From Prospect Magazine, March 3, April edition:
For nearly all of human history, the main concern was to cultivate enough food to feed everyone—but now we face a new crucial problem
When Stéphane Quere took over his parents’ farm in Brittany 16 years ago, he didn’t have any particular desire to turn it organic. He had grown up seeing his parents labour to grow broccoli and shallots and cauliflower on their 30 hectares, helping out from the age of seven, working through the summer holidays as a teenager. His main thought was: I have to find a different way to farm, one that isn’t so hard.
Stéphane’s dilemma is perhaps the fundamental question of all life since the dawn of time: how can we get enough food to sustain ourselves? In the Anthropocene era, it is a newly urgent question. Climate change is upon us and our dominion on Earth has become the planet’s most determining environmental factor. Agriculture and the food industry account for a quarter of global greenhouse emissions. How do we produce food and eat in a way that is not only sustaining for our own body and soul, but also the planet?
For nearly all of human history, the main concern was to cultivate enough food to feed everyone. But more than two hundred years on from the predictions of Malthus—in a world with roughly eight times as many mouths to feed—we live in an era of cheap and abundant food. Perhaps for the first time in history, we now produce more calories globally than we need per person. (About 800m people worldwide are still considered to be undernourished, but this is mostly as a result of conflict. Hunger is now a problem of distribution, not of production.) The price of food has been falling for decades. In Britain, household food spending now accounts for less than 10 per cent of the average disposable income; in the 1950s it was around 40 per cent.
But this spectacular achievement has come at a cost. The methods that have been so successful in increasing yield—intensive farming and aquaculture, larger and larger fields of monocultured crops, the use of pesticides and herbicides—have proved environmentally catastrophic. Chemical fertilisers degrade soil health and contribute to global warming. Using more and more chemicals creates a vicious cycle: more intensive farming leads to more degradation of productive land. This creates a greater need to push yields to their maximum with chemical inputs. Meanwhile, pathogens and pests continue to plague animals and ravage crops despite the continued development of new pesticides and herbicides to deploy against them. It’s an arms race that the pathogens are always going to win. And along the way small family farms, like Stéphane’s, have been squeezed into penury by falling food prices and falling incomes.
The EAT-Lancet Commission on Food, Planet and Health, published in 2019, was the first scientific review to ask: can we feed a future population of 10bn people on a healthy diet, and within planetary boundaries? In February of this year Chatham House published a landmark review concluding that agriculture is now the main threat posed to biodiversity. The issue is not only urgent, but mainstream.
The debate, however, has been presented as an almost unresolvable dichotomy: either we continue to eat like ravenous global omnivores and destroy the planet, or we must eat more plant protein than meat and revert to some kind of peasant-paleo diet of beans and gruel, enlivened with the occasional foraged herb.
On one side, the industrialists argue that the methods that were so successful in increasing manufacturing capacity—mechanisation, standardisation, specialisation, scale economies, comparative advantage—have also transformed agricultural production and delivered a stable global food supply. The other side, let’s call them the organicists, maintain that the natural world—the oceans, forests, fields and animals—should not be subject to Henry Ford-style efficiencies, and blame “big ag” for destroying the planet by churning out highly processed foods that also threaten our health.
The organicists seem to hanker for a bygone pastoral Eden, a countryside patchworked by small and medium family-run farms, where flocks of chickens follow cows grazing in pastures. The industrialists roll their eyes and say: you need monoculture efficiencies, you can’t feed billions of people on free-range chickens that cost twenty quid.
Somewhere in the middle are farmers, squeezed out of the value chain by the multinational food companies and supermarkets, and us, the eaters, the consumers, wondering what to cook for supper.
Organic farming was not taught when Stéphane went to agricultural college; he had to pay for supplemental courses after graduating. One of the courses he took was about how to bake bread. His instructor suggested that with about 30 hectares (a good average size for a vegetable farm in his part of Brittany), he could go organic and grow cereal grains for bread as well as vegetables. On a map Stéphane drew a compass circle around his farm to describe a 30 minute-drive radius and toured several weekly town markets. There were few organic producers and he saw that there was a way to sell his produce directly.
His Kerantosfal Farm is now organic and, he laughs, looks much like a farm might have looked at the turn of the last century. It is a mixed operation, growing 40 kinds of vegetable, including 15 varieties of tomatoes in the summer; cereals, several wheats, rye and buckwheat. He also keeps a small herd of reddish long-horned Salers cattle. The grain is milled on site and baked into bread in the farm’s giant stone, wood-burning oven. Hay meadows feed the cows that produce meat to sell and manure to fertilise the vegetables. Every three years or so, when weeds begin to overtake the vegetable patches, the fields are given over to grass for the cows to graze and refertilise.
Ten years ago he took on a partner, a young Breton farmer named Gurvan Raoul. The farm is a going concern that supports their two families and employs one almost-full-time farmhand, plus extra workers in summer. “When I started people thought, ‘Oh he is punk, he’s totally hippy,’” Gurvan told me; granted, he does have blue hair. His forearms are also colourfully tattooed. When I came to the farm, he was splitting wood for the bread oven. “Ten years later we are still here. It’s not a big farm,” he said modestly, “but it is a good one that we are proud of.”
The basic problem with the organic idyll is yield. If you take away the synthetic fertiliser, it plummets. One aggregated data analysis from Nature in 2018 suggests that organic farming yields vary between 2 to 30 per cent less than “conventional” farms. On the Kerantosfal farm, the broccoli are half the size of those on nearby non-organic farms.
Industrialists argue that although organic farming might be preferable, it’s just not practical. In order to grow the same kinds of quantities you would have to clear more wild habitats for agriculture. Dig a little deeper and other paradoxes emerge. The term “organic” is a big umbrella label that can shelter all kinds of unhelpful environmental practices. Run-off from organic slurry is as much an environmental problem as nitrates from chemical fertilisers leaching into groundwater. Big organic farms in California’s Central Valley are draining aquifers.
On the other hand, the industrialist’s monocultures, which produce higher yields of a more uniform product, are also more fragile and susceptible to pathogens, weather and market vicissitudes. They are the proverbial eggs in one basket. The Cavendish banana, one of the most popular fruits in the world, is propagated as a genetic clone and is being destroyed by a new strain of Panama disease. In Florida, citrus greening is threatening a billion dollar crop, despite the efforts of some growers to inject antibiotics into their trees to stop it. African swine flu has been sweeping through Chinese pig farms for the past two years, decimating herds, just as a new variant has recently been detected. The global agri-business is, as it were, devouring its own....
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