Consumed: Food for a Finite Planet

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On average, the plots farmed agroecologically retained 40 percent more topsoil after the storm passed and lost 18 percent less arable land in landslides. The industrial food system is praised for the efficiency of its large farms, but it is the small farms that perform better. Many studies have shown that small farms are in fact more efficient at transforming natural resources into foods. If you consider their total food output rather than yield from only one staple crop, small farms produce more food on the same amount of land than large industrial farms do.

This is because, whereas large farms tend to grow crops in monocultures--one crop, one field--small-scale farmers practising alternative agriculture will typically plant many different kinds of crops on their land, even sowing a second crop in between the rows a technique called intercropping. Small farmers also tend to incorporate livestock into general farm production, and work to produce a variety of fruits, vegetables, eggs, meat, and dairy. All this edible output will exceed the amount of food that is grown per unit of land on a large farm.

The idea that a smaller farm can produce more per hectare than a big farm sounds counterintuitive, but there is a term for the phenomenon: To better understand it, social scientists have built mathematical models that measure the output of different kinds of farms, accounting for variability in land quality and population concentration. They ask questions like, how fertile is the land?

And, are farmers in one area simply working harder and growing more food because they live near a large market where they can sell more? While there is some debate in the literature, the overriding consensus is that small farms produce more gross output per hectare per year. Even in parts of the world where farmers use green revolution technology on their small plots of land, it seems that they are able to produce more than their large counterparts. Big farms, on the other hand, have to dedicate resources to managing labour and technology, which eats into their productivity.

This phenomenon is striking in Cuba, where farmers largely have been forced off fossil fuels and into organic agriculture. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, when the country lost a prime source of cheap oil and gas and the United States tightened its trade embargo, the Cuban government had to figure out how to produce food for the island without fossil fuels.

Specialists in low-input agriculture from the universities taught farmers how to grow without the green revolution's help. On farms and in cities, organic agriculture took over.

Today in Cuba, farmers produce 65 percent of the country's food on only 25 percent of the island's land, growing more per hectare than a commercial farm. News of their success has spread wide, and there are even trips organized for tourists to see what Cubans have accomplished.

See a Problem?

Agroecology has many advantages, and small farms can be more efficient than large farms. However, whether or not organic agriculture can produce crop yields per unit of land that are as high as what industrial farms achieve isn't as clear-cut. How much food one way of farming yields over another is an important part of the picture because the amount of food a piece of land produces determines how much land we need to farm and how much land we can leave to be wild. Proponents of industrial food often argue that it is better for the environment because its high yields allow us to spare farmland and leave it fallow.

And although there are studies that show organic agriculture outperforms conventional, a lot of research demonstrates that it can't compete. The academic work that supports the idea that organic agriculture is just as productive includes the Rodale Farming Systems thirty-year trial. Not only did it find that organic agriculture delivered ecological benefits but it also recorded organic yields that matched conventional ones.

During drought years, organic corn yielded 30 percent more. Yet another study, overseen by Jules Pretty at the University of Essex, looked at how a transition to agroecology improved crop production on more than twelve million farms in fifty-seven countries. It found that sustainable methods increased yields an average of 64 percent, rising to as much as percent in some cases. In our search for the best way to feed the world, it can be hard to make sense of all the conflicting evidence.

EXCERPT: Consumed: Sustainable Food for a Finite Planet

They extracted data from scientific studies and searched for patterns as well as for factors that could explain variations between results. They found that--it depends! In some cases, depending on soil type and farming practices, organic yields can come close to conventional yields. Mostly, however, they do fall short. Overall, organic yields were 25 percent lower. The team's results were published in the prestigious scientific journal Nature. I buy organic food.

In the arid fields of rural India we meet a farmer who has transformed her community by selling organic food directly to her neighbors. We visit a laboratory in Toronto where scientists are breeding a new kind of rice seed that they claim will feed the world. Food might be the problem, but as Elton shows, it is also the solution.

The food system as we know it was assembled in a few decades—and if it can be built that quickly, it can be reassembled and improved in the same amount of time.

Food for a Finite Planet

Elton here lays out the targets we need to meet by the year The stories she tells give us hope for avoiding a daunting fate and instead help us to believe in a not-too-distant future when we can all sit at the table. Bill McKibben, author of Oil and Honey: The Education of an Unlikely Activist.

Food for a Finite Planet. Monks, University of Idaho Choice.

An enlightening and worthy read. For more information, or to order this book, please visit https: Conservation Ecology Economics and Business:

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