America’s high-yield farmers are finally claiming credit for the environmental benefits they’ve been delivering to the world for the past 50 years. A new Keystone Alliance has just issued its first report, noting that modern farmers are producing more food per acre and more food per unit of energy used, while radically reducing their soil erosion and water consumption.
Since 1987, Keystone’s analysts say U.S. corn growers have raised their per acre yields by 41 percent, lowered their per-bushel land requirement by 37 percent, cut soil erosion losses by 70 percent, cut water use per bushel by 27 percent, and cut energy use per bushel by 37 percent. Greenhouse emissions per bushel are down 30 percent.
On soybeans, Keystone notes that U.S. yields are up 29 percent, soil loss per bushel is down nearly 50 percent, and energy use per bushel is down 65 percent.
This is massively good news, since the world must produce more than twice as much food and feed by 2040 than today to supply a peak population of perhaps 9 billion more-affluent people. We’ll also have to feed hundreds of millions of additional cats and dogs— richer people have fewer children, but more pets; and, few of the pets are vegetarian.
The Keystone Alliance members include the American Farm Bureau, some big chemical and biotech companies, John Deere and other “corporate agriculture” players. But it also includes the World Wildlife Fund and the Nature Conservancy, finally admitting that high-yield farming is the only realistic way to preserve room for wildlife on this planet.
We’re already farming about 37 percent of the earth’s land area. If the Green Revolution hadn’t tripled the yields on the world’s good cropland since 1960, the planet’s forests and grasslands would already have plowed up for more low-yield crops.
I’m biased. My father was a county extension agent who helped encourage farmers to use hybrid seeds, chemical fertilizer, and the artificial insemination that has boosted milk yields per cow fourfold. As an agricultural economist, I’ve avidly followed such new-tech solutions as no-till farming and biotech crops that don’t have to be sprayed.
My 1995 book,
Saving the Planet with Pesticides and Plastic, celebrated the environmental benefits of high-yield farming while most of the Green movement was still touting slash-and-burn peasant farmers as the “sustainable” model for the future.
Dr. Norman Borlaug, the famed Nobel Peace Prize laureate who led the Green Revolution, in 2002 signed our Center’s “Declaration in Support of High-Yield Farming.” Dr. Borlaug testified that we wouldn’t be able to feed 6 billion people with organic farming, since we don’t have enough manure to provide the nitrogen, or enough spare cropland to accept organic farming’s lower yields. He noted that Britain’s Cooperative Wholesale Association had just testified to the House of Lords that they get 44 percent less wheat from their organic fields than from their conventional wheat. Europe would thus need millions more crop acres to feed itself organically.
Meanwhile, Monsanto is running an ad that asks, “How Can We Squeeze More Food from a Raindrop?” They hope new drought-tolerant crops will help farmers use one-third less water per bushel. In Australia, two new biotech wheat varieties have already delivered 20 percent more grain in a drought year, with no yield penalty in the good years.
Without new-tech’s high yields, the wildlife and forests that farmers and researchers have preserved through the past 300 years could be lost in our lifetimes. Unless we starved half the humans, we’d displace the remaining wildlife. Is that what Greenpeace and the Sierra Club promised they’d achieve?
