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How Should the Feed Industry View the Consumer Confidence Challenge?

By cgfi | September 9, 2004

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.

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, 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

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. 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.

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.)

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

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).

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.

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. 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

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, 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?

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 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.

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, (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.

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 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.

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. 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.

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.

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.

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 strongly 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 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

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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

. . . 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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Fertilizer from the Midwest Threatens the Gulf of Mexico

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.

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.

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 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.

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 Cycle of the Sun

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.

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 either case, conservation tillage and water management will become even more important.

Will malaria sweep over Illinois? History says malaria was rampant in Illinois 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.

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

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 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, since both are equally nutritious and approved as safe by three U.S. government agencies, including the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. 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, the suffering it causes, and the disability it inflicts. There is no evidence that DDT harms humans, and very poor 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. Fortunately, the World Health Organization has so far blocked the final ban, but just barely.

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

Rich Countries Are Better for the Environment

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

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

Richer Means a Cleaner Environment

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.

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.

The End of the Population Surge

The New Surge of Support for High-Yield Technologies

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.

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.

More Globalization, Not Less

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

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Has America Already Lost High-Yield Agriculture?

By cgfi | October 6, 2003

Dennis T. Avery

America has had a proud two centuries of world leadership in high-yield agricultural research and technology. It stretches back to George Washington’s farming experiments and Abraham Lincoln signing the Morrill Act to create the land-grant colleges and agricultural experiment stations. It includes the hybrid seeds, mechanization, and pesticides that produce ample American ample food-while retaining more forest than we had in 1900 with one-fourth today’s population.

America’s agricultural research leadership fostered the high-yield Green Revolution in the Third World. That Green Revolution saved billions of people from starving in Asia and Latin America, and preserved huge amounts of wildlands from being cleared for low-yield crops. My peer-reviewed estimate is that with 1950s crop yields, the world would have needed another 12 million square miles of cropland to produce the 1992 food supply. (If we factor in today’s larger demand and the land saved by high-efficiency confinement livestock, modern farming may well be saving wildlands equal to the world’s total forest area-about 16 million square miles.)

The American tradition of high-yield agricultural research lay behind this country’s recent world-leading investments in agricultural biotechnology, both public and private. Such biotech investments were once the best hope that the world could triple crop yields again in the next 40 years, to feed a peak population of 8 to 9 billion affluent people and their pets without clearing the world’s remaining wildlands. (We’re already farming half the land on the planet not covered by deserts and glaciers.)

America’s agricultural leadership should be one of this country’s proudest achievements.
The stark reality, however, is that this proud tradition may be ending now, just as the world is facing its biggest agricultural challenge of all time.

America’s high-yield agriculture no longer has the support and confidence of the urbanites that make up 95 percent of this country’s voters. In this affluent, risk-averse, farming-ignorant era, American farmers need an operating permit from the city folks-and they don’t have it.

Well-fed urban Americans are convinced that modern, high-yield agriculture is too risky to their health and the environment. They want farmers regulated back into the safety of low-yield organic production. After all, America has plenty of food and farmland. We don’t need to spray pesticides that “might someday be linked to cancer.” We don’t need even the perception of wastes from factory farms spewed into our rivers.

U.S. agriculture cannot get public approval for biotechnology, and every other element of high-yield agriculture is under regulatory threat as well. A vocal minority overwhelms the uncaring majority, and drives regulators toward more and more constraints on pesticides, confinement feeding, Diesel fuel, dust, water, and even plant food.

In 1958, I wrote a paper for a political science class at Wisconsin on the agricultural research and extension system. The professor criticized me for not listing the system’s opponents. I said, “Professor, there aren’t any.” In 1958, that was almost literally true. But that was long ago.

Recently, a consortium of foundations, The Collaborative for Health and the Environmnent, with total assets of $3.5 billion has reportedly begun talking of a ten-year campaign to convince medical students that pesticides must be banned. Their hope is that these impressionable students will ultimately develop into a condemning majority within the medical profession.

In the last decade, I’ve come to understand much more clearly how China in the 12th century and Japan in the 17th century could have closed their borders and frozen their technology levels. In both countries, the ruling class began to feel trade and technology getting beyond their control. Rather than let commoners run amuck with dangerous ideas about gunpowder and ships’ compasses,the elites shut everything down.

We’re seeing much the same sort of syndrome in Europe today, with the European elites putting up the “precautionary principle” as their response to “overpopulation,” immigration, urban sprawl, fast-food restaurants, and other discomforting trends. American elites are very much tempted to follow in their path.

Agricultural research and technology cannot survive the precautionary principle. No technology can prove the negative of doing no harm, ever, to any person or thing in the environment. Not electricity, not antibiotics, not fertilizer.

North Carolina’s Theft of Farmers’ Rights

Today, the state of North Carolina maintains a moratorium on new confinement hog houses that has been in place since 1997. The public reason is that factory hog farms threatened the water quality in local streams and rivers. However, the state has never released any water quality data supporting the claims of river pollution from well-run (and state-regulated) confinement hog farms.

Outdoor hog farms, as we all know, let their wastes wash into the nearest stream with every storm event. But confinement hog farms are managed essentially on a zero-discharge basis. There should be no stream pollution.

For more than a decade, however, activists have charged huge pollution levels from confinement hogs.A North Carolina State scientist, Dr. Joanne Burkholder, claimed that the hog manure fostered “the cells from hell,” fish-toxic dinoflagellates called Pfiesteria. Bobby Kennedy Jr. called confinement hogs a bigger threat than Osama Bin Laden.

Finally, this year, the Cape Fear River Assembly asked if our Center could do an objective analysis of the state’s water quality data. We agreed; but we had to threaten legal action before the state would release the water data. The pattern from the data was very clear. The quality of the rivers is good and not declining. (The primary “hog river,” the Black, is rated an outstanding resource water.) The nutrient levels in the North Carolina “hog rivers” are just about what they were 15 years ago before the hog expansion. The nutrient spikes in the rivers are not downstream from the hog farms, but immediately downstream from the sewage treatment plants.

For ten years or more, the government of North Carolina has been living a lie to the farmers in its poorest counties. These farmers weren’t able to grow affluence from cotton, tobacco, or peanuts. Until the hog expansion, they had to move to the cities to make money. Hogs have moved them up to the median income for all North Carolina counties.

But the city folks don’t like hogs in their state, even when they’re out of sight and beyond olfactory range. The city newspapers wrote alarmingly about the hog farms. In response to perceived voter opinion, the politicians decided to stop hog expansion. And for ten years, no one in the North Carolina governmental structure has been willing to tell the truth-that the confinement hog farms are fine for the environment, good for the state’s economy, and an asset to a bacon-loving nation. (Other academic researchers have been unable to replicate Dr. Burkholder’s toxic Pfiesteria, with or without hog manure.)

Are Farmers Killing the Salmon in the Pacific Northwest?

Out on the West Coast, for decades farmers have been accused of causing the decline of the region’s fabulous salmon runs. The myth is that farmers demanded dams to irrigate their crops; the crops stole the salmon’s river water while the dams and sediment from the crops stifled the salmon’s reproduction.

Today, seventeen eco-groups are suing to breach four federal dams on the Snake River, which they say are direct salmon-killers. This spring, a federal judge rejected a federal salmon rescue plan because it did not include breaching the dams.

Amid the debate, no one seems to notice that the salmon are recovering on their own. I predicted this three years ago. The salmon run last year was the biggest in a decade. The reason? There’s a 25-year cycle in Pacific salmon. For 25 years, Oregon and Washington have lots of salmon-while the salmon canneries in the Gulf of Alaska don’t. Then the cycle reverses, as it did in 1977. For the last 25 years, the Alaskan fishermen have had lots of salmon, but now Oregon and Washington’s turn.

Fishermen have known about this remarkable 25-year cycle for a century. Now, even the academics are beginning to write learned papers about “co-variance” between the Alaskan and Oregon fisheries, and the salmon’s linkage to the huge Pacific Decadal Oscillation.

Did the Sierra Club know about the 25-year cycle before the suits were filed and not tell us? Or just not know?

The Mild, Unstoppable Global Warming That Will Be

Virtually all of the warming that’s occurred in the past 120 years occurred before 1940, before much greenhouse gas was emitted by human industries and autos. Thereafter, the climate stubbornly refused to warm for 40 years, despite huge greenhouse emissions.

The world’s known temperature history includes a Medieval Warming of perhaps 3 degrees Fahrenheit (950 to1300 AD), followed by the much-colder Little Ice Age, from 1300 to 1850 AD. History also tells us about a Roman Warming, from 200 BC to 400 AD, followed by an Ice Age from 400 to 950 AD. The world has been moderately warming and cooling for as far back in history as we have records.

Last year, an elegant and careful analysis of iceberg debris from the floor of the North Atlantic showed that the world has had nine moderate global warmings and nine global coolings in the last 12,000 years-coinciding exactly with a known cycle in the magnetic activity of the sun. By this analysis, we are about 150 years into a mild, natural, global warming that will last another 500 years. The cycle will return us to what history calls the Medieval Climate Optimum-the finest weather humanity can remember.

The Great Gulf of Mexico Dead Zone Syndrome

During the Clinton Administration, a White House task force was all set to impose a 30 percent cut in farmers’ fertilizer use on half a billion square miles of the American heartland between the Appalachians and the Rockies- the most productive agricultural region in the world. They were willing to order this massive land-use change on the basis of 15 years of data from a single source: one annual small-boat voyage by a Louisiana scientist, Dr. Nancy Rabelais, to measure the low-oxygen zone at the mouth of the Mississippi River.

Never mind that virtually all the nutrients for the Gulf of Mexico’s rich marine come down the Mississippi, and no one knows how much nitrogen the Gulf fish need. Or, that there are hypoxic zones at the mouths of some 40 major world rivers. (The laws of biology and physics dictate it.)

Never mind that huge loads of nutrients came down the Mississippi before Columbus, from 60 million bison, 100 million antelope, billions of birds, and trillions of grasshoppers all munching and defecating on the grasses of the Great Plains.

Never mind that even Rabelais’ own data show the size of the hypoxic zone in the Gulf varying primarily with the river’s flow. It nearly disappeared in the 1988 drought year, and surged in size for three years after 1993’s “flood of the century.”

Never mind that nitrogen fertilizer use on Midwest farms plateaued two decades ago while corn yields have since risen 20 percent. That means more of the fertilizer is being harvested as corn, leaving less to leach into the river. More of the region’s poultry and livestock are being raised indoors, and their wastes applied as organic fertilizer in zero-discharge management. Where would the N come from to drive an expanding “dead zone” at the mouth of the Mississippi?

Even the Clinton White House Task Force could find no ecological or economic damage to the Gulf-but they were willing to force a huge constraint on modern farming because we’ve let modern farming be perceived as a problem in itself.

The Organic Illusion

Virtually every urban resident in the First World today has widespread praise for organic food and organic farming. Rachel Carson’s misinforming book, Silent Spring, published in 1962, played on our fears of lurking, man-made carcinogens. But in the intervening years, non-smokers’ cancer rates have trended down where pesticides have been used.

In fact, the British Advertising Standards Authority has forbidden the organic industry to make any claims about better health or better nutrition for organic foods. In the movement’s 60 years, it has never been able to provide any evidence of such benefits.

The U.S. media ignored the news when the head of the Foodborne Diseases branch of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and the International Federation of Food Technologists both warned publicly that organic food is more likely to carry dangerous pathogens such as salmonella and E.coli O157 since it is commonly fertilized with animal manure. (Composting is an erratic process not guaranteed to consistently protect consumers from such bacteria.)

The real problem with organic farming, however, is the huge global shortage of organic nitrogen. The world has less than one-third of the organic N to produce today’s crops, let alone tripling food output for 2050.

A high-level technical committee appointed by the Danish government reported in 1999 that all-organic farming would cut Danish food production by 47 percent. Under an organic mandate, most of Denmark’s farmland would be planted to forage crops, to feed the cattle to provide the millions of tons of manure for crop nitrogen. Denmark would become a “manure landscape,” with the forage hauled to cattle feedlots, and then the manure hauled back out to be spread thickly over the countryside.

Dr. Vaclav Smil of the University of Manitoba (author of Feeding the World: the 21st Century Challenge, MIT Press, 2001) estimates that the United States would need the manure from another 900 million to one billion cattle, at perhaps three acres of forage per beast. Since the United States has only 2.1 billion acres in its lower 48 states, America would have room for its cities and cattle forage, but no room for food production, forests, or Yellowstone National Park.

Yet the New York Times, the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, and a wide range of other urban “thought leaders” are falling over themselves to recommend organic farming. It vividly demonstrates the agricultural ignorance of today’s urban elite.

Trade and the Biggest Agricultural Challenge in History

In December 1999, activists took over the streets of Seattle to protest world trade. They demanded, among other things, that everyone have the “right” to produce their own food.

The world’s good farmland, however, is not well distributed to meet the challenge of feeding 9 billon affluent people and their pets in 2050. China, for example, has 20 percent of the world’s population, but only 7 percent of the world’s arable land, and a similarly tiny percentage of its water. Such densely populated tropical countries as Indonesia and Bangladesh, and such arid countries as Egypt and Morocco will have severe difficulty providing high-quality diets to their 2050 populations from their own farms.

Meanwhile, in many countries where high-yield agriculture has been especially successful, farmers are able to produce more food than their consumers want. The marriage made in economic and environmental heaven is between the unmet demand for high-quality diets in densely populated Asian countries and the surplus productivity of North America, South America, and Europe.

Yet, while the world trade organization helped cut the average nonfarm tariff from 40 percent to 4 percent since 1947, the average farm product tariff is still more than 60 percent. Agricultural trade has been stifled by more than $300 billon per year in rich-country farm subsidies that would be essentially unnecessary if we had free trade.

The eco-groups and “social justice” groups claim to be blocking farm trade to save small family and traditional farms from corporate monopolies. But most of Europe’s peasant farmers have already moved to the cities, and the American family farm has grown larger to match rising urban incomes. The real impact of the Luddites is to block the changes in global farming patterns that are urgently needed to protect the very wildlife they claim to revere.

Rich Countries Are Destroying the Environment - Or Are They?

One of the eco-movement’s biggest falsehoods is that affluent nations are the enemies of environmental conservation.

Jared Diamond notes in his Pulitzer-winning book, Guns, Germs and Steel, that when Stone Age hunters reached North America, they wiped out more than 40 of its large, huntable mammal species in a historian’s eyeblink. Similar surges of extinctions occurred when skilled hunters reached Australia and New Guinea.

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

The International Conservation Union (ICUN) warns that more than one billion people are trying support families in the world’s biodiversity hotspots with hunting and low-yield slash-and-burn farming. 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; every few years, a hurricane washes the steeplands into the valleys.

Yet the eco-movement presents hunter-gatherers and peasant farmers as the guardians of the world’s environmental future.

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.

But there is hope for both 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 (due to lower death rates) and higher incomes (better diets) demand more farmland. 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 no additional land is needed for food. Diesel fuel substitutes for firewood, even as 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.

Dasgupta et al. find no hordes of high-pollution industries fleeing to unregulated Third World countries. (Such labor-intensive industries as garments, shoes, and computer services are not heavily polluting.)

Dr. Bjorn Lomborg’s widely publicized book, The Skeptical Environmentalist, has been fiercely condemned by eco-groups, but they have not been able to shake his key point: An objective analysis of the world’s available eco-data shows virtually all of the First World environmental trends are virtuous.

Biotechnology and the Biggest Agricultural Challenge in History

One of the most serious endemic problems for Africa farmers is a parasitic weed called witchweed. It invades Africa’s staple grain crops, corn, and sorghum, through their roots, so weeding doesn’t help. The farmers don’t even know witchweed is there- until their cornstalks sprout bright-colored flowers instead of grain. Witchweed can take half, or all, of a small farmer’s corn crop. But if herbicide-tolerant biotech corn is soaked in a systemic herbicide before planting, the witchweed invading the sprouting corn plant may killed internally.

This one off-the-shelf adaptation of a biotech transformation could add millions of tons to Africa’s annual grain production. The cost of the biotech corn seed would be low, and the amount of systemic herbicide needed to soak the seeds would be minimal. This one is waiting permission for field trials.

But, will African countries dare to permit biotech corn in their fields? Last year, the activists took their biotech scare campaign to drought-stricken southern Africa, and convinced the governments of some starving countries to ban the U.S. corn offered as food aid. The president of Zambia said he’d been told it was “poison.” Other African politicians feared that they would lose European export opportunities-and even European aid-if they permitted biotech crops to be grown or eaten.

Yet current food production and population trends would drive Africa to clear a Texas worth of its wildlands over the next 20 years, and still leave 200 million malnourished Africans.

Biotech firms have lost $30 billion in equity since the activists launched their biotech scare campaign. Public support for biotech crop research has been decimated. Europe is still banning the import of any biotech products, warning export farmers not to plant the biotech seeds. Any hope that biotech can lead us to re-tripled crop yields, eliminating hunger, and saving wildlands, is on hold.

Why do They Hate Farmers?

Actually, city folks don’t hate farmers. They just don’t understand farming. Our cities’ agricultural ignorance has gotten steadily worse as fewer of us grow up on farms, and modern agriculture transforms itself far beyond the postcard-friendly, traditional red-barn-and-white-fence pattern of the 19th century farm.

All today’s urban consumers know about farming is what they’ve been told by farmers and activists. Farmers tell them there’s a food surplus and that farm prices are too low. The activists tell them we should have organic farming to protect the environment. The city folks figure we can solve both problems with low-yield organic farming.

Professional agriculturists have never told the urban public anything coherent and consistent. We criticize the activists for telling falsehoods-but we don’t tell the public about our core motives: making sure that all the little kids in the world get high-quality nutrition while protecting the wildlands from expanded low-yield farming.

What Can Agriculturists Do?

In the beginning of the eco-attacks, agriculturists assumed that the eco-groups had done their homework and were focused on real problems in agriculture. Our response was to apologize. Now, we know that some eco-groups put their agenda before reality.

Agriculturists need to become more proactive. While giving eco-groups full credit for their conservation intent, agriculturists need to aggressively make the case that high-yield farming is the greatest humanitarian triumph in history; and, at the same time, mankind’s greatest environmental achievement. We must urgently remind the public of the billions of people not malnourished, millions of kids not starved, millions of pets well-fed, and millions of square miles of wildlands not plowed.

It may not be fair that agriculturists should have to take on this huge public service task. We aren’t really trained or equipped for it; and, we have crops to grow, livestock to feed and agribusinesses to run.

But the world has never before faced such levels of consumer ignorance on farming. Or the massive, amply-funded, media-connected phenomenon of non-governmental organizations completely lacking the checks and balances we put on governments, businesses, and academics.

If agriculturists-including all of the professional societies, all of the farm groups-and all of the companies do not become far more proactive, then high-yield agriculture in America will be truly lost.

Confronting the Organic Icon

High-yield agriculturists also need to ensure that organic food and farming is presented accurately to the urban public. We need to do this, not because of organic’s tiny fraction of the food market is important, nor because high-yield farmers are jealous of the organic price premiums. We need to confront the organic myths because organic food has been turned into an icon for both the public and its government regulators at the federal, state, and even local level.

The activists use the organic icon to promise not only “adequate” food, but better food even as they undercut the very basis of current world food output. They say organic food will be full to bursting with richer nutrients, and will bring the pink glow of health to our indoor children’s cheeks. It will disarm the dreadful, lurking cancer epidemic. And of course, it’s kinder to the environment, so we’ll have more butterflies and birds flitting through the fields. One shopper even told ABC-TV that her kids behaved better when she fed them organic food!

The activists’ real, oft-stated goal, is a world with fewer and less-materialist humans, living far lower on the food chain. When they talk about “adequate” food from organic farming, the diet may resemble the meager Cuban diet currently being produced mostly with organic farming-for the lucky two billion chosen to continue living on the planet.

The organic icon has already proven that it has the power to deny high-yield agriculture’s inputs and farming systems. Even where the farming changes reduce human food security and threaten to clear more farmland. (It might take the land area of Pennsylvania to put all our hogs outdoors, and the land area of New Jersey to put the chickens outdoors, but the city folks won’t believe it until the forest trees are actually being cut.)

The clincher on the organic sales pitch has always been fear: The lurking cancer threat of pesticide residues, key nutrients lost, massive soil erosion, lack of sustainability. None of these assertions is true, but the media cut scaremongers a lot of slack, and the assertions are repeated over and over.

Misrepresentation: Synthetic fertilizer poisons soils. The whole organic movement began with the falsehood that synthetic fertilizer (actually, natural nitrogen captured from the air through an industrial process) would poison the soil. No such soil poisoning has been documented. In fact, some of the plots at Britain’s famed Rothamsted experiment station have gotten inorganic fertilizers for more than 150 years with rising yields.

Misrepresentation: Pesticides cause cancer: The American Cancer Society says, “. . . the very low concentrations [of pesticides] found in some foods have not been associated with increased cancer risk. In fact, people who eat more fruits and vegetables, which may be contaminated with trace amounts of pesticides, generally have lower cancer risks than people who eat few fruits and vegetables.” When activists assert that pesticides are “linked to cancer,” they mean that high doses of the chemicals cause tumors in rats. So does over-feeding, and we overfeed the rats to maximize dosage. At high doses, half of everything tested, natural and man-made, causes tumors in rats.

Misrepresentation: Organic is better for the environment. If all-organic farming required the world to give up nitrogen fertilizer, and it took the manure from another 7 to 8 billion cattle to replace it, every bit of forest and wild meadow on the planet would have to be converted to cattle pasture. That hardly seems “better for the environment.”

Is it time for a congressional hearing on the claims and merits of organic food and farming?

We have an official new U.S. Department of Agriculture Organic Seal. When Secretary of Agriculture Glickman announced the organic standards, he said, “Organic is about how it is produced. Just because something is labeled as organic does not mean it is superior, safer or healthier than conventional food.”

The National Food processors Association asked the USDA to require that the organic labels include a statement saying the products are no more safe or nutritious than conventional foods. Is such a disclaimer still needed to prevent the seal from misleading consumers? About two-thirds of U.S. consumers in polls say the USDA organic seal means organic is better.

Britain’s No-Nonsense Organic Advertising

You’ll be interested in some of the British Advertising Standards Authority’s recent rulings on organic:

Claim: “Organic. As natural as nature intended. It’s the environmentally friendly alternative to chemicals, fertilizers and pesticides that can damage the soil and kill off nature’s own nutrients.”
ASA ruling: Misleading. The EU permits organics to use chemicals including slag, crude potassium salt, elemental sulphur, and insecticides such as Derris dust. Most readers would understand these substances to be “chemicals,” “fertilizers” or “pesticides.”

Claim: “[Organic food] is the safe choice for your family.”
ASA ruling: Misleading. Implies, without proof, that non-organic food is unsafe.

Claim: “You can taste the difference [in organic food].”
ASA ruling: Misleading. The advertisers sent the results of a poll in which 43 percent of consumers who expressed a preference for organic food said they preferred it because it tasted better. However, the ASA said it needed more rigorous evidence, such as blind taste tests.

Claim: “It’s healthy.” [referring to organic food]
ASA ruling: Misleading. People’s health depends more on the composition of their diets than on the nature of individual foods. Moreover, the advertisers had sent no clinical evidence to show that a diet of organic products was more healthy than the same diet consisting of non-organic food.

Claim by a supermarket selling conventionally-grown chickens: “All our chickens come from good homes.” A complainant stated that many of the chickens were reared intensively in broiler houses.
ASA ruling: Acceptable. Even in confinement, the conditions for the chickens were carefully regulated and monitored, and the supermarket’s animal welfare specifications exceeded Government guidelines.

The Bottom Line:

High-yield agriculture’s first task is to convey to the urban public the massive benefits of high yields that have saved billions of people, millions of pets and millions of square miles of wildlife.

I see in my mind’s eye a set of full-color magazine ads, showing kids around the globe with their pets and some wild babies (a baby elephant, lion cub, baby egret). The cut line would say, “Let’s be sure we can feed them all in the 21st century.”

Then, we must make certain that the public understands the real limits of organic food and farming.

This is all outside our job descriptions. But there is no other line of defense for today’s American society against a future of hunger, malnutrition, and environmental desolation.

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