Heat and Serve

Can industrial agriculture withstand climate change? 11

If the fossil fuels don't getcha, the genetics will.

If the fossil fuels don't getcha, the genetics will.
Photo: iStockphoto


In the United States, the clearest signs of climate change so far have been stern words from Al Gore and a few hotter-than-normal summers.

In Greenland, by contrast, global warming has sparked a revolution -- at least, when it comes to agriculture. A recent article in the German magazine Der Spiegel explores the dramatic new opportunities arising for the island's farmers. The article opens with a man tending his potato patch amid the roar of "an iceberg breaking apart, with pieces of it tumbling into the foaming sea." It's some of the first serious crop farming to take place in Greenland since temperatures there plunged in the "Little Ice Age" of the 14th century.

If current warming trends continue, farmers the world over will face conditions that change rapidly and unpredictably. Some niches will open, as in Greenland; others will close or mutate. As we consider the possibilities, it's worth asking whether modern U.S. agriculture techniques, which have conquered much of the globe over the past 40 years, are up to the challenge.

One glaring weak point in our food-production system is its reliance on fossil-fuel energy -- and lots of it.

Conventional farmers look mainly to synthetic fertilizers derived in part from natural gas. Between 1950 -- roughly when U.S.-style agriculture began to spread to the global south under the aegis of the Green Revolution -- and 1998, "worldwide use of fertilizers increased more than tenfold overall and more than fourfold per person," according to a report from the Center for a Livable Future at Johns Hopkins.

Moreover, U.S. agricultural production tends to be highly concentrated in a few areas -- grain in the Midwest, fruits and vegetables in California, the Southwest, and Florida. In the recent E. coli scare surrounding pre-washed, bagged spinach, it came out that three-quarters of the nation's spinach crop hails from California -- and three-quarters of that from the Salinas Valley. That means the food system leans heavily on long-haul travel.

While current information on U.S. "food miles" -- the distance food travels from farm to table -- is scarce, one oft-cited study estimates the average at 1,500 miles. Since that figure hinges on statistics from 1980, the number has more than likely increased. The ever-growing popularity of frozen "convenience" food puts ever more distance between consumers and their sustenance. And globalization means we haul in lots of, say, asparagus from Mexico and garlic from China -- and ship out loads of corn and soy. USDA trade figures [PDF] show steadily rising imports and exports, with both expected to top $60 billion this year.

If, as the vast majority of scientists believe, human consumption of fossil fuel powers the current wave of global warming, it might be time for a serious rethinking of U.S. agricultural methods.

Don't Forget Diversity

Addiction to cheap and dirty fuel sources isn't the food system's only potential weak point. Another is the rapid and stunning loss of biodiversity that has accompanied the rise of industrial agriculture.

Agriculture has always relied on biodiversity to adapt to challenges from pests and diseases. To cite a famous example, potato farmers in Peru -- where the tuber was first domesticated and 3,000 distinct species of potato have been recorded -- have never experienced widespread crop failure, because broad genetic diversity ensured resistance to pests. In mid-19th century Ireland, though, where the genetic basis for potatoes was severely narrower, disaster famously struck.

In the U.S. and Europe, plant breeders have for a century sought to rationalize the unruly biodiversity that has characterized agriculture since its inception 10,000 years ago. Their goal has been to replace traditional species, which show broad variability within a single harvest, with "pure" hybridized varieties that produce highly uniform results.

Their success has been stunning.

In the classic Shattering: Food, Politics, and the Loss of Genetic Diversity, Cary Fowler and Pat Mooney lay out the ravages committed by modern plant breeding on agriculture's genetic heritage. They cite a study showing that 97 percent of fruit and vegetable seed varieties that were commercially available in 1903 had vanished by 1983. While they stress that the figure can be used only as a proxy, since it doesn't account for varieties informally kept vibrant by small-scale farmers and gardeners, the figure is stark nonetheless.

Today, the world's key genetic storehouses are the places where our staples originally came under cultivation: places like Mexico (corn) and the Near East (wheat). These "centers of diversity," clustered in the global south, have been subjected to severe genetic erosion as hybrid varieties from the U.S. and Europe have proliferated. Unlike the robust crops of old -- which used variation to survive pests, disease, drought, and other scourges -- hybridized cultivars depend on copious doses of fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, and irrigation.

Can such a convoluted system withstand the coming crises? As Jared Diamond showed in Collapse, history offers many examples of societies that faced rapid climate change and environmental damage. For some, food-production methods proved durable; in other cases, food production faltered and societies collapsed.

For a glimpse of things to come, consider last week's New York Times chronicle of India's water woes: "The country is running through its groundwater so fast that scarcity could threaten whole regions ..., drive people off the land, and ultimately stunt the country's ability to farm and feed its people." (The Times didn't address the effect of massive Green Revolution irrigation projects on India's increasingly fragile water table, but Vandana Shiva, the country's great champion of small-scale farming and local autonomy, has.)

India, already parched, seems distinctly unready for the challenges of global warming. And given its own excesses, the United States, global center of industrial agriculture, seems vulnerable too. While environmentalists have focused the bulk of their efforts to combat global warming on seeking alternatives to a petroleum-hungry transportation system, our equally reckless food system deserves more attention. In the end, its salvation may lie in the hands of a group long scorned by economists and development professionals: small-scale farmers using traditional seed-saving and fertility techniques.

Grist food editor Tom Philpott farms and cooks at Maverick Farms, a sustainable-agriculture nonprofit and small farm in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. Follow my Twitter feed; contact me at tphilpott[at]grist[dot]org.

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  1. Biodiversivist's avatar

    Biodiversivist Posted 6:14 am
    04 Oct 2006

    The beauty of arguments like theseis that, given time, they will move consumers in a direction that will favor food grown in more envrionmentally benign manners, and that is happening. They must be well-written and well argued to do that, as this one is. Producers will meet that demand. It is also a free market approach to change.

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  2. wiscidea Posted 7:14 am
    04 Oct 2006

    GMOsIt might be time for GMO people and organic people to work through their differences. It should be possible to engineer food plants to cope with environmental change and do things like fix their own nitrogen while preserving crop diversity and reducing chemical inputs. It should also be possible to ensure farmers are not further abused. If we could discuss this matter we might stop the collapse of civilization and reduce environmental degradation at the same time.
    Why reject useful technology because of a few bad apples... or kernels of corn?
    I'd enjoy organizing a group of GMO and organic advocates interested in figuring this out.

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  3. Green Granny's avatar

    Green Granny Posted 12:31 pm
    04 Oct 2006

    All about moneyThe beauty of GM foods for the Monsantos of the world is double income.  They get money for herbicide resistant crops and for the herbicides.  As long as our subsidies and attitudes are what they are, GM foods will be about more money for chemical companies that also produce seed.
    It'd be like big tobacco owning the latest lung cancer drug producer.

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  4. wiscidea Posted 2:32 pm
    04 Oct 2006

    Not all about moneyNot all transgenes are owned by corporations. Universities own them as well. Others are public domain. And putting the genes in plants does not necessarily yield double income for the Monsantos of the world.
    For example, academic institutions are collaborating to transfer a gene confering resistance to late blight (the disease triggering the Irish Potato Famine, though the ultimate causes were more complex) to cultivars of potatoes grown in SE Asia... local cultivars suitable for the climate and accepted by the consumers in those countries. The resulting transgenic potatoes would be propagated like all potatoes, vegetatively -- no terminator genes.
    Small scale farmers could benefit economically from increased yields, improved potato quality, and savings from reduced fungicide sprays. Environmentally, soil conditions could improve from a decline in the use of fungicide sprays. We are not talking about selling herbicide-resistant crops and then the herbicide. We are talking about lowering financial and environmental costs. Yet, there are people strongly opposed to this technology.
    Consider the options... (1) GM crops that lower costs, reduce need to destroy native habitat for farming, and reduce chemical use, (2) expanding agricultural land by cutting down rain forests and using greater chemical and energy inputs to extract food from marginal land, or (3) letting people starve.
    I prefer the first option in conjunction with education and efforts to stabilize population levels. And it is nothing like tobacco companies owning the treatment for lung cancer.

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  5. David Roberts's avatar

    David Roberts Posted 4:30 pm
    04 Oct 2006

    On this subject ...... I direct your attention to the nascent but intriguing open source biotechnology.

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  6. biofuelsimon Posted 11:49 pm
    04 Oct 2006

    sustainable farmingIt strikes me that people who are pro-biofuels have a couple of paradoxes to overcome. Firstly, I am not sure about thier long term sustainability, there is a need for fossil fuels to make fertilisers to maintain yields from year to year. It may be possible to rotate crops to maintain the output of biofuel-generating crops to do this, and from a biodiversity point of view desirable...
    If you would like to see more of my thoughts please come to the Biotank Blog

    http://www.icis.com/blogs/biofuels/

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  7. Bobbi Katsanis Posted 3:26 am
    10 Oct 2006

    GMOs are not the answerWhy not? Because nature can handle changes better than humans can. In places where farmers save seed, a field represents a certain amount of natural diversity. Within it, there are genes to deal with almost any eventuality, including drought, heat, heavy rains, etc., any of those genese might have a chance to shine if certain conditions prevail. A genetically engineered crop is just the opposite: every plant in the field is identical; there is no storehouse of possibilities. In fact, when crops created by technology fail, it is inevitably back to the diversity of landraces that we must turn. Monoculture forces out diversity and makes our chances for survival slimmer.

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  8. Bobbi Katsanis Posted 3:29 am
    10 Oct 2006

    BiofuelsBiofuels are a separate topic. We absolutely cannot afford to grow our way out of the energy crisis. The land is needed for food. But biofuels can be "harvested" from used restaurant cooking oil, for instance, tons of which are thrown out every day. Will this be sufficient to meet our transportation needs? Of course not. We are going to have to cut back drastically, which includes, as this article points out, eliminating our reliance on foods hauled long distances from the field to our table. In fact, food transportation uses dramatically more fossil fuel than personal transport.

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  9. CyberBrook's avatar

    CyberBrook Posted 4:29 am
    10 Oct 2006

    "it's the meat, stupid!"Nearly 3/4 of major crops, such as corn, wheat, and soy, in the US are fed to animals. The Amazon rainforest is being cleared to pasture cows and to grow genetically engineered soybeans to overfeed those cows destined to become meat for overfed Americans. We need to get out of the unsustainable, unhealthy, uncompassionate, ugly, dangerous, disease-spewing, regressive meat racket.
    Another Inconvenient Truth

    http://www.eatkind.net/inconvenient.htm
    EarthSave: A New Global Warming Strategy

    http://www.earthsave.org/globalwarming.htm
    Another Inconvenient Truth: Meat is a Global Warming Issue

    http://www.emagazine.com/view/?3312
    ABC News: Meat-Eaters Aiding Global Warming?

    http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/TenWays/story?id=2119267...
    Greenpeace: On Your Plate

    http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/news/green-living-guide/on-...
    Fight Global Warming by Going Vegetarian

    http://goveg.com/environment-globalwarming.asp?int=weekly...
    Vegan diets healthier for planet, people than meat diets

    http://www-news.uchicago.edu/releases/06/060413.diet.shtm...
    The SUV in the Pantry

    http://www.organicconsumers.org/btc/gasfood112105.cfm
    Cut Global Warming by Becoming Vegetarian

    http://www.physorg.com/news4998.html
    Five Food Choices for a Healthy Planet

    http://www.veg.ca/issues/enviro-5reasons.html
    and
    Eco-Eating: Eating as if the Earth Matters

    http://brook.com/veg

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  10. wiscidea Posted 7:09 am
    24 Oct 2006

    question regarding sustainable organic farmingI appreciate CyberBrook's post and look forward to exploring the links and CyberBrook's website. I am an omnivore, but feel that it is addiction more than a chosen lifestyle. Before I ask my question, I want to point out that I've used vegetarian cookbooks, eat vegetarian meals several times each week, and don't like to think about animals dying for my enjoyment. If I had to kill for meat I would become a vegetarian on the spot. But I just cannot resist beef when it is available.
    So the following question has nothing to do with advocating the consumption of meat or even justifying the consumption of meat.
    Is it possible to engage in sustainable agriculture, year after year after year, by removing animals from the equation? Didn't farms rely on animal manure before the advent of chemical fertilizers? Farmers around my home spread manure on their fields. I assume this is not only a way of disposing of it, but also enriches the soil and reduces chemical fertilizer use. Can dairy cows supply the nitrogen for sustainable organic agriculture or will crop rotation be the primary means for building soil?
    Thank you for any information you can provide.

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  11. wiscidea Posted 7:17 am
    30 Oct 2006

    What about hybrid seed technology?Is it correct to assume that you are also opposed to hybrid seed technology...  just crossing two independent varieties for increased productivity? The seeds from the hybrid plants are not particularly useful for growing another crop.
    Are you taking the objection to GMOs one step further and would prefer that our food production depend soley on open pollinated varieties of plants?
    In that case, we will have to arrange for a dramatic decrease in human population or add every single acre of the remaining natural landscape to the area cultivated for food and fiber production. I'm not sure how this protects the natural environment.

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