An editorial published in August 2021 in Nature Ecology and Evolution [1] entitled “Agriculture isn’t all rocket science” stated that agriculture and food security do not need high-tech solutions and that low-tech solutions may be just as important as they have been for the COVID-19 pandemic. Perhaps the authors have forgotten that if the effects of the pandemic are no longer as devastating as they were in the beginning, the main merit is of a high-tech solution, i.e. mRNA vaccines. And even when it comes to agricultural production we have to be fully aware of the importance of the introduction of combinations of novel scientific solutions and technological innovations if we want to be able to combine productivity with environmental and economic sustainability [2]. It is a dangerous illusion to try to recover from the past alleged golden ages and ancient glories, which puts at risk the projection towards the future by trying to turn our gaze towards the past. This illusion is always very present and pervasive when the discussion revolves around food and agriculture.

The objective of this chapter is to frame the problem of the impact of food production on the environment, identify what the possible solutions could be with particular attention to the use of new technologies and finally discuss what the main obstacles are which today hinder the adoption of these solutions.

Let’s start from a simple observation: today we are exploiting the capital of our planet's natural resources in an unsustainable way, i.e. we are consuming more natural resources than they regenerate spontaneously. The global impact equation [3], that compares the ecological footprint of human activities (equal to Ny/α, where N is the human population, y is the human economic activity per capita and α is the efficiency with which we utilise the biosphere goods to transform them into GDP) with the regenerative capacity of the biosphere, makes us understand this in a formal way. Today the footprint is approximately equal to 1.6 times the regenerative capacity of the biosphere [4]. This means that we are deeply eroding our capital of natural resources and the more we erode it the more the inequality increases. There are not many possible ways to at least bring the equation back to parity. Since it is impossible to reduce the population (N) and reduce economic activity (y) would be very unpopular, we just have to play on the alpha factor, which corresponds to the efficiency with which we exploit our natural resources to produce goods and services, in other words wealth. And efficiency corresponds to political choices and above all to technological innovation.

A significant proportion of the impact of human activities on the environment is linked to food production, although we commonly tend to think of other economic activities as the main causes of environmental degradation. Food production systems are responsible for 34% of global greenhouse gas emissions and the vast majority (71%) of these emissions are due to primary production (agricultural activities) and the related land use change, i.e. the fact that we dedicate land to agricultural production going to destroy natural ecosystems [5]. Only 29% of the emissions comes from all supply chain activities together.

Not only does food production have a great impact on the environment, but sensitivity analyses [6] show that by acting on food production, the type of diet and land use policies, it is possible to profoundly affect this impact, much more than we can do by acting on other economic sectors that we tend to think about much more often when we talk about these problems (fossil fuels, manufacturing processes, buildings, etc.).

The land use changes that have occurred over the last 300 years mainly to respond to increased food production needs have been dramatic [7]. Forests, savannas, grasslands have decreased and cultivated land and pastures have increased. Suffice it to say that in 20 years, between 1980 and 2000 in tropical areas, those richest in biodiversity, land used for agricultural use increased by more than 100 million hectares [8], an area equal to more than 3 times that of Italy. Or that the production of pet food alone occupies about 1% of the world's agricultural area (equal to approximately twice that of the UK) [9] and that animal farms alone use 77% of the world's agricultural area [10].

Taking a simple and concrete example, if we use an advanced life cycle assessment (LCA) tool to consider the environmental impact of the production of a loaf of bread starting from the sowing of wheat in the field until it reaches our tables, whatever the impact indicator, about two thirds of the impact are due to primary production alone (and one third only to everything that comes after, transformation, distribution chain, etc., with transport that weighs extremely little) and two thirds of these two thirds, i.e. about 45%, are due to the sole use of nitrogenous fertilizers [11]. It is clear that if we want to reduce the environmental impact of food production it is important to know what weighs more and what weighs less on the impact.

The current already serious situation is going to become more worrisome with time: as a consequence of an increase in both population size and in dietary needs the global food demand will be increased by 50% in 2050 [12]. Without changes in technology between now and then, the agricultural yield levels will not be able to meet the global demand for food (with a 5–25% deficit of food production, depending on the climate change scenario assumed) and we will face an increase in global food prices ranging from 30 to 50% above current ones. There is a common belief according to which we may solve this problem simply by wasting less food and consuming less meat in the developed countries. While these actions are certainly needed and useful, there is also an increasing awareness of the fact that they will not be sufficient and that there is a need for the agricultural system to increase yields on a per surface unit basis while decreasing the environmental impact of agriculture [13], i.e. to achieve a sustainable intensification of the agricultural systems. To put it in very simple terms we need to increase output, i.e. yields, while decreasing inputs, i.e. water, fertilizers and crop protection products.

To make things worse, climate change is going to affect agricultural productivity very differently in different areas of the planet, and will decrease productivity where it is already lower, where the shortage of food is greater and where the environmental efficiency in producing it is lower [14].

How can we help make food production more efficient, i.e. improve the alpha factor that appears in the global impact equation? We have to intervene on the processes of primary production and wanting to be very schematic there are three ways to do it: modify the genetic makeup of the plants and animals we use to feed ourselves, as we began to do 10,000 years ago and continued until today with increasingly more fast and precise methods, through the use of chemistry (fertilizers, crop protection products, herbicides) and finally with agronomic techniques. Looking at historical data, it can be seen that the greatest contribution to the increase in agricultural productivity and sustainability has come from genetics through plant breeding activities.

Perhaps the best-known example of the impact of genetic improvement is given by the adoption of corn hybrids starting around 1930, which allowed corn yields to at least quintuple within 70 years.

Nowadays we have much more refined tools available than in the past to be able to genetically improve the plants and animals that we use for our food. On the one hand, the tumultuous development of genomics, in addition to allowing us to sequence our genome, has allowed us to sequence the genomes of many species of interest for agriculture, helping us to identify the entire set of genes that characterize them and subsequently to identify the genes responsible for the characteristics we are interested in improving. On the other hand, the development of technologies such as cisgenesis and genome editing via CRISPR/Cas, which in the European Union are now called new genomic techniques, allows us to modify single genes or even single DNA bases within genes in a targeted manner obtaining results that are indistinguishable from those that we could obtain by crossing or by spontaneous mutation but much faster and in a more precise way, i.e. without unwanted side effects. And we can use these technologies to make plants more resistant to pathogens, to make them more tolerant to drought, a very topical issue, to make them better able to exploit nitrogenous fertilizers [15] and also to make them better able to exploit solar energy through the photosynthesis process [16, 17]. All modifications that can allow us to improve the sustainability of agricultural production and reduce the environmental impact of agriculture.

Genetics is by no mean not the only way to improve the ecological footprint of food production, the other great revolution that awaits us in agriculture is that of digital or precision agriculture, which through a series of innovations in the agronomic field can allow for better exploitation of production factors, i.e. water, fertilizers and crop protection chemicals.

What are the obstacles that hinder the adoption of these new technologies today? They are not scientific and are not even related to the technology transfer process but are social in nature. Man, as we have seen several times throughout history, is traditionally averse to innovations.

And this seems even more true in the food sector where consumers seem more willing to go back than to go forward. The values that win today in food marketing are those of the traditional, the natural, the small is beautiful and many seem to have great nostalgia for a past that was actually much less rosy than we tend to remember. In the not too distant past, eating adequately was a luxury for a few and some seem tempted to go back in time by decreasing productivity per hectare, decreasing the environmental impact per unit of surface but increasing the environmental impact per unit of product and ending up with making others produce what at this point we could no longer produce ourselves.

This, for example, would be the result of a complete conversion of agriculture to an organic farming model, which, having lower production per hectare, would oblige us to cultivate 40 to 75% more land globally [18], a fact that we cannot allow to happen unless we want to permanently compromise the biodiversity present in nature.

This type of choices, to go in the direction of decreasing agricultural production to reduce its environmental impact, even when made at a local level as could be the case for the European Union, can translate into profound social and economic injustices which further increase those great inequalities that exist on our planet and which represent as serious a problem as climate change and the loss of biodiversity. Deciding to produce less even if in a more sustainable way, if it corresponds to making others produce what we no longer produce, does nothing but shift the problem and make the situation worse if those who produce for us do it less efficiently than we can do. And it adds a further injustice because the rich countries, in which consumption is concentrated, in doing so impoverish the capital of natural resources of the poorer countries in which biodiversity is concentrated, without this loss of capital to be in any way compensated. With our consumption and with our agricultural policy choices, we are going to affect the natural heritage of the countries where this heritage is concentrated.

If process innovation is essential to reduce the environmental impact of agricultural production, how can we try to make it more acceptable to consumers? We must make people understand that science can allow us to reconcile productivity and sustainability, to reconcile innovation and tradition, to maintain agricultural and food diversification and to reduce the dramatic economic and social inequalities between different parts of the planet. We need a flexible and non-dogmatic approach, we need to establish a new pact based on trust between scientists, farmers and consumers.

Going back to the initial comparison to rocket science, it should be very apparent by now that agriculture is far more complex than rocket science. It is a complex problem that requires a very complex solution and in this solution we must be use quantitative analyses, rationality and science and not emotion and ideology.