The Green Revolution got off to a rocky start. In the fall of 1944, Norman Borlaug, who would become known as the revolution’s father, moved to Mexico to set up a plant-breeding program. Right away, he came down with a stomach crud. It was, he would later tell an interviewer, “the usual tourist thing,” except that it lasted for weeks. Though he had found his previous position, with DuPont, to be boring, in those weeks Borlaug decided that maybe it hadn’t been so bad. “If I could have gotten my job back at DuPont, I would have,” he said.
Borlaug had gone to Mexico specifically to work with wheat, which was being devastated by a fungal disease called stem rust. When he got well enough to travel around the country, he became depressed by what he found. In the Bajío, a region northwest of Mexico city, the farmers were desperately poor. Their wheat didn’t seem to grow so much as “fight to stay alive,” Borlaug wrote to his wife. “These places that I’ve seen have clubbed my mind.”
Borlaug threw himself into an effort to produce a new variety of wheat—one that would be both rust-resistant and higher-yielding. With the help of two Mexican agronomists, he gathered seeds from thousands of local varieties, planted them, and waited for them to mature. Most of the resulting plants succumbed to rust; the few that made it were crossed with one another to produce the next generation. To maximize his workdays, Borlaug often slept in a shack near his test fields, and, to speed up the breeding process, he shuttled between central Mexico, where wheat was grown in the summer, and northwestern Mexico, where he could get in a second crop in the winter.
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This went on for years. Progress was made; then it was unmade when a different “race” of stem rust swept through. Meanwhile, a new issue emerged. Mexican wheat varieties tended to send up tall, slender stalks. If they were dosed with fertilizer, they became more productive but grew so top-heavy that they fell over—a problem known as lodging. Borlaug began experimenting with a variety of dwarf wheat from Japan. He crossed the Japanese wheat with some doubly rust-resistant varieties he had developed. Finally, he got lucky. The transpacific crosses proved to be not just vigorous and high-yielding but also surprisingly versatile. They grew well across a range of climate zones and light conditions. In 1960, Borlaug invited farmers in the northern state of Sonora to visit a plot planted with a number of his best-performing dwarf wheat strains. The farmers went wild. They had been instructed to remain at a distance from the plot, but they refused to listen. Some grabbed at the wheat heads and pocketed the seeds. According to charles c. Mann’s “The Wizard and the Prophet” (2018), Borlaug—the wizard of the title—was secretly pleased by all the tumult. It was to him the “soundtrack of success.”
In later years, Borlaug liked to recite statistics illustrating his seeds’ superiority. In a speech he delivered in Australia in 1968, the year the term “Green Revolution” was coined, he noted that average wheat yields in Mexico, which had been around seven hundred and fifty kilos per hectare when he’d arrived, had since climbed to almost twenty-eight hundred kilos per hectare—a roughly fourfold increase. In western Pakistan, where versions of the Mexican varieties had been introduced in 1965, the results were similarly dramatic: average yields had risen, he found, by almost fifty per cent in just two years.
But, as proud as he was of his seeds, Borlaug also saw their limits. When he received the Nobel Peace Prize, in 1970, he used his Nobel address to caution against complacency. The new varieties of wheat he had bred, along with new strains of rice and corn which had subsequently been developed, represented, he said, only a “temporary success in man’s war against hunger and deprivation.” The world’s population, he predicted, would continue to grow, and eventually the demand for food would again outstrip the supply. “Perhaps the term ‘green revolution,’ as commonly used, is premature,” Borlaug worried out loud.
Today, there are some 8.2 billion people on earth, more than twice as many as there were when Borlaug won his Nobel. This figure is expected to rise to almost ten billion by 2050. A few months ago, more than a hundred Nobel laureates released an open letter that echoed Borlaug’s concerns. They predicted “a tragic mismatch of global food supply and demand by mid-century.” By their reckoning, “we are not on track to meet future food needs. Not even close.”
Do we need a second Green Revolution? And, if so, what form should it take? Two new books, Michael Grunwald’s “We Are Eating the Earth: The Race to Fix Our Food System and Save Our climate” (Simon & Schuster) and Vaclav Smil’s “How to Feed the World: The History and Future of Food” (Viking), pursue these questions with varying degrees of urgency.
Grunwald is a journalist whose previous books include a history of the Everglades. Humanity, he says, is facing “some terrible math.” On one side of the equation is the growing need for food; Grunwald estimates that, to keep pace with demand, agricultural production will have to increase by fifty per cent over the next twenty-five years. On the other side is climate change. Agriculture is a major source of greenhouse gases; depending on how you calculate it, the sector is responsible for between a tenth and a third of global emissions. To stabilize the climate, this figure has to drop to pretty much zero. We need to “feed the world without frying the world” is how Grunwald puts it.
Grunwald spends a lot of “We Are Eating the Earth” interviewing people who have ideas about how this balancing act might be brought off. One group is pushing what’s called “regenerative agriculture.” Grunwald visits a ranch in Northern california co-owned by the billionaire investor and former Presidential candidate Tom Steyer. Instead of rotating his cows among fields every few weeks, Steyer restricts them to a small area and moves them more frequently. The practice, known as “adaptive multi-paddock grazing,” is supposed to increase the amount of carbon stored in the ranch’s soils. This, in turn, is supposed to counteract some—or all—of the emissions from the operation’s ruminants, which are constantly burping out methane, a powerful greenhouse gas. “If we can show scientifically that this stuff really works,” Steyer says, “that would be priceless.”
A second group wants to take agriculture indoors, thereby freeing up land to plant carbon-sucking forests. Grunwald tours a “vertical farm” built on the site of an abandoned steel mill in Newark. The farm—which is, in fact, an enormous warehouse—is filled with lettuce seedlings growing under banks of lights in a mist of chemicals. The plants will never see the sun or touch soil. “The future is happening a lot faster than we expected,” David Rosenberg, then the c.E.O. of AeroFarms, the company that owns the warehouse, assures Grunwald.
A third group wants to eliminate farm animals, or at least reinvent them. chickens, pigs, and especially cows consume many more calories in the form of plants than they yield up in the form of eggs, chops, and burgers. Getting rid of the middleman—or, really, middle creature—will, it stands to reason, make the food system that much more efficient. Grunwald talks to Ethan Brown, the founder of Beyond Meat, and Pat Brown—no relation—the founder of Impossible Foods, both of whom have created beef substitutes out of plant-based ingredients like apple extract and pea protein. Grunwald samples ice cream that has been made without any cream, “egg whites” that have been produced without any eggs, and chocolate mousse made from microbes. (The ice cream, he reports, is tasty; the mousse, “bland.”) He interviews entrepreneurs who are trying to produce meat from animal cells grown in vats. These include a twentysomething from Australia named George Peppou, who wants to culture meat from exotic species, like Galápagos tortoises. “Let’s create brand-new experiences!” Peppou urges.
Grunwald began his reporting for “We Are Eating the Earth” pre-cOVID. What exactly he was expecting to discover is hard to say, but he seems to have set out on writing the book optimistically. The “good news is that remarkable people are working on the eating the earth problem,” he writes in his introduction.
Most of the ventures Grunwald tours, however, turn out to be duds. Steyer hires a research group to monitor his ranch. He learns that though some metrics are improving—there’s less erosion, for example—the soil is not absorbing more carbon. On the contrary, it is absorbing less carbon. “Those results are a bummer,” a member of the group acknowledges.
Vertical farming and fake meat prove, if anything, more disappointing. Even with highly efficient L.E.D. bulbs, it takes an awful lot of energy to mimic the sun. Grunwald calculates that to grow just five per cent of America’s tomatoes indoors would require “every megawatt” of the country’s renewable-electricity supply. This has financial as well as climate implications. AeroFarms ends up going bankrupt in 2023 (though it has since emerged from chapter 11). Many of its competitors follow suit.
Grunwald interviews Beyond Meat’s Ethan Brown just a few months after the company has gone public. Thanks to investor enthusiasm, it has a market capitalization of more than ten billion dollars. This figure has since dropped by ninety-eight per cent. Impossible Foods is privately held; what little information is available about its finances suggests that its value, too, has crumbled. Many other fake-meat ventures, meanwhile, have gone the way of AeroFarms. SciFi, a company that wanted to create burgers out of a combination of plant-based ingredients and cultivated cells, went belly-up in 2024. Motif FoodWorks, a company that was using yeast to produce a meaty-tasting protein called Hemami, went out of business the same year. (Motif’s problems were caused, in part, by a patent-infringement lawsuit filed by Impossible.)
“carbon farming and vertical farming are wildly overhyped,” Grunwald concludes. “Plant-based meat has floundered in the market, while cultivated meat hasn’t really made it to market.” He adds, “I’m sorry about all that.”
Grunwald is an engaging storyteller, and, to his credit, he sticks with the “terrible math” even as it turns terribler and terribler. A reasonable takeaway from “We Are Eating the Earth” is that the feeding-without-frying equation is the sort that can be solved only with imaginary numbers.
In the absence of breakthroughs, what’s to be done? A good first step, Grunwald counsels, would be to stop making things worse. We could start with biofuels. Every year in the United States, some fourteen billion gallons of so-called conventional ethanol—most of which are produced from corn—get blended into gasoline. The practice is federally mandated, and one of the justifications for the policy is that it’s supposed to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. Almost certainly, though, it has the opposite effect. Diverting corn from grocery stores to gas tanks pushes up commodity prices—which, in turn, encourages farmers to convert forests and marshes into cropland. Since forests and marshes store a lot of carbon, cutting down or draining them increases atmospheric cO₂. Higher commodity prices also, of course, pose more immediate problems, especially for the world’s poor. Grunwald quotes an anti-ethanol protest song by the Jamaican reggae singer Livebroadkast:
Another ostensibly green idea that needs rethinking, according to Grunwald, is organic farming. Reducing fertilizer and pesticide use, raising cattle on grass instead of grain—these may sound like community-minded, environmentally friendly options. But if such practices diminish yields—and Grunwald argues convincingly that they do—then they’re the reverse. To hold the globe’s food supply steady, not to mention increase it, any drop in one farm’s output has to be made up somewhere else. And that somewhere may well turn out to be a field cut out of a rain forest.
It’s “trendy to romanticize small family farms where soil is nurtured with love and animals have names rather than numbers,” Grunwald writes. But “organic, local, and grass-fed are often worse for the climate than conventional, imported, and feedlot-finished.” Grunwald travels to Denmark and Brazil with Tim Searchinger, a researcher at Princeton who has written extensively on the climate impacts of agriculture. “Bad accounting destroys the world,” Searchinger tells him.
Vaclav Smil is a professor emeritus at the University of Winnipeg and the author of more than forty books, several of which also focus on farming. “How to Feed the World” is a typical Smilian work in that it is dense, declarative, and dismissive of lots of other work. “Over the past decade I have been repeatedly exasperated by people’s poor understanding and sheer ignorance of life’s many basic realities, be they concerning organisms or machines, crops or engines, food or fuels,” he writes.
In his introduction, Smil waves aside climate change, saying that he is not going to take up such “fashionable topics.” Nevertheless, he, too, worries about agriculture’s ecological impact. The global food system, he observes, needs to “accommodate the nearly 2 billion people that will be added to today’s population by the middle of the 21st century” at the same time that it needs to “reduce its multitude of environmental burdens.”
Smil is a number cruncher. His premise is that he doesn’t need to visit laboratories or sample ice cream to know what is going to work—and, just as important, what isn’t. Take lab-grown meat. Such meat is produced in bioreactors, which are sterile vats filled with a growing medium. Bioreactors are widely used in drug manufacturing. Smil calculates that to grow just one per cent of the globe’s current meat output would require something like a hundred times the bioreactor capacity of the world’s entire pharmaceutical industry. “Ambitions and aspirations are one thing, realities another,” he writes.
Or consider efforts to improve on photosynthesis. Photosynthesis is woefully inefficient—even some of the most productive crops convert less than one per cent of the solar energy that hits them into calories—so streamlining the process, via gene editing, could produce significant gains. But Smil is skeptical that this can actually be accomplished. Photosynthesis has been around for hundreds of millions of years and is phenomenally complicated. “Prospects for any early commercial breakthroughs” on this front are, in his view, “meager.”
The good news, according to Smil, is that breakthroughs aren’t necessary. The world could go a long way toward keeping up with food demand simply by better managing the supply. A report commissioned by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations estimates that, globally, about forty per cent of fruits and vegetables, thirty per cent of cereal grains, and twenty per cent of meat and dairy products wind up uneaten. The problem is worst in affluent countries like the U.S., where more than two hundred pounds of food per person get thrown away each year. “Even modest food waste reductions would translate into considerable cumulative savings,” Smil observes.
Then, there’s the waste that results from improvident eating habits. If photosynthesis has a low conversion rate, feeding crops to animals compounds the problem many times over. According to Smil, corn “embodies” about 0.7 per cent of the solar energy that hits it; when corn is used as cow fodder, the resulting steaks embody only about 0.002 per cent of the original energy. Pigs and chickens do better at turning grain into flesh. Still, producing a pound of pork or chicken takes many more resources than producing the same amount of, say, cornmeal. Reducing meat consumption, Smil argues, would be “both rational and highly desirable.”
Rates of meat-eating vary widely around the world. At the low end are countries like India and Ethiopia, where the average person consumes just thirteen pounds of meat per year. The U.S. lies at the upper end, weighing in at more than two hundred and sixty pounds per capita. chinese rates of consumption are now also high—around a hundred and fifty pounds per person—after having doubled in just the past three decades.
Some of these differences reflect cultural and gastronomical traditions. But economics also plays a big—and ethically awkward—role. From a global perspective, the U.S. diet is too meat-heavy. But how do you get Americans to cut back, or the chinese to hold steady? And how do you persuade any country to take on food waste? Smil offers a few possibilities, including measures to raise the price of groceries. Though he acknowledges that this would be unpopular, he says that this isn’t really his concern, as his book is “more interested in science than politics.” The strength of “How to Feed the World” is its emphasis on realism. How realistic is it, though, to leave politics out of the calculation?
When Norman Borlaug died, in 2009, at the age of ninety-five, his Times obituary praised him for having done “more than anyone else in the 20th century to teach the world to feed itself.” The Associated Press called him “equal parts scientist and humanitarian,” and MIT Technology Review described his life as one of “heroic proportions.” Were it not for Borlaug and the Green Revolution, the world in the late twentieth century would have been a very different place. Food prices probably would have been a lot higher, the number of people who are malnourished would have been greater, and even more millions of acres of forest would have been transformed into fields.
And yet, by the time of Borlaug’s death, his accomplishments were looking increasingly equivocal. The Green Revolution, critics pointed out, may have alleviated some problems, but it created additional ones, and these tended to impose the highest burdens on precisely those communities the new seeds were supposed to help.
Borlaug’s wheat varieties were highly productive. They were also fussy. They performed well only when showered with nutrients, pesticides, and water. This meant that the gains from planting them went disproportionately to those who could afford such “inputs”— which is to say, those farmers who were already relatively well off. The poorest farmers, for their part, often found themselves forced to sell out. Even if the Green Revolution reduced the price of a commodity like rice by sixty per cent, Raj Patel, a research professor at the University of Texas at Austin, has written that this would have been “little consolation” to those farmers who “lost 100% of their income.”
Increased water, pesticide, and fertilizer use, meanwhile, led to a host of environmental problems. In India, for example, the government encouraged farmers to irrigate their thirsty new crops by drilling into underground aquifers. Some thirty million so-called tube wells were sunk. Now, after several decades of pumping, many aquifers are running dry. According to a recent editorial in the Deccan Herald, “India is facing its worst groundwater crisis in history.” Adding to this crisis, much of the groundwater that remains is contaminated. A report issued last year by the Indian government found that twenty per cent of the samples taken from around the country contained unsafe levels of nitrates. (Nitrates in drinking water are particularly dangerous for infants, who can develop what’s known as blue-baby syndrome.) The report blamed the problem on “excessive use of fertilizers.”
In the eighty years since Borlaug arrived in Mexico, farming in much of the world has been transformed. New tools that could make farms even more productive are constantly being developed—from cRISPR to remote-sensing drones and weeding machines that shoot out lasers. At the same time, the world, too, has been transformed, by such things as climate change, groundwater depletion, and soil contamination. The new tools and the new threats are bound up in each other—two sides, as it were, of the same leaf. If it is reasonable to imagine that we will, somehow or other, find ways to feed ten billion people, it is also reasonable to fear how much damage will be done in the process. ♦
