You’ll read here and there these days that industrial agriculture is more environmentally friendly than organic agriculture or traditional, diverse farming practices.

The writer is, almost without exception, someone who makes a living, directly or indirectly, from industrial agriculture. That doesn’t change the fact that they are, in their reasoning, perfectly correct. Industrial agriculture pollutes in ways organic and traditional growers do not, but its efficiency also creates environmental benefits.

As humanity’s population grows and we sprawl across the planet’s empty spaces, the efficiency of our food production becomes more and more important. As much as I believe in organics and grass-feeding, I don’t believe that I can produce 100 calories of soybeans or a pound of hamburger in a smaller space than the industrial farmer. I need more room, and generally more time, to do what I do.

If I have a hungry world to feed and I feel a sense of urgency, then it’s time to cultivate, irrigate and spray. It’s time for genetic engineering, herbicides and artificial fertilizers. That’s the way to produce the maximum amount of food using the minimum time and space.

I’m not talking about sustainability. I’m talking about efficiency.

Our toughest philosophical problem these days is what I call the Austerity Conundrum. A lot of people believe in human dominion and unfettered expansion. That leads us to a world in which we will, eventually, have minimal resources available to each person. We can’t expand production forever, so if we continue expanding demand we end up stretching our resources thin. It’s a grim certainty.

Unfortunately, many of our conservation efforts lead us to more or less the same conclusion.  When conservationists suggest that everyone should ride bicycles and that no human being should use more than five squares of toilet paper per session, they are tacitly endorsing the goal of maximum human efficiency, a goal that willfully averts the gaze from the underlying issue of population growth.

This is not to discredit the power and beauty of the conservation movement. Conservation ignites the human imagination. An aesthetic of simplicity is inherently a part of the spiritual practice of frugality and generosity. What we, as individuals, do not consume will be consumed by other living things. And the planet will benefit from our stewardship.

But our logic is flawed if we believe efficiency will solve our puzzles.

The only sustainable human future is a stable human future – a future in which both our population and our consumption are stabilized. While we focus on efficiency we ignore more compelling issues.

PHOTO BY BRYAN WELCH

We haven’t traditionally assigned much value to natural productivity except when it was producing something we could eat, wear or burn for fuel. Predictably, David Tilman’s research is inspired by the hunt for new biofuels — renewable resources that might replace petroleum products. He suggests that someday our cars might run on so-called “cellulosic” ethanol created from grass. Ethanol created from cellulose could be derived from nearly any plant, so why not the plants that naturally grow more profusely, the native plants of the prairie?

Cool idea, unless your children are among the millions currently starving for lack of corn, wheat, rice or some other staple foodstuff that might be grown on that property. We’ve clearly demonstrated that we can spike grain prices with burgeoning new demand from ethanol manufacturers. Poor people around the world are straining to pay for food made expensive this year by the demand for ethanol.

On top of everything else, there’s good evidence that while our population is expanding we’re also wrecking some of the natural machinery we use to create our food. Setting aside the excesses of industrial agriculture and the short-term damage they do to farmland, we’re still tearing down important environmental assets the old-fashioned way, by burning forests and overgrazing grasslands.

PHOTO BY BRYAN WELCH

This is no chicken-little scenario. Agribusiness is not destroying the human habitat (although it probably could, given time). We need to give due credit to the architects of the first “green revolution.” The benefits of agricultural productivity are real. We have fed a lot more people than would have been possible without technology. But a lot of people believe that the world would be a better place if we re-focused agricultural priorities on local food, environmental preservation and healthy farmers.

Agriculture’s green revolution underlines in a powerful way this basic biological fact: We live at the expense of other creatures. Every living thing does. We can, through symbiotic relationships or good husbandry, cooperate with other creatures to increase biological productivity overall, but at the end of the day if we disappeared, other living things would take advantage of the resources we no longer consumed.

And because I am alive — because you are alive — a lot of other creatures never get the chance to live. 

On Saturday, President Bush holds a summit of G-20 leaders where trade and agriculture policy, such as farm subsidies, are sure to come up. The global economic crisis will be a major topic, and a likely proposed solution will be for the countries to come to reach a conclusion on the Doha trade negotiations, which could affect American farmers. The current Doha Development Round is part of a World Trade Organization trade agreement.

A Reuters article by Doug Palmer quoted Deputy U.S. Trade Representative John Veroneau as saying, “I expect there will be some expression of support for the global trading system and the value and benefits of concluding the Doha negotiations as soon as possible.”

The last attempt failed in July, partially because of the Farm Bill that had just passed. The president vetoed the bill, in part to facilitate negotiations, but the U.S. Congress overrode the president’s veto. The bill provided the largest subsidies ever to U.S. farmers — a topic of contention with other countries, who feel this put them at a disadvantage in the global market. Their complaint is that subsidies allow U.S. farmers to sell goods at lower prices than farmers from countries without subsidies.

A main objective of Doha is to reduce global trade barriers, such as tariffs. But developing countries, such as India and China, see large farm subsidies as a barrier as well, because of the unfair advantage they create in the global market.

G-20 countries account for 70 percent of the world’s farmers and 26 percent of the world’s agricultural exports.

The conclusion of Doha would likely benefit American farmers because it would expand and increase their trade options, but because they benefited from the Farm Bill subsidies, negotiations could stall once again.

The recent global economic crisis might make the world leaders put their differences aside and develop a conclusion for the Doha agreement. Such a move could boost global economic confidence and take one issue off the plate of President-elect Barack Obama.

PHOTO BY BRYAN WELCH

The first “green revolution” has not been an unqualified success. It’s had its downsides. Farmers have generally stopped raising their own food as production has shifted to “monocultural” crops with global market value. So, when economies decline and geopolitical structures teeter, farmers are in the same dire straits as everyone else. They have, largely, surrendered their ability to live off their land or to supply their own communities with a balanced diet. The visionary scientist Wes Jackson[1] describes modern agricultural economies as “brittle.” When an entire region depends on a single product — say corn — and an unusual weather pattern devastates the corn crop one year, the region’s economy is also devastated. Most modern farmers don’t even raise their own vegetable gardens.

Pesticides, herbicides and industrial fertilizers pollute water supplies and destroy wildlife. Even as the White House and the Ford Foundation were trumpeting industrial agriculture’s achievements, Rachel Carson was taking note of the sudden decline of wildlife around the world where pesticides were used. New health problems proliferated in farming communities around the world. According to the National Cancer Institute within the U.S. National Institutes of Health, farm workers face unusually high incidence of leukemia, non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, multiple myeloma, soft tissue sarcomas, and cancers of the skin, lip, stomach, brain and prostate.[2]

The bare earth between the rows of corn or soybeans erodes in the absence of the root structures and decomposing plant matter that enrich undisturbed soils. Plant varieties are developed to maximize the nutrition derived from every square meter. As that nutrition is pulled from the soil and trucked away to feed human beings and livestock, the soil is depleted and the crops are increasingly dependent on artificial fertilizers. Those fertilizers are specifically designed to benefit the crops immediately, and have no lasting positive impact. The soil is, gradually, robbed of its natural assets.

Furthermore, there’s good evidence that, as we’ve increased the productivity of our farmland, we’ve also made our food less nutritious. Some studies suggest that up to 75 percent of the natural minerals we would expect to find in a piece of fruit or a bowl of spinach may be missing if our fruits and vegetables are grown with aggressive industrial agricultural practices. [3]

Forests consume greenhouse gases and emit oxygen. Deforestation is one component of climate change. And it’s the product, by-and-large, of overpopulation.

The other obvious result of overpopulation around the globe is desertification. I grew up on land that was covered in grass in the 19^th century. We have photos to prove it. By the time I walked there, however, only a few tufts of grass remained between the mesquite, sagebrush and creosote bushes. I’m an eye-witness to desertification. My predecessors moved on to the land with domesticated cattle, sheep, horses and goats. They subdivided it, homesteaded it, fenced it and then tried to make a living on it. There aren’t many animals there today but the grass isn’t coming back very fast. The United States Geological Survey cites the Rio Puerco basin in my own home state of New Mexico as a prime example of desertification. The process is not mysterious. Semi-arid grasslands sustain themselves through droughts by maintaining a dense mat of roots mixed with dormant seeds at the surface of the soil. In natural conditions, a grassland can lie dormant for years. When it is overgrazed, though, the mouths and hooves of the hungry foragers destroy the grass roots. Dormant seeds provide a little sustenance for desperate animals. When the rains come back, there are no roots to hold the soil in place or to regenerate the grassland. There are no dormant seeds to bring forth new life. The rain washes soil away. The land around the Rio Puerco is grotesquely eroded. The river itself is full of silt.

Desertification became well known in the 1930s, when parts of the Great Plains in the United States turned into the "Dust Bowl" as a result of drought, overgrazing and bad agricultural practices. We’ve learned to manage the land better and we reversed the desertification of the plains, but elsewhere the desert marches on, especially where people have no other option than to push their herds to the next patch of grass. The famine that periodically afflicts sub-Saharan Africa is, primarily, the result of desertification, which is a result of overpopulation, which in turn aggravates the severity of the famine. By 1973, the drought that began five years earlier in the Sahel of West Africa and the land-use practices there had caused the deaths of more than 100,000 people and 12 million cattle[1].

Droughts do not cause desertification. Droughts are common in arid and semiarid lands. Well-managed lands with intact root systems and dormant seed cover will revive when the rains return. Continued land abuse during droughts, however, prevents that recovery.

When I'm introduced to a new acquaintance, the introduction often ends with, "Bryan farms." Like it's the most interesting thing about me. Well, maybe it is.

A few years ago I was introduced that way and the fellow said, "Why would you choose to live way out in the country away from everything."

"Well," I replied,"we like the peace and quiet. We like having space around us. But we're just outside town. We're, like, two miles from the nearest Starbucks."

"I see," he smirked. "You're one of those 'cappuccino cowboys.'"

I should have felt insulted. Maybe I did for a second. Then I thought, "Well, yeah. If that means I farm for fun, that's true. If it means my motivations are more artistic and philosophical than they are economic, then I plead 'guilty as charged.'"

We started calling our farm Rancho Cappuccino.

Industrial agriculture has turned a lot of farmers into underpaid laborers on their own land. The pressures of the industrial model prevent creativity. They grow what the system tells them to grow, in the way the system tells them to grow it. There's too little whimsy in it, and too little joy. Their day, like bad coffee, is a routine grind. The opposite would, I guess, be cappuccino.

True, we're lucky enough to make a good living elsewhere so we can enjoy the farm as a refuge, an avocation, a source of physical and spiritual nourishment: an amateur work of art.

It's sad, though, isn't it that just a few years ago most farms were all those things.

If being a real farmer, or a real cowboy, means trading in my agricultural whimsy and my creativity for a grind of conformity and worry then I don't want to be a "real" cowboy. I'm happy being a cappuccino cowboy. I'm right where I belong here at Rancho Cappuccino.

For centuries now Dr. Thomas Robert Malthus has been, on and off, an object of derision because people associate him, unfairly, with predictions of a doomsday scenario in which humanity should long ago have suffered a population catastrophe. In fact, that wasn’t part of his fundamental thesis. He was, explicitly, putting a bee in the bonnets of the enlightenment philosophers who visualized a Utopian future for humanity in which every individual would have enough to eat. Malthus suggested that wouldn’t be achieved as long as population growth continued apace and, indeed, he seems to have been proven right by the events of the intervening centuries.

He was wrong about the arithmetic increase of the food supply. We’ve managed to make food supplies increase geometrically. Even so, someone is always starving.

In Robert Heinlein’s science-fiction novel, “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress,”[1] one of his characters warns, “It is never safe to laugh at Dr. Malthus; he always has the last laugh.”

Those who want to take the risk and discredit Malthus might nevertheless point to two “green revolutions.” The first one came during the 20^th century when new science helped create sudden, astonishing growth in our food supply. In 1968 William Gaud, former director of the United States Agency for International Development called the achievement a “green revolution”[2] in a speech. He believed that the growth in our agricultural productivity would revolutionize human life worldwide. In fact, we did increase food production to keep up with worldwide population growth. The innovation that made this agricultural revolution possible was funded by wealthy nations like the U.S. who were concerned that famine in nearby poor nations, like Mexico, could threaten economic security.[3] U.S. Vice President Henry Wallace, The Rockefeller Foundation and Mexican President Manuel Avila Camacho got the wheels turning. The Ford Foundation and others soon pitched in to provide money to scientists who were working to increase food supplies. The production of cereal grains in developing nations more than doubled between 1961 and 1985.[4] In places like Mexico and India the gains were orders of magnitude more impressive.

Still, true to Malthus’ predictions, poverty and famine persisted. We fed a lot of people, but we never managed to feed everyone. Throughout the last quarter of the 20^th century the newspaper stories about mountainous piles of surplus grain in North America routinely ran side-by-wide with stories about starving multitudes in Africa.