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.”
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