With Skip Hyberg, and Andrew Manale
In his guest essay published in the New York Times on December 15, 2024, journalist Michael Grunwald identifies a number of important aspects of the future of agriculture, particularly the role of intensive, high-yield production systems in protecting forests, wetlands, and grasslands from being lost to agricultural uses. Certainly, achieving greater productivity per unit of cropland will require less land to provide food for billions of people. Unfortunately, Mr. Grunwald embraces the false dichotomy that agriculture is either intensive or environmentally benign, acknowledging no middle ground in his constricted view of global agriculture.
Mr. Grunwald uses several fallacious assumptions to make his case including: extending the role of the first several thousands of years of agriculture on reducing soil carbon stocks into the future, an error he excuses by pointing to the difficulties in measuring soil carbon; ignoring our better understanding of soil processes to develop innovations in tillage practices and conservation technology that increase soil carbon and overall soil health; overlooking the role of new precision agriculture technologies such as spatial positioning to enable farmers to manage their cropland and optimize input use by square meter rather than by field; and disregarding conservation measures such as saturated filter strips, constructed wetlands, and prairie strips that can mitigate fertilizer runoff and other offsite ill effects from intensive agriculture.
He also asserts that carbon-smart practices only achieve gains in soil carbon content by increasing use of nitrogen fertilizer, which increases greenhouse gas emissions by agriculture.This claim is not accurate—long-time practitioners of key crop conservation practices, such as reduced tillage and cover cropping, report that the improved soil health in their fields that they enjoy after a few years of the new practices in place allowed them to reduce their application of many inputs, including both fertilizer and herbicides, as well as reduced fuel usage due to fewer machine passes through those farmers’ fields.
Looking at a total of 16 case studies conducted by American Farmland Trust across ten states on farm savings from use of soil health practices such as reduced tillage, cover cropping, and nutrient management between 2019 and 2024, farmers recorded average savings of about $60 per acre from using those practices (dropping the highest and lowest figures reported), typically the result of a combination of reduced input costs and modestly higher yields.
In light of the current challenges associated with global warming, adopting agricultural practices that conserve soil are especially important. Soils are not only the third largest reservoir of carbon on earth (after mineral and ocean reserves) but also a principal medium where carbon in the atmosphere can be removed and placed into long-term storage. Given the substantial reductions in soil carbon from past agricultural practices and other land use changes there is a great opportunity to reverse these losses while reducing atmospheric carbon. Agriculture restoring carbon back into our highly depleted soils captures and locks in greenhouse gases, thus mitigating global warming. At the least, adopting climate smart agricultural practices buys time to develop and implement energy sources less dependent upon fossil fuels.
A significant number of American farmers have already adopted such practices.According to the 2022 Census of Agriculture, farmers used no-till or reduced till cultivation practices on 202.2 million acres, while conventional or intensive tillage was used on only 73.5 million acres in that year.The share of acres farmed using conventional tillage actually fell by eight percent between 2017 and 2022.
A former reporter for the Wall Street Journal, Roger Thurow, has written a number of excellent books in recent years that look at global food security issues in depth.His most recent book, Against the Grain, which was published last year, looks at nearly the same question as Mr. Grunwald but comes to a very different conclusion.Mr. Thurow found that some farmers in the United States and around the world that he interviewed have found ways to produce food in ways that help improve the natural environment rather than degrade it.
For example, he interviewed Ethiopian farmers located in the Great Rift Valley who had years ago denuded their land of trees to plant corn (maize) in search of quick profits, but now are trying to restore the land. This has included protecting and replanting the local acacia forest, building terraces, and planting a diversity of crops to help improve the soils, including beans, onions, cassava, cabbage, and sorghum, rather than mono-cropping cash crops. Since their restoration work began with the support of a World Food Program project, the wildlife and pollinating creatures (such as bees and butterflies) have begun to return and their soil is starting to retain more water.
In the United States, Thurow interviewed a young Kansas farmer who has turned to planting a variety of perennial crops such as Kernza after his family had planted winter wheat for several generations. In making this change, he recognized that his previous cultivation practices had been taking a heavy toll on his fields, resulting in gullies and significant soil erosion that was degrading the fertility of the land. The farmer, Brandon Kaufman, believes that the new crops and practices are helping to ameliorate these damages.
We do not have to accept the pessimism that Mr. Grunwald reflects in his essay. Agriculture has always faced the challenge of producing more without harming the resources upon which it depends. “We can do better” was and is still the watchwords that guide modern farming practices.Protecting the soil must be the focus whether the enterprise is industrial or an organic farming operation.In this regard, there is no dichotomy.
