Conor here: The following delves into problems and potential solutions to the food production-climate crisis, but omits one key issue, as summed up in a recent piece from The Wire to mark World Food Day:
The problem is not the absence of food but its unequal distribution. Structural inequities, fractured supply chains, broken public distribution systems, speculative markets and profit-driven trade often stand between abundance and access, turning plenty itself into a cruel irony…What stands in the way is power—who controls food, how it moves, and who gets to eat. These contradictions are sharpened by climate change, conflict, and trade systems that reward speculation and corporate consolidation over local resilience. Small farmers who produce much of the world’s food face displacement, debt, and marginalization.
Beneath every famine or food crisis lies a struggle over sovereignty: the ability of people and communities to grow, harvest, and share food on their own terms. When farmers are forced off their land, when fishing grounds are militarised, or when seeds and water are controlled by distant powers, people lose more than food – they lose autonomy. Hunger, then, is not just about empty plates; it is about who decides how those plates are filled.
By Michael Svoboda, the Yale Climate Connections books editor. He is a professor in the University Writing Program at The George Washington University in Washington, D.C. Originally published at Yale Climate Connections.
Three new and recent books grapple with an inconvenient and uncomfortable truth: Agriculture is responsible for one-third of our global climate problem.
It’s a finding that propelled Michael Grunwald, formerly a reporter for The Washington Post and now an independent journalist and author, to research and write “We Are Eating the Earth.”
Grunwald learned the stat from Tim Searchinger, an environmental lawyer with an intuitive sense for when things don’t add up and a zeal for confirming his suspicions. Searchinger became a source, a friend, and an adviser. Their investigations of agriculture and climate change eventually led to Grunwald’s new book.
We’ll publish interviews with authors Kesley Timmerman, author of “Regenerating Earth,” and Mark Easter, author of “The Blue Plate: A Food Lover’s Guide to Climate Chaos,” later this month.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
Yale Climate Connections: Thanks for taking the time to speak with us today, Mike. Why do we need to be worried about agriculture if we’re worried about climate change?
Michael Grunwald: The short answer is that it’s eating the Earth. Food is responsible for a third of the climate problem. Agriculture also uses 70% of our fresh water. It’s the leading driver of deforestation, biodiversity loss, and water pollution. If you care about the environment, you really should care about food and agriculture.
Six or seven years ago, I had one of my conversations with Tim. I asked him if meat is really as bad for the climate as everyone says. And he said, yes. And then he said, duh.
That was when it really hit me: Gosh, if I’m this ignorant about this stuff, then other people probably are too.
YCC: As you explain in your book, land use is the crux of the problem. But before we get into that, we should probably say more about Tim Searchinger. Who is he? And what does he discover about land use?
Grunwald: Tim was a wetlands lawyer when I met him. He was fighting to save the wetlands from agriculture in the Mississippi Valley. And he got interested in corn ethanol. Not because he cared about the climate, but because he cared about what the Bush administration was saying about a new ethanol mandate. That’s going to mean more corn, he realized, and that means more wetlands will be drained in Iowa, and more fertilizer will get into the Mississippi River, which will increase the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico that’s already the size of Connecticut.
Then he heard that there was a climate study about ethanol. The long story short of the study was that it found that ethanol was extraordinarily inefficient to produce. It required almost as much fossil fuel to grow as it replaced. But this study said corn ethanol was 20% better than gasoline because when you burn ethanol, yes, that creates carbon emissions, but when you grow the next crop of corn, the carbon emitted into the atmosphere is reabsorbed. So the idea was that ethanol, although very inefficient, is still a little better than gasoline.
But Tim realized if you’re going to grow fuel instead of food, then someone somewhere else is going to have to grow more food. That’s probably not going to be on a parking lot. It’s going to be on land taken from a forest or a wetland that was storing a lot of carbon.
His basic insight was that land matters; land is not free. But these studies were
treating land as if it were free and freely available. Instead, when he accounted for the emissions from changes in land-use, like deforestation, Tim found that corn ethanol is twice as bad for the climate as gasoline.
YCC: Let’s pause a moment to stress some key points. The first is that climate scientists had recognized the problem of land use changes. Cutting down forests to grow crops, a change in land use, increases emissions.
But Searchinger, who was not a practicing scientist …
Grunwald: That’s right. At the time, he’s just a smart guy who can read.
YCC: … Searchinger realizes that there are indirect consequences. If you’re going to use agricultural land for something other than growing food that people eat, then land must be taken from somewhere else to grow that food. And that could be more damaging than the problem you think you’re solving by growing biofuels. Was Searching startled when he discovered this blind spot?
Grunwald: Yes and no. That’s one of the meta-narratives of this book: the extraordinary amount of groupthink, of conventional wisdom, of wish-casting that’s not only in the political world, but in the scientific world, too.
I do profile one scientist, one environmentalist, and one public official who had had the conventional ideas about why bioenergy was great for the climate. And then when Tim showed why that was silly, they admitted they were wrong, and they switched sides. But it turns out that is not so common, that human beings are not so great at admitting they are wrong.
YCC: But sadly, the biofuel mandate is enshrined in American law as a result of these early misses by the scientists and then the enthusiastic embrace of that option by senators from ag states … and by any senator dreaming of running for president in the Iowa primary.
But the land problems don’t end with biofuels, or with biomass, another wrong turn you address in your book. Searchinger next realizes that even the most appropriate use of agricultural land, for growing food, has enormous climate consequences, especially meat production. What is the main problem with meat production?
Grunwald: Yes. Right now, we use the equivalent of all of Asia and all of Europe to grow food. But three-quarters of that land is used to grow food, either pastures or crops, that are fed to livestock. The transformation of natural land, especially rain forest, into agricultural land is the biggest source of agricultural emissions. And that is mostly a meat story.
Eating plants is way more efficient than feeding the plants to animals and then eating the animals. Cattle and other ruminants are spectacularly inefficient converters of their feed into our food. In the United States, we use about half of our agricultural land to produce beef, from which we get just 3% of our calories. All of agriculture eats the Earth, but meat eats the most.
YCC: Right. You note that just shifting away from beef is possibly the most consequential decision you could make as an individual in terms of diet. It gets you a good percentage of the way toward being vegetarian.
Grunwald: Absolutely. The best thing you can do for your diet, if you care about the planet, is to go vegan. But most of us don’t want to go vegan. In most cases, however, cutting beef and lamb is about as good as going vegetarian because cows use about 10 times as much land and generate about 10 times as many emissions as chicken or pigs. So the first best thing you can do for the planet with your diet is eat less beef.
The second is waste less food. We waste about a quarter of our food. And when we waste food, we waste the farmland and the fertilizer and the water that’s used to grow that food. Effectively, right now, we’re using a landmass the size of China to grow garbage.
YCC: Having made this point vividly in your book, you explore some alternatives. One way to reduce the downsides of eating meat, beef in particular, is to create meat in different ways.
Grunwald: Right. The first half of the book is about the eating the Earth problem. The second half is about potential solutions. And because meat is such an outsized part of the problem, I explore those potential solutions first. With plant-based meat or cultivated meat made from cells, you’re talking about 90% less land use, 90% fewer emissions. So these could be a huge solutions.
I actually started my reporting for this book in 2019 at the Good Food Institute Conference. It was a crazy time because Beyond Meat had just gone public with the biggest initial public offering of the 21st century. You had these new biotech burgers from Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods that were way better than the old kind of hockey puck veggie burgers. But they were still more expensive and not as delicious as meat, so people didn’t have a reason to keep buying them.
When I went back to GFI in 2023, it was all doom and gloom. However, this response is overblown, too. The cow is a pretty mature technology; meat substitutes are not. But they’re going to keep getting better and cheaper and maybe even healthier.
YCC: After exploring meal alternatives, you turn to regenerative agriculture. What in Searchinger’s view does regenerative agriculture get wrong and what does it get right?
Grunwald: Let me say a couple of things about it.
There’s this very popular notion – in movies, at the U.N., among environmental groups, major philanthropies, even big ag and big food – of carbon farming, the idea that by treating our soil better, all that bad carbon that we pumped up into the sky is going to magically reappear as good carbon in our soil. That I really do have to say is mostly bullshit.
Tim has been at the forefront of exposing this. Most of the discussion has been about how difficult it is to measure soil carbon and how difficult it is to make sure that once you have carbon in the soil that it stays in the soil. But also, there’s a lot of science that shows that you can’t add a lot more carbon to your soil without adding a lot more nitrogen. And there are all kinds of problems with adding more nitrogen, either through manure or synthetic fertilizer with nitrous oxide, with pollution.
So the idea of carbon markets paying a lot of money to people who claim to be able to store carbon, this is dangerous nonsense.
YCC: But Searchinger does seem to acknowledge that there can be benefits if you adopt a more diverse approach to farming, or even expand your notion of farming to include agroforestry.
Grunwald: I’m not an agronomist or a scientist, but I can do the math. By 2050, we are going to need a lot more food, and we’re going to have to grow it with less land and much fewer emissions. That’s my starting point for this eating the Earth problem.
Food authors like Michael Pollan write beautifully about organic farms, with their red barns and where the animals have names instead of numbers. But if they are making less food per acre, they need more acres to make food, and so they are eating more of the Earth.
That’s where I start from on these questions, and I know that upsets people, because it acknowledges that these factory farms, which treat people badly, treat animals badly, and use too many antibiotics, are really good at manufacturing a lot of food at affordable prices.
YCC: Right, that’s the essential message of your book: We have to grow more food on less land with less pollution.
Grunwald: Yes, exactly. We need to make even more food with less mess.
YCC: So what are some of the innovations that might help us achieve that goal?
Grunwald: On the demand side, alternative proteins are really exciting. And there are lots of new technologies to help reduce food waste. There’s biotech that can slow the spoiling of fruits and vegetables. And there are apps that can reduce the price on foods approaching their expiration date and then notify shoppers.
On the supply side, you see all kinds of exciting new technologies. I wrote about how scientists are gene-editing microbes to snatch fertilizer out of the air and feed it to crops, and how they’re using the mRNA technology behind the COVID vaccines to create alternative pesticides, like one that constipates potato beetles to death. You’ve also got stuff like biological nitrification, inhibition, and better manure management.
GMOs offer the possibility of drought-tolerant, flood-tolerant, heat-tolerant crops that, in a warming world, can produce higher yields and thus more money for farmers and more food for people. And there’s really no evidence of health or environmental harms from them.
For all of this stuff, though, we need more money for research and more money for deployment, because we need to figure out what actually works.
YCC: Don’t we also need to change the way we govern farming?
Grunwald: This is an interesting question. The political economy of this stuff is tricky, right? All over the world, the agricultural lobby is very powerful. That’s why the world spends $600 billion a year subsidizing agriculture, and $300 billion of that is just direct handouts to farmers. All forms of farming fall short of what we need: more food from less land with less mess. But you have to do the accounting.
In the big, beautiful bill that the Republicans just passed in Congress, when it comes to biofuels, they tell the government to put their pencils down. You can no longer look at land use change when you’re analyzing biofuels to find out whether sustainable aviation fuels are truly sustainable, basically because that would be bad for corn and soy farmers.
I wrote an op-ed in The New York Times about how ludicrous it was for Democrats to support the farm provisions in the big, beautiful bill. It makes sense for Republicans; they’re winning 90% of the vote in farm country in some areas. For Democrats, the argument used to be, “We’ll give them their farm subsidies, but we’ll get food stamps.” But now Republicans are slashing food stamps while jacking up farm subsidies.
YCC: So I’m hearing grim vigilance is the attitude one must adopt.
Grunwald: Yes. Like Searchinger – who has now published 10 articles in Science and Nature, even though he never did get a scientific degree – you need to know who does their homework and who are the cranks.
i dont know if studies are accurately including carbon emissions from transportation and fertilizer, but the fertilizer is also deeply terrible for emissions. haber bosch process that makes our nitrogen functions at very high pressures, which is energy costly. plus mining and refining of things like phosphorous causes a lot of pollution. the agribusiness industry that supports farming is just as bad if not worse than say, lithium mining for phones. but paradoxically it is what allows the modern world to have such an abundance of food, and we come back to the classic question of “more resource now vs slow destruction of the environment: which is worse?”
this is a lot of what drives me to grow my own food.
The author’s framework is urban/industrial:
> And there are all kinds of problems with adding more nitrogen, either through manure or synthetic fertilizer with nitrous oxide, with pollution.
This erases a couple billion years of evolution as irrelevant. His cases require active transport to the growing location. Which implicitly centralizes function. Seems to have no concept of things like legumes and biochar.
He’s not wrong about many particulars. But his solutions are energy intensive. And I can’t tell what fight he’s picking.
Yes, exactly, whatever happened to alfalfa and clover ?
Not to mention the physical impossibility of replacing all that grassland with arable and actually be able to farm sustainably ….
“I’m not an agronomlst or a scientist”
Well at least that uncomplicated statement rang true…..
The article really had me interested – right up to the point where as solutions they suggested frankenfoods, mRNA technology, more industrial farming with animals, more new technologies to save the day and mobile apps. Yeah, nah. Intensifying what we have been doing is not a way to get out of the problem created by what we are doing currently.
Just about every answer in that interview scared me. mRNA based pesticides? Nothing to worry about there, I’m sure.
But the scariest part of the piece is the underlying assumption that there is somehow a way to distribute the earth’s resources much better than we are doing now. Who’s going to do that? Most of the great famines in history have been the result of government inefficiency or deliberate government malfeasance. I think we’re probably better off letting the Cargills and their peers stay in charge [and just taxing them more heavily], rather than handing off the responsibility to journalists and lawyers from inside the Beltway.
“And there’s really no evidence of health or environmental harms from them.”
Look. Around. You. At least if you live in the USA. Note how many people walking down the street or across the parking lot don’t look healthy. Pale, puffy, overweight, with clear difficulties moving their bodies and a distressed look on their faces, if they have any animation at all. It’s painful to see.
I found it difficult to get through this article.
The last few questions and answers were particularly frustrating. the interviewee feels compelled by the idea that we need to produce more food. By food, he seems to mean calories, not nutrition. Those farms Michael Pollan writes about can produce lots of great quality nutrition, but yes, not as much in the way of raw calories. But, one look at the obesity and related chronic health issues plaguing the US and Mexico, in particular, should make you question whether or not we need more calories.
He brushes off the “Michael Pollan farms” as if it’s a complete non-starter. Big ag wouldn’t be able to complete without all those ridiculous subsidized inputs that are causing all the damage (fertilizer run-off and dead zones) that the author laments.
The idea that technology is going to save us is like some kind of religious dogma with these pseudo-environmentalists. We’re not going to save ourselves with GMOs, lab-grown meat, and m-RNA targeted solutions for pests. None of those things have solved any actual problems. Why on earth does the author think they are going to do so?
Why does the interviewer and the author both seem oblivious to the idea that cows are supposed to eat grass and that almost all the harms from industrial agriculture disappear once you….stop doing industrial agriculture and manage the animals properly.
It’s not beef…it’s big ag, and how big ag wants you to produce beef.
The biggest trick the oligarchs have ever played on us is pusing the idea that we can ‘solve’ climate change with individual choices instead of neutering the oligarchs.
To your point—imo, the best sign(handmade) striding through my red state ‘No Kings’ protest yesterday was:
“The Only minority threatening the USA is the RICH and WEALTHY”
There’s people out there who know better. It’s a not-so-small matter to organize them, empower them and spread that particular message.
It takes an awful lot of organized millions of people wanting to neuter the oligarchs to have a hope of neutering the oligarchs.
One thing that individuals can achieve by making publicly visible individual choices is to spot eachother and make eachother spottable to eachother to see how many millions of people they add up to. If/when they recruit enough “individual choicemakers” to the “individual choicemaking community”, they may have the “safety and victory-margin in numbers” to be able to organize into a cultural base and foundation able to support a political movement capable of conquering political power in order to neuter the oligarchs with it.
So there’s a reason for making publicly visible “individual choices” with a longer-term goal of welding enough individual choicemakers into political-economic combat-warfighting strike forces.
Another foray into this area: George Monbiot’s Regenesis
He’s another one that’s a completely wrong-headed environmentalist. There is no technological solution here, it’s a political/social/economic/governance one. That’s a much tougher nut to crack.
We have never had the “grass fed” marketing tag on UK beef markets until very recently as ALL beef was grass fed.
We used to feed brewer’s grains in winter as a supplement to silage, and some UK Wagyu producers supplement with wonky supermarket rejected spuds for that fat build up, but only since the build up of the industrial agri-business feedlot approach has the grass feed diet changed.
Of course industrial feedlots are an energy intensive and totally unsustainable form of food production (farming it ain’t).
The problem really is the continued industrialisation of farming, with oligarchic control at both ends of the process – so we have the biochemical agrichem companies which “own” seed ‘copyrights’ plus all the genetically tailored pesticides and fertiliser trade at the supply end and then the oligarchic supermarket buyers at the other control the demand end and primarily fix prices for their own profitability and certainly not for public health.
The original production principles in the ‘Green Revolution’ of improving yields without massive cost rises for farmers through IR8, IR20, IR64. etc., have long been captured by profiteering oligarchic suppliers
But as oligarchs .. they control government…
In the UK 4 supermarkets control 80% of all food retailing.
In India Monsanto has been engaged in monopoly seed supply disputes for years.
Its not all bad news though..There are still 300m Chinese quasi subsistence farmers working small units of an acre or two, often less, so traditional methods still dominate, (and commercial Japanese farms are 2.5ha average though Japan is very much import dependent) and 40% of all Russian food comes from semi-urban dacha horticulture, so oligarchic industrialisation is thankfully still only partial, globally.
Monbiot’s technofix of industrially produced and cultivated protein for the masses is a total chimera.
His own conversion to veganism (following the two Oxford geographers producing misleading ‘gross’ data for “Our World in Data”) completely colours his writings.
He has also quite wrongly slagged out regenerative farming – based as it is on the traditional 3 or 4 field crop rotation cycle with a nitrogen fixing ley as well as manure from grazing stock and arable. If that isn’t agronomically sensible and sustainable I don’t know what is.
The primary management issue is then to maintain yields without reliance on inorganic nitrogen.
Given that American average daily calorie intake is reported as 3914 – compared with a daily requirement closer to 2500 calories, there is plenty of slack in the US for improving farming qualitatively, even with some yield reduction, to improve soil conservation and maintain long ter fertility, as well as diets.
As for :-
” By 2050, we are going to need a lot more food ….”
well that needs a very high degree of qualification indeed….
Yes, these things you list out are examples of real problems to address.
mRNA designer germs to kill pests don’t fix any of them.
My understanding of Monbiot is that he is basically a child of upper-class-adjacent cultural privilege and his “rewilding” concept is based on forcing the vast “normals” majority into test-tube-vat-grown vegan humanchow-eating lives in urban eco-gulags, while he and his kind will spend their lives playing and amusing themselves in their gated fenced ” re-wilded nature zones”.
Or am I wrong?
” By 2050, we are going to need a lot more food ….”
Not the way things are going. Discourage childhood vaccinations. Do a few more genocides around the world, including human-induced famines. Continue reducing life expectancies and increasing infant mortality rates by allowing health care to become astronomically expensive. Top it off with a few strategically placed tactical nukes. Allow the oligarchs to continue to suck up increasing amounts of resources, leaving less and less for the bottom half of humanity, who will be encouraged to die quietly, polite and non-violent to their last breath.
The Wire blurb introduction nicely summarizes the problem with the book and interview. It was interesting when it discussed the complex interlinkage of food and environment, but then it went off the rails in the solutions section.
Given that the existing societal structures (neoliberalism) maximize profits (irrespective of climate or hunger). Improvements (at the margin) by legal definition (maximize shareholder value) accrue as higher profits, not better outcomes (except for the shareholders/management). But I guess an environmental book without easy personal actions (even if globally meaningless) sells poorly, and doesn’t get invited on the big morning chat shows (to drive sales), if it points out the systematic issues.
Given that such-like environmental books were common when I was young, half a century ago, and the problems are worse, it’s a safe prediction that the solutions are not to be found in these types of books.
Not a minor quibble: “The cow is a pretty mature technology.” No, it is NOT! Milk production per cow has increased dramatically in the last decade – over 100 gallons per cow per day now is typical for family-owned dairies (10000-15000 noses) in California, today – and that’s not big Ag!
Meanwhile, new cow varieties grow beef faster than ever, with gene splicing bio-tech certain to further increase profitability, aka productivity (at the likely expense of quality and nutrition). Sounds like it was lifted unexamined from Beyond Beef marketing material.
over 100 gallons per cow per day now is typical for family-owned dairies
Not to quibble much with your larger point, but you may need to double check this statement because raw milk (most often sold by the cwt not per gallon) weighs about 8.5lbs per gallon meaning cows would be offloading ~400 lbs of milk at each milking or 850 lbs per day.
That’s a lot for 1,500lb dairy cow to carry…
My bad, it’s 100 pounds, not gallons. Wrong units!
Whenever I see that “Yale Climate Connections” branding I cringe. I’m going to have to read the ravings of another out-of-touch urban-dwelling Mandarin looking at our global climate through a Democrat/Republican Beltway-centric lens.
I get my beef from a high-desert co-operative in eastern Oregon, processed about 250 miles from where I live. Their land can’t be used for any other sort of agriculture; it’s too dry and the soils are too poor to produce anything digestible by a human being. Their cattle turn that high-desert scrub into delicious protein. I’ve met a couple of the cattlemen from the co-op and if they vote Republican it’s because they’re sick of urban-dwelling finger-waggers telling us to eat sodium-laden Beyond burgers and factory-farmed poultry.
Of course most land is used for agricultural production. We must feed 8.25 billion humans in simultaneous being — 60 percent of them urban-dwellers who have no hope of producing their own food. North America is a whopping 83 percent urbanized which is why these Yalies are so clueless about where their food comes from.
Me too, the farm lands are North, due East of me currently.
my wife and i were in ethiopia on our honeymoon in january – the orthodox church there manages meat hunger by imposing a tremendous number of vegan fasting days (180 a year, including 50 straight before christmas). the food culture is delicious, highly spiced, and nutritionally diverse even during the fast. on christmas eve in addis we got to see everyone visiting the street corner on-the-hoof livestock vendors selling goats, sheep, and cows for families to feast in the morning. maybe if the west could remember that this is a reasonable and sustainable way to live, we wouldn’t be proposing lab-grown meat and bioengineered slop.
Orthodox Christian lent is not vegan, because fish is included. It is also not just an Ethiopian thing, though the practise is less common in modern times.
This article is an excellent example of people who need to get out from behind their screens and learn how the real world works.
All plants take carbon dioxide out of the air and turn it into oxygen and plant. An animal comes along and eats the plant and metabolises it back to CO2. This cycle goes round and round with virtually no effect on the total amount of CO2 in the atmosphere.
Atmospheric CO2 has been increasing because humans have been digging up fossil fuels that have been buried for millions of years and spewing the resultant CO2 into the atmosphere.
It was some bright spark in the fossil fuel lobby that came up with the idea of blaming agriculture for the greenhouse effect. For the fossil fuel industry this has been an excellent way to avoid paying for the problems they have caused.