Chinese rice hybrids. Each of the new genes produced a 17-percent yield gain. Together, they offer the world’s rice breeders a sudden 20 to 40 percent increase in rice yields. It is no accident that China recently announced a new rice variety that yields 13.5 tons in test plots—more than double that nation’s 6-ton national average yield.

These are all examples of “high-yield conservation.” Since 1950, the rising yields of the Green Revolution have permitted farmers all over the world to triple their yields (and more) on the world’s best farmland. That is permitting the world to feed better diets to twice as many people, without taking any more land for farming (except in Africa).

The challenges ahead, both in humanitarian and environmental terms, are enormous. We must find a way to supply higher quality diets to a 50 percent larger population; preferably without destroying more of the world’s wildlife habitat. Our immediate challenge is convincing the public that this challenge warrants significant public investment. Agricultural researchers have justified their work in humanitarian terms. However, the stakes are much higher. The public seems to place as much if not more importance these days on environmental conservation. Agricultural research in productivity and disease resistance have at least as much conservation value as humanitarian and it’s our job to communicate this to the public.

Because if we don’t, the costs in lost biodiversity and wildlife habitat will be the legacy of our inaction.

###

Alex Avery is Director of Research and Education at the Center for Global Food Issues of the Hudson Institute, a think-tank headquartered in Indianapolis, Indiana. He received his bachelor’s degree in biology and chemistry from Old Dominion University. From May of 1992 to December of 1994 he was a McKnight research fellow in plant physiology at Purdue University working on a project to develop drought-resistant sorghum varieties for the Sudan of Africa.

He represented the Center at the 1996 United Nations World Food Summit in Rome and was co-author of Farming to Sustain the Environment, a Hudson Institute briefing paper which addresses issues of agricultural sustainability from a practical and global perspective. This paper is available in Adobe Acrobat PDF format at the Center’s web site under “Key Publications” or by contacting the Center for Global Food Issues at (540) 337-6354.

[1] United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization statistic, UN FAO Production yearbook: 1996. And World Bank, World Development Report 1997.

[2] C. J. M. Musters, H. J. de Graaf, and W. J. ter Keurs. Can Protected Areas Be Expanded in Africa? Science Mar 10 2000: 1759-1760.

[3] How Efficient are Modern Cereal Cultivars, CGIAR News Vol. 4, number 2, pgs. 2-3, April 1997. Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research, Washington, DC.

[4] Dr. W.R.J. Sutton, Tasman Forestry Ltd., “The Need for Planted Forests and the Example of Radiata Pine,” paper presented at the symposium “Planted Forests — Contributions to Sustainable Societies,” Portland, Oregon, June 28th, 1995.

[5] FAO Production Yearbook, 1976, Table 1, “Land Use.”

[6] FAO Production Yearbook, Vol. 47, 1993, Table 1, “Land Use.” Note: most of the expansion was on productive and sustainable land in places like Canada, Australia, Paraguay, eastern Bolivia and Brazil. Most of the Brazilian expansion was not in the rain forest but in southern and central savanna regions. This is not to excuse the expansion of cropland in some rain forests (Ecuador, Indonesia, Brazil) or other fragile environments which should not have been needed.

[7] FAO Production Yearbook, Vol. 46, 1992, Table 3, “Population;” Table 106, “Calories;” Table 108, “Fat.”

[8] Roger Sedjo, personal interviews, 1992 and 1996.

[9] Dr. Michael Huston, Biological Diversity, Cambridge University Press, 1994.

[10] Gogerty, “More Plants, More Corn,” The Furrow, Deere & Co., Moline, IL, Jan. 1996, pp. 7-8.

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