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PORTSIDE CULTURE

SORRY, BUT THIS IS THE FUTURE OF FOOD  
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Michael Grunwald
December 13, 2024
New York Times
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_ Environmentalists and even agribusinesses and food conglomerates
talk about supplanting industrial methods with kinder and gentler
“regenerative agriculture” that revives the pastoral wisdom of our
ancestors. _

Europe and the United States are flirting with back-to-nature
agriculture, Illustration by Sam Whitney/The New York Times; source
photographs by wwing, Fotoforce, Clara Bastian, DaydreamsGirl and
Mercedes Rancaño Otero, via Getty Images

 

This is the final essay in What to Eat on a Burning Planet, a series
exploring bold ideas to secure our food supply. Read more about this
project in a note from Eliza Barclay, Opinion’s climate editor.

“Industrial agriculture” is a phrase used to signify “bad,”
evoking toxic chemicals, monoculture crops, confined animals, the
death of the small family farm and all kinds of images people don’t
like to associate with their food. Factory farms are a constant target
of environmentalists, documentarians, animal rights activists,
spiritual leaders like Pope Francis and the Indian mystic Sadhguru,
and leftist politicians like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie
Sanders.

Even the manosphere podcaster Joe Rogan has called for banning them,
while Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Donald Trump’s pick for health
secretary, has blamed industrial agriculture for making us sick and
fat. The United Nations has pointed out that it does $3 trillion in
damage to the global environment a year.

Agriculture in general does have real environmental downsides. It’s
the leading driver of water pollution and shortages, deforestation and
biodiversity loss. It generates one-fourth of the greenhouse gases
that heat up the planet.

And it’s eating the earth. It has already overrun about two of every
five acres of land on the planet, and farmers are on track to clear an
additional dozen Californias worth of forest by 2050. That would be a
disaster for nature and the climate, because the carbon dioxide
released by converting wild landscapes into farms and pastures is
already the most damaging source of agricultural emissions, worse than
methane from cow burps or nitrous oxide from fertilizer.

But industrial agriculture in particular has one real upside: It
produces enormous amounts of food on relatively modest amounts of
land. And that will be agriculture’s most vital job in the coming
decades. The world will need even more enormous amounts of food by
2050, about 50 percent more calories to adequately feed nearly 10
billion people. The inconvenient truth is that factory farms are the
best hope for producing the food we will need without obliterating
what’s left of our natural treasures and vaporizing their carbon
into the atmosphere.

It’s true that if we ate less meat and grew fewer biofuels, we would
reduce agriculture’s hunger for land. But the reality is we show no
signs of doing that — meat consumption is only projected to rise in
the coming years.

So we’ll have to make more food per acre instead of using more acres
to make food. And that’s what industrial agriculture does well. Its
fertilizers and irrigation systems turbocharge production. Its
pesticides and herbicides kill bugs and weeds that stunt crop growth.
Its GPS-enabled tractors help farmers plant high-yield seeds precisely
where they want. And its factory farms — which exploit modern
advances in genetics, nutrition and veterinary care to cram trillions
of calories into billions of animals — manufacture prodigious
quantities of relatively cheap commodities.

That, after all, is what factories do.

Ideally, Big Ag could make even more food with even less land while
doing less to harm the environment. But these days, the politically
correct stance toward Big Ag is not to reform it but to replace it.
Environmentalists such as Al Gore and Jane Goodall, foodies like Alice
Waters and Michael Pollan and even agribusinesses and food
conglomerates like General Mills and Danone talk about supplanting
industrial methods with kinder and gentler “regenerative
agriculture” that revives the pastoral wisdom of our ancestors. The
Biden administration has blasted more than $20 billion into
“climate-smart agriculture” focused on regenerative practices. Mr.
Kennedy has called for a Trump-led regenerative revolution.

But that’s a formula for agriculture to devour even more of the
earth. Old MacDonald-style farms where soil is nurtured with love and
animals have names rather than numbers may sound environmentally
friendly. But their artisanal grains and grass-fed beef are worse for
nature than chemical-drenched corn and feedlot-fattened beef because
they require much more land for each calorie they produce. In 2021,
Sri Lanka’s president banned agricultural chemicals in an effort to
force its farmers to go organic, vowing to end industrial farming and
get in “sync with nature.” Then farm yields crashed, plunging the
country into a food crisis and forcing it to import calories it used
to grow itself.

Europe and the United States are flirting with back-to-nature
agriculture, too, but that would ultimately just outsource more
production, pollution and deforestation to the developing world. Big
industrial agriculture has plenty of shortcomings, too, but most of
them have less to do with “big” or “industrial” than
“agriculture,” which has always made a mess.

We tend to think of our transformation of the earth as a modern
phenomenon wrought by industrial advances such as private jets and
factory farms, but recent scholarship suggests it actually began with
the invention of agriculture about 12,000 years ago. Early farmers
didn’t need tractors or chemicals to reshape their environment. They
subdued nature with fire and the ax, converting wilderness into crops
and pastures that supported a much larger population. By the dawn of
the fossil-fuel era, they had already cleared a South America worth of
wilderness.

Scientists have used ice cores and ancient pollen samples to show that
preindustrial farming and the deforestation that made room for it also
changed the climate, likely emitting enough carbon to avert another
ice age. Indigenous people deforested so much of the Americas to grow
crops that when they mostly died out after European contact, forests
on their abandoned farmland grew back so quickly and reabsorbed so
much carbon that it created measurable global cooling. Their
disappearance helped nature reclaim some territory, however briefly.

Agriculture didn’t change much until the 1960s, when the agronomist
Norman Borlaug bred a higher-yielding variety of wheat. That was the
beginning of the Green Revolution, a new era of disruption that
brought farmers chemical pesticides, powerful fertilizers, advanced
automation, large-scale irrigation and other innovations that helped
triple their crop and livestock yields in half a century.

The Green Revolution made big industrial agriculture possible, and its
productivity saved billions of people from malnutrition and
starvation. It did create environmental problems — soil erosion, air
and water pollution from pesticides and herbicides, mountains of
manure leaching off overcrowded feedlots. But even though its soybeans
and cattle have often invaded forests and wetlands, its higher yields
have spared billions of additional acres of the planet’s ecosystems
from destruction, by making more food on existing farmland. The Green
Revolution didn’t end deforestation, but few forests would still be
standing without it.

The key point, obscured by our cultural nostalgia for the quaint
farmsteads of yesteryear, is that old-fashioned agriculture made much
more of a mess when it replaced nature than intensive industrial
agriculture makes when it replaces old-fashioned agriculture. Every
farm, even the scenic ones with red barns and rolling hills that
artists paint and writers sentimentalize, is a kind of environmental
crime scene, an echo of whatever carbon-rich wilderness it once
replaced.

Dirk Rice’s great-great-grandfather was one of the pioneers who
converted the Grand Prairie of east-central Illinois from a soggy
expanse of marshy grasslands into a breadbasket with their bare hands.
Mr. Rice still grows corn and soybeans on 200 acres of the prairie his
ancestors wrestled away from Mother Nature, but that ancestral land
now makes up just one-tenth of his farm; the only farmers he knows
with 200 acres or less work full-time jobs in town. He installs drains
with a laser-guided tile plow, works his fields with a 320-horsepower
tractor, and grows remarkable amounts of grain.

“Back in my great-great-grandfather’s day, men were men and
horsepower was horse power,” Mr. Rice told me. “Got to say,
though, we get better yields.”

The story of the Midwestern Corn Belt, and of agriculture throughout
the developed world, is a story of steadily increasing efficiency and
scale toward mega-yielding megafarms. When I visited his farm a few
years ago, Mr. Rice showed me his father’s tricycle-red Farmall 400
tractor, a technological marvel from before the Green Revolution. It
was about the size of a Kia Soul. Then he showed me his John Deere
combine, which weighed as much as 10 Kia Souls. It looked like a
Zamboni on steroids, with a yield monitor on a touch-screen and a
grain cart that held more corn than a semi truck.

“My grandfather ruined his shoulder shucking corn,” Mr. Rice said.
“This thing picks corn, strips it, sorts it, weighs it and measures
the moisture content of its kernels. And this is probably the smallest
one John Deere makes.”

That combine helps Mr. Rice harvest 220 bushels of corn per acre, five
times the yields his grandfather got. And his operation is typical for
the area; I visited a nearby corn grower with an even more advanced
500-horsepower combine who gets 25 percent higher yields. The more
grain their farms can grow for the world, the less new farmland will
need to be wrestled away from Mother Nature on the other side of the
planet.

So we’re going to need to increase yields a lot. And since most of
the Green Revolution’s advances have already spread across most of
the planet, that will be much harder than it was the first time.
Meanwhile, climate change itself threatens to drag down yields as
extreme weather intensifies and pests and diseases invade new regions.

Somehow, though, our farms are going to have to become even more
productive — especially our industrial animal farms. Just as Willie
Sutton robbed banks because that’s where the money was, any strategy
to reduce agriculture’s footprint will have to focus on higher-yield
meat because three-fourths of agricultural land is now used to feed
livestock.

Steve Gabel knows beef has a bad reputation, which is why an “I 🖤
Beef” sign greets visitors to his Magnum Feedyard in northeastern
Colorado. He also knows factory feedlots where multitudes of confined
cattle get stuffed full of grain before getting shipped off to
slaughter have an even worse reputation, which is why he wanted to
show me real industrial beef production. He drove me to the middle of
his outdoor lot, amid a black and brown sea of ear-tagged cattle, and
rolled down the windows of his mud-splattered Chevy Silverado.

“You hear that?” asked Mr. Gabel, a gruff prairie lifer with a
white goatee, chewing a toothpick and staring me down. I wasn’t
going to lie to him.

“Uh, I don’t hear anything,” I said.

“Exactly!” he shot back. “You’re surrounded by 25,000 animals.
You think any of them were mistreated today?”

Feedlot cattle generally do get treated better than factory-farmed
chickens or pigs, in part because they spend most of their lives
grazing grass before getting sent to operations like Magnum. But Mr.
Gabel’s point was less about animal welfare than about efficiency,
his North Star.

Mistreating the “beef animals,” his unemotional term for his
factors of production, is inefficient. Stressing them out: also
inefficient. Even making them walk through mud or manure to their
troughs is inefficient, which is why he was building a
multimillion-dollar drainage system to keep his pens dry, and why he
had tractors tricked out like snowplows to scrape manure into piles.
He sends riders on horseback into every pen every day to make sure
every heifer and steer is healthy and comfortable.

“If I don’t create the friendliest possible environment for the
animals, they might gain 4.1 pounds a day instead of 4.5. That’s
money out of my pocket!” he said. “We maximize our efficiency, so
they can maximize their genetic potential.”

Not only is Mr. Gabel’s industrial efficiency better for his bottom
line, it’s better for the planet. Cattle are terribly inefficient
converters of their feed into our food. They use about 10 times as
much land as chicken or pork, and nearly 100 times as much as plant
protein. But that makes beef an inviting target for reducing land use
and other environmental impacts. And while industrial pork and chicken
operations are already so ruthlessly efficient that it may not be
biologically possible to get pigs or poultry much fatter much faster,
beef still has room for improvement.

In general, beef from cattle that spend their last few months eating
grain in feedlots is better for the environment than supposedly green,
grass-fed beef from cattle that spend their entire lives in pastures
— partly because grass-fed cattle take longer to reach slaughter
weight, so they burp more methane and use more water, but mostly
because grain-finished cattle use less land per pound of meat. And Mr.
Gabel has reduced the amount of feed he needs to grow a pound of beef
by a third since 1994, so his cattle use even less land.

Part of his secret is using “Moneyball”-style analytics to
optimize protein production. He told me without checking notes that he
uses 10.23 gallons of water per head per day, his finishing feed is
72.5 percent corn, and his on-site mill converts kernels into flakes
at 208 degrees Fahrenheit, increasing their digestibility to 95
percent.

He seemed to know about every cow on his lot with a case of foot rot
or diarrhea. He sounded like the busybody mayor of a town whose
residents all had hooves, hides and execution dates at a nearby JBS
slaughterhouse.

But even though Magnum is a family business Mr. Gabel runs with his
wife and two children, it’s Big Ag, too, growing tenfold in three
decades, unlocking efficiencies through economies of scale.

Originally, it held only 3,500 cattle — not enough to justify an
on-site mill, costly drainage projects or state-of-the-art manure
lagoons that limit its pollution. Now Mr. Gabel has veterinary,
nutritional and environmental consultants, a hospital with electronic
medical records for every cow that passes through his property, and
10,000 acres of corn and alfalfa fields where he can spread his
manure. Today, Magnum is in the top 1 percent of U.S. cattle
operations, and that top 1 percent feeds half of U.S. cattle.

“Being big doesn’t make us evil,” Mr. Gabel said. “It makes us
efficient.”

Beef’s inherent inefficiency makes it worse for the climate than
other foods, but Mr. Gabel’s focus on efficiency makes his
high-yield beef better for the climate than other low-yield beef. If
we’re going to keep stuffing our faces with skirt steaks and Quarter
Pounders, factory farms can help reduce the damage of our diets.

It would be lovely if we could have guilt-free beef, if our diets
didn’t do any damage. That’s the fantasy the regenerative movement
pushes: By farming in harmony with nature, we can sequester billions
of tons of carbon in our soils, transforming agriculture from an
environmental problem to a climate solution.

“Carbon farming” is the hottest trend in agriculture, backed by
Mr. Kennedy and Mr. Gore, celebrities such as Jason Momoa and Gisele
Bündchen, the United Nations and the World Bank, and even
agribusinesses like Archer Daniels Midland, Tyson, Bayer and Cargill
that want to look green. Farmers who plant cover crops and reduce
their tillage are selling credits on the carbon market to companies
looking to offset their emissions, while regenerative brands such as
TruBeef claim their cattle have no impact on the climate.

But carbon farming has been wildly oversold as a climate solution.
Soil carbon is incredibly difficult to measure, monitor and keep
underground, and there’s little evidence that Mr. Biden’s
“climate-smart” efforts to scale up regenerative practices like
no-till are actually climate-smart. Storing more carbon in soils turns
out to require adding more nitrogen to soils — and adding nitrogen
usually warms the climate.

Unfortunately, there’s no magic solution to the problem of
agriculture. We need it to make our food, and it can’t do that
without using some land and doing some damage. But the world already
spends more than $300 billion a year on subsidies, tax breaks and
other handouts to farmers, and it could spend that money in
climate-friendlier ways.

A coalition of philanthropies — including the Rockefeller
Foundation, which financed the work by Mr. Borlaug that set off the
Green Revolution — has called for the world to spend $4.3 trillion
over the next decade to transition away from industrial agriculture.
But what if that kind of money was deployed to help finance a new
Green Revolution that was truly green?

Governments could encourage all kinds of land-sparing and
emissions-reducing approaches, whether or not they jibe with our
cultural stereotypes of wholesome farming. Hundreds of startups are
using genetic engineering tools like CRISPR to reprogram crops for
higher yields, better resistance to pests, fungi and disease, and
higher tolerance of heat, drought and floods.

Terviva, a startup in Alameda, Calif., has commercialized a super-tree
called pongamia that produces soybean-like seeds with higher yields on
lousy land. Pivot Bio in Berkeley, Calif., developed an alternative
fertilizer that uses genetically edited microbes instead of chemicals
to feed nitrogen to crops. Boston-based GreenLight Biosciences
harnessed the RNA tech behind the Covid vaccines for a biopesticide
that constipates crop-killing potato beetles to death without
poisoning the soil. And in Brazil, I visited crop-and-cattle ranches
that integrated regenerative farming and grazing practices with
conventional industrial practices to produce immense yields that have
helped spare the Amazon.

The public sector can help accelerate all those innovations, and can
help spread the original Green Revolution to countries left behind.
But carrots alone won’t relieve the pressure on nature. Denmark
recently unveiled sweeping new reforms that include a very big stick:
a nationwide tax on agricultural emissions. The revenues will be
earmarked to help its already efficient farmers get even more
efficient, and eventually restore nearly one-fifth of its farmland to
forests and wetlands, which is why it attracted support from
Denmark’s agricultural as well as environmental lobbies.

Of course, Denmark already had some of the world’s strictest climate
laws, and was decarbonizing the rest of its economy so fast that its
farmers were under unusually intense pressure to start doing their
part. Most of the world isn’t Denmark. Farmers elsewhere in Europe
have blockaded major roads with tractors and piles of manure to bully
politicians into reversing green regulations. Mr. Trump has also made
it clear that he also intends to roll back Democratic climate
policies; it’s much less clear whether he shares Mr. Kennedy’s
interest in reducing industrial agriculture’s impacts.

The goal should be to produce more and protect more. Rich countries
that already deforested their arable land long ago should help poor
countries improve their yields and protect their own forests, but the
money should flow only on the condition that the forests are actually
protected.

The developed world can also attach strings to its own agricultural
subsidies, withholding aid from farmers who mistreat animals and
workers, overuse antibiotics or flout environmental regulations. The
largest 6 percent of American farms manufacture three-fourths of our
food, and factory farms produce almost all our animal protein; it’s
unrealistic to expect them to go away, but maybe in exchange for all
the money we throw at them, they could do less harm.

What the world really needs is a vibe shift. Most people who don’t
farm don’t think much about agriculture, and we’ve fallen into a
trap of assuming there’s virtuous agriculture and evil agriculture,
just like clean energy and dirty energy. Instead, we should think of
all farming as a necessary evil. It makes our food and it makes a
mess. We should try to confine it, so that it doesn’t keep
overrunning nature.

But there’s no point in demonizing the industrial farmers who make
the most food. We should just insist that they make less mess.

Michael Grunwald is a journalist and the author of the forthcoming
book “We Are Eating the Earth.”

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the
editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our
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