Maybe this is obvious, but expanding our agricultural footprint to feed the growing population — cutting down forests, plowing prairies — is a really bad idea.
What’s less obvious, and more interesting/troubling, is that farmland expansion is so harmful on so many levels that it’s worth doing just about anything that helps us avoid opening up new land — even things that have their own environmental costs.
In a 2001 paper published in Science, David Tilman et al. calculated what would happen if agricultural expansion continued, business-as-usual style: In 50 years, an additional billion hectares of land — larger than the entire area of the U.S. — would be cleared for farming. Algae dead-zones, like the Mississippi discharge and parts of Lake Erie, would more than double, as would pesticide use. All this “would cause unprecedented ecosystem simplification, loss of ecosystem services, and species extinctions.”
When you add, on top of that, major greenhouse gas emissions, it makes a lot of sense to do all we can to limit farmland expansion.
Share this article
That’s why ecologists like Tilman support techniques for agricultural intensification, even though they often come with problems of their own. For example, in a 2011 paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Tilman found that if you try to minimize fertilizer use, you end up farming more land and emitting more greenhouse gases.
In this very imperfect world, it would be foolish not to embrace imperfect methods of agricultural intensification that help stop the clearing of carbon-rich ecosystems.
Read full, original article: We can feed the world without chopping down more forests
