Agricultural Progress

Modern agriculture is one of humanity’s greatest achievements — and where progress is still needed most

The Potato Eaters

It is not so simple a thing to feed the world. Yet most of us eat three meals a day and think little of it. If you do give the calories you consume much thought, I’m guessing you spend far more time worrying about how to avoid eating too many than you do worrying about whether you’ll get enough.

The last sentence should awe you. Do not skim past it. The fact that many of our bellies are overfull is one of humanity’s greatest achievements.

Consider this graph:

Source: Our World in Data

If you allow yourself the time to sit with this graph and all that it means, what do you feel? I feel an appreciation for all the nights, and I mean all, that I’ve gone to bed without hunger pangs. I feel grateful that my children were born into a world where they can push away fresh vegetables in the winter without a second thought. In all of human history, how many ages could even make sense of that sentence? Full enough to be picky, discarding nutritious food, fresh in winter?! I rejoice in lives made healthier, taller — possible. I see previously unimaginable wealth.

If that graph doesn’t make you feel as fortunate as I do, consider this one:

Source: Our World in Data

I find this graph astonishing for two reasons. First, each red bar represents the wretchedness and death of millions; it represents misery on an spectacular scale.¹ Second, it shows how drastically, quickly, and recently our human condition has changed. In 1945, it was estimated that roughly half of the global population didn’t have access to enough calories. Today, the number of people without enough calories to eat is down to nearly 1 in 10. That’s an incredible improvement in less than 100 years. Poverty and hunger were, for almost all of human history, the default. No longer. We escaped this trap when we learned how to grow more food from less land. Our ability to raise agricultural yields, and all it enabled, is the quintessential example of what I mean when I say progress.²

Where Progress Comes From

In his excellent essay, Breakfast for Eight Billion,³ Charles C. Mann highlights three major breakthroughs that led to the massive increase in crop yields that characterize modern agriculture: fertilization, irrigation, and genetics. I’ll add two more: mechanization and energy.

Fertilization

Nitrogen is the limiting factor to plant growth. Historically, farmers used fire, manure, and crop rotations as ways to increase nitrogen in soils, but these techniques weren’t sufficient to overcome nitrogen as a constraint on yields. Then, in the early 1900s, came the discovery of how to make synthetic nitrogen at an industrial scale via the Haber-Bosch process. In Thomas Hager’s book about the discovery of Haber-Bosch, Alchemy of Air, he estimates that roughly 50% of the nitrogen found in our bodies comes from nitrogen made available by the process. That is to say, if we are what we eat, roughly half of what we consume was grown with the assistance of synthetic fertilizer made possible by Haber-Bosch. What does this mean, practically? Billions of us alive today owe our very existence to this technology.

Irrigation

As anyone with a house plant knows, plants are thirsty. Less than 1% of the water on earth is freshwater accessible and usable by humans, and we use around 70% of that limited freshwater supply to support agriculture. Harvests used to depend on the whims of nature to supply water in sufficient quantities, at the right time. Heavy spring rains didn’t help a farmer that needed water in the late, sweltering days of summer. Limited or poorly timed water availability, limited or no harvest. Now, with dams and pumps, farmers have much more access and control over when water can be applied to a field. This ability to irrigate is a major driver of yields; roughly 40% of global production depends on irrigation.

Genetics

The potential yield of any individual plant is a function of its genetic makeup. Plant genes are like human genes, they impact traits like height and health. In short, better genes equal a higher potential yield. Norman Borlaug figured out how to breed wheat that was not only disease resistant (plants struck by pests and disease don’t produce as much), but could also produce far more grain if fertilized and irrigated. This variety of wheat, called dwarf wheat, allowed crop yields to quadruple in some places. Billions of people are alive because Borlaug figured out how to feed them.

When we combine the power of fertilizer, irrigation, and genetics we get amazing outcomes like this one described by Mann:

Between 1961 and 2003, Asian irrigation more than doubled, from 182 million acres to 417 million acres, and fertilizer use went up by a factor of more than twenty, from 4 to 87 million tons. Combined with the new rice strains, the consequence was a near-tripling of Asian rice production.

⁠In the 1970s, much of South and East Asia were plagued by hunger. By the twenty-first century, Asians had an average of 30 percent more calories in their diet. Millions upon millions of families had more food, and with that came so much else. Seoul and Shanghai, Jaipur and Jakarta; shining skyscrapers, pricey hotels, traffic-choked streets blazing with neon: all are built atop a foundation of laboratory-bred rice.⁠

Mechanization

Mechanization dramatically reduces the amount of labor required on a farm and allows that labor to be applied elsewhere; this is one of the reasons the industrial revolution was possible in the first place. Adam Smith saw it happening: “By means of the plough two men, with the assistance of three horses, will cultivate more ground than twenty could do with the spade.”

What Smith didn’t envision is how far tractors and other machinery would take this trend. The decreasing need for labor is what allowed Borlaug to leave his family farm and pursue the education that would lead to his wheat breakthrough. Mechanization not only improved yields directly, but it allowed for the processing, transport, and storage of bumper yields that characterize modern agriculture supply chains.

Energy

It’s hard to overstate the importance of energy. Modern agriculture requires copious amounts of energy (coal, oil, gas, renewables) to produce fertilizer, make cement for dams, and fuel tractors, to name only a few uses. Remember how I said that roughly half of what we consume was grown with the assistance of synthetic fertilizer made possible by Haber-Bosch? Making that fertilizer consumes around 2% of global energy. It is no coincidence that as energy consumption grew, agricultural land use per person fell. Abundant, cheap energy very directly translates into more food. Without that energy, billions would starve.

Source: Our World in Data

Why we still need more progress

For all the progress we’ve made, so much more is necessary. That graph of agricultural land use per person that gave me all the warm and fuzzies? It also adds a tremendous urgency to push further. There are three primary reasons why more agricultural progress is needed: progress has not reached everyone, agriculture’s environmental impact, and population growth.

Progress is not evenly distributed

We can now grow enough food, on a per calorie basis, to feed the world. Yet billions of people are still plagued by low agricultural productivity and hunger, regardless of what the global average has to say. There are still roughly three billion people on this earth who don’t have to imagine the tragedies that people like me in the developed world have largely left behind. They’re still living in it. Progress has undeniably reduced suffering, but it clearly hasn’t eliminated it.

It should be no surprise that low agricultural productivity leads not only to hunger, but poverty. In Sub-Saharan Africa where agricultural productivity significantly lags the rest of the world, 40% of people live below the international poverty line. The poorest of the poor are farmers. 76% of working adults in extreme poverty are employed in agriculture. These numbers were very similar in France, Italy, and the UK — in the early 1800s. Today, 4% or less of the workforce in these countries is employed in agriculture, agricultural yield per worker is at least 30% higher, and those living in extreme poverty have plummeted.

The adoption of the same breakthrough technologies that define modern agriculture would be a great place to start. Africa uses more than 5x less fertilizer than the global average. In many countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, less than 1% of cropland is irrigated. Use of high yield crop varieties, mechanization, and energy are all among the lowest in the world. Extending the means and benefits of modern agriculture would pay enormous dividends.

The challenge is that the spread of modern agriculture has been handicapped by the lack of fundamental economic modernization — things like roads and land tenure, let alone basic security from war. Sub-Saharan Africa needs agriculture focused reforms, infrastructure, and technologies tailored to the region’s context. It’s not enough to wait on general economic development that trickles into agriculture when people are going hungry today. Creating the enabling conditions for increasing yields must be a priority. There is no route to progress, no route to relieving the ongoing suffering associated with hunger and poverty, that doesn’t include increasing agriculture yields.

Environmental Impact

There is no human activity that has more impact on the environment than agriculture. Consider only two of the many concerns. First, nearly half of the earth’s surface is used to grow food (or food for our food), at a direct cost to forests and grasslands. Second, agriculture accounts for roughly 25% of global emissions. Each challenge, land use and emissions, benefits from increased efficiency. The more food we can grow with fewer inputs, agricultural productivity in a nutshell, the better we address local and global environmental problems.

Thankfully, we have met or are approaching the point where we can grow enough food per acre to feed the world and take land out of production to be returned to nature. The challenge will be increasing yields quickly enough, especially where they’re lagging, to avoid massive habitat loss. There is no greater opportunity for environmental protection and restoration than enhancing agriculture yields.

Population growth

The global population is expected to peak at a little over 10 billion in 2084. That means that in less than sixty years we need to be able to feed an additional 2 billion people every day. The challenge is only exacerbated by the fact that many of these people will likely be born in areas with currently low agricultural productivity. Whether we advance one of our greatest achievements will determine whether or not future souls will know literal feast or famine.

Agricultural progress deserves more attention

All of this is to say, agricultural progress matters. But I fear that a general lack of appreciation for the achievement that is modern agriculture, the want of understanding of what makes the achievement possible, has resulted in a stalling of the agricultural progress humanity still desperately needs. We cannot lose sight of all that progress has made possible and all that progress can still make possible.

With that in mind, I’m envisioning this as the first post in a series on agriculture and progress. To start, the next posts will cover the interplay of agriculture and the environment, barriers to progress, and how to fund agricultural progress. More to come!

Thank you to Brendan Mulligan,

Rob L'Heureux

,

Emma McAleavy

,

Andrew Miller

, and Kaylee Mulligan for their comments on earlier drafts.

1. I wonder if Max chose this red color on purpose? I can’t see that color, conveying this data, and not imagine the direct cost of hunger as blood, of life itself.

2. I define progress as the improvement in the human experience over time as a result of humanity’s collective effort to better understand and more skillfully manipulate the world we inhabit. Practically, and slightly less academically, progress is a synonym for reduced suffering in the aggregate. Progress can also be thought of as what fills the space that suffering previously occupied, things like health, joy, and freedom.

3. The article is paywalled, but I promise it’s worth getting a subscription to read it. This is the first in a series, and you’re going to want to read them all.