FEEDING THE WORLD AND MAKING ROOM FOR ALL SPECIES
Author of Rambunctious Garden: Saving Nature in a Post-Wild World
The western prairie fringed orchid (Platanthera praeclara) is a stunning spring flower of the tallgrass prairie. Each stalk is up to two feet tall and covered in dozens of elaborately fringed white flowers. It is also threatened with extinction because only tiny scraps of tallgrass prairie remain in North America. About 96 percent of this once vast and diverse landscape has been plowed under. Corn and soy grow there now, in neat rows. Who eats all this corn and soy? Not us.
In fact, 36 percent of crops around the world are used to feed livestock. In the United States, the figure is 57 percent.1 The number one threat to endangered species is habitat loss. The number one cause of habitat loss is agricultural expansion. And by far the least efficient use of agricultural land is meat production.
When people eat plants, most of the energy in the crops ends up in people’s bellies. But when people eat animals, which in turn ate plants, a mere 12 percent of the energy of the crops ends up in people’s bellies. The rest is lost. That means we can feed more people with the same amount of land if we all eat less meat. And that’s even before accounting for the vast areas of the Earth used as pasture land.
Beef cattle, in particular, are enormous users of land. Mind bogglingly, they use 160 times as much land per calorie as rice, potatoes, or wheat.2 Producing poultry, pork, eggs, and dairy also requires a significant amount of land, on average six times as much as the three plant staples.
This huge land use is a direct threat to the western prairie fringed orchid and hundreds of other species that are endangered because of habitat conversion to agriculture, which has already mowed over 70 percent of the world’s grassland, 50 percent of its savanna, 45 percent of its temperate deciduous forest, and 27 percent of its tropical forest.3 And as the global population grows—and gets richer and potentially eager to eat more meat—agriculture expansion could drive species extinct, erase whole ecosystem types, and convert our world to an endless expanse of dull monocultures. All this land clearing and agriculture are also massive contributors to climate change as forests are burned and livestock release methane.
When faced with the challenge of an expanding and increasingly affluent global human population, the knee-jerk response has been to think about ways we can grow more food on more land. But that is not the only path forward. We can feed the world now and in the future without expanding lands devoted to agriculture.
In 2011, a diverse group of environmental and agricultural scholars wrote a paper in the scientific journal Nature in which they explained how. First, we can use tried-and-true technologies to improve how much food can be grown on each acre—that is, to improve yield. In poorer parts of the world, yields are much lower than in Europe and the United States. This yield gap could be closed using a mix of techniques from organic farming and “precision farming,” by which GPS and satellite imagery helps farmers add just enough water and fertilizer to each plant rather than bathing the whole field in excess water and chemicals. Better seed varieties and breeding higher-yielding varieties of so-called orphan crops like yams, groundnuts, tef, and cassava can help too.
Second, we must attack food waste at all points on the chain between farm and compost heap. A shocking one third of the food we grow is never eaten.
Third, we must cut back on growing crops for biofuel and to feed to animals. The group estimated that if sixteen major crops were eaten instead of fed to cars, trucks, cows, pigs, chickens, and other meat animals, we would have a billion more tons of food every year—a 49 percent increase in calories. That’s huge. At that rate, we could do more than stop agricultural expansion. We could give some land back to the species with which we share the planet. We could reseed grasslands and come back to listen to the meadowlarks sing. We could watch the tropical forest regrow and the orangutans fan out into new homelands. We could watch African wild dogs romp on expanded savanna.
A key point here is that we don’t have to all become vegans to make profound changes in our agricultural systems. As the authors of the Nature paper write, “While wholesale conversions of the human diet and the elimination of food waste are not realistic goals, even incremental steps could be extremely beneficial.”
Today, people in China, India, and Southeast Asia eat diets heavy on plants and light on meat. But they are getting richer. Will they maintain those plant-based diets or switch over to the hamburgers and chicken patties of North America? And will we keep eating all those hamburgers and chicken patties once we see how much land it takes?
While governments can use taxes and incentives to try to shift citizens’ diets, it may be the cumulative weight of billions of individual decisions that will allow humans to feed ourselves without driving countless other species extinct. Reducing our poultry, beef, and pork consumption can have a real positive effect if enough of us do it. And on an individual level, cutting back on meat can be a powerful way of enacting your own belief that other species have a right to continued existence on Earth and that the planet is not ours to turn into a giant spherical feedlot.
I eat meat. But I am happy to eat it much less frequently if it means that there will be western prairie fringed orchids in the world.