The brutal trade-off that will decide the future of food

Perhaps the most crucial idea for understanding our species’ future on this planet boils down to two boring words: land use.

To mitigate climate change, humans will need to extract critical minerals to build vast numbers of photovoltaic cells and wind turbines. We’ll need millions of tons of copper to wire continent-spanning power grids. But the most immutable resource constraint we face — the one we can’t mine more of — is land.

Although many of us don’t see it, because most humans now live in urban areas, the story of land constraints is really a story about agriculture, which devours nearly half of our planet’s habitable land; urban and suburban areas take up only a tiny fraction.

We’re not using all that farmland very wisely. Beef farming, for example, occupies “nearly half the world’s agricultural land to produce just 3 percent of its calories,” the journalist Michael Grunwald writes in his new book, We Are Eating the Earth. In part because it consumes so much land, agriculture contributes between a quarter and a third of all greenhouse gas emissions, and as humanity’s numbers climb, its footprint will swell. “If current trends hold, the world’s farmers will clear at least a dozen more Californias’ worth of land to fill nearly 10 billion human bellies by 2050,” Grunwald writes.

Grunwald’s book — a lively, reportorial world tour through the misunderstood science and politics of agriculture, often explained via Gen X movie references — is among a slate of new titles that I like to think of as the abundance agenda of food.

Abundance, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s bestselling it-girl of wonk manifestos, shares intellectual DNA with a growing set of ideas bringing supply-side economic principles to the future of farming. Just as we can’t solve the housing crisis or the green energy gap with a politics of scarcity, we can’t fix agriculture’s planetary impact by simply producing less food. We have to grow enough food to affordably and sustainably feed a world of 8 billion and counting. And because there’s a hard limit on land, that means figuring out how to squeeze more food out of our precious acreage.

The proposed solutions might surprise you. They are not crunchy farming philosophies like local agriculture or so-called regenerative ranching — woefully inefficient, low-productivity systems that, if deployed at scale, would mean mowing down the world’s remaining forests, accelerating climate change and mass extinction. That’s because wild, carbon-sequestering ecosystems are our best natural defenses against climate change, which is something that no agricultural pattern can replicate. “Every farm, even the scenic ones with red barns and rolling hills that artists paint and writers sentimentalize, is a kind of environmental crime scene,” Grunwald writes. And today, “global agriculture is shifting south, toward tropical forests and wetlands that are the world’s most valuable carbon sinks,” like the Amazon.

That means the most important determinant of agriculture’s planetary impact is how much land it sucks up — what Grunwald calls “the eating-the-earth problem.” By this measure, conventional, intensive, industrial crop farming like that practiced across the US, and heavily criticized by many environmentalists, outperforms organic agriculture or low-yield farming common in low-income countries, for the simple reason that it produces the most food on the least land (though there is, to be sure, nuance to this debate).

We Are Eating the Earth is joined by a grumpier, more academic provocation on food sustainability. Food Fight, by UC Davis agricultural economist Richard Sexton, decries the policies being implemented around the world, often in the name of helping the environment, that will make farming less productive and less sustainable, and food more expensive. “Never have governments actively intervened to implement policies guaranteed to reduce food production the way they do today and promise to do into the future,” he argues, dismantling approaches ranging from senseless ethanol mandates in the US and elsewhere to Europe’s pro-organic and anti-GMO policies.

These are intelligent, highly timely books that get many things right, surfacing the misguided pastoral fantasies and fatal misunderstandings of land use that make it hard for us to pursue sane agricultural policies. They inspire due respect for a modern industrial food system that, for all its problems, has achieved spectacular feats of productivity necessary to support a planet of billions of people.

But their emphasis on intensification also leads them somewhere far more ominous: a defense of the worst part of our food system, one that will lead to ever-more horrifying levels of suffering and death.

The rise of anti-anti-factory farming

Repairing our food system is so confoundingly difficult in part because it often feels more intractable than it needs to be. We already know we could alleviate a lot of the problem by eating less meat and dairy — the food equivalent of coal power — and more plants, but convincing consumers to do that through either policy or suasion is really, really hard. (Believe me, I try).

“One American pollster told me meat taxes were the most unpopular policy he ever surveyed, ‘up there with veterans’ benefits for ISIS,’” Grunwald grimly remarks. And one of the surest bets you can place on the future, as both authors point out, is that as people in low- and middle-income countries become richer, they will eat lots more animal products. Humans already slaughter an eye-watering 80 billion land animals per year, a number that will continue to soar.

Resigned to that dismal reality, both We Are Eating the Earth and Food Fight reflect an idea that’s increasingly prevalent in future of food debates — that factory farms, despite their cruelty, are a necessary evil. Call it anti-anti-factory farming.

The reasoning is straightforward enough. Animal agriculture takes up lots of land and resources — that’s why meat is bad for the environment in the first place. The only way to produce it at scale without blowing up climate targets and clearing rainforests is to raise animals as intensively as possible through what’s called “sustainable intensification.”

Factory farms don’t exist merely to be evil, after all, but rather because they produce animal products with the fewest possible inputs. Just as much as these books puncture Michael Pollan-esque pipe dreams of feeding the world with pasture-raised steak, they also have little patience for animal rights activists who want to regulate factory farming out of existence.

Thus included on Sexton’s list of misguided policies are animal welfare laws like California’s Proposition 12, which ban some of the most extreme forms of confinement for farm animals, including caging female breeding pigs in crates so small they’re comparable to spending an entire human life trapped inside a coffin.

“Policies being imposed in the name of animal welfare reduce the productivity of these animals and raise the costs of producing animal products,” he writes. In fairness to Sexton, whom I have an enormous amount of respect for and have interviewed for numerous stories, he suggests what he argues is an alternative, less costly route to achieving the welfare benefits of Prop 12. “I like animals and want them to be treated well,” he writes.

Grunwald more gingerly suggests factory farms remain an inevitable, if inhumane and not ideal, part of food production. In a controversial New York Times essay last December, he argued, “the inconvenient truth is that factory farms are the best hope for producing the food we will need without obliterating what’s left of our natural treasures and vaporizing their carbon into the atmosphere.”

One of the surest, most realistic ways to reduce meat’s outsize land and carbon footprints this century, Grunwald writes, is for diets to replace beef with poultry and pork, which are far lower in climate impact. But that trade would be morally calamitous — it takes far more individual chickens and pigs to produce the same amount of meat as beef cattle, and those animals are treated far worse.

The anti-anti-factory farming ethos is certainly a way of looking at our food system. There’s a brutal logic to it that anti-factory farm advocates have to learn to contend with.

Take dairy cows as just one illustrative example: Breeding them for maximal productivity has meant that “since World War II, the US dairy herd has shrunk by two-thirds, yet produces two-thirds more milk,” Grunwald writes. Had that not happened, we’d have more dairy cows emitting more greenhouse gases, and we’d likely have cleared more land and harmed more ecosystems to grow the crops that feed them. In much of the rest of the world, dairy herds are much less productive, thereby consuming more resources and polluting the climate more for every gallon of milk produced.

Yet America’s hyper-productive turbo-cows have come at a severe cost to animal welfare. Dairy cows are some of the most miserable animals in our food system: Like all mammals, they only make milk after giving birth, to feed their babies, but they’ve been bred to produce far more than a calf would drink. These astronomical yields destroy the dairy cow’s body, forcing her to channel “freakish” amounts of energy into milk production, as the food historian Anne Mendelson has written. (One might argue that the counterfactual would be even worse: a world with more, less-productive dairy cows, each enduring a life of continual pregnancy and separation from their calves. Nevertheless, the sheer extremity of the modern turbo-cow’s suffering, and the prospect of bringing many more of them into the world, crosses a moral threshold.)

All this for a food that still, even after cows have been pushed beyond the limits of decency, remains significantly worse for the environment than simply eating plant-based foods. So is industrial milk really a win for the planet?

One of my favorite visualizations the global food system comes from Our World in Data:

Plant-based foods — that is, everything that’s not meat, dairy, and eggs — already supply more than 80 percent of the world’s calories, and nearly two-thirds of our protein, with just 16 percent of global agricultural land. One conclusion you could draw from this chart is that animal agriculture is so inherently inefficient — we grow feed crops to raise animals that we then slaughter to feed ourselves — that we have to work hard to find ways of making it more productive. Another way of looking at it is that animal agriculture is so inefficient — and, by the way, it comes at an unthinkable moral cost, and it might start the next pandemic — that it would be the definition of lunacy to squander limited global carbon budgets to produce an ever-greater share of our food this way.

But there’s no single council of humanity that can make that decision for our species — only billions of individuals making market choices. And they have shown every sign that they are going to keep eating meat.

So Grunwald calls for an all-of-the-above approach. We Are Eating the Earth roots for the success of meat alternatives like plant-based and cell-cultivated meat — and it made me feel more optimistic about their future than I have in a long time — just as much as it embraces intensive animal production. Innovation can also make intensive crop agriculture more planet-friendly, as Grunwald explores, by making it less dependent on inputs that harm wildlife, like chemical pesticides.

The logic of anti-anti-factory farming genuinely challenged me, because as impossible as its choices feel — do we torture several billion more animals per year, or let the Amazon burn? — they are real trade-offs that policymakers face every day.

It’s hard to compare the despoiling of irreplaceable ecological wonders to the infernal horror of the factory farm according to a cost-benefit analysis, because they feel incommensurate. But if we tried to do it honestly, I’m not sure the answer would be as clear as factory farming’s defenders suggest. Their case only works because food systems analysis sees animals as economic inputs, not much different than a bushel of wheat, rather than as who they really are. It doesn’t seriously engage with what it really means to farm animals for food — the incessant pain of a modern broiler chicken, or the mind-numbing despair of a caged mother pig used as a reproductive machine.

So let me offer one more new book recommendation: my friend the philosopher John Sanbonmatsu’s The Omnivore’s Deception. Another rebuke of Michael Pollan and his defense of eating animals, it’s the rare book that unshrinkingly names our tyranny over animals as a “civilizational error,” as Sanbonmatsu writes. It’s “about what happens when we organize our society, economy, and daily lives around a radical evil, then engage in self-deception to keep the truth of that evil from ourselves.”

We Are Eating the Earth is, to a great extent, a work of unsentimental pragmatism, which makes the spirited case for principled idealism in the book’s final moments all the more potent. Sometimes progress depends on a “refusal to read the room and stop saying things nobody wanted to hear,” Grunwald writes. “It pays to keep working and fighting the good fight, because maybe something good will happen. Maybe it won’t, but if you don’t keep working and fighting, it definitely won’t.”

We should look at animal agriculture the same way. We could continue turning our planet into a giant factory farm, but then, what are we even doing all this for? If we continue to ignore one of the greatest atrocities of our time — and expand it even further — what would be the point of building such a world?

All over the globe, there are animal advocates urging their fellow humans to change course, and the only way we’ll feel our way out of the factory farm trap is to commit to that task. We don’t know if we’ll ever convince humanity to abandon the “radical evil” of factory farming, but it would be an abdication to give up trying.