How will we feed 9 billion people by 2050, without destroying the planet?
That was the question asked over and over again at the meeting of agricultural experts at Columbia University in New York that I attended last week. The idea behind the meeting was that current methods of agricultural production cannot be sustained, or as Jeff Sachs, director of Columbia’s Earth Institute, put it at the beginning of the meeting, “We’re here because we can’t go on the way we’re going on. The question Malthus posed – can we feed the planet, slow population, and remain sustainable – is still an open question.”
The view from the meeting
The goal was to create a set of metrics for assessing the state of global agriculture. The organizers of the meeting had the idea that if we set up targets for what should be the desirable outcomes for agriculture – for example, making sure that people have access to nutritional food or that agricultural production is not harming the local environment – we’ll have a pathway to making agriculture more productive and sustainable.
We were 15 stories up, in a crowded room with windows offering views of one of the greatest cities in the world, stretched out as far the eye could see. Not a farm in sight. Yet the discussion was focused on issues of subsistence farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa, the agricultural practices in the South American tropics, the crop yields and soil nutrients of the American Midwest, and the 1 billion undernourished people around the world, among myriad other concerns. The people in this room considered themselves responsible for solving the problems faced by farms large and small, feeding a population that grows by 80 million each year, and changing the course of global agriculture as it is known today. I honestly felt like I was in the presence of the people who would save the world.
Most of the meeting consisted of scientists, and also agricultural industry and non-profit representatives, giving Power-Point presentations on their work, and addressing the question of how to feed the 9 billion projected by the U.N. for the year 2050. Jon Foley of the University of Minnesota told me in an interview, “We need a third approach to agriculture, somewhere between big agribusiness, and the lessons from organic and local systems. Can we take the best of both of these and invent a more sustainable and scalable agriculture? One that actually can feed the world, but also has much more sustainable practices for the economy and rural livelihoods.” Foley’s work was cited throughout the day. But what will that third approach look like? And how to transition from the current system to a more sustainable system?
It wasn’t until late afternoon that the meeting got around to the actual metrics. Each table in the room became its own small group, discussing which aspects of agriculture and food were the most important, and how easily they could be measured. At my table was Hans Herren, president of the Millenium Institute, and best known for saving the African cassava crop. An impressive man, to say the least. The debate amongst my table-mates (I remained a silent and journalistic observer) was impassioned and interesting, yet not unlike my experience of breaking into small groups in class. Except that instead of students of varying interest and intelligence, the people discussing were deeply experienced, widely respected, and in certain cases had saved Africans from hunger almost single-handedly.
Tom Tomich, director of the Agricultural Sustainability Institute at UC-Davis, jumped into the role as everyone’s favorite college professor, yelling out questions and encouragements, and handing people the microphone when they wanted to make a suggestion.
It was in the midst of this very engaged, collegiate-type discussion that I realized something important: no one here had the all answers. Not one single person knew the best way to make agriculture sustainable and feed 9 billion people. While everyone in the room was hopeful, accomplishing this is no sure thing. Good ideas floated 15 stories above New York don’t necessarily translate to sustainability on the ground.
By the end of the meeting, it was clear – if it hadn’t been before – that the pathway to agricultural sustainability will not be a simple journey.
It’s not an issue of better fertilizers or better crop varieties, it’s an issue of scientists, industry, and farmers working together towards an dauntingly large goal – feeding the 9 billion people, or more, on Earth by 2050. We’re just at the beginning of this trek, and we’re not yet agreed on where to start.
This is not an answer only ideas about a possible solution for America, and hopefully globally….
In the U.S. an estimated 1,200,000 rural acres of croplands, pasture, woodlands, and wetlands are disappearing under the pressure of urbanization each year.
Our company has been in rural land development in Idaho, Montana and Washington for over 40 years. During these four decades our ideas have evolved on what we consider, the optimum way to utilize land for, not necessarily its highest, but its best use.
At Skokomish Farms, our current project on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State, we are taking the next step of combining preservation of prime agricultural land with the desire of people to live in a rural atmosphere.
We are taking lessons from Randall Arendt’s teachings about conservation design, and combining his ideas with agricultural processes with forward thinking farmers like Joel Salatin at Polyface Farms in Virginia by literally creating ‘a Village around a Farm’.
Other developers like Bundoran Farms in Virgina, Prairie Crossing in Illinois, and Hidden Springs in Idaho are doing or have done somewhat similar developments.
As developers, we are most often the industry that converts agricultural land to urbanization, therefore our industry must be the one who first addresses the problem and proposes the answer.
The solution for more land being permanently preserved for crop production together with urbanization will only work with the joint cooperation of governmental planning departments. developers and environmental organizations all working together.
As we at Skokomish Farms have learned from Randall Arendt, “If developers, environmentalists, and government all work together, all will succeed…!”
Does this solution work globally……….?
This is coming from the owners of Skokomish farms who have a history of screwing people on land deals. Follow their wake in Montana and eastern Washington. These people are the worst type of developers who are now trying to cash in on a “new age” of land development.
Land, what “history of screwing people” do you speak of? Is this accusation made from personal experience? Where can I “follow the wake”? Is it online? Are there actual formal complaints made against them? Or is this just plain slander? Personally, I’ve found nothing but positive feedback in the community in the area of Skokomish Farms.
Your post does not even address the topic of “Is Sustainable Agriculture Possible?” so I have to take your negative post as irrelevant in it’s present context.
To answer Alann Krivor: Yes sir, I do believe your ideas can work globally and in some countries, I’m sure it already has.
Lindsay, feeding a world with 9 billion or more people is a daunting prospect. Perhaps these scientists don’t have solutions currently. But I for one feel gladdened that the fact that they are, at least, discussing it!
The Skokomish Farm sounds like one of many good attempts at reducing the monoculture farming world to which we’ve come to be dependant. I live a few miles from Polyface Farm and use their pork, beef, chicken,and eggs in my restaurant. I believe we should all have acccess to “pure” food. Unadulterated chicken, pork and beef. Joel Salatin’s symbiotic farming methods are duplicable, and scaleable. Water, land and desire to accomplish such farming methods, is all that is needed. Getting the USDA to open its’ eyes to what can be accomplished relatively inexpensively and safely is a major challenge. Awareness of the needs of the world’s hungry is an issue that needs way more than the lip service most governments are giving the problem.
every acre of farmable land will have to have precision ag. It’s the only way to minimize finite resources that are needed to produce the crops. Throw GMO crops in the trash can and use wider spacing so new robots can cruise down the row spacing’s and swab weeds with round up. The robots will have to have high teck silver halide batteries and little solar panels with silver in them to make most efficient use of the suns energy to move along the gound.
That is the option on a large scale. the other is for everyone to have a garden, but that’s not possible.
Interesting things have been happening with vertical grow systems where you grow produce on a “blind like sheet” that has pockets. Could be a very effective way to grow food in the desert where you could never grow much of anything before. There would just be lots of greenhouses in the desert with these grow systems. Problem is water. Piped it in. The vertical grow system takes the problem with flat land “leaching” away because the nutrients flow through the pockets and then are just recycled back up on top again. Very interesting system.
Our biggest hinderence in the future of Ag is GMO. We are playing with our survival product and at the same time making the competing forces (weeds)stronger with the tolerance. Plant’s in the ground fight for nutrients like UFC fighters fight in the Octagon.
I am glad the discussions are taking place. This is a starting point and along with films such as Food Inc. sustainable agriculture will have its day.
However, I believe there is also another avenue for increasing the bounty from the land. If farmers and ranchers on the land were to focus on maintaining land health and diversity (including all the involved ecosystems such as wetlands and woodlands) the land would respond in plenty.
Current cropping and livestock feedlot methods keep us so under productive and inefficient it is no wonder we have arrived at this point and are having conversations about feeding the population.
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