Land's End

In this episode of Unconfined, author Michael Grunwald and host Tom Philpott grapple with the future of food in a warming world.   

No Easy Answers: A Conversation About the Future of Food 

By Tom Philpott                                                                                                                                                                    Subscribe to Host Notes

In his new book We Are Eating the Earth: The Race to Fix Our Food System and Save Our Climate, veteran journalist Michael Grunwald argues that the US model of highly regimented, chemical-intensive agriculture—including bunching cows, chickens, and pigs by the thousands in geographically concentrated confinements—provides our only path to a robust and sustainable food future. For him, farming is essentially a necessary evil: We have to eat, but manipulating land to grow our sustenance inherently degrades soil and vaporizes the carbon stored in it, contributing to climate change. The task, made more urgent as global population approaches 10 billion and the climate warms rapidly, is to grow as much food as possible on as little land as possible. Freed from the burden of feeding us, the rest of the land can "rewild" and revert to sequestering carbon undisturbed by the plow. With its relentless emphasis on boosting crop yields, US-style industrial agriculture provides the template for achieving this goal, Greenwald argues.   

In the latest episode of Unconfined, Grunwald and I spar over these ideas. We open on a note of agreement. He devotes the first section of his book to a long discussion of the folly of growing huge amounts of corn for the purpose of turning into car fuel in the form of ethanol. In the mid- and late-2000s, Grunwald and I became acquainted because we were among the few journalists at the national level pushing back against the Renewable Fuel Standard, a bipartisan Congressional push to devote about a third of the vast US corn crop to replacing a small portion of gasoline consumption. In our chat, we commiserate about how even though we were correct about the empty environmental hype around ethanol, the biofuel lobby—composed most powerfully of big agribusiness firms that supply seeds and chemicals to farmers— prevailed in the political arena. Today, US law continues to mandate that a landmass the size of New York State be devoted to growing corn to be burned in our gas tanks, a policy implacably supported by both major political parties. Yet our ethanol program boosts soil erosion and water pollution in the US corn belt; feeds an aquatic dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico; and helped trigger a deforestation surge in Brazil and elsewhere. 

Having visited our narrow area of accord, we moved to our broader points of contention. Our beef, so to speak. For me, Grunwald’s plea for more industrial agriculture rests on the assumption that humanity somehow exists apart from nature, and that our activities can be neatly contained, so that wildlands can flourish unbothered by us. In my view, we exist within nature, and there's no neat boundary around the consequences of what we do. For example, we efficiently concentrate millions of hogs in a few counties of Iowa and North Carolina, a practice that yields enormous quantities of meat. But the air and water fouled by their titanic manure production move far away from the factory farm gate. Viral pathogens move even more freely; and as I point out in the conversation, these hog facilities are ideal generators of novel flu strains that scientists warn will likely trigger the next global pandemic.           

In our chat, Grunwald responds to these concerns by shifting the conversation to what he sees as the consequences of moving away from such ruthlessly intensive meat production. "These are all real problems that I'm not trying to hand-wave away, but agriculture's big job over the next 30 years is, it's going to have to make more food than it's made over the last 12,000 years," he said. And to do so, he repeats more than once, climate change means we can't afford to simply clear the world's remaining forests and put land under the plow. He cites stark math showing that if the world’s farmers don’t slash greenhouse gas emissions, including from land-use change, average global temperatures will rise dangerously. He calls for an urgent and concerted effort to increase crop yields, in hopes that by doing so, these carbon-sucking forests can be spared. 

 "I'd like to see a much greener industrial agriculture that makes less of a mess," he adds. For him, greening industrial agriculture mostly means tech fixes. In his book, he chronicles many possibilities, including an effort to reduce synthetic nitrogen fertilizer use by replacing some of it with nitrogen-fixing microbes. Unfortunately, he finds, that potential solution has yet to pan out; and many others, including the push to cultivate meat at scale in vats, remain years or decades away from viability. All of that aside, he adds: "I should step back and say that what I'm really pushing for is high-yield agriculture." 

My response is that the US agricultural policy has been successfully fixated on just that goal for nearly a century, and much of the world has followed suit. But even as yields have steadily grown, land has stubbornly kept coming under the plow—most catastrophically in Brazil, which has emerged as an industrial-agriculture powerhouse, to this day sacrificing not only chunks of the Amazon Rainforest but even more so a vast biodiverse savanna known as the Cerrado to expand corn and soybean plantations as feed for industrial meat production, despite ever-rising yields. As I show in my book Perilous Bounty, the same set of giant seed, pesticide, fertilizer, meatpacking, and grain-trading firms that hold sway in the US corn belt also loom over Brazil's industrial-agriculture regions. The ever-expanding corn-soybean frontier drives their profit growth. They make their money from land that grows feed for livestock, not wild forests. They're the same crew whose lobbying props up domestic ethanol, which Grunwald despises. In this context, why would steady yield gains over the next 30 years magically translate into spared land? In my view, both in his book and in our chat, Grunwald fails to come up with a convincing response to this trouble spot in his argument, though he does concede that yield gains alone won't do the trick. The imperative is to "produce and protect," he says; but he has much more to say about the first part of that mantra than the second.  

Ultimately, we left the conversation where we started it: agreeing on not much (besides ethanol). But I do think Grunwald is right that climate change and population growth are combining to force an urgent need for an abundant food supply for everyone without fouling water and air, destablizing the climate, destroying soil, and exploiting workers—within our shared terrestrial ecosphere, not in some pretend place where our disturbances can be roped off from nature. On this we do agree: There are no easy answers.