DYSPEPSIA GENERATION

Ronald Bailey thinks we’re at that point.

“Humanity now stands at Peak Farmland, and the 21st century will see release of vast areas of land, hundreds of millions of hectares, more than twice the area of France for nature,” declared Jesse Ausubel, the director of the Program for the Human Environment at Rockefeller University, in a December lecture. Ausubel was outlining the findings in a new study he and his collaborators had done in the Population and Development Review. Unlike other alleged resource “peaks,” peak farmland reflects not the exhaustion of resources but the fruits of human intelligence and growing affluence.

The amount of people and resources devoted to growing food has been trending downward for decades, as automation has been substituted for expensive labor. This is why politician-talk about ‘family farms’ is so retrograde; substitute ‘family factories’ and think about where we would be if that had been a political priority during the industrialization of the 20th century.

In 1960 India’s population was 450 million, and the average Indian subsisted on a near-starvation diet of just more than 2,000 calories per day. Indian farmers wrested those meager calories from 161 million hectares (400 million acres) of farmland, an area a bit more than twice the size of Texas. By 2010, Indian population rose by more than two and half times, national income rose 15-fold, and the average Indian ate a sixth more calories. The amount of land devoted to crops rose about 5 percent to 170 million hectares. Had wheat productivity remained the same that it was in 1960, Ausubel and his colleagues calculate that Indian farmers would have had to plow up an additional 65 million hectares of land. Instead, as people left the land for cities, Indian forests expanded by 15 million hectares—bigger than the area of Iowa.

I would quibble about 2000 calories a day being a ‘near-starvation diet’ — I’m doing that right now to lose weight, and I can tell you that it’s actually a pretty comfortable amount of food. But the rest of it is right on.

In the United States, corn production grew 17-fold between 1860 and 2010, yet more land was planted in corn in 1925 than in 2010. (The area planted in corn has started increasing again, thanks to the federal government’s biofuels mandates and subsidies.) Today U.S. forests cover about 72 percent of the area that was forested in 1630. Forest area stabilized in the early 20th century, and the extent of U.S. forests began increasing in the second half of the 20th century.

This is the dirty little secret that the eco-nazis don’t want you to know — and their fellow-travellers in the Lamestream Media take care not to report. Just as with ‘clean air’ and ‘clean water’, advancing science and improving technology are doing more to give us a healthy environment than all of the heavy-handed political mandates ever imposed on a victimized public.

One concern is that farmers may be approaching the biological limits of photosynthesis, which would constrain crop yields. But the authors note that the winners of the annual National Corn Yield Contest currently produce non-irrigated yields of around 300 bushels per acre, nearly double average U.S. yields. Ausubel suggests that the difference between the global average of 82 bushels and contest-winning 300 bushels per acre yields means that “much headroom remains for farmers to lift yields.”

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 24th, 2013 at 09:25 and is filed under Think about it.. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.