Our approach to food generation must change — the corporate industrialism of Big Ag has failed us and will only get worse in the challenging world it‘s helped to bring about, while the corporate industrialism of Big Food is doling out by-products as food and sickening people around the world. Is technology going to save us or offer us more of the same? Is it possible to feed the world with small local farms or have we passed that point?

Note to readers: This is a long post more easily read on a larger screen or directly from the website: https://theprinciplesofbeing.com/2023/09/30/the-future-of-food-factory-or-farm/

It’s a combination made in hell. At the industrial level, both food growers and food manufacturers focus on profit to the detriment of the environment and the health of the people. World hunger and disease continue to escalate as crop yields and food security continue to fall. All of this is despite massive funding for “agricultural and food improvement” and “hunger reduction” programs by the Gates Foundation and others. Obesity and diabetes are on the rise right alongside starvation in the poorest countries. In the wealthiest countries, obesity and other health issues afflict all economic strata. At the same time, the amount of agricultural land around the world is contracting due to population growth and land degradation (soil erosion, loss of nutrients, salinization of the soil, carbon decline within the soil, and decline of vegetation). The total land surface decline is estimated at 38% which has reduced the productivity of about one quarter of the planet’s land surface. More than 140,000 chemicals and pesticides have been created since 1950, only 7500 of which have been tested for toxicity and 5000 of which are widely used around the globe. Further, the global food system is responsible for about 30% of global energy consumption and emits more than one-third of global greenhouse gases. How on earth did we get here? And where are we going in terms of what we’ll eat?

The Green Revolution

If we start with the growing of food, the so-called Green Revolution begun in the 1950s can be taken as a definitive global departure point from the way agriculture had been done for thousands of years. This story is well-told in Charles C. Mann’s book “The Wizard and the Prophet” but a few salient points will suffice here.

In the early 1950s, American plant researcher Norman Borlaug was in Mexico working to develop disease-resistant varieties of wheat in support of peasant farmers. Finally achieving success, by the early 1960s almost all of the wheat grown in Mexico came from Borlaug’s two most-preferred varieties. Together they tripled the annual wheat harvest in Mexico. Within the next decade, and in addition to the Americas, India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan were all growing Borlaug’s wheat. What became known as the Green Revolution was believed to have averted famines and saved over a billion lives. In 1970, Norman Borlaug was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

In the decades that followed, the many downsides of the Green Revolution became clear. The wheat Borlaug developed required intensive irrigation and copious amounts of synthetic nitrogen fertilizer produced through fossil fuels. The extremely uniform Borlaug varieties of the Green Revolution meant a monoculture of plants that were completely lacking in diversity. Created to be genetically identical, their consistency ensured higher yield, efficiency in harvesting, and conformity to specification for industry purchasers. What was lost, and still is today, is nutritional value and flavor.

The Green Revolution provided the world with more calories but less nutrition and a long-term cost to the environment as well as plant diversity. Borlaug himself had foreseen this. He saw the Green Revolution as a stop-gap measure lasting no more than 20 to 30 years. Sixty years later the intensive, industrial approach has cleared forests, depleted the soil, polluted and drained waterways, and weakened food diversity. Even higher yields can no longer be counted on.

Of roughly 8 billion people alive today, at least 1 billion are starving. One in ten people currently lack access to clean water. How will the planet support what’s needed by 2050 in terms of access to safe and sufficient food and clean water? And how will the planet continue to support humanity’s increasing energy needs while emissions from fossil-fuel consumption has created a change in climate that, coupled with destructive agro-business practices, is already making more land unproductive and much of it uninhabitable? 

Proponents of Big Ag point out that in the 1940s roughly half of the human population around the world was malnourished, but today the population has tripled and malnourishment is down to 10 percent. They associate this dramatic decrease with technological advancement in diesel-fueled agricultural machinery, synthetic fertilizer, and genetic enhancement to seed. And they are equally certain that technology will address the present and future challenges faced by humanity when it comes to food.

Those who see the Green Revolution as having been detrimental put forth several counter arguments. First, a case is pretty easily made that more than half of the world’s population today is malnourished. They may not all be starving but they are definitely not healthy by standard definitions. Second, if somewhere between 650 million and a billion people on the planet truly are starving, it’s hard to consider our collective story as a successful one.

The figures given regarding 2050 population and food consumption are in constant contention. Many wealthy countries are now in the position of negative growth rate, while most poorer countries have increasing birth rates with some expected to continue to increase throughout this century. Infant mortality is higher in many of these poorer countries but it is not at a level expected to offset the growing birth rate. Despite a sense by many that human population is on the verge of decline, with all factors taken into account the global population is still expected to reach approximately 10 billion by 2050. What is not taken into account is that the amount of food consumed by most of those people is also growing.

In the second half of the 20th century, the Green Revolution brought an increase in food that exceeded the increase in population growth. This caused the price of food to fall and per capita consumption to increase. This was most obvious in wealthy countries but soon enough it was the case in more countries worldwide. In China in 1961, the average person ate 1427 calories per day. In 2019, the average person was eating 3375 calories per day. Food consumption had increased 237%. India saw a 126% increase in consumption over that same timeframe. Crucially, this would indicate the need to double global food production by 2050. By all accounts, this is not possible given the state of our collective global ecosystems. And because our food systems are managed by commercial interests, we can’t expect that correspondingly urgent efforts will be made to tackle this challenge.

The impending food production crisis is somewhat confounding when we factor in the current reality that global food production is greater than what is needed to feed everyone. The United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) reported that the global food supply in 2019 was capable of providing 2963 calories per person daily, well above the 1800 minimum calories required. This represents an increase of 376% since the 1960s and is largely a result of the Green Revolution. Given the doubling in population over that time, this is a 30% increase in food supply per person. So why is anyone starving?

It is the unequal distribution and waste that fosters hunger and unnecessary, but real, food insecurity. Roughly one quarter of the world’s children suffer stunted growth from hunger and malnutrition. Fully 40% of member states in the United Nations are dealing with starvation, and this number has increased every year for the past seven years. For the many reasons being experienced around the world, these defects in our food system will only worsen. As the emphasis on efficiency and profit continues, the reduction in buffer stocks of food staples, soil depletion and desertification as well as pollution of water sources from poor agricultural practices, drought and flood from climate changes, and breakdowns in longer international supply-chains lead food scarcity experts to assert that the world is now reaching the biophysical limits of food production.

In his recent book “Breaking Together,” sociologist and professor at the University of Cumbria Jem Bendell maintains that foregoing certain kinds of foods and better sharing of what we produce could help us through disruption to the food supply without experiencing more extreme upheaval or even collapse. “However,” he adds, “none of the commercial or governmental organizations at [the] national or international level have any mandate or mechanism for such an aim to be primary and to determine food distribution.”

Because the commercial interests of efficiency and profit persist despite growing threats, technology is the default hope for many who are concerned about the future of food production. These hopes are heightened for those who are honest about the third reason the achievements of the Green Revolution are less likely to be successful in addressing present and future concerns relative to growing food. That third reason is that the industrial agricultural processes and practices that got us to the “achievements” Big Ag proponents are so proud of have radically damaged — perhaps beyond repair — the land and water sources from which our food has been brought forth.

Soil First

The rate of growth in the global food supply has been falling for more than three decades. In the 1990s it was growing by 2.1% annually, but in the 2000s it was only up 1.7% per year, and in the 2010s production grew by 1.4% annually. A shortfall in total calories is predicted for as early as 2027.

The biophysical condition of the world’s soil is a critical cause of the decline in the rate of growth for the global food supply, and it carries within it a multitude of factors. The industrial agriculture of the Green Revolution has been fully reliant upon ammonium nitrate as synthetic fertilizer. In the early 20th century, German chemist Fritz Haber was the first to “fix” nitrogen into liquid ammonia. This was the basis for synthetic fertilizer and was seen as an important breakthrough as a lack of nitrogen in soil had been preventing the industrialization efforts for increased crop production. Five years later, in 1913, German chemist Carl Bosch came up with the first large-scale application of Haber’s work. Bosch developed ammonium nitrate as an explosive for the German military but its use as a nitrogen fertilizer was obvious and it was soon put into fields on a broad basis.

In her book “Who Really Feeds the World,” physicist, author, and activist Vandana Shiva points out that the view of soil at that time was primarily as “an inert, empty container for chemical fertilizers.” Shiva writes, “Synthetic fertilizers provided a convenient ‘conversion’ for peaceful use of war products, except instead of being peaceful, these chemicals waged a battle against the soil and against the Earth.” Twenty years of the Green Revolution in India destroyed the fertility of its soils, soils which previously had been carefully tended for centuries by farming families. With 24 billion metric tons of fertile soils currently lost from global agricultural systems annually, 6.6 billion metric tons are from India, 5.5 billion metric tons from China, and 3 billion metric tons from the Unites States. All are countries with intense use of industrial agricultural practices.

Beyond causing soil loss, continued application of monocultural chemicals make soils more susceptible to drought and toxic water run-off. The end result is enhanced vulnerability to climate change and more areas of greater food insecurity and poverty. The technology hailed as so successful in the Green Revolution was a very short-term fix for hunger given that it destroyed the soil in which food must continue to grow. Shiva is right in proclaiming “Degraded and dead soils, soils without organic matter, soils without soil organisms, and soils with no water-holding capacity do not create food security; they create famines and are at the heart of the food crisis the world is facing today.” The father of modern sustainable farming, Albert Howard showed this in his early work regarding plant breeding with and without soil cultivation. An emphasis on breeding alone produced a 10 percent increase in yield whereas improvement to soil fertility with organic matter and green manures resulted in a 200 to 300 percent increase in yield. In his book “The Soil and Health,” Howard proclaimed, “the foundation of all good cultivation lies not so much in the plant as in the soil.”

The Green Revolution put pesticides and herbicides into the soil as well as synthetic fertilizers. Where these chemicals were sprayed on a daily basis, the cancer rate in humans has also been higher. One in twenty people in the United States was diagnosed with cancer in 1960. The number was one in eight by 1992. In a report by former professor of agricultural sciences at Cornell, David Pimentel, this increase was directly correlated to an increased use of pesticides.

At its core, industrial agriculture is a fossil-fuel based form of agriculture. Fossil fuels are required to make the fertilizers, to run the farm equipment, and for long-distance distribution of the product. Nitrogen fertilizers also emit nitrous oxide and industrial livestock farms emit methane, both significant greenhouse gases.

In “The Coming Wave,” high-tech entrepreneur and definite fan of techno-solutions Mustafa Suleyman describes food production as a major success story of technology. And yet even he goes on to say, “But from tractors in fields, to synthetic fertilizers, to plastic greenhouses, [food production is] saturated in fossil fuels. Imagine the average tomato soaked in five tablespoons of oil. That’s how much went into growing it.” (He wasn’t referring to olive oil.) Synthetic fertilizers use natural gas and their manufacture is an energy-intensive process. Producing one kilogram of nitrogen fertilizer consumes the energy equivalent of two liters of diesel. By 2030, the energy consumption for the manufacture of synthetic fertilizers is expected to be the equivalent of 277 billion liters of diesel. When the price of oil goes up, so does the price of synthetic fertilizer. The Green Revolution, initially conceived to help farmers, has put them further and further in debt.

Biologist Merlin Sheldrake writes passionately about mycorrhizal fungi and its importance to the web of life in his book “Entangled Life.” Building on Albert Howard’s concern that chemical fertilizers were disrupting mycorrhizal associations between soil and plants, eighty years later Sheldrake maintains that the single-minded focus on yield by modern industrial agriculture has caused widespread environmental destruction and added significantly to global greenhouse gas emissions. He points out that a staggering thirty football fields’ worth of topsoil worldwide is eroded away every minute. With a third of the world’s food wasted every year, and the incessant loss of topsoil for growth, how will we meet the demand for a doubled food supply by 2050?

Sheldrake points out that traditional agricultural practices have for millenia attended closely to the health of the soil. It doing so, they were supporting the plants’ fungal relationships. In the modern industrial view of soil as lifeless, “agricultural practices have ravaged the underground communities that sustain the life we eat. . . . Disrupt the rich ecology of microbes that live in the soil — the guts of the planet — and the health of plants too will suffer.” The combination of mechanical ploughing and heavy application of chemical fertilizers and fungicides destroy the mycorrhizal fungi and their communities.

Sheldrake explains that mycorrhizal fungi do much more than feed plants. They hold the soil together, actually preventing erosion. They increase the soil’s ability to absorb water, keeping the soil from drying out as easily but also preventing nutrients from being washed away by rainfall. It is the mycorrhizal fungi that holds much of the carbon in the soil, preventing it from adding to emissions but also adding support to the complex food webs. The list goes on. But it isn’t quite so straightforward. It doesn’t necessarily work to just add mycorrhizal fungi to a field. The relationships between fungi, soil, plants, and other organic microorganisms is complicated and sensitive. There must be an ecological fit and the traditional care taken over years of “knowing” one’s farm can’t easily be replaced.

Then the Seeds

Far from a lifeless container, a healthy soil is essential for healthy plants. But an old farmer’s proverb maintains that “whomever has the seed, has the say.” Rich soil is essential but nothing happens until a seed is dropped into it. For thousands of years, seeds have taken their own evolutionary path without constraint and life on Earth is rich and diverse in large part because of this freedom. Over the past 11,000 years or so, humans joined in partnership with nature and aided in the creation of this diversity. Today these seeds are referred to as “primitive cultivars” by the multinational companies that have latched onto the farmer’s proverb as a means to profit and control as they’ve endeavored to make the modifications necessary to patent life in the form of seeds, thereby making traditional seed-saving and small-scale or backyard plant breeding into illegal activities. Around the world, these corporations have destructively insinuated themselves into the lives of home gardeners and smallholder farmers.

The latest buzz-phrase for modern industrial agriculture is “climate-smart agriculture” and it’s used most often in reference to the current rationale for completely restructuring traditional food-growing systems in regions of the Global South. The idea is to integrate smallholder farming into the industrial agriculture system. The Green Revolution initiated these efforts in the 1960s but the latest attempt to win over local farmers is focused on food insecurity as a result of escalating climate change. In 2007, the patron saint of the original Green Revolution, the Rockefeller Foundation, partnered with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to launch the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA). That is, the Green Revolution 2.0. And not unlike the first time around, the mission has been to promote a chemical industrial food system and to own the seeds. This time the farmers saw them coming. As the international alliance of small farmers, GRAIN, put it, they saw AGRA as “imposing a corporate-controlled seed and chemical system of agriculture on smallholder farmers, appropriating Africa’s indigenous seed varieties, weakening Africa’s rich and complex biodiversity, and undermining seed and food sovereignty.”

For a number of years, companies like Bayer (previously Monsanto), BASF, Corteva (previously Dow/DuPont), and Syngenta (a subsidiary of ChemChina) had been creating GMO versions of regional staples like cowpea and sorghum, and global commodities like maize, patenting them as unique proprietary products. Farmers complained about the taste, the diseased crops, and the need for more fertilizers, pesticides, and water for the plants grown from these seeds, but worst of all were the handcuffs that came with the seeds they were now forced to use. The patented seeds came with fines, possible imprisonment, and even dispossession of their land for any farmer selling or sharing the patented seeds, including any accidental contamination through having been spread by wind, etc. Most of these GMO seeds do not reproduce (or if they do their yields are significantly reduced) so the farmer must purchase them again every year, the exact opposite of traditional practices of seed-saving and seed-sharing as well as experimental selection of superior qualities for growing in their region, and so forth.

The same has been happening in Meso-America and there too the smallholder farmers are fighting back. In his article “The New Colonialist Food Economy,” Alexander Zaitchik shows how winning the battle for control of seeds is crucial to the success of agro-ecological food systems. He quotes the director of the permaculture institute in Guatemala, Ines Cuj: “Bill Gates’s ‘magic seeds’ will accelerate the cycle of chemical destruction that has destroyed the earth’s soils in less than a century. The answer to climate change lies in traditional knowledge and ancestral seeds that have been around for thousands of years. We cannot allow the attack on them to succeed. It is an attack against life itself.”

The seeds for Norman Borlaug’s wheat came down to two genetically modified varieties: Lerma Rojo 64 and Sonora 64. Without greater diversity in our seed stocks, we lack the resilience needed to deal with climate crises and disease. But we also lack variety in taste and nutrition. Food cultures around the world depend on this seed diversity for what is uniquely associated with their region. Agro-business turns seeds into patented commodities and thus food becomes the same. Sovereignty over local seeds is fundamental to food security.

How Will The World Be Fed?

Nearly every corporate seed program, every GMO scheme, every government-sponsored farmer training program, every corporate food regime, every large-scale philanthropic farm program, every modern grocery store chain, every government-sponsored school meal plan, and every attempt to address crop yield with more and more synthetic fertilizers and pesticides around the world is a Trojan horse for greater food insecurity and ill health. Without exception they promote the opposite of what’s required for an agro-ecology approach to soil regeneration and improvements in food productivity, and for an approach to getting food on the table that results in enhanced food security and the restoration of health.

In Charles C. Mann’s book “The Wizard and the Prophet,” he focused on two dedicated scientists and their disparate visions for solving the world’s problem relative to food and the future. Ecologist William Vogt was a key founder of the environmental movement and, as we’ve seen, Nobel Prize winner Norman Borlaug was the father of the “Green Revolution.” Both were visionaries deeply concerned about the future but the conclusions they drew from their work differed radically. Charles Mann has labeled Vogt’s followers as “prophets” and those who subscribe to Borlaug’s methods as “wizards.” The prophets believe we must regain a balance in our position within nature, always striving to remain within its biological limits. The wizards believe we have the ability to create and execute grand technical solutions to these problems, just as we have with so many others in the past.

The history of the past sixty years has shown that destructive agriculture can’t really be separated from destructive food production and dissemination. And both are global crises at this point. The Green Revolution and the corporate interventions that followed have amply demonstrated that large-scale technical solutions — the way of the “wizards” — can indeed make things much worse. There may be short-term wins that appear worthy of a Nobel Prize, but the long-term effects make the prize worse than meaningless. And, just as often, even the short-term effects are not wins. The question we need to reflect upon and determine individually and collectively is which path leads to a more realistic answer for constructive continuation of our world — both that of our species and the rest of the flora and fauna with which we share it: the path of the wizards (the techo-optimists) or the path of the prophets (the techno-pessimists)? That is, how will we approach the challenges of the present and the future?

A Grand Technical Solution for the Future of Food — The Wizard’s or Techno-Optimist’s Way

NOTE:  The more standard nomenclature for Mann's "wizards" and "prophets" today is "techo-optimists" and "techno-pessimists." Techno-optimists believe that technology can solve any problem while also keeping us on the track of progress. Particularly related to climate change, they believe the only way we'll survive what's ahead is through large-scale technology-based solutions. They support solar and wind farms, nuclear power plants, carbon capture and storage programs, and electric vehicles. Techno-pessimists see a history of missteps, environmental and cultural damage, and unforeseen as well as unintended consequences when it comes to modern technological solutions. Relative to climate change, they believe the most important changes required are tied to societal and behavioral change. They see previous large-scale technological changes like those brought about through the Industrial Revolution as also having brought about the climate crises. They support post-growth approaches like reduced consumerism, reduced travel by car and airplane, new approaches to our economic models, and an emphasis on ecology and getting back in balance with nature. Both of these mindsets are generally value-based. There's a tendency for both sides to see these values and approaches as mutually exclusive but, at least to some degree, we have to be able to accommodate both perspectives or we face the risk of working against each other. Alternatively each can be seen as a strategic direction taken on separately by its advocates with the idea that survival will be advanced one way or the other.

A grand technical solution immediately before us today is the proposal to “save the world” and address all present and future food insecurity concerns through precision fermentation. Is this the answer we’ve been hoping for or is it another Trojan horse for still greater food insecurity and ill health?

One of the most vocal advocates for precision fermentation is environmentalist, activist, and writer George Monbiot. In addition to writing for The Guardian, Monbiot has a recent book out — “Regenesis” — which provides his thoughts on “feeding the world without devouring the planet.” At this point, Monbiot is an avid techno-optimist and he sees precision fermentation as the answer to feeding the world in the future as it simultaneously prevents climate and ecological breakdown by ridding the world of farming — “the world’s greatest cause of environmental destruction.”

Monbiot not only dispenses with farming, but also with other technical solutions for feeding the world. Urban indoor and vertical farming in which food is grown in tiers could not, he holds, compete with rural outdoor horizontal farms economically as the rural farms have cheaper overhead costs, including free sunlight. Monbiot initially anticipated the bigger news would be about cultured (or cell-based) meat (including fish), which he describes as “flesh that’s biologically identical to meat from animals, but is reared in a bioreactor, not a farm.” He soon learned that growing the cells on a scaffold that could approximate the taste, texture, and appearance of a meat or fish steak was almost hopelessly complex. He no longer feels this concept will ever make it to market.

The precision fermentation process that exceeded Monbiot’s greatest expectations was created in the 1960s at NASA. It’s essentially a brewing process. It begins with a soil bacterium — Cupriavidus necator — that is hydrogen-oxygenating (as opposed to deriving energy from photosynthesis as plants do). The brewed “sludge” (as it’s informally referred to) goes from a vat into a heated drum where it’s “turned into a golden flour that smelled like scrambled egg.” Approximately 60% of the flour is protein and 100% of it is edible. The pancake Monbiot had made from this flour “tasted rich and mellow and filling: just like the pancakes I used to eat.” (He is referring to what he used to eat before becoming a vegan.) Monbiot was now convinced; this pancake represented the beginning of the end for most of the world’s agriculture and the most likely hope for “regenesis” of the planet.

Unlike the time required for growing plants, the bacteria in the vats double every three hours so they can be harvested eight times a day 365 days a year. Also unlike the case with plants, there’s no seasonality. A relatively small amount of land is required for growing the original bacteria and then there is land required for the processing facilities where the bacteria is killed and dried to become the flour. The process requires electricity for the electrolysis needed for separating water into hydrogen and oxygen. The electricity comes from solar panels and a lot of land is required for the solar farm, just as a lot of extraction and manufacturing of minerals and other raw materials are required for the panels, transformers, and wiring. And then of course there is the distribution of the product. (Monbiot provides some encouraging figures comparing this “food” to food as we know it in terms of use of land, electricity, water, etc. The problem is that there have been several papers now published that seriously refute the figures provided.)

Monbiot says we can make any kind of food from these technologies. We can develop whole new cuisines with entirely unique textures and tastes. For example, they could create “a morsel that tastes like seared steak but with the texture of scallops. Or they might develop a mousse that breaks on the tongue like panna cotta but has the flavor of jamon iberico.” There are a few issues to be worked out — like, the level of nucleic acids is too high compared to other foods and could cause gout or kidney stones. Also, its impact on the microbes in our gut have not been fully tested yet. The precision fermentation process requires genetic engineering in order to create certain tastes and specific nutritional needs, but Monbiot has no problem with this and believes most others won’t either. Antibiotics will likely be needed to ensure sterility of the equipment and growth media, but Monbiot compares this to the antibiotics used in the livestock industry and imagines less will be required for precision fermentation.

There are quite a few technical and economic questions that have gone unanswered regarding these planned attempts to synthesize food from microbial biomass. Still, the promise of feeding the world and restoring the planet has garnered the attention of investors, journalists, and potential consumers. To date there are no complete life-cycle figures for the process but those put forth by Monbiot have come under heavy criticism for their lack of comprehensiveness. The word ‘precision’ implies exactitude in calculations as well as the technical process. For different reasons, some have suggested the word ‘precision’ is misleading and should really be replaced by the words ‘genetically modified’. To genetically engineer any organisms runs the risk of allergic reaction by the consumer as well as possible ramifications if/when the novel organism “escapes” into nature. This begs questions about the need for regulations and oversight. But way before that is the question of the rest of the world beyond the West where we have the inception of this entire concept. Can less developed countries afford it? Are they interested in it at all? Or is it once again the know-best West saving everyone else from themselves?

In addition to vat-cultivated meat, there are projects underway to fully replace the cow in dairy production using precision fermentation techniques. One organization claims doing so will reduce greenhouse gas emissions and use of land and water by more than 90%. But in 2022, a peer-reviewed study by Behm, Nappa, Aro, et al. found “the environmental impacts of microbially produced milk protein were of the same magnitude as for extracted dairy protein.” More importantly, they found that when the microbially produced milk protein is compared directly to dairy products like milk, yoghurt, and cheese, the latter is most likely to have an even lower impact on the environment.

What Monbiot sees as one of the greatest achievements of a farm-free future is that the land freed up by precision fermentation could all be rewilded, and thus the world’s ecosystems would be restored. The question is, can you take a modern industrial technology that requires a vast amount of energy, land, water, and raw materials and use it to fix what modern industrial technologies have done to damage the planet’s ecosystems, often in their own attempts to address previous technological solutions? Can more of the same really be expected to redress what’s been done or is it only the greenwashing myth of modernity that makes us think that nature needs our heroic efforts? Perhaps the most profound form of climate denial is held by those who promote ‘green growth and sustainability’ through technology as our path to an unchanging but nevertheless decarbonized world.

Then there’s this: Monbiot is excited that for the first time in the history of our species, a staple food exists that did not come from photosynthesis. The question is, will those needing to be fed be so excited about this? Maybe a person starving due to famine will be happy to have that protein no matter what. And this is not insignificant. But what if the goal were to not have people starving from famine? Is there a way to feed everyone on the planet and to do so with more than dried dead bacteria, to do so with something that feeds their soul and spirit as well as their stomachs?

Small Farmers Serving Local Food Systems As a Solution for the Future of Food — The Prophet’s or Techno-Pessimist’s Way

These foods offered much more than a supply of calories delivered in ever greater quantities, they helped us work more in harmony with nature. Take, for example, a humble legume called the Swabian lentil, once grown widely in the Alps of southern Germany. Beloved for its flavour, the Alb-linse fed the people in this mountainous region because it was able to nourish the otherwise ungenerous soil. Or consider a rare variety of maize found high up in a village in Oaxaca, Mexico, that oozes a self-fertilizing mucus which scientists believe could help reduce agriculture’s dependence on fossil fuels. Many of the world’s endangered foods are so complex that scientists are only beginning to unlock their secrets.

Dan Saladino in “Eating to Extinction”

In “Eating to Extinction,” Dan Saladino points out that while humans have eaten around 6,000 plant species over the course of our time on the planet, we now primarily consume only nine, and of these, only three make up about 50% of our total calories. These three are rice, wheat, and maize. To reach 75% of our overall calories, you need only add potato, barley, palm oil, soy, and sugar. This consolidation toward uniformity is occurring just as we’re beginning to grasp the importance for our own health of diversity in our food system. Our 20th-century tendency toward reductionism coupled with our abiding conviction regarding the immense cleverness of our species has caused us to deeply misunderstand nature (of which we’re a part) and the complexity that underpins its interrelationships. Now add the industrialization of agriculture and the food system overall and we’ve lost almost all diversity, compromised our soil and water, seriously damaged the environment and its inhabitants, and put our own species in greater danger of starvation.

As the reality of our situation and the enhanced likelihood that our high energy-consuming lifestyles are reaching the end of their lifecycle, a solid strategy would be to determine how best to use the current energy resources left in preparation for a much lower-energy future. What do we need to stop doing right now, what do we need to start doing right now, and what do we need to bring with us from our history-to-date that will serve us best as we go forward?

For most agroecologists, the answer relative to a food system approach is small farmers serving local food systems. In the modern western world, that answer is taken as a fairly conservative (i.e., non-modern, non-technical) solution, even a highly improbable one in terms of the likelihood of success. For much of the rest of the world, it’s the standing answer in use throughout history and still today albeit one under siege by industrial agro-business since the middle of the last century. High-energy technological solutions for “feeding the world without devouring the planet” are unlikely to replace these long-standing, low-energy, low-impact, local agrarian approaches for a number of reasons.

As the climate continues to change, urban dwelling will become more and more difficult. With pandemic-related work-from-home situations the new norm for some, we’ve already seen many of those who could do so make the move to more rural areas. The migration pattern in many regions is reversing itself from cities to more rural settings. Building inclusive communities that incorporate these newcomers can be significantly aided by local small farm food movements.

For those who maintain that such local agrarian efforts could not possibly feed the world, there are thousands of years of history around the world that show otherwise. For those who respond that there weren’t 8 billion people on the planet at that time, there’s an undeniable reality in what they say. And that reality makes feeding the world by any means, whether local agrarian or microbial food factories, an extremely difficult proposition.

So what do we do? In the face of the improbable, even the potentially impossible, we do what’s important enough to surmount the challenges. We organize policy-makers to stop the agro-business practices that are destroying our soil, water, people, and eco-systems, and controlling seeds and food sovereignty. We, the government, stop the land grabbing that makes it impossible for young people to secure smallholder farms to grow our food. We, the government, stop making it so hard to keep a small farm going by moving support to them instead of giving subsidies to huge multi-national companies for mono-cropping a small set of GMO foods mostly shipped to other parts of the world. We, the consumers, start buying our food from local farmers practicing pesticide-free, cruelty-free, healthy farming and from the locally-owned restaurants that prepare and serve their food. In doing so we will have stopped consuming the ultra-processed foods in the middle isles of the Big Food grocery chains. And as a result, our food will no longer have to be transported across the country and from other parts of the world. Emissions will go down and our health will improve. Farmers will receive more fair pay for their products and we will be buying real food with our money. We will start engaging more with the natural world as we focus on how to live in harmony with it in small agrarian communities. And if we stay in the city, we start finding ways to procure our food from nearby rural farms (often available at the farmers’ markets in most cities today). Wherever we live, if we can, we also grow what we’re able to in a home garden.

Sound utopian? There are only two other ways to go: Business as usual, which is already a losing proposition, or high-tech, genetically engineered, fermented bacteria made in factories that are pitching an equally utopian vision. At least local agrarian approaches are well-tested and still in use all over the world. The high-tech alternative has yet to be fully costed-out or put into practice. But the high-tech ecomodernist approach plays to what most people want to hear because it sounds like a way of not having to give up the high-energy, urban, consumerist lifestyle they’re currently living. They have yet to accept that this future being open to them is a delusion except as a dystopia that forces itself forward as long as it can while continuing to crush the ecosystems it feeds upon. What most people don’t know is that only 30% of the world’s food comes from the industrial food system. In an annually updated report called “Who Will Feed Us?,” it’s clear that the vast majority of the world’s people are fed by the network of peasant farmers invisibly (by industrial measures) laboring at or below subsistence level to do some of the most important work of all. The industrial food system consumes over 75% of the global agricultural resources but only 30% of humanity is fed by that system. Imagine the loss and waste involved.

British social scientist, writer, and agrarian activist Chris Smaje sums it up this way: “The issue is to (re)develop renewable local agricultures, usually with the local preindustrial agriculture as inspiration.” In his book “Saying No to a Farm-Free Future,” Smaje makes an argument against manufactured foods like those Monbiot promotes and for agrarian localism, that is: “a turn to low-energy input, job-rich, diverse and predominantly local self-provisioning of food, fibre and other material requisites of life, and accompanying forms of politics that don’t really fit within contemporary left-right framings.” He convincingly maintains that, “Instead of a technical reboot, the food and farming system needs a radical social rebuild from the hands of small-scale growers of food and fibre, and the local households and communities they serve.” This is what we need to bring with us from our history-to-date that will serve us best as we go forward.

A living example of Charles Mann’s “prophets” (or techno-pessimists), Smaje believes that a largely distributed rural population that lives within the boundaries of low-energy consumption and supports local, diverse, mixed farming as well as local wildlands is essential for surviving the coming challenges. Diverse mixed farming is structured in ways that still produce when the weather makes Big Ag farming practices untenable. It’s not easy, but no other approach will be either. Smaje sees “little possibility that cities not scaled to locally accessible and productive agrarian hinterlands can weather the major disruptions in global trade . . . Everything points to the need for urgent localist rethinking — including rethinking where ‘local’ is going to be for a lot of people.” Working with nature rather than against it seems to Smaje and many others the only viable ecological path for the planet. The necessary changes then are political, social, and ecological rather than technological.

In an inspirational case study of self-empowered change, in “A Precautionary Tale,” Philip Ackerman-Leist tells how the people in the Northern Italian enclave of Mals organized themselves to ban the pesticides coming from multinational conventional apple producers and overtaking their small farm community in rolling mists of toxic chemicals. Unwilling to give up their centuries-old traditional food cultures, the townspeople fought back as Big Apple crept up the valley and into their mountainside community. Through a direct democracy approach (versus a representative one), they banned pesticides by a referendum vote and set a precedent that is being followed in local agrarian communities across Europe, Asia, and the United States.

Mals is also a perfect case study for how small farms serving local needs are a flexible fit for varied terrain and changeable climactic conditions. Ackerman-Leist describes how this works so well for the area.

Despite the constraints of elevation, the inhabitants of the higher reaches of the Vinschgau long ago discovered ways in which to optimize slope and turn it into a useful variable for agriculture. Cattle, goats, sheep, even pigs traditionally followed the greening of the grass as it gradually moved up beyond the tree line and then back down, essentially following the rise and fall of the mercury through the course of the year.With much of the livestock sent to the high pastures, farmers could use the lower fields to grow grains, vegetables, and the linchpin of the system: hay. In such a risky growing environment, farmers grew fruits for subsistence but not extensively for commercial purposes. Milk products, cold-hardy vegetables, and grains were a better bet for market.

Philip Ackerman-Leist in “A Precautionary Tale”

Farmer, lawyer, and political activist John Klar uses his own story as another case study to show how a future that puts small farms placing a regenerative agriculture approach at the center can move us past the devastation of Big Ag to restore our ecosystems as well as our rural communities. In his book, “Small Farm Republic,” Klar argues that as agro-business decimated small local farms in the United States, it also destroyed local satellite businesses and communities in the process. He believes local food can be profitable, but it can also be the way we reverse inhumane industrial treatment of animals, and the destruction of previously healthy soils through application of chemicals and excessive tillage. Through their own experience, Klar and his family realized what real food was and committed themselves to making it available to the people in their community.

Woven into this education was a stark contrast: a growing knowledge of the dangers of dependency on a food system that is fragile despite an illusion of plenty — untrustworthy, unhealthy, and harmful to land, water, human health, and community. Jackie and I likely would not have learned this had we remained in suburbia, but sometimes the truth is shocking. There is much in modern food that should not be ingested by humans, much horrific treatment of animals of which consumers are conveniently oblivious. The mega-companies that have consolidated the world’s food production are about as trustworthy as the pharmaceutical industry — perhaps less so.

John Klar in “Small Farm Republic”

Klar sees two particular policy areas that would help democratize the food system, advancing agriculture that is both regenerative and environmentally sensitive. The first is to phase out subsidies for destructive monocultures like corn and soy. The second is to improve the profitability of and investment in small farms through short-term tax credits and long-term regulatory relief. Klar sees this as “a radical transformation that challenges both corporate cronyism and limitless government regulatory oversight.”

John Klar is what some might consider a rare bird — a politically conservative environmentalist and regenerative farmer who considers long-standing liberal farmer, writer, and activist Wendell Berry his mentor and hero. Wendell Berry wrote “The Unsettling of America” in 1977 and its words ring as true today as they did then. Forty-six years ago he saw that agro-business was removing farming from its cultural context, away from the families and communities of which it was a part. Berry sees this as a crucial furthering of our estrangement from the land and nature. And he fervently believes that food is a cultural product incapable of being produced through technology alone. He writes, “Those agriculturists who think of the problems of food production solely in terms of technological innovation are oversimplifying both the practicalities of production and the network of meanings and values necessary to define, nurture, and preserve the practical motivations.” Berry believes at a fundamental level that agriculture can only exist within nature, but also that we can only have culture within agriculture. “At certain critical points these systems have to conform with one another or destroy one another.”

We Know How We Got Here; Now Where Are We Going?

What one personally chooses to eat and what approach to agriculture we believe is the way to go about feeding the world may inform each other but they are not one and the same. I’ve been a vegetarian since I was 17 years old. I can’t eat eggs but I do eat cheese. I’ve consciously cut my cheese consumption back quite a bit and I sometimes go for extended periods without eating it at all, but I’ve never been fully vegan. I have friends who are vegan and some of them eat what seem to me to be very healthy diets. Other vegans eat what seem to me to be pretty unhealthy diets in that I notice they include a number of processed foods, foods made with sugars, additives and gums, and so-called fake meats. I have friends who eat meat and they are the same — some are particularly mindful about eating healthfully and others are content to buy fast-food or finish their home-made meal with a sugar-laden store-bought dessert. These are all personal choices. But when it comes to agriculture overall, whether we take an ecological approach or an industrial one makes a much more profound impact on all of us and the world as a whole. What we eat — how it is produced and how it gets to us — can be an obsession or a barely considered decision. But no matter how much time we spend on it, the consequences of our food’s production and distribution are enormous, making up some of the largest impacts on our current planetary conditions.

In his book, “At Work in the Ruins,” Dougald Hind reminds us that it was twenty years ago that the Dutch chemist and Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen came up with the term Anthropocene to delineate a new geological epoch catalyzed through human actions. Across most disciplines of the arts and sciences, the Western world came together in general embrace of the term. The rest of the world seemed to hear it differently. As Hind describes it, “It can sound as though the people who benefitted most from two centuries of industrialization are starting to suspect that all that outsourced death might soon be coming home to them.” He quotes anthropologists Mario Blaser and Marisol de la Cadena as they put this idea forward in their book “A World of Many Worlds“.

The world of the powerful is now sensitive to the plausibility of its own destruction in a way that may compare, at least in some ways, with the threat imposed on worlds sentenced to disappearance in the name of the common goods of progress, civilization, development, and liberal inclusion.

Mario Blaser and Marisol de la Cadena in “A World of Many Worlds”

The modern industrial era has brought prosperity to some parts of the world by outsourcing hardship and death to other parts, founded as it has been on the destruction of people, cultures, and ecosystems. Just as they were centuries ago, the raw materials needed today for the new green economy are directly extracted by those individuals who pay the price through death, disease, and dismemberment. But they’re far away and out of sight from those benefitting. This is the reckoning that is implicit in the term “Anthropocene,” but it is not a revelation for the parts of the world benefitting the least and paying the biggest price.

As Hind considers the early decades of this new century and wonders about a collective need in the West to assuage the growing sense of vulnerability through the projected authority of science and its associated technologies, he thinks again of Mario Blazer and Marisol de la Cadena and what they are aware of in our Western fixation regarding the Anthropocene.

Two possibilities arise from this newfound sense of vulnerability. It can be a humbling moment in which, brought down to earth, we are able to hear at last what those on the receiving end of Western projects of colonisation, salvation, modernisation, and development have been trying to tell us for generations. Or it can be the license for the grandest version of that project yet: an attempt to turn our planetary home and all those we share it with, our human kin and our more-than-human kith, into an object of global management and control, and all in the name of ‘saving the world’.

Dougald Hind in “At Work in the Ruins”

Many today seek solace in science and technology as a bulwark against the many threats and challenges we’re facing. The political language of Western politics and its regular intoning about ‘the science’ to underpin each side’s point makes it harder to see the downsides in a grand technological approach. The current language embedded in the climate change narrative does the same (as exemplified by Bill Gates’ recent exclamation, “Are we the science people or are we the idiots?”). But it’s also important to remember those to whom we’ve outsourced the dirty work of this grand industrial approach and the ecosystems and their inhabitants that we destroy as we do so. What is the meaning of prosperity at this point? If we are in fact able to feed the world in a less destructive way, why wouldn’t we work toward doing so?

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