by Hal Hamilton

— June 17, 2002 —

Dennis Avery is the leading challenger of sustainable agriculture, and he sets up “high-yield” agriculture as its opposite. Why can’t high-yield agriculture also be sustainable?

Unfortunately, Avery seems less interested in exploring the future of farming than in selling industrial agriculture. He claims that industrial methods are the best way to preserve nature and feed the hungry. He’s not subtle. He trumpets hog factories, and his book is titled, Saving the Planet with Pesticides and Plastic.

Dennis Avery is also currently spearheading a “Declaration in Support of Protecting Nature With High-yield Farming and Forestry,” signed by Nobel Prize winners and a couple of leading environmentalists.

Their argument goes like this: We need to use high-yield farming methods in order to feed a population of more and more people who eat more and more meat. Allowing farmers to use modern methods on the best land ensures that fragile rain forests and mountainsides don’t have to be plowed up for food production.

So far so good. We need high-yield practices on good farmland. That’s not all we need though. High-yields have to be sustainable over time. If current high-yields make future high-yields impossible by damaging the soil, for example, then the high-yields are short-term. If our farming methods are depleting non-renewable resources like water in ancient aquifers, for example, then they are clearly not sensible. If the unintended impacts of our methods cause too much pollution and kill off life in the Gulf of Mexico, for example, then we’re solving one problem but creating others.

I’ll cite just one specific instance. Under the Great Plains of the US there’s a huge aquifer, the Ogallala, which is being used for irrigation at three times the rate at which it is recharged. How long can we do that?

Yields and Sustainability Aren’t Opposites

Luckily, we don’t have to choose between yields and sustainability. Farmers and universities all over the world have developed sustainable high-yield farming techniques. We don’t know all the answers yet. Lots of times pesticides seem necessary for specific crops in specific places if we are to ward off insects, diseases, or weeds. Lots of times chemical nitrogen seems the only way to get enough yield because we’ve so separated crop and livestock production; there’s no manure to put on crop fields anymore, and crop farmers can no longer rotate grain with hay and pasture legumes.

All of these barriers are solvable. We can raise water-conserving crops on dry land. We keep learning how to solve pest and disease problems with biological methods. And we could, if we got the incentives right, bring livestock back onto crop farms, or at least nearby.

Avery implies that the primary choice is between industrialized agriculture and “going back” to organic methods that use raw manure and peasant slash-and-burn cultivation. This line of reasoning misses decades of scientific and farmer knowledge of high-yield sustainable techniques. Avery is right that we shouldn’t “go back,” although there’s plenty of wisdom among those who have tended fragile landscapes for generations. We can integrate that wisdom with the most advanced knowledge of soil biology and plant physiology and animal husbandry to create the agriculture we all want — very productive and indefinitely sustainable.

Eventually we know we must strive to meet some basic conditions like the ones described by Herman Daly, former World Bank economist, as follows:

• Don’t harvest a renewable resource at a rate faster than it can regenerate.

• Don’t take a non-renewable resource at a rate faster than you can develop a renewable substitute.

• Don’t emit a pollutant or waste stream faster than the planet can absorb it or render it harmless.

These principles define prudence, and we’re violating them. There many indicators, with global climate change the most dramatic (although Avery dismisses its severity and importance). We just can’t keep going on the way we’re doing things. Fossil fuel production will peak in ten years or a hundred. The exact timeframe isn’t all that important. What is important is that we will run out of what is fueling our economy. So we’d better start doing things in ways that can last. It doesn’t really matter if soil erosion will severely reduce productivity in ten years or a hundred-we can’t sustain soil erosion. And so forth.

I agree with Avery and the people he has recruited to sign declarations that high yields are necessary to feed a growing population. I agree that natural ecosystems should be protected. I can’t imagine, however, why we would have to choose between high yields and sustainability.

This is not a choice between industrial farming and organic farming. That’s a false dichotomy. We need to be talking about good farming, with each crop and livestock enterprise adapting to each farm. Good farmers know their land and want to treat it well. All farmers want to be productive, and good farmers also want to make sure that their farm is productive in the future.

Modern technology has helped farmers be more productive. Sometimes these gains in productivity are only short-term, and sometimes at the expense of environmental degradation. Ideally, however, scientists and farmers form quite extraordinary teams to pioneer ever more productive and sustainable methods.

The evidence for this transformation of modern agriculture is everywhere. Good farming is not only good for the environment. It pays. For those wanting to explore examples, try these* from a book called “The New American Farmer.”

© Sustainability Institute

*original article includes the following link, which is no longer available: http://www.sare.org/newfarmer/