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It’s Time To Tell The World How High-Yield Farming Saves Nature

By admin | February 9, 2005

Presentation in Winnipeg to the Canadain Association of Agri-Retailers
Dennis Avery

. . . farms obliterate empty places, ploughed fields vanquish forests, herds drive out wild beasts. . . and there are such great cities where formerly hardly a hut . . . everywhere there is a dwelling,
everywhere a multitude. . . . We are burdensome to the world. The resources are scarcely adequate to us . . . 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., with a world population 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.”

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

“Here’s something for the Greens of the world to ponder: ‘genetic engineering’ may be the most environmentally beneficial technology to have emerged in decades, or possibly centuries,’ Jonathan Rauch writes in The Atlantic Monthly. . . . Noting that ‘world food output will need to at
least double and possibly triple over the next several decades,’ the author argues that ‘the great challenge’ is ‘not to feed an additional three billion people (and their pets) but to do so without converting much of the world’s prime [wildlife] habitat into second- or third-rate farmland.’”

New York Times, “Frankenfoods to the Rescue of Mother Earth,” September 21, 2003

The Environmental Movement’s Record of Untruths

1. Myth: High-Yield Farming Threatens the Frogs

In 1995, a group of Minnesota school children visited a local pond, and found deformed frogs—too many legs or too few. They reported it on the Internet, and over the next three years reports of deformed frogs flooded in from across the country. The Minnesota Pollution Control Agency quickly decided it must be pesticides in the water, and spent millions of dollars trying to prove it. Now, we’ve learned that the frogs are deformed because of a natural parasite, the trematode, which burrows into the developing leg joints of the tadpoles. Frogs don’t become deformed in ponds that don’t have trematodes. Pesticides were not the cause, though the Minnesota officials still refuse to admit this.

In the mountains of California, red-legged and yellow-legged frogs are often absent from the lakes. Several researchers are trying to prove that pesticide-laden dust from the Central Valley is being blown up into the lakes and killing the frogs. Indeed, traces of various pesticides were found in the mountain waters. However, the U.S. Forest Service and the University of California/Berkeley have now proved the cause of the frog decline: hungry trout. In the high lakes stocked with trout, there are no frogs. The aggressive fish eat the frog’s eggs and tadpoles. In the lakes no longer stocked with trout, the frogs thrive. When researchers netted all the fish out of a lake without frogs, the frog population “exploded,” even though there were still traces of pesticides in the water.

2. Myth: Farming and Logging Caused the Salmon Decline in the Pacific Northwest

The salmon numbers in the Columbia River of Oregon and Washington began to decline in 1977. Environmentalists were quick to blame overfishing, logging, and the water demands and pollution from irrigated farming. State and federal governments began spending billions of dollars on logging restrictions, fish ladders, and barging young fish down to the sea. Nothing helped. But in the fall of 2002, the Columbia River had a record salmon run, and the salmon numbers have recovered to their former abundance.

The salmon catch data for the past 100 years of the Columbia River and Gulf of Alaska fisheries clearly reveal a 25-year cycle. For 25 years at a time, the Pacific currents take the salmon food to the Gulf of Alaska, while the Oregon/Washington salmon fishery shrinks. Then, for the next 25 years, the Oregon/Washington salmon fishermen flourish, while the Gulf of Alaska shrinks.

Did the Sierra Club not know about the cycle? In that case, we can’t trust their advice on fish management. Or did they know about the cycle and not tell us—in which case we can’t trust their advice on fish management.

3. Myth: Fertilizer from the Midwest Threatens the Gulf of Mexico

During the Clinton Administration, a White House Task Force recommended a 30 percent cut in Midwest fertilizer use because of a so-called “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico. Fortunately, the task force admitted in its report that it could find no evidence of either ecological or economic harm to the Gulf from the summer algae bloom that causes the “dead zone.” The first reports of such algae blooms in the Gulf go back into the 19th century. Fisheries experts say that most of the nutrients for the Gulf’s vast, rich fishery come down the Mississippi River. Such hypoxic zones are a common feature at the mouths of 40 major rivers around the world, where fresh, nutrient-laden water hits salt water. Under such conditions, the laws of biology and physics guarantee periodic algae blooms.

Know also that Midwest fertilizer use has not risen since 1980, while the yields from the corn that gets most of the N fertilizer have risen 25 percent. Obviously, more of the farm fertilizer is being harvested as corn. More of the Midwest’s poultry and livestock have been moved indoors, where their wastes are carefully collected and spread on growing crops. If the “dead zone” is expanding, which is in serious doubt, where is the additional N coming from? The sewage treatment plants of St. Louis and Kansas City?

Don’t forget either, that before farmers settled the Great Plains, the grasslands there had 60 million bison, 100 million antelope, billions of birds and grasshoppers, all eating the grass and defecating. The N may have taken longer to reach the Gulf, but it’s likely that Cortez could have found an algal bloom in the Gulf of Mexico when he invaded Mexico in 1520.

4. Myth: Modern Farming Causes Soil Erosion

In a piece of elegant ’soil archeology,” Dr. Stanley Trimble of UCLA went back to the highly-erosive Coon Creek watershed in southern Wisconsin, and redid the 1938 Soil Conservation Service surveys, in the 1970s and again in the 1990s.. What he found is that the Coon Creek watershed is currently losing only 6 percent as much topsoil as it lost during the Dust Bowl era. Thanks to crop rotation, contour plowing and especially to conservation tillage, the Coon Creek watershed is building topsoil in the midst of the highest-yielding farming in all history. Dr. Trimble says those who claim high rates of soil erosion “owe us the physical evidence.” They owe us the locations of the huge gullies, the sediment-filled creeks and the dust clouds that would attest to their soil crisis. The fact is that they lack such evidence because modern farmers are doing a better, more sustainable, more productive job of farming today than ever before in history.

5. Myth: Farmers Caused Overpopulation By Producing Too Much Food

Environmentalists believe that high-yield farming is the root cause of global overpopulation. The reality, however, is that the population growth surge started before the Green Revolution. It started in the 1950s, powered by public health interventions such as vaccinations, clean water, sewage treatment, antibiotics—and yes, DDT. It was lower death rates, not higher crop yields, which caused the population surge.

At the same time, fortunately, the food security produced by high-yield farming helped bring about the first major decline in human birth rates the world has ever seen. Higher crop yields started a circle of reduced hunger risks, more food to support off-farm jobs, and affluent urban couples having 1.7 births each.

In 1960, the average woman in the Third World had 6.2 children. Today, she has 2.7, and since population stability is 2.1 births, the poor countries have come 75 percent of the way to stability in 34 years. No one in 1960 would have dared predict such a radical drop in birth rates. After 2050, the world’s human population will begin a slow decline.

6. Myth: Modern Farming is Destroying the World’s Plant Biodiversity

Eco-activists like to claim that high-yield farming is destroying the world’s biodiversity. By that they mean that farmers in the Third World tend to plant better, modern seeds when they can get them, forsaking the thousands of “farmer varieties” they used to plant. But those low yielding seeds aren’t original species. They couldn’t survive in the wild. And we have most of those varieties saved in seed banks.

The real challenge is to save the truly wild species, and to do that we need to save the wild lands. Understand that the modern farming you represent has saved virtually every tree and wild creatures on the planet today.

More good news: The world has set up a new Global Crop Diversity trust that is inventorying gene banks to identify plant material in need of rescue. The Trust is also raising more than $250 million to fill in the gaps in our gene banks, and to ensure high-quality retention and grow-out facilities - even in the Third World.

Still more good news: The International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYjust demonstrated that genetic crop diversity can be restored—or even amplified—through modern plant breeding techniques. With “wide crosses,” CIMMYT has just created what it calls “synthetic bread wheats,” by crossing the original wild parents of durum wheat and then crossing their offspring with another wild wheat. This effectively duplicated the natural events that originally gave rise to bread wheat some 10,000 years ago.

The bad news: The eco-activists still want us to turn half of the world’s cr0pland into a gene museum for low-yielding farmers’ seed varieties.

Myth: Organic Farming is Kinder to the Environment

Organic farming is an environmental fraud. The first and foremost rule of organic farming is that ‘thou shalt not use industrial fertilizer.” This means organic farming needs more land to make up for its lower yields (typically 10 to 40 percent lower) and it needs more land for green manure crops or more cattle to produce more manure.

In Denmark, a high-level technical committee reported in 1999 that an all-organic mandate would cut Danish food production by 47 percent. Most of Denmark’s farmland would have to be planted to forage crops and fed to feedlot cattle so their manure could then be spread thickly over the whole Danish landscape.

Dr. Vaclav Smil, an award-winning science author from the University of Manitoba, says all-organic farming for America would take the manure from another 900 million to 1 billion cattle, at 3 to 30 acres of forage per beast. There are only 1.2 billion acres in the whole lower 48 states. We’d have to eliminate half our citizens, or plant all the forests to pasture grass. The world would need the manure from another 7 to 8 billion cattle to replace the 80 million tons of nitrogen we take from the air each year. (The air is 78 percent N.)

Organic farming could be nearly as kind to the environment as high-yield farming - if two thirds of the human population were executed, and the organic rules amended to allow soil-saving conservation tillage (with herbicides).

The Most Vicious Myth: DDT Was Dangerous to People and Birds

Rachel Carson claimed in Silent Spring that “Dr. Dewitt’s now classic experiments [on quail and pheasants] have established the fact that exposure to DDT, even when doing no observable harm to the birds, may seriously affect reproduction. Quail into whose diets DDT was introduced throughout the breeding season survived and even produced normal numbers of fertile eggs. But few of the eggs hatched.”

Ms. Carson was lying. Dr. Dewitt’s study actually showed no significant difference in hatching rates between the quail fed DDT (80 percent) and the control quail (83.9 percent). When Dr. Dewitt tested pheasants, he found that those fed with DDT hatched more than 80 percent of their eggs, while the controls birds hatched only 57 percent. In total, then, the birds fed DDT hatched a larger percentage of their eggs than the control birds!

Dozens of studies of birds fed large doses of DDT have failed to thin their eggshells. Some of the studies achieve thin eggshells—but by reducing the calcium in the birds’ diets. Stress, old age, and mercury pollution have all been shown to produce thin eggshells in the wild, but DDT has not.

Yet the myth of DDT causing declines in bird populations has been allowed to ruin a billion human lives. We are still accepting a million deaths per year from malaria - most of them African children—rather than use DDT indoors, as the most effective and cost-effective mosquito killer and repellent ever discovered. Why are we being so inhumane?

Myth: Modern Farming is a Major Contributor to Global Warming

Eco-activists hate the fact that American farmers burn diesel fuel and put nitrogen fertilizer on their crops and they’ve gotten the whole world excited about global warming Everyone knows about CO2 and global warming and the push for the Kyoto Treaty that would sharply raise the cost of both diesel and fertilizer for American farmers and destroy the economies of the first world. But wouldn’t it be worth it? Who wants a fried planet?

Researchers around the world are giving us a new reality. This reality is that the Earth’s climate has always been in a state of flux and will continue in its ordained cycles farther into the future than man can fathom. We didn’t cause it, we can’t “fix” it, but we can live with it and modern farming can help.

Global Warming and the 1,500-Year Cycle of the Sun

History tells us of the Little Ice Age, which lasted from 1400 AD to 1850. Before that, there was a Medieval Warming, which lasted from about 950 AD to 1400. The temperatures during the Medieval Warming were about 2 degrees C. warmer than today in Northern Europe, and during the Little Ice Age they were about 2 degrees colder. Before the Medieval Warming, the Romans enjoyed a moderate warming period from 200 BC to 400 AD, and the Roman Empire began to disintegrate when the Dark Ages cold period began (600 to 950 BC).

Now, cave stalagmites and ice cores and seabed sediments and fossilized pollen are allowing us to go back into the temperature record of prehistory—and we’re finding dramatic findings that the eco-activists don’t want you to know: the Earth is governed by an irregular 1500-year cycle. It’s natural, it’s moderate, and it’s unstoppable. But we can adapt, as humans have been adapting through the centuries. The North American Pollen Database testifies that there’s been a major reorganization of this continent’s vegetation nine times in the past 14,000 years. That’s an average of once every 1650 years. The seabed sediments say these long-term cycles have been occurring for at least a million years.

We first learned of the cycles from a Greenland ice core in 1984. By that time, lots of people were already committed to the idea of man-made global warming. Al Gore had already held his first congressional hearing on the problem. Greenpeace had already announced that mankind must give up fossil fuels (and send in money).

Fortunately, it doesn’t look as though our current warming is due to CO2 from factories and auto exhausts. In the first place, most of it took place before 1940, and thus before the big increase in CO2 emissions. We’ve had very little global warming since 1940.

More important, the Greenhouse Theory says the additional CO2 will collect heat in the lower atmosphere, from the Earth’s surface up to 30,000 feet. Then the heat of the atmosphere will radiate down to heat the Earth’s surface itself. The problem is that for the past 25 years, we’ve been getting the most accurate temperature readings of the atmosphere ever taken, from satellites and high-altitude balloons. They show virtually no warming at all. The Earth’s surface is warming faster than the atmosphere that is supposed to warm it! That can’t be Greenhouse warming.

There’s more. The ice cores in Antarctica clearly show CO2 and global temperature tracking closely together through 250,000 years and three Ice Ages—but the changes in CO2 lag behind the changes in temperature by 200 to 800 years! CO2 is a lagging indicator of temperature change, not the forcing agent for global climate.

The physical evidence of the Earth’s past climate says we’re 150 years into a moderate, cyclical warming being caused by the sun. We used to think the sun was a constant. But now that we can send satellite measuring devices out beyond the obscuring atmosphere of the Earth, we find that it varies by fractions of a percent.

And we have the linkage. We’ve known for 400 years that when the number of sunspots is low, the Earth’s climate will be cold. When the number of sunspots is high, the Earth will be warmer. And the number of sunspots is higher now than it has been in 1200 years.

We also have beryllium. Beryllium is created when cosmic rays hit the Earth’s atmosphere. When the sun is weak, we get hit by lots of cosmic rays, and lots of beryllium is created. (When the sun is active, solar winds protect us from cosmic rays.) In the last 50 years, researchers find there’s less beryllium in our atmosphere than for the past 1150 years.

Will all the wild species die from overheating? Why? The species are mostly at least 600 million years old. They’ve already survived lots of these 1500-year cycles. One “study” that’s gotten lots of publicity says that a warming of 0.8 degrees C will destroy 20 percent of our wildlife species. But over the past 100 years, we’ve already had that much warming—and we can’t find a single species that’s gone extinct as a result.

Will huge storms destroy our cities? Storms are driven by the temperature differential between the Poles and the Equator. With global warming, that differential is decreased. History and physical proxies both say the warm periods have fewer, milder storms.

Will there be more and worse droughts? Maybe, we don’t know, but there are always droughts. California should perhaps start serious water conservation efforts. We do know there’ll be a bit more rain, because more warmth will evaporate more water from the oceans. In eithercase, conservation tillage and water management will become even more important.

Will malaria sweep over Winnipeg? History says malaria was throughout most of the U.S. and clear up to the Arctic Circle until after World War II. Then window screens and DDT helped us eradicate it. If the temperatures become 2 degrees warmer, we’ll still have window screens and pesticides.

It’s not your pickup trucks, your tractors or your fertilizer. It’s not my Chevy Suburban. It’s the sun, and we’ve got to adapt to a moderate warming, probably at least for the next 500 years. If it’s any comfort, the Medieval Warming was also known to history as the Medieval Climate Optimum—the finest weather humanity can remember. The following Ice Age will be the true challenge.

The Strange Anti-Human World of the Late 20th Century

For the past 40 years, human society has been in a unique anti-human mode. “Saving the planet” has been the watchword. For the first time in human history, kangaroo rats and flowerhead weevils are deemed more important than people.

This orgy of anti-humanity was almost certainly driven by people-hating Paul Ehrlich and his wrong-headed 1968 book, The Population Bomb.

Much of our eco-fervor seems to be due to an irrational fear that our ways of living would be overwhelmed by 20 or 50 billion additional poor brown and yellow people who might grab all the resources away from us.

In Southern Africa, in 2003, environmental activists took their campaign against agricultural biotechnology to famine-stricken countries. They convinced African government leaders not to distribute U.S. corn donated as food aid. America co-mingles corn that is genetically altered with conventional corn. The president of Zambia said the activists told him the U.S. corn was poison. People who were boiling poisonous roots because they had nothing else to eat were denied access to an abundance of their favorite food staple. And remember, this is the same corn that everyone in this room eats as corn flakes, tacos, and chips.

Does putting Nature above people always lead humans to inhumane behavior? Does nature-worship always push society over that thin line?

The same moral codes that say humans are responsible for protecting Nature also say we’re also responsible for helping our fellow men. They don’t say we can become Druids, worshiping trees and practicing human sacrifice.

It would certainly be easier to leave room for wildlife if we eliminated all the humans. But killing off our fellow men or forcing billions of forced abortions are not moral solutions when we have the intelligence and societal skills to save both people and wildlife.

Rich Countries Are Better for the Environment

Paul Ehrlich said the affluent people of the First World were: (1) the worst polluters in the history of the world; (2) would destroy half the world’s wildlife species in the next few decades; and, (3) would bring about the ruin of the whole planet.

The reality, however, is that most of the Third World is already in the most polluting phase of industrialization—burning huge amounts of coal to smelt massive amounts of iron, cooking food with wood from trees that aren’t replanted and caring too little about water pollution.

Meanwhile, in places like Southern Africa and Southeast Asia, the world’s remaining hunter-gatherers are peddling rhinoceros horn and “bushmeat” from endangered gorillas—harvested with AK-47s.

Mexico is losing three million acres of forest per year to the expansion of peasant farming. More than half of the forestland cleared in Honduras in recent decades has been “steepland,” with a slope of more than 30 degrees; at least once a decade, a hurricane washes the steeplands into the valleys.

How can the eco-movement present these hunter-gatherers and peasant farmers as the guardians of the world’s environmental future?

But there is hope for humanity and nature, thanks primarily to the affluence generated by knowledge, technology, and trade. A World Bank staff team has documented a bell-shaped curve in environmental protection. In the early years of industrialization, forests die and pollution surges. Rising populations and higher incomes demand more farmland and better diets.

But when per capita incomes reach a level of $5,000 to $8,000 (Brazil and Malaysia now) a different set of factors take over. People are already well-fed and birth rates fall rapidly. With better inputs and management, crop yields rise, so less land per capita is needed for food. Diesel fuel, taken from under the land or sea, substitutes for firewood and forests are replanted. Affluent people want cleaner air and are willing and able to pay for it. They begin to demand clean rivers, for both health and aesthetics.

Richer Means Fewer Wildlife Extinctions

We tend to forget that man has been using and abusing wildlife for eons. Stone Age man used to hunt birds and animals to extinction. North America lost more than 40 species of huntable birds and animals within a few years after the human hunters arrived from Asia some 14,000 years ago—including North America’s horses, camels, and elephants.

Equally dangerous, we’ve forgotten how vicious people were to other people when food was scarce. Paleontologists tell us that up to 25 percent of the males (and perhaps 15 percent of the females) in primitive communities showed signs of violent death. They were essentially fighting over food: good hunting grounds and good farmland.

Only in the last 100 years has man been able to support high populations of both people and wildlife in the same region. Only after World War II, when the Green Revolution extended high-yield farming over most of the world, did human society free itself from “food wars.” (Just before WWII, crowded Japan invaded Manchuria, in part for its soybean fields; Nazi Germany invaded Poland for “living room.”)

The World Conservation Union today warns that more than one billion poor people are living in the world’s biodiversity hotspots (particularly tropical and mountain rain forests)—and trying to feed their children by hunting bushmeat and doing slash-and burn farming. We must give these people higher-yield farming if we hope to prevent massive wildlife extinctions in the next 50 years.

Yet the eco-movement holds up primitive hunters and farmers as the environmental models for the future.

Richer Means a Cleaner Environment

Remarkably, the waste volume from American homes today is one-third less than the waste volume from Mexican homes! This is due in sizeable part to the centralized processing of our food supply. Our broiler chickens, for example, arrive at the store wrapped in sanitary, lightweight plastic-wrapped trays—with the feathers, heads, feet and many of the unwanted internal organs already separated out for recycling at the processing plant.

These poultry waste products are then turned into livestock feeds and many other products, far more effectively than they could be handled without the centralized waste management.

The modern rendering industries are among the world’s most successful and most critically needed recyclers. In America, they treat 50 billion pounds per year of waste that urgently needs to be treated, even if it were only going into a landfill. However, it would take millions of additional acres of farmland to replace the nutrients salvaged and put to use through rendering.

The rest of the First World’s vaunted recycling effort has pretty much collapsed. Most of our carefully sorted urban trash is all dumped together in the local landfill, because it takes more resources to produce useful things with recycled stuff than it takes to start from scratch.

21st Century Human Society is the Most Sustainable in History

Roman citizens worried about soil erosion and declining farm yields nearly two thousand years ago, with good reason: soil erosion has always been the most vulnerable aspect of human society.

Thanks to chemical fertilizer, modern farmers no longer need to “wear out” their soils. Today’s farmers use soil testing and industrially supplied nutrients to keep their soils rich and productive. In addition, modern farmers invented conservation tillage and no-till. These farming systems cut erosion by up to 95 percent and encourages far more earthworms and subsoil bacteria.

Industrial fertilizers and conservation tillage are two of the major reasons why the Soil and Water Conservation Society of North America calls modern high-yield farming “the most sustainable in history.”

The New Surge of Support for High-Yield Technologies

After the success of the Green Revolution became clear in the 1970s, a vice-president of the Rockefeller Foundation—founder of the key agricultural research stations in Mexico and the Philippines-spoke of his profound regret. He said that agricultural research had turned humanity into a cancer on the earth. We now know he was wrong.

Now, with the end of the population surge, high-yield farming is at last beginning to get the support it has so long deserved from the intellectual leadership of the First World.

In May of 2001, our Hudson Institute presented (at the National Press Club in Washington) two Nobel Peace Prize winners, a co-founder of Greenpeace, the then-latest winner of the World Food Prize, and the British author of the Gaia Hypothesis, as signers of our “Declaration in Support of Protecting Nature with High-Yield Farming and Forestry.”

This remarkably broad coalition was led by Dr. Norman Borlaug, Chairman Emeritus of our Center, and the 1970 winner of the Peace Prize for his work on high-yield crops for the Green Revolution.

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—to save room for wildlife.

At the time of the Press Club event, we feared it had been a failure. The biggest media outlet to feature the event was the American Farm Bureau News. But in the months since that event, the concept of high-yield conservation has been praised by columnist David Ignatius of the Washington Post. The October, 2003, issue of the prestigious Atlantic Monthly carried an article lavishly praising both high-yield farming and biotech. More startling by far, the editorial page of the New York Times recommended the Atlantic Monthly article to its readers-in a newspaper which has been editorially praising organic food and condemning high-yield farming for decades.

In October of last year, the journal Science carried an editorial by Dr. Donald Kennedy, the magazine’s editor. Kennedy states that world hunger is now the overarching issue for world health-and concludes:

“Unless agricultural production is increased on the good lands, population pressures will cause farmers to move upslope and deforest the hillsides. That’s a double whammy: a loss for those families, and a loss for the environment. And on already marginal lands, GM technology may offer the best hope for producing crops that can withstand drought, impoverished soils and disease. For both these reasons, we’d better resolve the GM controversy.”

Half Again As Much Meat Demand in 2025

All of that comes in the nick of time because the worlds’ demand for meat and livestock produce will continue to soar. The Third World is raising its meat demand three times as fast as the First World. No vegetarian societies are emerging anywhere. (India has always consumed lots of milk, and now they’re eating chicken and yearning for mutton.)

Meat consumption has an almost perfect correlation with higher incomes. We project that per capita world incomes will be 31 percent higher in 2025 than today. Combined with a 28 percent increase in population, this would drive meat consumption to an increase of nearly 55 percent by 2025.

This meat increase will be good for children, since it provides them with high-quality protein and key micronutrients. Without livestock products, children do not reach their full genetic stature, and may lag in cognitive learning. Moreover, the Council for Agricultural Science and Technology says that, since birds and animals can nourish themselves on grass and other things that humans can’t or don’t eat, the resource cost of the meat and milk is just about the same as for the same amount of non-meat proteins and calories.

Such a major meat production increase will require higher grain yields (perhaps 30 percent higher), higher oilseed yields (25 percent higher?) and still-better feed conversion ratios. These will only be possible if we continue to invest in research (including biotechnology) and allow it to be adopted.

The current regulatory war against farmers, renderers, fertilizer makers, and virtually anyone else involved in high-yield farming must stop if we are to sustain the kids, pets, and wild animals in the 21st century.

It looks now as though agricultural biotechnology is winning its place in the 21st century. I’m thankful, since I do not know how we would triple the world’s crop yields again in the next 50 years without it. And unless we triple the crop yields again, we risk losing most of the world’s wildlands.

More Globalization, Not Less

The world also urgently needs farm trade liberalization. Obviously, most of the increase in global meat consumption will occur outside of North America. It is also true that much of the meat consumption gain will occur in densely populated countries that will be critically short of land and water to produce their own livestock products cost-effectively.

Fortunately, the farm trade liberalization talks among the members of the World Trade Organization have taken a dramatic positive turn. Last year, the EU had refused to consider much farm subsidy reform, and the Third World countries walked out of the talks at Cancun, Mexico, and went home. Many of us feared it would take ten years to get farm trade liberalization back on the table. However, thanks to Brazil and India, the talks are back in high gear. The EU has promised to eliminate all of its farm export subsidies as part of a global farm trade reform. President Bush has promised a dramatic reduction of U.S. farm subsidies. (Bush has consistently worked for farm trade reform, and signed the 2002 farm bill only reluctantly.)

The EU is already having trouble paying for the Common Agricultural Policy, and it has just taken in 10 new countries, including big agricultures in Poland and Romania with millions of small farmers and tens of millions of hectares of underperforming farmland.

Meanwhile, China has 20 percent of the world’s population, and 7 percent of its arable land. Three-fourths of India’s Hindus say they will eat meat when they can afford it, and their GNP is now rising twice as fast as their population. Bangladesh, Indonesia, and Egypt are other major population centers which are likely to bid happily for farm imports in the decades ahead.

The world urgently needs both high-yield farming and the liberalization of global farm trade to meet the population and conservation challenges of the 21st century. I think the time is now ripe for North American farmers to present their credentials more forcefully, and more successfully than when the First World was fleeing in terror from “overpopulation.”

You might start by joining the thousands who have signed the High Yield Declaration, at www.highyieldconservation.org

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The Nine Most Dangerous Myths About Pesticides and High-Yield Farming

By admin | December 1, 2004

Presentation in New Delhi, India for a Seminar on Pesticides: Myths, Realities, and Remedies
Dennis Avery

It is a tremendous privilege to be in India, a key site of the Green Revolution, to discuss pesticides, the modern miracle of high-yield agriculture, and the future of our world.

For thousands of years, mankind was constantly threatened by hunger and famine. Ancient civilizations were often destroyed by crop failures. Graneries were stocked for “the lean years” whenever possible, even though rats and beetles ate much of the stored grain; no one knew when the next drought or plague of locusts would create the next hunger emergency.

Paleontologists tell us that the skeletons of our prehistoric ancestors reveal a high level of violent death—nearly 30 percent among males and about 15 percent even among females. Since many violent deaths don’t leave skeletal evidence, that means huge numbers of prehistoric people died at the hands of their fellow men. Most of the fighting was over food: the richest hunting grounds, the favored river valleys full of wild rice, the best groves for finding tree nuts.

After humans learned to farm, they fought over cropland. As recently as World War II, Japan invaded Manchuria, in part for its cropland. Hitler told us he invaded the Soviet Union so his German farmers could take over the fertile fields of the Ukraine.

The world been largely freed of hunger-driven violence and the almost constant fear of famine only since the Green Revolution of the 1960s. Even now, in Africa where the Green Revolution is only now beginning to express itself famine stalks the land during the drought years.

In the densely populated highlands of Rwanda, it was only ten years ago that a lack of rising crop yields contributed to genocide. The Hutus and Tutsis doubted there would be enough land to support both tribes. Neighbor wielding machetes against neighbor resulted in the murder of a million.

Only the must recent generation of humans has been freed for the first time in history from the chronic, traditional human fears of hunger, violence, and being crowded away from crucial resources.

How ironic that the well-fed children of the first generation of well-fed humans is now trying urgently to destroy the very high-yield agriculture that freed them from fear and violence.

The well-fed elite are attempting to persuade humanity to throw itself back into fear and violence with a cavalcade of myths, which are proving amazingly successful in the very countries where education should have made myths an untenable strategy.

They are being aided by the very journalists who have sworn to free their readers, viewers and listeners from ignorance and untruth. Why? Because the mythical scares gain the journalists more attention and prominence. Even some scientists have put the hope of bigger government grants ahead of sound research.

Let me offer what I believe are the most dangerous myths threatening the world.

Dangerous Myth #1: DDT Causes Human Cancer.

I put this as the most dangerous myth about the modern farming because this is the myth that started the movement to reverse the Green Revolution.

It was invented by Rachel Carson, the widely revered and even more widely read author of Silent Spring, in 1962. She had no evidence that DDT caused cancer, but she hated the pesticides that she thought were killing too many birds and bees. She said that DDT and “six or seven other” pesticides then in use would be proven carcinogenic. None have been so proven. In fact, the only proven carcinogen among farming’s widely used pesticides to date has been the lead arsenate, the deadly blue powder the modern synthetic pesticides have displaced.

DDT and its metabolites are long-lasting molecules, and they do build up in the fatty tissues of people, fish, and animals. So, how do we know DDT doesn’t cause cancer?

Primates have been fed more than 33,000 times the average daily human exposure to DDT during the heyday of widespread DDT spraying. The test was “inconclusive with respect to a carcinogenic effect of DDT in nonhuman primates.” That means the primates didn’t get cancer, even when exposed to massive doses of DDT.

Even today, more than 30 years after DDT was banned in the United States, huge numbers of urbanites are still terrified that they will get cancer from DDT residues. The federal government was recently forced by congress to spend millions of dollars on a massive test of women in the New York City area, where elevated breast cancer rates were being blamed on the DDT that helped New York and America eradicate malaria decades earlier. The results of the study were published in 2002. They concluded that the elevated breast cancer rates were due to more women smoking, and having their children later in life. Both are well-known cancer factors. The women of New York are still not convinced, and are demanding still more studies, which they hope will allow them to blame their cancer risks on a pesticide instead of on their own life choices and genetics.

The cancer myth lingers because modern medicine has eliminated so many other causes of death in the modern world. Cancer is one of the few things left for us to die from. All over the world, city people eating pesticide-grown food are living 30 or 40 years longer than their ancestors did,. They are also spending far less time being sick than did their forebears. But they still fear pesticides.

Humanity, which evolved one paw-swipe away from death, has few real un-chosen risks left—and thus few places to target its numerous fear genes.

Our cancer researchers, our medical professionals, and our food safety experts tell us that consumers need not fear pesticides. Yet organic food is the fastest-growing segment of the food industry in the richest, safest cities of the planet.

This is the most dangerous myth because it could lead us to renounce the use of the pesticides that protect our food supplies, both in the field and during storage, and bring back the famines that the pesticides have done so much to help us escape.

Pesticides are also helping to protect us from dangerous natural toxins such as aflatoxin and fumonisin that are far more deadly than pesticide residues. Britain recently pulled all of the organic corn meal brands from its supermarket shelves because all of them were dangerously contaminated with fumonisin, which causes cancer in rats. Our food safety standards normally permit pesticide residues at a rate one hundredth or less of the “no-effect” levels in test animals, and not even one-thousandth of the levels of anything that triggers cancer. However, the organic corn meals were contaminated with as much as one-third of the fumonisin that caused cancer in the test rats.

British authorities said the organic corn meals averaged more than 9,000 parts per billion of fumonisin, more than 20 times the new EU standard for the toxin. Twenty brands of conventional corn meal averaged a tiny 130 parts per billion, because they were better protected with synthetic pesticides than the organic corn crops. Better insecticides helped prevent damage to the seed heads, so the fungi could not attack successfully, and better fungicides meant fewer fungi to attack.

Dangerous Myth #2: DDT thins the eggshells of birds.

My second ranking myth also is based on DDT. This myth is a proven global danger, having caused more than 30 million human malaria deaths, and perhaps a billion ruined human lives from chronic, debilitating malaria. This is the myth that caused the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to ban DDT in 1972, leading to the banning of DDT in most of the non-tropical countries (after they had eradicated their malaria mosquitoes, of course).

Worse, the “righteous” concern of well-fed elites for the birds also led them to discourage the use of DDT in tropical countries where poverty was as endemic as the mosquito-born malaria, yellow fever, and dengue that kept the populace debilitated and poor, if not actually dead.

During the DDT hearing in Washington in 1972, Dr. Charles Wurster, the chief scientist for the Environmental Defense Fund, testified that DDT was a danger to birds. Asked if a DDT ban would lead to more human deaths, he stated that the world had too many people. “We need to get rid of some of them, and this is as good a way as any.”

The First World’s concern about birds has been so strong that it has often tied tropical countries’ foreign aid to their not using DDT, even sprayed indoors where it is not only the most cost-effective, long-lasting mosquito killer, but also the most cost-effective, longest-lasting mosquito repellent we have.

The myth about DDT thinning birds’ eggshells also came directly and wrongfully from Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. She wrote, “Dr. Dewitt’s now classic experiments [on quail and pheasants] have now established the fact that exposure to DDT, even when doing no observable harm to the birds, may seriously affect reproduction. Quail into whose diets DDT was introduced throughout the breeding season survived and even produced normal numbers of fertile eggs. But few of the eggs hatched.”

What about raptor birds, the smaller myth that has persisted longest (being the hardest to disprove)? Researchers for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service fed captive eagles heavy doses of DDT for months, and found no impact on the birds or their eggs. Canadian peregrine falcons were found thriving with 30 times as much DDT in their tissues as were supposedly threatening the extinction of U.S peregrines. Dozens of studies of birds fed large doses of DDT have failed to thin their eggshells. Some of the studies achieve thin eggshells-but by reducing the calcium in the birds’ diets. Stress, old age, and mercury pollution have all been shown to produce thin eggshells in the wild, but DDT has not.

Yet the myth of DDT causing declines in bird populations has been allowed to ruin a billion lives. Why?

Dangerous Myth #3: High-yield Farming is the Cause of “Overpopulation.”

The world’s population has sharply increased since the Green Revolution, from 3 billion to more than 6 billion. The world’s rapid population surge began in the 1950s, before the Green Revolution, thanks to the rapid spread of modern health care: vaccinations, clean water, sewage treatment, sulfa drugs, antibiotics, etc.

High-yield farming did not create the population growth, but on the contrary helped to create a virtuous circle of lower birth rates. Poor farmers the world over and throughout history have traditionally had large families. Kids quickly become useful on a farm—and parents needed two or three adult children to support them in their old age. With the threat of famines and epidemics, no one felt safe without five or six kids. Throughout history, the fertility rate was probably about six or seven births per woman.

High-yield farming, however, created more food security, even as it permitted more people to move to high-value jobs in the cities—where children are an expensive luxury. The countries that raised their crop yields the most rapidly also turned out to be the countries where birth rates declined most rapidly.

Births per woman in the developing world have dropped from about 6.2 in 1960 to 3.1 today, three-fourths of the way to population stability at 2.1. First World fertility has dropped to 1.7, and in many European countries it is at 1.2. Italy is now offering $1200 bonuses for families which have a second child.

It is the hungry countries that still have high birth rates In Ethiopia, the average woman still has seven births.

Dangerous Myth # 4: Pesticides are dangerous to wildlife.

Nothing could be more dangerous to the future of the world’s wildlife than getting rid of pesticides.

Virtually every tree and wild creatures alive on this planet today owes its existence to high-yield farmers and farm-science researchers. The Green Revolution technologies essentially tripled the crop yields on the Earth’s good cropland since 1960—and even so we are farming half the planet’s land not covered by deserts or ice. Without the Green Revolution, the wildlands and their species would already have been plowed down for low-yield crops.

The plant breeding, irrigation, and fertilizer of the Green Revolution would simply have created the perfect environment for insects, weeds, bacteria, and plant diseases without pesticides. Without pesticides, crops would have been decimated, and along with it, much of humanity.

Without veterinary pharmaceuticals, our livestock and poultry would have had their energies and feed efficiency ruined by diseases and by internal and external parasites. As they still are in Africa. Without chemistry, we’d be starved and stunted for lack of high-quality protein and the micronutrients we get from livestock products.

The well-fed elitist children announce that the world should go back to organic farming to produce “natural” food that it claims, without any proof whatsoever, would somehow be more nutritious. But organic farmers’ yields in the First World are usually 20 to 40 percent lower than high-yield farmers’ yields. More wildlands would have to be plowed down for crops.

In addition, there is the “organic fertilizer penalty.” The world has less than half enough organic nitrogen to nourish its crops. Farmers globally use 80 million tons of nitrogen per year that’s taken from the air through an industrial process. Giving up that industrial fertilizer would require fertilizing our crops with the manure from another 7-8 billion cattle. Where would we get the forage? There isn’t enough land on the planet to feed the expected 8 billion people plus another 8 billion cattle. The forests would be cleared—to produce manure. What a ghastly prescription we are getting from the children of the elites.

Pesticides, badly used, can threaten birds, bees, and other wild creatures. However, pesticides properly used are the most important protection for wildlife habitat. Ultimately, it is the amount of habitat we can leave unplowed that protects the wildlife.

Only high-yield agriculture protects both people and Nature.

Dangerous Myth #5: Modern farming is Unsustainable.

The farming-ignorant children of the well-fed elitists crusade against high-yield farming with the claim that it allows too much soil erosion.

Let’s think about that soil erosion claim logically. If the high-yield fields get three times as much yield, than we can get the same amount of food by planting only one-third as much land. One-third as much planted land should mean one-third as much soil erosion.

If we need only one-third as much land, moreover, we can concentrate our crops on the land with the least erosion potential—and we do. That means high-yield farming must allow less than one-third as much erosion as would a global mandate for organic farming.

Finally, we must look at a recent marvel of accidental technology called conservation tillage. During the first world oil shock after 1974, farmers trying to conserve diesel fuel discovered that the newly developed chemical weed killers—the herbicides—could control weeds even if they didn’t plow their fields. They could just disc the top inch of topsoil to create a seedbed, and it took far less diesel.

Then they discovered that discing the crop residue into the soil surface created billions of tiny dams that defied the efforts of wind and water to carry soil away. Erosion per planted acre was reduced by 65-95 percent, with lower production costs. Water retained in the fields often doubled, because the residue encouraged it to infiltrate instead of running off. Soil microbes and earthworms doubled, too, because they fed on the residues. Conservation tillage was born.

Conservation tillage is now being used on hundreds of millions of hectares, around the world. Its latest expansion has been here in South Asia, where it not only reduces erosion and increases soil moisture, but radically speeds the preparation of wheat land after a rice crop. That allows the wheat crop to mature before the worst heat of summer.

One important soil study in the American state of Wisconsin found that a highly-erodable farming region is now suffering only 6 percent as much erosion as it did during the Dust Bowl days of the 1930s.

Thanks to crop rotation, contour plowing and conservation tillage, the Coon Creek watershed is building topsoil in the midst of the highest-yielding farming in all history. The study’s author, Dr. Stanley Trimble of UCLA, says those who claim high rates of soil erosion “owe us the physical evidence.” They owe us the locations of the huge gullies, the sediment-filled creeks and the dust clouds that would attest to their soil crisis. They lack such evidence because modern farmers are doing a better, more sustainable, more productive job of farming today than ever before in history.

The Soil and Water Conservation Society of America says modern high-yield farming is the most sustainable in history, thanks to high-yield seeds, irrigation, chemical fertilizers, pesticides-and especially conservation tillage.

Dangerous Myth # 6: There is already plenty of food to go around.

Population is like a train, it has momentum. When the brakes are applied, it still has a long stopping distance. World population is likely to increase further in the next three decades, from 6.3 billion to between 8 and 9 billion, before it stops and then retreats.

Even more importantly, humans throughout history have displayed an urgent hunger for high-quality protein. In India, this is reflected primarily in the very strong growth in the demand for milk. India’s annual consumption of milk has risen nearly 25 million tons here since 1990. All over the world, as incomes are rising strongly, the demand for meat, milk and eggs is amplifying the demand for farming resources.

Thanks to technology, free trade, and democracy, we can expect incomes to grow more rapidly in the next half-century than ever before. India and China, with the two largest populations in the world, are now both expanding their incomes faster than any big countries in world history. By 2050, we can expect the world to have 7 billion affluent consumer buying meat, milk, and eggs, rather than the 2 billion or so affluent consumers the world has today.

The world demand for farming resources will more than double by 2050. We will need not only the pesticides and fertilizers we use today, but twice as much yield per hectare of farmland as we get today. Whether it comes from biotechnology, chemistry, physics, or some other scientific source, we must at least double the world’s crop yields again in the next several decades. The alternative is to watch human poverty, hunger, and the needless destruction of wildlands increase.

Dangerous Myth #7: High-yield seeds risk destroying the world’s natural biodiversity.

Traditional farmers used to plant thousands and thousands of locally developed seed varieties. Today, they tend to plant a few specialized, high-yield seed strains developed by universities and seed companies. The activists say that we must stop this march of seed uniformity before some genetic or natural disaster creates a huge famine disaster.

Fortunately, the Global Crop Diversity Trust is being created to assist the world’s gene banks. These gene banks already have most of the world’s farm crop diversity in their hundreds of thousands of selections. The Trust will help them protect that diversity. The latest storages keep their seeds at -18C to -55C, so they need to be regrown only once every 50 to 100 years instead of every five or ten.

Other good news: The International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center in Mexico has demonstrated we can restore or even amplify crop genetic diversity through “wide crosses” between the traditional, modern and wild wheat seeds in the gene banks. Over the past 15 years, CIMMYT researchers crossed banked wheats that represented the original wild parents of durum wheat and then crossed their progeny with another wild wheat. This effectively duplicated the natural events that originally gave rise to bread wheat some 10,000 years ago.

These efforts are far more effective for people and wildlife than turning half the world’s scarce cropland into a giant low-yielding gene museum.

Dangerous Myth #8: Affluence and fertilizer production are destroying the planet with too much CO2.

The Earth’s average temperature has increased about 0.8 degree Celsius since 1850. The children of the well-fed elites are telling us it’s because humans are emitting too much greenhouse gas, from factories and autos, rice paddies, and fertilizer factories. They say we’re overheating the planet. The well-fed elites tell us we must give up fossil fuels, or the planet will become too hot for humans to prosper.

They have no evidence of this, however, beyond the fact that the planet has warmed and that there is more CO2 in the air. The computer models predicting drastic warming are completely unverified. And unverifiable.

The planet warmed in two surges, one from 1850-1870 and another from 1920-1940. These warming periods came before humanity emitted much CO2. Since 1940, the Earth has not gotten significantly warmer despite a huge increase in CO2 emissions and more rice and cattle production.

The lower atmosphere (up to 10,000 meters) that the Greenhouse Theory says must warm before the Earth’s surface hasn’t been warming much at all. Instead, our satellites show a very modest linear upward trend since 1979—about 1 degree C per 300 years! Even that small increase may be an artifact of a recent, natural El Nino event in the Pacific. The satellite readings had virtually no upward trend before 1998. The trend for 1979-1999 with the El Nino year deleted is tiny—0.0003 degrees C.

Meanwhile, in the last two decades scientists have found from the Greenland and Antarctic ice cores that the Earth has a moderate, natural 1500-year climate cycle driven by changes in the sun’s irradiance. The 1500-year cycle has also been found in seabed sediments in the Atlantic and Indian oceans, in cave stalagmites from Ireland to Oman to South Africa, and in carbon-dated glacier advances and retreats all over the world.

The Medieval Warming and the recent Little Ice Age were the two halves of a moderate climate cycle that goes back at least 1 million years.

Based on the million years of the cycle, we are 150 years into a moderate, unstoppable, natural warming that could last another 600 years. It will be followed by either another Little Ice Age or a big Ice Age.

Why would we expect a climate, which has been cycling up and down for 1 million years, to remain stable in the 21st century, with or without fossil fuels? The Greenhouse Effect may be real, but the evidence says it’s not very important. The Modern Warming started too soon, has been too abrupt and too erratic, and has too little warming in the lower atmosphere to blame on CO2. However, it fits the pattern of the 1500 year cycle very neatly.

Will all the wild species die from overheating? Why? The species are mostly millions of years old. They’ve already survived lots of these 1500-year cycles. One “study” that’s gotten lots of publicity says that a warming of 0.8 degrees C will destroy 20 percent of our wildlife species. But over the past 150 years, we’ve already had that much warming—and we can’t find a single species that’s gone extinct as a result. Trees and plants are cold-limited, but they are rarely heat-limited, so our forests have become more diverse in the past century. Most species extend their ranges as the cold-tolerant species hold theirs.

Will huge storms destroy our cities? Storms are driven by the temperature differential between the Poles and the Equator. With global warming, that differential is decreased. History and the physical proxies both say the warm periods have fewer, milder storms.

Will there be more and worse droughts? We don’t know, but there are always droughts somewhere. We do know there’ll be a bit more rain, because more warmth will evaporate more water from the oceans. That means conservation tillage will become even more important.

Will malaria sweep over Europe? History says malaria was rampant in Europe and North America until after World War II, when window screens and DDT allowed it to be eradicated. If their temperatures become 2 degrees warmer, they’ll still have window screens and pesticides-and I am quite sure that if the First World is at risk, the elite will be more amenable about doing whatever it takes, including DDT. However, remember that the medical doctors of the world have had to beat back a proposed worldwide ban on DDT within the last three years, and the UN machinery is still straining to produce that result.

Dangerous Myth # 9: The Children of the Well-fed Elites Are Benevolent

The same well-fed elitists have been pushing an organic farming mandate that would be unable to feed more than half the world’s current human population—apparently not realizing that the hungry people would destroy the remaining wildlife before they grew too weak to slash, burn, and hunt.

And they are against biotech in food production—although they are happy enough to have it in their personal medical arsenal. Two years ago, the children of the well-fed elites told the governments of famines-stricken countries in southern Africa that American food aid was “poison.” This was the same biotech corn that Americans have been eating in their breakfast cereals and snack foods for a decade with no documented danger whatsoever. This is essentially the same biotech corn that the government of the European Union has now belatedly approved for sale in the sanctified precincts of the EU countries.

We don’t know how many poor Africans starved as a result. Fortunately, it was less than the 30 millions deaths we must already lay at the door of Rachel Carson’s ghost.

How many additional people would die if the world suddenly shut off the fossil fuels and rationed the electricity for schools and hospitals, the heating oil for homes, the fuel for ambulances? How many more forest trees would be cut for firewood? How many more women would die of lung disease from the smoke of their unsustainable cookfires?

The Arrogant Selfishness of the Well-Fed Elites

Why are the First World elites trying to push low-yield farming? Apparently, they would like a world with fewer, poorer people. Remember that classic book sponsored by the wealthy industrialists of the Club of Rome’s book, Limits to Growth. The eco-movement has always said there were too many people, and fought against affluence for more people.

Such constraints might be justified if the world were truly a lifeboat without adequate resources for all of its passengers. Instead of a lifeboat, however, we live on a planet, and one of the most important resources is humanity’s ability to learn and use technology— including conserving technologies such as the herbicides which are making humanity more sustainable through conservation tillage.

Africa today averages only about 2300 calories per capita per day, compared to Europe’s 3400, and Africa’s average is declining. The International Food Policy Research Institute warns that by 2020, current farming and population trends would leave Africa with more than 200 million malnourished people—even after African farmers clear wildlands equal to the land area of France.

Africa averages about 13 grams of animal products per capita per day, compared to about 60 grams of livestock products per capita per day in Europe. This means that many, perhaps most, African children are suffering from key deficiencies in amino acids, zinc, and iron that can stunt their growth, cause such nutritional diseases as rickets, and retard their cognitive development.

Somehow, I think that if 200 million Europeans were starving and its children stunted, even after Europe had destroyed European wildlands equal to the land area of France for additional low-yield farming, Europe would have welcomed the development of genetically enhanced crops.

I think the well-fed elites have mainly been concerned about losing their own wealth and access to resources—in a world they mistakenly see as having too few resources to go around. Their fear of overpopulation is driven by a fear that the extra people would take their wealth instead of creating the new wealth that economic growth has historically produced.

In a world of increasing human knowledge, the environmental movement is revealed as inhumane and immoral. I have little doubt that if the anti-technology elites succeeded in shutting down the energy systems, and the chemistry laboratories, and the biotech fields, the world would all too soon look again as it did in prehistory when nearly half the humans died violently at the hands of their neighbors.

Only in the most recent era of world history, since World War II, has the world largely gotten beyond the geopolitics of envy. (If, indeed, Moslem extremism is not itself an exhibition of that envy, and it may be.)

The danger is not so much that Nature will be shortchanged as that humans will forget how to be humane. That is why civilization has had such a high value on human life. Hitler and Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden remind us that we abandon that precept at everyone’s peril.

We must rein in the arrogant ignorance of the children of the well-fed elites. We must defeat them in the public debates and at the polls. We must reclaim the right to pursue the technological abundance that already supplies our food, our medical care, and most of our attractive lifestyle choices—while preserving our wildlands.

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How Should the Feed Industry View the Consumer Confidence Challenge?

By cgfi | September 9, 2004

Dennis Avery

It’s happened again. The food industry has once again allowed activists and headline-hungry journalists to turn the safest food system in human history into a house of horrors. Once again, there has been no effective answer or strategy on behalf of the food system to the unwarranted public attack.

The Mad Cow Media Circus is probably over - for the time being — but we’ll be paying the price for the public’s admission to that media circus for decades - in tighter regulations, heavier inspections and lost public confidence. In cattle, the cost may be $40 per head - which would make the annual cost of BSE non-confidence close to $1.5 billion per year. In the case of confinement hogs and poultry, the regulatory costs of defending indoor production are equally substantial, and continuing to rise.

Modern agriculture has lost another round to the know-nothings who pretend that organic and natural is the best way to feed a more-populous world that urgently wants to keep its wildlife.

Today, the cattle and feed industries are just praying that the USDA will find no additional cases of Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy as they test hundreds of thousands of animals, and that things will get back to “normal.” That’s unlikely.

We’re hoping against all odds that Japan and the other beef-importing countries that have suspended U.S. beef imports will not keep their bans in place for years to come, in order to favor their own farmers. That’s equally unlikely.

We’re hoping here today that the activists are not sitting in their offices plotting new attacks on the modern food system, designed to undermine our faith in our food. Which, of course, is an impossible dream.

We’re hoping that McDonald’s and the other big retailers that market U.S. meat, eggs and milk are not going to demand some additional changes in the production system to protect their investments and their reputations from this latest activist foray, or the next one. Bigger cages, no antibiotics, no cages at all, pasture-only feeding? We have no idea what they’ll demand next - because of pressure from the public dictated by the activists and their symbiotic journalists.

Agriculture looks at Mad Cow as an aberration that was impossible to foresee. An unknown disease, caused by a misfolded protein that no one knew existed, may have crossed from sheep to cattle to humans, through a rendering system that had previously been safe and environmentally constructive.

That rendering system itself was invented for environmental and health reasons: nobody wanted billions of pounds of rotting slaughter scraps lying around the countryside, or even buried in pits where dogs or wild animals could dig them up. How much better to turn the slaughter by-products into meat and bone meal, to make use of that protein, so we didn’t have to clear still more forest for more livestock feed.

The meat industry was holding true to the reality that land is the scarcest resource. Humans are already farming half the land on the planet that isn’t under deserts or glaciers. The world’s population is still growing, though more slowly, and getting richer. They’ll demand three times as much farm output by 2050. and perhaps five times the livestock products we produce today. Fortunately, we’ve doubled the meat output per acre in the First World over the past 30 years. Part of that is higher crop yields. Part of it is better breeding and better feed rations. But it’s a conservation miracle.

And unless we triple the yields of crops and livestock again, over the next 45 years, we risk losing the world’s wildlife after all. That’s why biotechnology is important. That’s why the eco-activist model of organic farming doesn’t win.

But our opponents don’t see Mad Cow and Industrial Agriculture the way we do. They really don’t. They claim there’s already enough food produced on the planet for everybody - especially since humans don’t need meat. They say that producing more food will just produce more people who will need more food, and on and on. They say that factory farming is eroding all the soil, using up all the water, and polluting all the streams. Nitrogen from the farms is causing “dead zones” downstream and killing all the fish. Antibiotics from livestock are making it less and less effective to treat human illnesses with antibiotics. And now, industrial farming has created Mad Cow disease.

We’ll get to the realities later, but these are things they tell each other and tell the public.

What does agriculture tell the public? Nothing. We don’t need to tell the public anything. We produce lots of safe food at low cost. That’s all they need to know, and they already know it. This crisis will blow away just like the others.

After all, the public wouldn’t do anything truly stupid to farmers and jeopardize their food supply, would they? Just out of ignorance?

Yes, this crisis will blow away, after costing agriculture billions of dollars, and making the public even more willing to believe the next “crisis” about modern agriculture.

Urban Myths Working Against Agriculture

1. High-Yield Farming Threatens the Frogs

In 1995, a group of Minnesota school children visited a local pond, and found deformed frogs-too many legs or too few. They reported it on the Internet, and over the next three years reports of deformed frogs flooded in from across the country. The Minnesota Pollution Control Agency quickly decided it must be pesticides in the water, and spent millions of dollars trying to prove it. Now, we’ve learned that the frogs are deformed because of a natural parasite, the trematode, which burrows into the developing leg joints of the tadpoles. Frogs don’t become deformed in ponds that don’t have trematodes. Pesticides have not been implicated by any science, though the Minnesota officials still refuse to admit this.

In the mountains of California, red-legged and yellow-legged frogs are often absent from the lakes. Several researchers are trying to prove that pesticide-laden dust from the San Joaquin Valley is being blown up into the lakes and killing the frogs.

Indeed, traces of various pesticides were found in the mountain lake waters!

However, the U.S. Forest Service and the University of California/Berkeley have now proved the cause of the frog decline: hungry trout. In the high lakes stocked with trout, there are no frogs. The aggressive fish eat the frog’s eggs and tadpoles. In the wilderness areas, where the lakes are no longer stocked with trout, the frogs thrive. When researchers netted all the fish out of a lake without frogs, the frog population “exploded,” even though there were still traces of pesticides in the water.

2. Farming and Logging Caused the Salmon Decline in the Pacific Northwest

The salmon numbers in the Columbia River of Oregon and Washington began to decline in 1977. Environmentalists were quick to blame overfishing, logging, pollution and the water demands of irrigated farming. State and federal governments began spending billions of dollars on logging restrictions, fish ladders, reserving water for off-season flow, and barging young fish down to the sea. Nothing helped. But in the fall of 2002, the salmon came back. Columbia River had a record salmon run, and the salmon numbers have recovered to their former abundance. I had predicted this, three years earlier, in a Knight-Ridder newspaper column.

How? The salmon catch data for the past 100 years of the Columbia River and Gulf of Alaska fisheries clearly reveal a 25-year cycle. For 25 years at a time, the Pacific currents take the salmon food to the Gulf of Alaska, while the Oregon/Washington salmon fishery shrinks. Then, for the next 25 years, the Oregon/Washington salmon fishermen flourish, while the Gulf of Alaska shrinks. Studies now show that this cycle is Pacific-wide, exhibited most dramatically by a 250- year shift in sardine and anchovy populations.

Did the Sierra Club not know about the cycle? If not, we can’t trust their advice on fish management. Or did they know about the cycle and not tell us-in which case we can’t trust their advice on fish management.

But the public hasn’t yet heard about the salmon cycle. The Portland Oregonian just said it was “changed sea conditions.” A fish researcher from the University of Washington -who has published in peer-reviewed journals on the 25-year cycle - is on TV saying it was the $1 billion per year in Federal fish management subsidies. He’d rather be funded than right.

3. Fertilizer from the Midwest Threatens the Gulf of Mexico

During the Clinton Administration, a White House Task Force recommended a 30 percent cut in Midwest fertilizer use because of a so-called “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico. Fortunately, the task force admitted in its report that it could find no evidence of either ecological or economic harm to the Gulf from the summer algae bloom that causes the “dead zone.” The first reports of such algae blooms in the Gulf go back into the 19th century. Fisheries experts say that most of the nutrients for the Gulf’s vast, rich fishery come down the Mississippi River, and when fresh, nutrient-laden water hits salt water, the laws of biology and physics guarantee period algae blooms. It’s a common feature at the mouths of 40 major rivers around the world.

Don’t forget either, that before farmers settled the Great Plains, there were 60 million bison, 100 million antelope, billions of birds and grasshoppers, all eating the grass and defecating. The N may have taken longer to reach the Gulf, but it’s likely that Cortez could have found an algal bloom in the Gulf of Mexico when he invaded Mexico in 1520.

4.Modern Farming Causes Soil Erosion

Thanks to crop rotation, contour plowing and especially to conservation tillage, the Coon Creek watershed is building topsoil in the midst of the highest-yielding farming in all history.

Dr. Trimble says those who claim high rates of soil erosion “owe us the physical evidence.” They owe us the locations of the huge gullies, the sediment-filled creeks and the dust clouds that would attest to their soil crisis. The fact is that they lack such evidence because modern farmers are doing a better, more sustainable, more productive job of farming today than ever before in history.

5. Farmers Cause Overpopulation by Producing Too Much Food

Ted Turner claims modern farming is the root cause of global overpopulation. The reality, however, is that the food security produced by high-yield farming helped bring about the first major decline in human birth rates the world has ever seen. In 1960, the average woman in the Third World had 6.2 children. Today, she has 2.7, and since population stability is 2.1 births, the poor countries have come 75 percent of the way to stability in 34 years. No one in 1960 would have dared predict such a radical drop in birth rates. After 2050, the world’s human population will begin a slow decline.

6. Organic Farming Would Be Kinder to the Environment

Recently, the UN Environmental Program published a new edition of The Atlas of Biodiversity. In it, they mention that the current rate of species loss-20 birds, fish, and mammals in the last third of the 20th century-is half the rate of wildlife extinctions in the last third of the 19th century. In fact, the rate of species extinctions today is as low as it’s been in 500 years.

Why? Primarily because high-yield farming eliminated the need to clear more land for food production.

Today’s farmers are feeding 6.3 billion people on the same cropland that used to be inadequate to feed 2.3 billion in 1940. With the crop and livestock yields of 1950, the world would already have had to plow all 16 million square miles of its remaining forestland to get today’s food supply. If we extend high-yield farming to Africa and the world’s currently-marginal farmlands, we shouldn’t have to clear any more land for farming ever again.

Organic farming is an environmental fraud. The first and foremost rule of organic farming is that “thou shalt not use industrial fertilizer.” This means organic farming needs more land to make up for its lower yields (typically 10 to 40 percent lower) and it needs more land for green manure crops or more cattle to produce more manure.

Dr. Vaclav Smil, an award-winning science author from the University of Manitoba, says all-organic farming for America would take the manure from another 900 million to 1 billion cattle, at 3 to 30 acres of forage per beast. There are only 1.2 billion acres in the whole lower 48 States. We’d have to eliminate half our citizens, or plant all the forests to pasture grass. The world would need the manure from another 7 to 8 billion cattle to replace the 80 million tons of nitrogen we take from the air each year. (The air is 78 percent N.)

7. Modern Farming Aggravates Global Warming

Eco-activists hate the fact that American farmers burn diesel fuel and put nitrogen fertilizer on their crops and they’ve gotten the whole world excited about global warming.

But the physical evidence of the Earth’s past climate - the ice cores, the tree rings, the cave stalagmites and the fossilized pollen grains — are telling us something quite different. They’re telling us that the Earth is ruled by an irregular solar cycle that lasts about 1500 years. That cycle is moderate (about 2 degrees C up or down), goes back a million years, and all of the Earth’s creatures and plants are adapted to it. It’s not something to be feared, it’s just something to be accommodated - until the next Ice Age brings a really bad climate.

Global Warming and the 1,500 Cycle of the Sun

The North American Pollen Database testifies that there’s been a major reorganization of this continent’s vegetation nine times in the past 14,000 years. That’s an average of once every 1650 years. The seabed sediments say these long-term cycles have been occurring for at least a million years.

We first learned of the cycles from a Greenland ice core about 1980. By that time, lots of people were already committed to the idea of man-made global warming. Al Gore had already held his first congressional hearing on the problem. Greenpeace had already announced that mankind must give up fossil fuels (and send in money).

But most of the warming of the last 150 years took place before 1940, and thus before the big increase in CO2 emissions. We’ve had very little global warming since 1940.

More important, the Greenhouse Theory says the additional CO2 will collect heat in the lower atmosphere - up to 30,000 feet. Then the heat of the atmosphere will radiate down to heat the Earth’s surface itself. But the lower atmosphere is hardly warming at all. The highly-accurate satellite reading show virtually no warming trend since 1979. The Earth’s surface is warming faster than the atmosphere that is supposed to warm it! This can’t be Greenhouse warming.

There’s more. The ice cores in Antarctica clearly show CO2 and global temperature tracking closely together through 250,000 years and three Ice Ages-but the changes in CO2 lag behind the changes in temperature by 200 to 800 years! CO2 is a lagging indicator of temperature change, not the forcing agent on global climate.

We also have beryllium. An isotope called Beryllium 10 is created when cosmic rays hit the Earth’s atmosphere. When the sun is weak, we get hit by lots of cosmic rays, and lots of beryllium 10 is created. (When the sun is active, solar winds protect us from cosmic rays.) In the last 50 years, researchers tracking ice cores find there’s less beryllium in our atmosphere than for the past 1150 years.

Will all the wild species die from overheating? Why? The species are mostly millions of years old. They’ve already survived lots of these 1500-year cycles. One “study” that’s gotten lots of publicity says that a warming of 0.8 degrees C will destroy 20 percent of our wildlife species by 2050. But over the past 100 years, we’ve already had that much warming-and we can’t find a single species that’s gone extinct as a result.

Will huge storms destroy our cities? Storms are driven by the temperature differential between the Poles and the Equator. With global warming, that differential is decreased. History and physical proxies both say the warm periods have fewer, milder storms.

Will there be more and worse droughts? We don’t know, but there are always droughts. We do know there’ll be a bit more rain, because more warmth will evaporate more water from the oceans. In either case, conservation tillage and water management will become even more important.

Will malaria sweep over Virginia? History says malaria was rampant in Virginia until after World War II, when window screens and DDT helped us eradicate it. If the temperatures become 2 degrees warmer, we’ll still have window screens and pesticides.

The Harsh Costs of Kyoto

Unfortunately, the Kyoto Treaty would bring about a bigger collapse in human standards of living than the Great Depression of the 1930s. Solar and wind power couldn’t possibly provide all the power a modern society needs, nor could nuclear power plants. (We don’t have enough uranium ore.) The Ecologist magazine in Britain says we should give up 80 percent of the fossil fuels and 75 percent of the wood we use - now, next year, in a crash program. How would it affect your life if your electricity supply was cut 80 percent and you could only drive your car two days a month?

Worse, we’d have to give up the nitrogen fertilizer that supplies more than half our food.

I want to see very strong proof of a CO2-warming linkage before I accept Kyoto.

The Strange Anti-Human World of the Late 20th Century

This orgy of anti-humanity was almost certainly driven, not by Rachel Carson and her erroneous 1962 book Silent Spring, but by people-hating Paul Ehrlich and his equally wrong-headed 1968 book, The Population Bomb.

I think people cared about the environment before Rachel Carson, and will continue to do so in the future. However, much of our eco-fervor has been due to an irrational fear that our affluence would be overwhelmed by 20 or 50 billion additional poor brown and yellow people who might grab all the resources away from us.

In Southern Africa, in 2003, environmental activists took their campaign against agricultural biotechnology to famine-stricken countries. The president of Zambia said the activists told him the U.S. corn was poison. People who were boiling poisonous roots because they had nothing else to eat were denied access to an abundance of their favorite food staple. And remember, this is the same corn that everyone in this room eats as corn flakes, tacos, and chips.

The environmental movement has been broadly involved for many years in an even more deadly effort-to ban the use of DDT on the planet. The campaign against DDT has cost at least a million malaria deaths per year in the Third World-and tens of millions of lives ruined by the disease. There is no evidence that DDT harms humans, and no solid evidence that it harms birds. Nevertheless, the eco-movement has tried to ban even the indoor use of DDT in malarial regions, which could not possibly harm wildlife. On the inside walls of homes, it’s by far the most cost-effective mosquito killer, and also the longest-lasting and most effective mosquito repellent.

Does putting Nature above people always lead humans to inhumane behavior?

Rich Countries Are Better for the Environment

The reality, however, is that most of the Third World is already in the most polluting phase of industrialization-burning huge amounts of coal to smelt massive amounts of iron, cooking food with wood from trees that aren’t replanted and caring too little about water pollution.

Meanwhile, in places like Southern Africa and Southeast Asia, the world’s remaining hunter-gatherers are peddling rhinoceros horn and “bushmeat” from endangered primates - harvested with AK-47s.

Mexico is losing three million acres of forest per year to the expansion of peasant farming. More than half of the forestland cleared in Honduras in recent decades has been “steepland,” with a slope of more than 30 degrees. At least once a decade, a hurricane washes the steeplands into the valleys.

How can the eco-movement present these hunter-gatherers and peasant farmers as the guardians of the world’s environmental future?

There is hope for humanity and nature, thanks primarily to the affluence generated by knowledge, technology, and trade. When per capita incomes reach a level of $5,000 to $8,000 (Brazil and Malaysia now) crop yields rise and birth rates fall rapidly. Less land per capita is needed for food. Diesel fuel from under the land or sea substitutes for firewood and forests are replanted. Affluent people want and pay for cleaner air and water.

High Yield Mean Fewer Wildlife Extinctions

The biggest reasons for the low rate of wildlife extinctions today are high-yield crops and high-efficiency meat production. High-yield farming has tripled the yields of crops on the world’s best farmland in recent decades. High-efficiency meat production has doubled the pounds of meat produced per acre of pasture and cropland in the past 30 years. While some activists rail against confinement feeding, moving the birds and animals indoors has made them more comfortable and increased their feed efficiency by 15-20 percent. It has also prevented the clearing of millions of acres of wildlife habitat for hog and chicken playgrounds.

We tend to forget that man has been using and abusing wildlife for eons. Stone Age man used to hunt birds and animals to extinction. North America lost more than 40 species of huntable birds and animals within a few years after the human hunters arrived from Asia some 14,000 years ago-including North America’s horses, camels, and elephants.

Only in the last 100 years, (thanks to nitrogen fertilizer, plant breeding, and integrated pest management) has man been able to support high populations of both people and wildlife in the same region. Only after World War II, when the Green Revolution extended high-yield farming over most of the world, did human society free itself from “food wars.” (Just before WWII, crowded Japan invaded Manchuria, in part for its soybean fields; Nazi Germany invaded Poland for “living room.”)

The World Conservation Union today warns that more than one billion poor people are living in the world’s biodiversity hotspots (particularly tropical and mountain rain forests)-and trying to feed their children by hunting bushmeat and doing slash-and burn farming. We must give these people higher-yield farming if we hope to prevent massive wildlife extinctions in the next 50 years.

Richer Means a Cleaner Environment

Remarkably, the waste volume from American homes today is one-third less than the waste volume from Mexican homes! This is due in sizeable part to the centralized processing of our food supply. Our broiler chickens, for example, arrive at the store wrapped in sanitary, lightweight plastic-wrapped trays-with the feathers, heads, feet and many of the unwanted internal organs already separated out for recycling at the processing plant.

These poultry waste products are then turned into livestock feeds and many other products, far more effectively than they could be handled without the centralized waste management.

The U.S. rendering industry is one of the world’s most successful and most critically needed recyclers, treating 50 billion pounds per year of waste that urgently needs to be treated, even if it were only going into a landfill. However, it would take millions of additional acres of farmland to replace the nutrients salvaged and put to use through rendering.

The rest of America’s vaunted recycling effort has pretty much collapsed. Most of our carefully-sorted urban trash is all dumped together in the local landfill, because it takes more resources to produce useful things with recycled stuff than it takes to start from scratch.

21st Century Human Society is the Most Sustainable in History

Roman citizens worried about soil erosion and declining farm yields nearly two thousand years ago, with good reason: soil erosion has always been the most vulnerable aspect of human society.

Environmental activists today rely on our long-held and valid fear of soil erosion to undermine our confidence in the sustainability of modern high-yield farming. They tell us that today’s farmers are “mining the soil.” That’s not the truth.

Thanks to chemical fertilizer, modern farmers no longer need to “wear out” their soils. In the traditional farming of the 19th century, growing crops often took more nutrients out of the soil than farmers could replace with manure. As yields and soil organic matter declined, the farm would be abandoned as “worn out.” (On a broader scale, the depleted soils combined with drought to give us “Dust Bowls.”) Today’s farmers use soil testing and industrially supplied nutrients to keep their soils rich and productive.

In addition, modern farmers invented conservation tillage and no-till. These farming systems cut erosion by up to 95 percent and encourages far more earthworms and subsoil bacteria. Organic farmers can’t use conservation tillage because they don’t allow themselves to use herbicides. Thus, organic farmers are still forced to use bare-earth, erosion-inviting plows and rotary hoes.

The End of the Population Surge

The absolute best news for the planet is that the world’s recent population surge is nearly over. Farmers won’t have to feed many more people, but instead of having one billion affluent people eating meat and cheese, we’ll have at least 7 billion affluent consumers. Most of them will demand hamburgers, fish, salad bars and fresh fruit year round.

There’ll even be a pet challenge. America has 112 million companion cats and dogs today. A rich, urbanized China in 2050 may still have the one-child policy, but it will also have perhaps 500 million companion cats and dogs; and, woe unto the politician who stands between Fluffy and her favorite food.

The New Surge of Support for High-Yield Technologies

After the success of the Green Revolution became clear in the 1970s, a vice-president of the Rockefeller Foundation-founder of the key agricultural research stations in Mexico and the Philippines-spoke of his profound regret. He said that agricultural research had turned humanity into a cancer on the earth. We now know he was wrong.

Now, with the end of the population surge, high-yield farming is at last beginning to get the support it has so long deserved from the intellectual leadership of the First World.

This remarkably broad coalition was led by Dr. Norman Borlaug, Chairman Emeritus of our Center, and the 1970 winner of the Peace Prize for his work on high-yield crops for the Green Revolution.

At the time of the Press Club event, we feared it had been a failure. The biggest media outlet to feature the event was the American Farm Bureau News. But in the months since that event, the concept of high-yield conservation has been praised by columnist David Ignatius of the Washington Post. The October, 2003, issue of the prestigious Atlantic Monthly carried an article lavishly praising both high-yield farming and biotech. More startling by far, the editorial page of the New York Times recommended the Atlantic Monthly article to its readers-in a newspaper which has been editorially praising organic food and condemning high-yield farming for decades.

Half Again As Much Meat Demand in 2025

Meat consumption has an almost perfect correlation with higher incomes. We project that per capita world incomes will be 31 percent higher in 2025 than today. Combined with a 28 percent increase in population, this would drive meat consumption to an increase of nearly 55 percent by 2025.

This meat increase will be good for children, since it provides them with high-quality protein and key micronutrients. Without livestock products, children do not reach their full genetic stature, and may lag in cognitive learning. It will also be good for adults, who need calcium and protein. Moreover, the Council for Agricultural Science and Technology says that, since birds and animals can nourish themselves on grass and other things that humans can’t or don’t eat, the resource cost of the meat and milk is just about the same as for the same amount of non-meat proteins and calories.

Such a major meat production increase will require higher grain yields (perhaps 30 percent higher), higher oilseed yields (25 percent higher?) and still-better feed conversion ratios. These will only be possible if we continue to invest in high-yield farming research (including biotechnology) and allow it to be adopted.

More Globalization, Not Less

Liberalization of farm trade remains a strong imperative, despite the recent collapse of the World Trade Organization talks at Cancun. I say this because the world’s big agricultural players will all need farm trade reform in the coming decades.

The EU is now admitting it will have to change its Common Agricultural Policy as it takes in millions of additional farmers and farming acres in 10 new member countries that include Poland and Romania. The EU should be exporting more livestock products to Asia.

The United States recently passed a lavish farm bill-but did it during a period of supposed budget surplus. Now the budget surplus has disappeared (economic slump and war on terror). Worse, we are rapidly approaching the time when the federal government must begin to pony up the money for Social Security reform. The Congressional Budget Office says the costs of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid for the baby boomers’ retirement will force a 36 percent increase in all federal taxes-or a 91 percent increase in the payroll tax and 81 percent increase in the individual income tax. The next farm bill will have to cost far less than the current one.

The world urgently needs both high-yield farming and the liberalization of global farm trade to meet the population and conservation challenges of the 21st century. I think the time is now ripe for American farmers to present their credential more forcefully, and more successfully than when the First World was fleeing in terror from “overpopulation.”

You might start by joining the thousands who have signed the High Yield Declaration, at www.highyieldconservation.org

Posted in Speeches |No Comments »

Is High-Yield Farming Worth Saving?

By admin | July 26, 2004

Presentation to the Illinois Farm Bureau Commodity Conference: Is High-Yield Farming Worth Saving?

Dennis Avery

Quintus Septimus Florence Tertillianus, Roman citizen, about 200 A.D., with a world population 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.”

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

“Here’s something for the Greens of the world to ponder: ‘genetic engineering’ may be the most environmentally beneficial technology to have emerged in decades, or possibly centuries,’ Jonathan Rauch writes in The Atlantic Monthly. . . . Noting that ‘world food output will need to at least double and possibly triple over the next several decades,’ the author argues that ‘the great challenge’ is ‘not to feed an additional three billion people (and their pets) but to do so without converting much of the world’s prime [wildlife] habitat into second- or third-rate farmland.’”

New York Times, “Frankenfoods to the Rescue of Mother Earth,” September 21, 2003

Urban Myths worth Exploring

High-Yield Farming Threatens the Frogs

In 1995, a group of Minnesota school children visited a local pond, and found deformed frogs-too many legs or too few. They reported it on the Internet, and over the next three years reports of deformed frogs flooded in from across the country. The Minnesota Pollution Control Agency quickly decided it must be pesticides in the water, and spent millions of dollars trying to prove it. Now, we’ve learned that the frogs are deformed because of a natural parasite, the trematode, which burrows into the developing leg joints of the tadpoles. Frogs don’t become deformed in ponds that don’t have trematodes. Pesticides were not the cause, though the Minnesota officials still refuse to admit this.

Farming and Logging Cause the Salmon Decline in the Pacific Northwest

The salmon numbers in the Columbia River of Oregon and Washington began to decline in 1977. Environmentalists were quick to blame overfishing, logging, pollution and the water demands of irrigated farming. State and federal governments began spending billions of dollars on logging restrictions, fish ladders, and barging young fish down to the sea. Nothing helped. But in the fall of 2002, the Columbia River had a record salmon run, and the salmon numbers have recovered to their former abundance.

Did the Sierra Club not know about the cycle? In that case, we can’t trust their advice on fish management. Or did they know about the cycle and not tell us-in which case we can’t trust their advice on fish management.

Fertilizer from the Midwest Threatens the Gulf of Mexico

During the Clinton Administration, a White House Task Force recommended a 30 percent cut in Midwest fertilizer use because of a so-called “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico. Fortunately, the task force admitted in its report that it could find no evidence of either ecological or economic harm to the Gulf from the summer algae bloom that causes the “dead zone.” The first reports of such algae blooms in the Gulf go back into the 19th century. Fisheries experts say that most of the nutrients for the Gulf’s vast, rich fishery come down the Mississippi River, and when fresh, nutrient-laden water hits salt water, the laws of biology and physics guarantee period algae blooms. It’s a common feature at the mouths of 40 major rivers around the world.

Don’t forget either, that before farmers settled the Great Plains, they had 60 million bison, 100 million antelope, billions of birds and grasshoppers, all eating the grass and defecating. The N may have taken longer to reach the Gulf, but it’s likely that Cortez could have found an algal bloom in the Gulf of Mexico when he invaded Mexico in 1520.

Modern Farming Causes Soil Erosion

In a piece of elegant “soil archeology,” Dr. Stanley Trimble of UCLA went back to the highly-erosive Coon Creek watershed in southern Wisconsin, and redid the 1938 Soil Conservation Service surveys, in the 1970s and again in the 1990s. What he found is that the Coon Creek watershed is currently losing only 6 percent as much topsoil as it lost during the Dust Bowl era. Thanks to crop rotation, contour plowing and especially to conservation tillage, the Coon Creek watershed is building topsoil in the midst of the highest-yielding farming in all history. Dr. Trimble says those who claim high rates of soil erosion “owe us the physical evidence.” They owe us the locations of the huge gullies, the sediment-filled creeks and the dust clouds that would attest to their soil crisis. The fact is that they lack such evidence because modern farmers are doing a better, more sustainable, more productive job of farming today than ever before in history.

Overpopulation? Farmers Produce too much Food

Those who hate people, Ted Turner being a prime example, claim that modern farming is the root cause of global overpopulation. The reality, however, is that the food security produced by high-yield farming helped bring about the first major decline in human birth rates the world has ever seen. In 1960, the average woman in the Third World had 6.2 children. Today, she has 2.7, and since population stability is 2.1 births, the poor countries have come 75 percent of the way to stability in 34 years. No one in 1960 would have dared predict such a radical drop in birth rates. After 2050, the world’s human population will begin a slow decline.

Modern Farming is Destroying the World’s Wild Plant Species

Eco-activists like to claim that high-yield farming is destroying the world’s biodiversity. By that they mean that farmers in the Third World tend to plant better seeds when they can get them, forsaking the thousands of “farmer varieties” they used to plant. But those aren’t species. They couldn’t even survive in the wild. And we have most of those varieties saved in seed banks.

Recently, the UN Environmental Program published a new edition of The Atlas of Biodiversity. In it, they mention that the current rate of species loss-20 birds, fish, and mammals in the last third of the 20th century-is half the rate of wildlife extinctions in the last third of the 19th century. In fact, the rate of species extinctions today is as low as it’s been in 500 years.

Why? Primarily because high-yield farming eliminated the need to clear more land for food production.

Today’s farmers are feeding 6.3 billion people on the same cropland that used to be inadequate to feed one billion in 1940. With the crop and livestock yields of 1950, the world would already have had to plow all 16 million square miles of its remaining forestland to get today’s food supply. If we extend high-yield farming to Africa and the world’s currently-marginal farmlands, we shouldn’t have to clear any more land for farming ever again.

Organic Farming is Kinder to the Environment

Organic farming is an environmental fraud. The first and foremost rule of organic farming is that ‘thou shalt not use industrial fertilizer.” This means o

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