I open with a heartfelt plea from the world’s farmers to its environmentalists: “Please understand that high-yield farming is mankind’s greatest humanitarian achievement while also its greatest environmental triumph.”

High-yield farming is the major factor in lowering both human death rates and human population growth rates—while minimizing the land required to feed each person. Because of this, we fully agree that humanity now has the capability of, and thus the responsibility for, saving the wildlife still on this planet. With population growth continuing—though at a declining rate—and the rapid spread of global affluence, there is only one viable strategy for conserving the world’s wildlife over the next 50 years: We must triple the food yields per acre on the current farmlands. But be of good cheer, we have accomplished the feat before.

A Half-Century of Benefits

A brief recap of the amazing achievements of high-yield farming over the present 50 years is in order.

Benefits to the Environment:

  • Because the Green Revolution tripled crop yields on most of the world’s good farmland after World War II, the world still has 16 million square miles of forests. Better seeds, chemical fertilizers, irrigation and pesticides, brought about this amazing result.

  • According to the United Nations’ new World Atlas of Biodiversity, only 20 major species became extinct during the last one-third of the twentieth century, compared to 40 such extinctions in the last third of the nineteenth century. This is mainly due to wildlands being saved from the plow by high-yield farming.

  • High-yield farming has cut soil erosion risks by at least two-thirds. We use low-till farming, with herbicides to control weeds instead of bare-earth plowing and hoeing.

  • In the USA, confinement feeding has preserved forests equal to the land area of Pennsylvania and New Jersey from being cleared for hog and poultry pastures.

  • The low erosion rates of modern farming, plus the stream protection of confinement feeding under zero-discharge management, have given America’s streams and rivers a level of water quality protection not seen since European colonists brought their plows to America.

One of the strongest and least-understood arguments for high-yield farming is that the best farmland has the least biodiversity, all over the world. Ecologist Michael Huston of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory points out that the American Great Plains had millions of bison, antelope and prairie dogs, but that’s only three species. The Russian steppes used to have 10 million saiga (an antelope-like animal that was actually related to cattle) but not a lot of other mammals. The Australian grasslands were dominated by huge numbers of kangaroos.

In contrast, there is a Peruvian national park in the Amazon Basin that is home to more than 1,300 plant species, 300 bird species, 130 species of amphibians and reptiles, 70 species of non-flying mammals, plus thousands of insect species. Indeed a few square miles of tropical forests may contain more aboveground species than all of North America.

Benefits to Mankind

  • High-yield farming and modern transportation have banished famine everywhere they have been implemented. Africa, with its declining, all-organic food production, is the last horrifying example of a low-yield agricultural society.

  • High-yield farming has enabled much of the world’s population to eat high-quality protein, which provides an abundance of the micronutrients humans get mainly from livestock sources, such as iron, zinc and Vitamin A. As a result, children grow more vigorously, learn faster, and suffer fewer diseases.

  • Livestock and poultry farmers have doubled their meat and milk production per acre since 1970 with higher-yielding feed crops, better livestock breeding, confinement feeding, balanced feed rations, and veterinary medicines.

  • The greatest achievement of confinement livestock feeding is protecting the general public from the epidemics of influenza, cholera, smallpox and other diseases that historically afflicted humanity from the close human-domestic animal interactions of back-yard farming.

  • The poorest countries have come three-fourths of the way to population stability in 46 years. Birth rates declined earliest and most rapidly in the countries where crop yields increased the most and fastest.

Organic Farming’s Shortcomings

By contrast, the world cannot be fed, nor its wildlife saved, through organic farming. Organic farming produces only about half as much food per acre as conventional farms. Organic farmers must use added land to grow their nitrogen, either as cattle forage or green manure crops. Dr Vaclav Smil of the University of Manitoba estimates that an “organic-only” farming mandate for the world would require the manure from another 5–7 billion cattle (up from 1.2 billion cattle). Each cow needs 4–6 acres of forage for a massive global land requirement of perhaps 47 million m2! Total world forestland is only 16 million m2.

The US Department of Agriculture and the Environmental Protection Agency both agree that the United States has less than one-third of the organic nitrogen needed to support current crop production. Nitrogen is the key plant nutrient. Every time we grow a crop, we take nitrogen out of the soil. Unless it is replaced, we get terrifying black blizzards and Dust Bowls. That is what happened to America’s Great Plains in the 1930s, and to Soviet Russia’s 80 million acres of Siberian “New Lands” that were plowed up in the 1950s.

Unfortunately, low-yield farming continues to be the goal of eco-activists, whether it is organic farming in Connecticut or slash-and-burn farming in Africa and Latin America. Low-yield farmers deal with rising populations by pushing their plows onto steeper, more erosive slopes and into the habitat of the gorilla and the tiger. Organic farming is still presented as the ideal, even though it cannot feed the people.

Effects of Affluence on the Need for Added Farmland

There is little question that, during the twenty-first century, we will have to radically increase global output of food and feed, especially livestock feed for meat, milk and eggs. Humans seem to have an inherent hunger for these foods, and they require three to five times as much farming resources per calorie as rice or wheat. There has never been a voluntarily vegan, or even vegetarian society. Mandates for vegetarian/vegan diets are likely to be quite unsuccessful.

In Asia today, some 2.5 billion people are rapidly becoming affluent. China’s economy is growing at nearly 10% annually, and India’s economy at about 7%. Such growth rates are almost unprecedented, but the World Bank says they are continuing and spreading. Advances in research, technology, transport (such as container freight), computers and satellite communications are all hastening the spread of economic growth. So are trends toward democracy (which encourages higher incomes to spread beyond an elite class) and deregulation.

As the direct result of rising affluence, China’s meat consumption has recently been rising by up to 10%, or four million tons a year. India’s consumers have been trying to buy an additional two million tons of milk per year, and far more chicken. Asians in 1990 averaged about 14 g of animal protein per day, while Americans ate 71 g and the Japanese 55 g. By the year 2030, it is virtually certain that the global food system will have to provide at least 55 g of high-quality protein per day for 4 billion Asians.

Fortunately, high-yield farming has proven it can take the environmental sting out of population growth and high-protein diets. We are already feeding more than twice as many people today as we fed in 1950. Yet the world is still farming almost the same 5.8 million square miles of land that were used for crops in 1950. Only Africa is using significantly more land because Africa is not yet using the high-yield farming systems that are beginning to be developed for that continent.

If the world’s farmers today got the yields they achieved in 1950, the world would need nearly three times as much cropland to produce today’s food supply. That would be about 15–16 million additional square miles of crops—all the global forest area available today. Every biologist who is worried about species extinction is worried most about lost wildlife habitat—especially forests and most of all the tropical forests. Without higher yields, we might indeed lose millions of wild species over the next 50 years. With continued investments in high-yield farming and forestry research, we might not have to lose any wildlands. But a much bigger commitment to research is required to ensure this result.

Payoffs from Current Agricultural Research

Let me dangle a few of the potentials that have already been achieved or have clearly become possibilities, to whet your appetites for “mundane” agricultural research.

Blight-proof potatoes

Potatoes produce more nutrition per acre than any other crop, and have become increasingly important in densely populated regions such as Asia and central Africa. Nearly 50 years ago, researchers discovered a wild Mexican relative of the potato carrying a gene code for resistance to the potato blight that caused the Irish potato famine in the 1840s. However, the blight resistance has never successfully crossbred into domestic potatoes.

The potato famine killed one million Irish and drove another two million from the Emerald Isle. Fortunately, biotech has permitted three different universities (The University of California at Davis, Wisconsin and Wakening in The Netherlands) to produce blight-resistant potatoes.

Unfortunately, the activist campaign against biotech crops has kept potato processors from accepting the potatoes—so they are not being grown.

Herbicide-tolerant corn for Africa

When Monsanto first marketed its herbicide-tolerant corn in the USA, an Israeli researcher saw it as a potential weapon against the parasitic witchweed that infests tens of millions of hectares of African small farmers’ cropland. The witchweed can’t be pulled, hoed or sprayed because it invades through the plant roots and grows inside the corn or sorghum stalk. It can take a fourth, a half, or even the farmer’s entire crop, leaving the family hungry and helpless.

The Israeli scientist’s idea was that herbicide-tolerant corn seed could be soaked in a small amount of herbicide, which would kill the witchweed as it invaded, and leave the corn to flourish. Unfortunately, due to efforts of anti-biotech activists, no permission for field trials of genetically modified herbicide-tolerant corn could be obtained.

However, the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) in Mexico found that Pioneer Hi-Bred had discovered corn naturally tolerant of a BASF herbicide called imazopyr. That corn DNA has now been crossbred into African farmers’ varieties. It is genetically researched, but not biotech-modified. Field tests have recently shown fourfold yield increases for corn in Africa, with an even bigger gain than fourfold in the food security of African families.

Drought-tolerant wheat with no-till

Genetic engineers have also made some remarkable progress with drought-tolerant crops. One of the most startling developments is an Egyptian wheat variety that contains a gene from the barley plant and needs one irrigation per growing season instead of eight. This saves on irrigation water and reduces the tendencies toward water logging and salt buildup on irrigated fields.

No-till farming uses herbicides to kill weeds instead of such “bare-earth” farming systems as hoeing and plowing. One of the benefits of no-till is that it increases the opportunity for water to infiltrate the soil through root canals and earthworm tunnels.

What if we combined the new drought-tolerant wheat variety with no-till farming, to radically increase the productivity of major semi-arid land areas such as central Turkey, which is now mainly pasture? What about this system applied to the newly warming territories of Siberia? The food production potential could be dramatic.

How Dangerous Are Pesticides?

A decade ago, my home state of Virginia banned what it said was the most dangerous farm chemical for wildlife—a soil insecticide called Furadan 15 G. This chemical had caused at least hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of bird deaths over a period of years because birds too often mistook the granules for seeds and ate them.

Fortunately, this was only one pesticide, and we could give up that formulation with no major yield loss. However, if Virginia had to ban all pesticides, the 50% reduction in harvested yields, would require its farmers to plow another 2 million acres of wildlands to make up the production loss. How many birds live in 2 million acres of Virginia wildlands? Millions of birds do. The tradeoff is obvious, but seldom discussed.

As for endangering people, I take the word of Bruce Ames of the University of California at Berkeley who was awarded the National Science Medal by President Clinton. He says that 99.99% of all the cancer-causing materials we ingest are natural pesticides, mostly in the fruits and vegetables we eat. Celery, for example, contains a potent carcinogen called psoralans.

Dr Ames says his testing shows that growing organic food only reduces our carcinogen ingestion by about one-hundredth of 1%. We do know, however, that eating more fruits and vegetables—natural and trace amounts of manmade pesticides included—is the single best way to reduce our cancer risks.

The most infamous pesticide of all is DDT. After World War II, DDT was credited with saving more than 50 million lives from such insect-borne epidemics as typhus, malaria, and yellow fever. DDT eradicated malaria across the USA, where it had been endemic from Florida to Minnesota. Its inventor won a Nobel Prize.

But in 1962, Rachel Carson published her internationally famous book, Silent Spring, saying that DDT and “six-of seven other pesticides now in use” caused cancer and would soon be rated as proven human carcinogens. She also said that DDT killed robins that fed on worms from soils treated with the chemical. Most famously, Ms Carson told us that DDT thinned the eggshells of birds, causing sharp declines in bird populations.

We know now that Rachel Carson was wrong. Over 50 years, extensive experiments have shown that DDT does not cause cancer in humans, and poses no threat to mammals, birds or fish. (It does, however, kill honeybees.)

Moreover, Rachel Carson’s evidence for the thinning of birds’ eggshells was based on “the well-known experiments of Dr DeWitt,” which she said proved that few of the eggs from birds exposed to DDT could hatch. Actually, DeWitt’s study, published in the Journal of Agriculture and Food Chemistry in 1956, found that more of the eggs from DDT-exposed birds hatched than of the eggs from control birds.

The real tragedy of the international DDT ban has been the 30 million people who have since died from malaria, needlessly. Perhaps a billion more people have suffered the chronic ravages of the disease without dying. The dead and the dying from malaria epidemics may have been a big enough millstone around the necks of tropical societies to prevent their economic growth, and destroy prospects for better lifestyle choices for billions of children.

South Africa recently banned DDT from its malaria program, and malaria case numbers began to surge out of control. When indoor DDT spraying was resumed, and backed with other public health measures to suppress the mosquitoes outside the homes, malaria rates were reduced by nearly 90%.

New Agricultural Policies are not Always Nature’s Friend

Currently, corn ethanol may be the biggest threat to wildlife in the USA. Thanks to an unusual set of circumstances, corn ethanol is the only energy source that is currently approved for expansion by a majority of Americans. Environmental and agricultural groups in support of non-fossil renewable fuels have voiced fears about global warming, energy dependence, and nuclear meltdown.

Because farmers hold the keys to selecting half of the country’s Senators each election, Congress always loves to lavish subsidies on them. Environmental activists are embarrassed that solar power and wind power are such flops despite decades of subsidy. They are in favor of corn ethanol to take our minds off the fact that most of us lack the requisite amount of sunshine and wind to meet our energy needs.

Thus, we have a federal mandate to produce 7.5 billion gal of biofuels by 2012, and virtually nothing but corn with which to meet the mandate. Unfortunately, we are already using virtually all of our corn land to grow food and feed. Few people have looked at the massive land requirements of corn ethanol to produce auto fuel.

The nation uses 134 billion gal of gasoline a year, and each acre of corn produces only about 250 gal gasoline equivalent a year. Worse, corn ethanol produces only a tiny net energy gain—about 20% after we subtract the fertilizer, tractor fuel, pesticide and process heat required to make it. That means we effectively get only 50 gal worth of transportation fuel per acre of corn! Given the low quality of the forest land left to be cleared, the small net gains in fuel, and the massive transport fuel requirement, America might have to clear an additional 50 million acres of forest in the Corn Belt and mid-South to make any significant part of its auto fuel from corn ethanol.

Brazilian sugar cane is a far more effective source of fuel, with a net energy gain of 260%. Sugarcane yields twice as much feedstock per acre, needs half the fertilizer, and the leftover leaves and stalks fuel the sugarcane-ethanol process.

Cellulosic ethanol can theoretically be made from forest gleanings and switchgrass from dryer climates that can’t grow corn. But we can’t yet make ethanol from cellulose. If and when we can make ethanol from woodchips, such a development will put today’s corn ethanol plants out of business.

The farmers and agribusinesses have already built and started more ethanol plants than it would take to meet the 2012 mandate, and their thirst for government-guaranteed profits is not yet satisfied. Look for a bid to double the farmers’ corn ethanol guarantee in the upcoming federal farm bill. Though weather conditions also certainly affect corn supplies and prices, corn has already gone from about $2 a bushel to $3 a bushel. Midwest economists are predicting prices up to $5 a bushel in the next few years.

US ethanol policy will hand the truly profitable markets for corn to Brazilian farmers. Then, when Americans tire of seeing heartland forests cleared to grow small amounts of low-quality auto fuel—and/or cellulosic ethanol grabs the fuel market—American corn farmers will be left in the lurch. By that time, however, they will have pocketed lots of public money for cutting down lots of forest.

The recent Chevron oil strike in the deep rock strata under the Gulf of Mexico will do far more to provide US energy independence and energy security than all the corn farmers can grow. It could increase our proven oil reserves by at least 50%. Meanwhile, the Canadians are ramping up production in the Alberta tar sands, where steam injection units are now producing oil for less than $15 a barrel in a region that the provincial government says has 2.5 trillion barrels of oil. It also takes the nasty oil out of a watershed where it has been polluting the rivers for eons.

The ethanol subsidy has eliminated American farmers’ past desire for greater freedom in trade in agricultural products. American farmers could have obtained access to Asia’s growing markets for food and feed, forestalling the tendency for densely populated countries to clear species-rich tropical forests to grow chicken feed and cooking oil.

The Role of Private Foundations in High-Yield Agriculture

One of the world’s more remarkable recent developments has been the creation of Bill and Melinda Gates’ massive charitable foundation. In the past, public subsidies for the poor have tended to create a spreading dependence on the government and a massive drag on economic growth that made all citizens poorer in the long run. Foreign assistance from rich governments to poor governments has an equally sorry history of “white elephant” projects and massive diversions of cash to dictators’ Swiss bank accounts.

Rather than giving money to poor people or corrupt governments, the Gates are trying to eliminate the external constraints on health and wealth creation: diseases, malnutrition and bad farming systems. They started by giving more than $250 million dollars of their $30 billion for the development of a malaria vaccine. The Gates are also funding a massive drive for an AIDS vaccine.

Then the Gates extended their philanthropy to overcoming malnutrition. Their foundation has supported research to enhance the levels of vitamins and other key micronutrients in rice, corn, cassava, sorghum, and bananas, all of which represent the major sources of calories for the world’s poorest peoples. Most recently, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation turned to investments in agricultural research for the Third World, especially for the tropics and Africa where the Green Revolution has never really reached.

In all of these efforts, the Gates have worked to create new and independent networks for research and delivery of new technology. In agriculture, for example, they have put together a network that includes the Rockefeller Foundation, which launched the original Green Revolution in Mexico in the 1940s, and the worldwide network of semi-public Green Revolution agricultural experiment stations now called the FutureHarvest. It also provided funding to Dr Norman Borlaug, 1970 Nobel Peace Prize winner for breeding the famous semi-dwarf wheat varieties that tripled yields in Latin America and Asia.

The early achievements of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation have been so impressive that billionaire Warren Buffett has added more than $30 billion of his wealth to the Gates Foundation’s charitable resources. This is a powerful combination of the productive power of capitalism and technology, amplified by the philanthropy of the global economy’s “big winners.” The promise of capitalism’s productivity combined with private charity is huge, especially in contrast to past failures of governments.

Global Warming’s Effects on Nature

Although global warming is a bit off my subject on high-yield farming, I believe it bears on the topic of man’s impact on nature. Furthermore, because I have co-authored a book on this issue that was released in November, I would like to answer the question, “Will humanity destroy a million wild species with greenhouse gasses and global warming from fossil fuels?”

The short answer is, “Probably not.” Global warming must today be viewed in light of the moderate, erratic 1,500-year climate cycle that was revealed by the first 250,000-year long ice cores brought up in 1983 from the Greenland ice sheet. The cores showed the big 100,000-year Ice Age climate cycle, but superimposed on it was a small-but-persistent 1,500-year cycle. The small climate cycle raised temperatures at the latitude of Washington and Paris by about 2°C for centuries at a time-and then dropped them 2° below the mean for centuries more.

In 1986, a Russian-French team brought up an even longer ice core—400,000 years in the making—from the other end of the Earth, in Antarctica. It, too, provided evidence of the 1,500-year climate cycle. The cycle was ubiquitous, persistent and global.

Since then, scientists working all over the world have found the 1,500-year climate cycle in the seabed sediments of at least six oceans, in tree rings around the Northern Hemisphere, and in cave stalagmites and glacier movements on every continent plus New Zealand. Archeologists find prehistoric villages moved up the mountainsides of both Europe’s Alps and South America’s Andes during the Medieval Warming (950–1300 a.d.) and back down during the cold, unstable weather of the Little Ice Age (1300–1850 a.d.). The North American Pollen Database shows nine complete reorganizations of our trees and plants in the past 14,000 years—or one every 1,650 years.

We now know from satellite measurements that the sun’s irradiance is not a constant, but varies slightly. We know from measuring carbon, beryllium, and sunspot cycles that the impact of the sun’s variations is magnified on Earth by cosmic rays hitting our atmosphere more or less frequently.

If the natural 1,500-year cycle produced the pre-industrial warming from 1850 to 1940, a very supportable theory, then we can credit human-emitted CO2 only with causing some part of the post-1940 increase of 0.2–0.3°C. That makes man-made warming far less threatening than the newspapers and alarmists have claimed.

More to the point of conservation, all of today’s wild species are survivors of the very warm Holocene Optimum 5,000 years ago, when the temperatures were about 2°C warmer than today in southern Scandinavia—and up to 4°C warmer above the Arctic Circle. The Sahara Desert was then full of giraffes and rhinos, and Egypt’s Nile Valley was so wild and flood-ravaged that no humans lived there.

While our planet’s life forms are generally cold-limited, they are rarely heat-limited. Further, the species and/or their reproduction systems are mobile. The very biologist who predicted the world would lose a million wild species to global warming (Chris Thomas of the University of East Anglia) has documented butterflies taking up new food sources, and bush crickets producing offspring with longer wings, the better to find new habitats farther away.

In fact, despite the “unprecedented warming” of the past 150 years, not a single wild species is documented to have gone extinct due to rising temperatures. Instead, biologists have found a startling enrichment of biodiversity, as warmth-loving species have moved northward and upslope, without displacing the existing cold-tolerant species in those territories.

The Earth’s cities currently take up only about 1.5% of the planet’s land area. By the year 2050, they will occupy perhaps 3.5%. If tomorrow’s citizens treat their sewage and tend to live in high-rise apartments, what threat do they represent to wildlife? The answer is, “Not much, unless it takes too much land to produce their food.”

Global warming should actually help in this regard. The Earth’s current warming is almost certain to be moderate and beneficial—and because it is being caused primarily by the sun, it is unstoppable anyway. Investments in stopping the warming, such as the Kyoto Protocol, will be wasted. We should invest, instead, in adapting to moderate increases in warmth and wetness.

During the twenty-first century, the Earth will probably warm perhaps another 1°C, with more rainfall and with fewer-and-milder storms. (The warming of the poles will narrow the temperature differential with the equator, subtracting power from all storms.) Sea levels will rise at only about 6–7 in. per century because the Antarctic ice cap contains 90% of the world’s ice and melts very, very slowly, due to reflectance and the extreme cold of the South Pole. Currently, the Antarctic ice is gaining mass from increased snowfall.

There may be some serious multi-year droughts, with California at particular risk. The Sahara may become wetter again, due to a northward shift in the tropical rain belts-leaving more droughts in parts of central Africa. On the other hand, the Mayan civilization collapsed due to long-term drought during the cold Dark Ages. There are always droughts, floods and storms, and we cannot predict where they will be.

However, solar-linked warming will produce some large benefits. Crops and forests will be stimulated by longer growing seasons, the fertilizing effect of CO2 on plants and trees, and the warming of big tracts of arable land in Canada and Siberia.

Humanity is not the threat to Nature that many would have us believe. While pessimists insist that increasing human population must damage the rest of the planet, modern man appears to be protecting nature through innovations in agriculture and conservation.

Even the current fear of catastrophic human-induced climate change appears overblown. A 1,500-year natural warming cycle may well prove to be a better explanation for current warming than manmade greenhouse gas emissions. Further, whatever the cause of apparent warming, the result likely will be modest and, on balance, beneficial.

Just as population fears have proved popular but incorrect, so too fear of man’s impact on nature likely will be proved to be exaggerated. The power of intellect and economic incentives should produce optimism for the future of humanity and the planet.