Redesigning Agriculture

October 2006 / Vol. 56 No. 10 • BioScience 839 M industrial agriculture is incredibly good at the mass production of low-priced commodities. Such single-minded efficiency has given developed countries consistently full supermarket shelves and allowed the world’s population to grow from 1.6 billion to more than 6.5 billion in a little over a century. But this has come at a significant cost. The industrial approach relies on a disconnect between crops and livestock and an emphasis on maximizing production to the exclusion of all else. Such a break has created a highly dysfunctional nutrient cycle, one in which massive amounts of nitrogen fertilizers are used to maintain high yields on industrial farms. A significant proportion of those nutrients, along with other pollutants, leaves our farms in the form of water and air pollution. Nitrogen fertilizer escaping midwestern crop fields, for example, is creating a dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico that is undermining the fishing industry there. Agricultural fertilizer in Australia is a major threat to the Great Barrier Reef (Smil 2001), as it is to 146 coastal estuaries around the world (Zimdahl 2006). There is even evidence that excess nitrogen fertilizer is causing declining plant diversity in natural ecosystems such as grasslands (Wedin and Tilman 1996, Smil 2001). During the past half-dozen years there has been an intensive debate among agriculturalists, environmentalists, scientists, policymakers, and, most recently, nutritionists about how to restore ecological functions to agricultural land. It has become clear that it will require a multidisciplinary approach that goes beyond mere agronomic tinkering. Taken as a whole, five books provide a glimpse at how we can broaden agriculture’s narrow preoccupation with yielding a handful of commodities and remake it into a multifunctional process that provides many public goods, including food; functional landscapes; economic development; and ecosystem services such as increased biodiversity and a tight, sustainable nutrient cycle. In Enriching the Earth: Fritz Haber, Carl Bosch, and the Transformation of World Food Production (2001), geographer Vaclav Smil tells the important story of how we got to this point in agriculture. Smil describes how the ability to circumvent the natural nitrogen cycle and create this critical nutrient in a factory has become both a blessing and a curse, a long-term dependence with many negative consequences. Weed scientist Robert Zimdahl, in Agriculture’s Ethical Horizon (2006), brings facts and a broad, informed set of ethical and philosophical reflections to bear on dilemmas that face scientists and agricultural practitioners. This engaging book seeks to spur the creation of “a firm ethical foundation” for our food and farming system, which Zimdahl argues is essential to advance the practice of agriculture toward sustainability. As Jules Pretty skillfully writes in Agri-Culture: Reconnecting People, Land and Nature (2002), there are changes afoot all over the world. Pretty, a professor of environment and society at the University of Essex, provides supporting evidence for a global perspective and place-based stories for how agriculture is being transformed into a multifunctional beast of burden. His informative book makes the case that new approaches are possible and could be expanded if given sufficient credence. Journalist Michael Pollan, in The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (2006), provides an entertaining and firsthand look at how a more localized food and farming system could tighten our nutrient cycle while creating healthier consumers. In Farming with the Wild: Enhancing Biodiversity on Farms and Ranches (2003), environmentalist and journalist Daniel Imhoff demonstrates with photos and text that farming can be integrated into systems that protect wildlands.