A new book says tech-supported industrial ag will feed the world. Agroecologists would like a word.

Blocking a too-hot sun with aerosolized particles. Re-freezing melted glaciers. Sucking carbon out of the air, then storing it deep underground. For every current and pending catastrophe being wrought by human-caused climate change, there’s an ambitious workaround touted by tech enthusiasts as our salvation from ourselves. Agricultural systems are not immune, and a cycle of news in which researchers warn that we are on track to produce too little food for a growing population only fans the flames of innovation fire. By now, decades and billions of dollars have been poured into manufacturing insect-based proteins, tinkering with kelp to reduce cattle methane burps, and developing pepper-picking robots to replace vulnerable human workers.

Agroecology does sound quaint by comparison to Grunwald’s “buzzy biotech startups.” While agroecology, too, recognizes the importance of producing food without further imperiling ecosystems, it sees smaller-scale farms as the foundation for this work. In a piece for Mongabay, Lappé describes it as a nature-based practice that “includes techniques such as intercropping and planting cover crops, integrating livestock and trees into landscapes, and deploying organic farming methods to enhance biodiversity and soil health while eliminating dependence on external inputs like pesticides and synthetic fertilizer.”

Or as Molly Anderson, a panelist at the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES-Food) puts it, “We’re talking about farming systems that are extractive versus regenerative.” And what that means, she expounds, is: “We want to be regenerating communities. We want to be regenerating soil. We want to be regenerating decent livelihoods for farmers and farm workers, and moving away from everything that’s extracting, [including] extracting nutrients from the soil.” The need to cut back on meat-eating is a given here.

Why don’t we have this sort of system now? Techno-optimists say it’s because it cannot work. Timothy Bowles, an environmental science professor at the University of California, Berkeley, says it’s because no one has truly invested in it. Debating Grunwald this past May, he blamed policy choices that “a handful of companies have profited handsomely from,” he said. However, “If we look ahead to 2050 and don’t want widespread crop failures, and we don’t want soil to be so degraded it becomes unfarmable … and we don’t want to give a pass to multinational agribusinesses while they continue to siphon profits out of rural communities, then we can’t be doubling down on industrial agriculture.”

Too little to eat?

Prophets of industrial ag maintain that farm practices that are good for the land, like organic, produce far less food on far more land than conventional, chemical-based systems. Bowles insists this isn’t true. His lab found that cover crops increase yields in low-carbon soils, for starters. Additionally, comparing a field of conventional monoculture crops to one of organic monoculture crops does indeed show a yield drag, he said in the debate. But that “that yield gap goes from about 20 percent to about 5 percent when … organic farms are using more complex crop rotations [and] polycultures.” As a bonus, polyculture farms also support biodiversity — less than an intact forest, say, but considerably more than a field of soybeans alone.

“The people who benefit from keeping [the yield] argument alive,” says Anderson, are “the pesticide people, the synthetic fertilizer people, and very large-scale farmers and traders, who benefit from large quantities of product.” She points out that in the U.S. we actually have an overproduction problem. “There’s so many incentives to grow way too much food,” she says, including subsidies for the biggest commodity crop farmers. Food waste continues to be a massive problem, too. The most recent stats show that surplus food in the U.S. added up to almost 74 million tons in 2023 — that’s 442 pounds per person, for a total value of $382 billion.

“When you look at the number of calories that we produce, it’s enough for every single person on the planet, from infancy to old age,” says Lappé. “That should be evidence enough that the problem … of feeding ourselves is not about yield or about productivity.”

Forests for food?

Proponents of CAFOs and other industrial agriculture systems tout their efficiency — less land for more food. “Yes, it’s bad to cut down the rainforest to plant soybeans,” says Brooks Lamb, land protection and access specialist at American Farmland Trust (AFT). The U.S., however, is undergoing other disturbing land-use changes that do not invoke a comparable moral outrage. “Our research suggests that between 2016 and 2040, the U.S. will convert 18 to 24 million acres of farmland across the country to real estate development and sprawl,” he said. AFT believes those figures are likely an undercount.

On top of that, many U.S. farmers “have poured all of their economic assets into trying to pay for their land and their equipment,” Lamb says. “When they get ready to retire or when they need end-of-life health care, they often have to sell the farm, and they need to sell it at a fair market value.”

Meanwhile, young, landless, would-be farmers are desperate to start their own operations. But thanks to the exorbitant cost of fertile farmland —  $5,000 an acre in Lamb’s home state of Tennessee, although he’s seen properties selling for 10 times the amount — “they can’t buy that,” Lamb says. Who can buy it: developers looking to build low-density housing or strip malls, and asset managers for whom land is a profitable investment to add to their portfolios.

Where the CAFO crowd perceives a land shortage, Lappé sees deleterious choices instead. “We’re using about 40 percent of all corn-growing land for biofuels,” she says, which are linked to decreased biodiversity, increased water use and air pollution. “The vast majority of the rest of that land for corn is going to animal feed and other industrial purposes.” In fairness, Grunwald argues that these land uses are highly problematic, too.

We’ll never change

All that animal feed props up the meat industry, which Americans hear time and again will never shrink. “It’s true that if we ate less meat and grew fewer biofuels, we would reduce agriculture’s hunger for land,” Grunwald wrote in a controversial opinion piece last year for The New York Times. “But the reality is we show no signs of doing that — meat consumption is only projected to rise in the coming years.” It’s a sentiment, say critics, that smacks of self-enforced fatality: Our food system is this way, therefore it must stay this way forever.

Top photo by oticki/Adobe Stock.