Facing Planetary Enemy No. 1: Agriculture

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Early morning view of an automated irrigation system in on a farm in Sudlersville, MD

Cliff Owen/AP

Early morning view of an automated irrigation system in on a farm in Sudlersville, MD

For the past 200 years, ever since Thomas Malthus published his Essay on the Principle of Population, big thinkers have been wondering whether Earth-dwellers will eventually run out of food.

Today, a global group of scientists released a fresh look at the question. They add a different, environmental twist to it. Can we feed the world without destroying the environment?

It's a good question, because agriculture is probably the single most destructive thing that humans do to the earth.

 

Consider: Cropland and pasture now cover 40 percent of our planet's land surface; farming consumes nearly three-quarters of all the water that humans use for any purpose; farming accounts for a third of all the emissions of greenhouse gases that humans release into the environment. (Those greenhouse emission come from clearing forests or grassland for crops, the emissions of methane from rice paddies, and the conversion of nitrogen fertilizer into nitrous oxide — a powerful greenhouse gas.)

That's bad enough, but Jonathan Foley from the University of Minnesota, who led this new analysis, says it's likely to get worse. Demand for food is expected to double over the next forty years. Are we truly, to quote environmentalist Bill McKibben, facing the "end of nature"?

According to the new study, not necessarily. But avoiding mass deforestation and food scarcity is going to take some very big changes. Briefly: Big investments in food production in places (think Ukraine and Uganda) where current farm land isn't producing as much food as it could; much more efficient use of water and fertilizer; less wasted food; and (controversy alert!) eating less meat. About 40 percent of the planet's crops, according to this study, currently are fed to animals.

Unfortunately, the paper does not really explain how this will happen. There's no global dictator who can, for instance, abolish feedlots where corn is fed to cattle.

What we have instead of a dictator is the global marketplace, setting prices for land, corn, meat, and everything else. Those prices drive decisions by farmers. But Thomas Hertel, an economist at Purdue University, says those markets can help solve our planetary problem — especially if we step in to make those markets work better.

For example, governments can put a price on forests, making it really, really expensive to cut down trees for crops. They can charge more for water or fertilizer, discouraging waste.

But when food gets scarce, Hertel says, markets do respond. Prices go up, farming gets more profitable, and farmers grow more food. Markets will balance supple and demand for food, Hertel says.

But at what cost? Will food get really expensive, driving down consumption and really hurting the world's poorest people? Right now, that's one of the biggest, most interesting questions that agricultural economists are debating.

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How Community Supported Agriculture Sprouted In China

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Little Donkey Farms' mascot, Professor, is a symbol of the challenges faced by the farm

Daniel Charles/NPR Little Donkey Farms' mascot, Professor, is a symbol of the challenges faced by the farm

It's a little hard to tell, walking through Little Donkey Farm, in a village northwest of Beijing, whether this is just a charming but ineffectual protest against the tide of Chinese history, or a sign that the tide may be shifting.

Little Donkey is an organic farm. (Yes, there is an actual donkey. More about him later.) Dozens of different vegetables grow here: Eggplant, green beans, Chinese cabbage, corn, and some that I've never seen before. There's also a small barn filled with pigs.

It's also the first Chinese Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farm. Four hundred families pay an annual membership and get, in exchange, a share of the harvest. Another 260 families rent small plots of land for their own gardens.

 

Shi Yan, a soft-spoken but determined young graduate student from Beijing's Renmin University, set up this operation three years ago — inspired, in part, by her experience working for six months with Earthrise Farm, a small CSA in western Minnesota. (There are at least 4,000 CSA farms in the U.S.)

"It changed my life," says Shi Yan. She arrived at Earthrise Farm thinking that she would study its business model, "but living with them, I realized that it's not just a model, it's a style of life. Before that, although I cared about rural problems, I never thought about living in a village. After I came back, I moved to this village and started this farm."

It was an audacious move, because it goes against every recent trend in Chinese agriculture — which, it's worth remembering, feeds 20 percent of the people on earth. Young people, especially young men, have been abandoning rural villages for better jobs in cities.

Little Donkey, being organic, uses only manure and compost for fertilizer, but most Chinese farmers abandoned those methods over the past forty years. They're now among the world's biggest users of synthetic fertilizer, and it's helped them boost their food production dramatically.

There's now plenty of food in China, but some people worry about its safety — especially since a nationwide scandal in 2008 involving toxic contamination of milk powder and tests (carried out by the environmental group Greenpeace) that found traces of banned pesticides on supermarket vegetables.

Now, more people are buying food that's labeled "organic." More people are visiting Little Donkey. And at least three dozen other Chinese CSAs are now in business.

But the food is not the only thing that brings people here. In a country that sometimes seems obsessed with making and selling things, Little Donkey Farm is a tiny island of Chinese counterculture. "It's mostly for relaxing," says Gao Xiang, who's there with his family, spending a Sunday tending their part of the community garden.

"Little Donkey Farm isn't just the land, or the food. We can know each other and create new ideas. We make friends here," says Fang Danmin, an editor. "It's small, but it's a trend."

Watching it all, from inside his pen, is an actual donkey named Professor. It's the farm mascot, a symbol of its ideals, but also - unintentionally - the difficulty of realizing those ideals in today's China.

"About this donkey, we have a long story," says Shi Yan. "Five or six years ago, we had a very hot discussion about whether China should keep traditional, small-scale farming. One side said we need to use donkeys to plow the land. The other side said we need tractors. At the end, my advisor Professor Wen said, 'We won't discuss this anymore. But I will buy a donkey, and my wife will name the donkey!'"

"But the embarrassing thing is," Shi Yan continues, "we hoped that we could use this donkey to plow the land. But then we figured out that in the village, there was not even one farmer who know how to work with the donkey! So right now, she can only stay in the pen."

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