Guest essay by Steve Goreham
Agriculture is under attack. Environmentalists label modern farming as unsustainable, blaming farming for polluting the planet and destroying the climate. But today’s food is abundant and nutritious—a modern agricultural miracle.
From 1961 to 2013, world population more than doubled from 3.1 to 7.2 billion. But agricultural output more than tripled over the same period, according to data from the United Nations. We are slowly winning the battle against world hunger. The percentage of chronically undernourished people has fallen from 30 percent of world population in 1950 to about 11 percent today.
Not only the quantity, but the quality and variety of food are much better than in past ages. A 2015 study at Stockholm University compared modern food to recipes from the chef of King Richard II of England in the 1300s. The study concluded that people of today’s developed nations eat better than the kings of old.
In the 1300s, King Richard did not have pepper, cinnamon, cloves, and nutmeg, which came to Europe from the Far East in the 1400s. He did not have coffee, which was first brewed in Arabia in the 1400s. He did not have oranges, corn, or pineapple, which arrived in Europe from Asia and North America during the 1400s and 1500s. Today we enjoy dozens of varieties of fruits, vegetables, and meats that were not available in past ages.
Today’s foods are a product of thousands of years of efforts to cultivate more abundant and more nutritious crops. Cross-pollination of plants, cross-breeding of animals, and now genetic engineering of plants and animals continues to deliver rising farm output with better food quality and variety. Grains, fruits, vegetables, meats, dairy products, and even seafood continue to improve due to advanced farming techniques.
But environmental groups attack modern farming methods as unsustainable, scorning the farmer’s use of water, land, pesticides, and energy. A 2010 UN Environmental Programme document states:
Agricultural production accounts for a staggering 70% of global freshwater consumption, 38% of the total land use, and 14% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions…The use of agrochemicals is related to ecotoxicity, eutrophication and depletion of phosphorus stocks. Intensive agriculture is related to substantial energy use. The loss of soil and biomass carbon can contribute to climate change.
The attacks on agriculture are too numerous to address in a single article, but one aspect of modern agriculture is not well known. Farmers are now giving land back to nature.
According to UN data, land used for farming is now declining. Total world agricultural area, the sum of crop land and pasture land, peaked in 2000 at 4.95 billion hectares and declined about one-half percent through 2013. Over the same period, world agricultural production increased 37 percent. The recent decline in total farm land use occurred despite 41.3 million hectares added for biofuel production, an area larger than Germany.
An astounding improvement in agricultural yields provides rising output without the need for additional land. Gains in US corn yield are a remarkable example. US land employed to harvest corn peaked in 1918. Today, US farmers produce five times more corn on 11 percent less area than 100 years ago.
The world has passed the point of peak agricultural land use. Today, farmers are feeding the growing world population and providing us with the best food in history, while at the same time returning land to nature.
Steve Goreham is a speaker on the environment, business, and public policy and author of the new book Outside the Green Box: Rethinking Sustainable Development.
Charles Mann has written a fine article that puts this agricultural controversy in historical context. The two giants of plant development last century were William Vogt and Norman Borlaug, whose followers Mann calls “Prophets” and “Wizards”, respectively. The latter are committed to solving problems through human ingenuity, while the former think “Small is Beautiful”. Of course the attacks are coming from the Prophets, while the wizards are researching new crops like C4 Rice, funded mostly by the Gates Foundation.
A synopsis and link to the article is at https://rclutz.wordpress.com/2018/01/24/adapting-plants-to-feed-the-world/
Perhaps few have noticed, but the trend has been away from locally grown food towards large enterprise and factory-like operations, at least in first world countries. Not many backyard gardens, few neighborhood chickens and pigs, and nobody delivering eggs and milk to their neighbors. The small organic grower is a relic of the old normal, with many jurisdictions having regulations that restrict them considerably.
I grow veg in my back garden, not for economical or ideological reasons, but the fun and taste and challenge; there’s a short growing season up here 🙁
It will be planting time before we know it. 🙂
I purchased a portable greenhouse 4 years ago so that my lime tree could survive the winter. I live at 2000 ft elevation not far from the Trinity Alps in Northern California. When I set up the greenhouse last year as the temps dropped in the fall I also included several grow bags from my summer garden. These bags contained German chamomile, eggplant, cherry peppers, and sweet peppers. All of those are still alive in the greenhouse even with snow on the ground outside. The sweet pepper is still slowly producing peppers. I harvested around 100 pounds of Rangpur limes, and still have around 20 pounds of fruit left on the tree. It will be interesting to see how well the eggplant and other vegetables will perform when springtime arrives.
The lives and minds of Leftists are so chaotic, bizarre and uncoordinated that when they see something that is functioning normally or well, they feel disturbed and in need of taking action against it. It is as if socialists needed to keep the World in the state of poverty of organisation and scarcity of rational thought, similar to that which that they can see from the inside of their heads. They push their simplistic ideas about the fault of rich or white people being responsible for all the faults of the World when it is as often as not, the result of their own socialist policies. Cheap freely available food that sustains billions of people is just too much for the Leftards to handle, as it should not be there.
Margarine (oleomargarine) was invented because Emperor Napoleon III wanted some cheap gunk to feed his warrior goons and the peasants. But at least it was originally made from animal fat, not from the plant seed oils that evolution didn’t shape us to consume in volume.
Some people think evolution did a miserable job at shaping organisms over the past few billion years, and that’s God’s divine two-legged creations can do a better job of it in the laboratory, despite failures, like the genetically engineered Tryptophan disaster resulting from our owners allowing corporations to secretly test their new products on us.
I note that a lot of people around here who support corporate lifeforms(TM) in the foodchain as a route to salvation, also believe in dowsing.
Of course, much of the growth in agricultural output, perhaps 40%, is simply a consequence of ordinary people burning stuff (hence why trees in Brooklyn grow at double the rate of their rural counterparts without any help from Monsanto).
It really is sad the way some people allow their religious convictions regarding how those who own businesses are all evil, to influence what little is left of their sanity.
Those who own us?
Secretly testing?
tryptophan disaster?
Is there anything you know that is actually true?
its funny that – *exactly* what I found while farming.
Precisly how my barley field yeilded ever more and more year after year.
it just got sooooooo boring pulling 100 tonnes of stuff off a postage stamp sized bit of dirt, I simply lost my mind figuring out what to do with it all.
and while my neighbours wer paying £17000 an acre for dirt, I had so much yeild from mine, I simply couldn’t give it away.
Crazy eh
It even got so bad that huge trucks atarted coming to take away fertilser from my place.
If i’d not seen it with my own eyes, I’d have not beleived it.
Let alone read about it on that fountain of certain incontrovertible truth, The interweb.
Here you are lads, listen to the words and throw some shapes around the living room you might be in.
Nobody’s watching.
Hey, doing so might even stave off the CVD, the hypertension and (pre) diabetes.
Enjoy.
PS Do turn the wick riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight up. give it some bump. sing along even.
I’ve often said to eco nuts that as agriculture has the largest impact on the environment of all human activities, then agriculture should be band; the fields and pastures returned to their natural state. Pastures …? Oh, wait a minute.
Several years ago I had a vegetable and herb garden in an outlying suburb in Australia and local kids were fascinated by the fact that I could pull a carrot out of the ground, pluck a red tomato off a bush, pick sugar-snap peas off a vine … and, after a quick rinse with water as required, eat them … then and there. Up until then they thought vegetables simply came from the supermarket.
I was grinding up venison for burger and a young friend of ours remarked something to the effect of “Yuck”. He had no idea where hamburger came from except the supermarket. He did not want any further lessons on food, either….
Decadence. They attack that which keeps them alive.
It seems as if George Fitzhugh may have been one of the original Progressives.
If farmers in the US, Canada, France, various South American countries, Mexico, et al., went on strike for a year and refused to ship anything to liberal-dominated states and countries, how long do you think that would last before the squawking started from the libs?
If field corn (as opposed to sweet corn for the dinner table), wheat and soybeans weren’t produced for a full season, how long do you think it would be before the Greenbeans, CAGWers, and Warmians started squawking about not having soy lattes, no bread from Panera – use your imagination. The lest of products is longer than both of my arms put together.
What if grocery stores and shops refused to sell any and all products to them, and they had to have an ID for food shopping?
Let’s see them raise their own d*****d food, period, for a full year. These clowns have no idea where their food comes from. They only know that farming, which is what brought humans out of the hunter-gatherer hunger-driven existence into civilization, is bad, bad, bad, when we all know better.
I really do believe now that these people are so stupid they don’t even know that they’re alive. Therefore, take away all the convenience stuff like groceries, shops, and kitcshy cafes where the food has phony but special labeling on the menu, and tell them they aren’t allowed to eat, shop or buy anything there.
I don’t think they’d last very long.
Of course there wouldn’t be a farmer still in business anywhere in the country when the year was up either.
But the farmers would still have food on their tables. As my dad used to say, “You can’t eat money.” He grew up on a farm and saw people starving in North Africa during the War (WWII).
Not if the bank foreclosed and kicked him off the land.
One of my cousins lives in New York City. He said that “It was the REAL WORLD,” and that everywhere else in America was not. If you cut off all road, rail and air traffic to NYC for a month, the inhabitants there would literally be killing each other in the streets. For NYC can’t produce anything that is essential for survival.
[A month? Perhaps 4 hours for the troubles to begin, less for the murders to begin. .mod]
So what? No place in the world can produce all what it needs, if cut off. Everywhere nowadays, it would turn into a nasty “survivor”-like existence (but no quitting, no staff to help and police the players, because they are not “players”, because this is no game anymore), with few chance of living out. Few humans can manage; a US farmer has little more chance to be one of them, that a dweller of New York. I am pretty sure I am not one of them. The few I trust to be able to cope, I pity, because this means they already have a shitty life, without all modern convenience, but i also envy.
It wouldn’t be that difficult for a farmer to shift back to ancient farming techniques and continue to feed his family and neighbors.
You’re taking this scenario literally. Can you not see the OP’s main point? A farmer in Iowa or California is far more “self-sufficient” than people living in New York City or LA. That’s the point. Just like the old days, farmers today can harvest wildlife for meat. They can have chickens and pigs and eggs. They can grow gardens all in addition to their crops. In short, in regards to food (the topic of this post), a farmer is infinitely more self-sufficient than city dwellers (the enviro-wackies).
The point being made here is that cement jungles like New York City or L.A. can’t produce ANY food to support themselves. People living in cities have NO IDEA where their food comes from and have NO appreciation of how good they have it–never in the history of humanity have so many people had completely stable, reliable and delicious food with the only effort needed to obtain said food is a short trip to the supermarket.
My cousin and others living in New York pretend to “care” about the environment yet they have no idea how artificial their existences are. They have no idea where their water comes from. A farmer knows where his water comes from. City dwellers have no idea where their bread, coffee or chickens come from. Farmers do. And they have no idea where their electricity comes from or where their waste from their toilets go–farmers do.
And the New York City citizen has no idea that their artificial world would last only a day before all hell broke loose if their electricity, water, sewage system, roads, railroads and airports were to stop functioning. You actually saw that happen when NYC had some minor flooding recently. People in high-rise apartments were left helpless–no water, no sewage system and trapped in their cement coffins.
That’s the point.
paqyfelyc–You obviously have never heard of Dick Proenneke. He lived for over 30 years in the Alaskan wilderness and their wasn’t a happier guy on earth than him. He didn’t have a “shitty life”–in fact his “quality of life” was probably much better than most of the people living in America today. And he managed quite well with no electricity or modern conveniences. He only had simple hand tools, a Springfield ’03 rifle, pistol, fishing rod and his wits.
You talk like a city slicker who hasn’t even gone wilderness camping. Just how did the pioneers manage in the old days? Did they lead miserable “shitty lives”? You insult the millions of Americans who built this country literally with their bare hands. And back in those days there weren’t any helpless and spoiled urban environmentalists. People like that got weeded out quite quickly.
@zzy
The fact is, pioneers did all they could to improve their lives, and here we are. May be some of them, offered the choice to live as we do or as they did, would choose the second, but since all of our ancestors (their descendants) did the very opposite (except a few Amish), I very much doubt so. For sure, there may be a few happy Dick Proenneke, or “back to the trees” Uncle Vania (why I ate my Father), but few people follow this backward path, for some reason.
Your cousin and other enviromons talking about nature surely don’t have a clue about what this really means, but your saying they wouldn’t survive, as true as it was, just missed the mark.
Just suggest introducing back wolves, boars and bears, etc. in Central Park, whatever happens. Then, their love of Nature will be tested.
In “Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Change”
https://www.amazon.com/Liberal-Fascism-American-Mussolini-Politics/dp/0767917189/
Jonah Goldberg reviewed the history of progressivism and fascism. He demonstrates that both American progressivism (a/k/a liberalism) and European Fascism are branches of the socialist tree, and that European fascists were talking about and implementing many of the same ideas that are popular now on the American Left including things like organic food. There is a section of a chapter titled: “The Nazi Cult of the Organic”. Contemporary “progressives” are singing out of an old hymn book with some really foul fingerprints on it.
Nearly everyone of those attacks against some major aspect of modern civilisation’s essential underlaying support systems, be they food and food production / farming, the essential to all civilisations electrical power supply systems, water with its elitist zealotry against the building of new dams, the Coal industry where a single coal mine and its electrical generation power plant might cover the equivalent area to that of a couple of suburbs of a city out of say 10, 000 square kilometres in area, four million inhabitants city.
And that coal mine and its generated electrical power can, would and does supply the power needs of that entire city as and when required and at a price all of its citizenery can afford.
All of these attacks on the fundamentals for human survival, the infrastructure that is the basis of a human cityn and absolute basic essentials for human survival and for the maintenance of a civilisation seem to invariably begin and are sustained by the abject ignorance of the self promoting Elitst zealots who are to be found in almost their entirety to be part of the highly paid and usually government associated and government paid inner city living zealots.
Zealots that are from politics. academia, particularly so here in Australia at present , bureacrats, greens and public media whose very ignorance of the roles of those civilisation supporting factors is only surpassed by their total and abject ignorance of the world outside of their own severely limited inner city goat cheese circles that they reside in.
To those elitist environmental zealots, electricity comes out of a switch in a wall, water comes out of a tap. Human waste just goes down a hole somewhere when you press the button, the street lights work by magic,
And that essential Food in all its variety,, who needs farmers anyhow as the Super markets always have huge amounts of food on their shelves and a few organic farmers can supply a city anyhow if you want something different and “healthier ” along with the assorted wild life and fungal products in” organic” food!
Those same elists green environmental zealots who decry the destruction of the Holy environment by anybody else are totally blind to the immensity of the environmental destruction of the natural wild life and natural vegetation they themselves have created in creating the cities through their demands for a life style to suit themselves where they live in the cities of today.
Take Melbourne , capital of the state of Victoria here in Australia; covering very roughly an area of more than 10,000 square kilometers and housing nearly four million citizens.
The Environment, that Holy environment of the environmental zealots and elitists who decry and fiercely oppose anybody who might want to create something of benefit to Australia and Australians and to do it outside of the city limits, even if those developments are two thousand kilometres away and near to Australia’s outback where only a few locals live, the zealots of the environmental green organisations will do everything in their power to prevent any progress, all the while residing in their comfortable inner city environment, ignorant in the extreme as to why they can live that life style and do so where nothing of any significance is left that is of a natural Australian character.
They are so utterly and near criminal deliberately blind and mentally warped and so wrapped up in their own self importance as “protectors of the environment” that they are totally blind to the few thousands of square kilometres of concrete and macadam and bricks and steel and waste lands and golf courses and horse farms ans used car yards and towering buldings because there ins no room left in 7.8 million square kilometres of the Australian continent, the covering all of that 10,000 square kilometres of a city where once the magnificent trees of the ranges grew down to the edges of Port Philip Bay , the wild Australian shrubs and the tiny wild flowers bloomed, the small animals skitttered about amongst the plants and the plant debris as they went about their business , Australia’s unique large animals grazed in the open grasslands.
Sometimes the wild fires came and went and a new begining was made with fresh growth as only the Australian fire adapted fauna and flora can make such a new beginning.
I am eighty years old and I have seen close to half or more of that wild natural environment destroyed in and around what is now Melbourne city over my eighty years without a single peep of protest being heard from those same Elitist Environmental Zealots who protest the building of a mine two thousand kilometres or more away for the city.
A mine that might in area cover the equivalent area of two or three suburbs in Melbourne.
I have seen where once the native animals roamed and lived and thrived and the plants and scrublands and magnificent trees of the Australian Bush once thrived being bull dozed down and then the whole area being covered in concrete and macadam and bricks and glass and steel factories and junk yards and used car yards and endless miles of little boxes where its citizens” live”, each with its artificial and introduced species of plants and its introduced animals and rarely a native animal or plants in any number can be found..
Rarely is there a patch left of the true natural local environment that has not been “Groomed “out of any semblence to the reality of the local Natural environment.
The wild things and native trees and bushes and scrublands in all their immense splendour are gone, destroyeduntil a time when mankind no longer is a power upon this planet.
If you are a city dweller and unlike those far from the pollution of the city, you can no longer see the vast glittering array, the spendour on a clear cold night of the massed stars of the Milky Way, [ thats if you even know that the Milky Way exists,] spreading in its great band from horizon to horizon as dust and smoke and steet lighting and flashing signs in the myriads of thousands blank out the spendour of the stars and even that of the rising Moon.
Perhaps it is time that the arrogant elites in the city to be made to actually suffer deprivation and forego all that abundance of food on those super market shelves and the running taps of water and power at the flick of a switch.
Only then would they begin to realise in their tiny self congraturalory, self satisfied, selfish in the extreme mentalities that maybe there are one hell of a lot of ordinary people on this planet who enable them to exist in that very self satisfying life style they believe that they and theynalone in their arrogance created and which they believe they are the chosen ones to entitled to live there as their right above that of all other humanity.
Excellent post, thank you.
While this was not true in the past, the problem with world hunger today is not due to any shortage of food. The planet has no problem producing any amount of food required of it. The problem of world hunger is poverty. Poor people around the world cant afford to buy the food they need. The solution is that poor people around the world need to be more productive ( jobs and trade ) so they can BUY food. Farmers will continue to produce what they can sell but if you cant pay for it, you arent getting any.
The problem of world hunger is not even poverty. It is politics.
When people cannot afford food, there always are people charitable enough to give them.
Only politics can prevent charitable person to be able to donate food to those in need
US: Forage protein may not be what it once was
An examination of forage nutritional quality measurements taken for 22 years found a continued decreased in the level of available protein, says researcher… Read
I snipped this from my newsletter at
feednavigator.com
and the same is true of the foods we eat, chem fertilisers simply dont get processed by soil biota to make them as assimilable as natural applications do.
i refer those of you supporting chem ag to read The Albrecht Papers
decades of continual research documented and proven
I know full well that science isn’t a democracy. However, anyone can find a crank paper here and there.
actually, crank paper are at least 95% of the papers.
This excellent article talks about ‘Environmentalists’ without making specific reference as to who these environmentalists are that are propagating their stupid anti farming rubbish. Apart from animal rights groups, are their any individuals or other groups that we can direct the logical arguments to , and try to get them to defend their stupid stance.
I hate to beat a winning horse, but this is just once again the pattern of what happens when you argue with stupid people, and they drag you down to their level by allowing them to beg the question, and thereby forcing you to prove a negative.
This could all be avoided by sticking to the scientific method of forcing the proponent to Bear the burden of proof before responding to them.
Thus once again, it is preaching scientific protocols on both sides that causes the conflict.
Why is food under attack? Very simple. Eco-fascists are anti-human and anything that promotes the comfort, proliferation, or even the survival of the human race is to be destroyed.
So how successful would we have been if CO2 remained at 300 ppm?
Mark W,
When did Showa Denko corporation announce to the world that it was going to be shoving genetically engineered product down the gullets of its customers??:
TELL US WHEN THAT WARNING WAS ISSUED.
https://www.gmoevidence.com/us-tryptophan-disaster-gm-bacteria/
The display of religious faith, by alleged skeptics, towards anything a corporation does in the name of glorious capitalism, is just a little but sickening.
[?? .mod]
Great point! I agree with you to a lot of extent. Perhaps the behemoth expense we while on agriculture only drive home the point that we are just another animal in the food chain whose primary needs include food. mostly. However, technology has always tended to undo itself, and everyday newer, better, faster technology come up. i think the argument is not so much that we are blaming farmers but their practice. Going forward, the discussion should be on reducing resource consumption and on increasing yield sustainably so that we can feed the earth 100 years down the line