The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food (44 page)

In 1940, vice president–elect Henry Wallace attended the inauguration of the Mexican president, Manuel Ávila Camacho. The trip was a show of support, and Wallace, the former secretary of agriculture, seized on an invitation to visit the hillside fields of the local Mexican farmworkers. Before entering politics, Wallace had started the Hi-Bred Corn Company, which came to lead the industry, and soon the world, in hybrid corn-seed technology. Wallace was a wealthy man. He was also a progressive for his times—an early advocate for civil rights and government health insurance. His heart went out to the Mexican peasants who worked their small plots in miserable conditions. The soil was failing, their seeds were unproductive—they had no machines and no fertilizers.

After returning to the United States, Wallace persuaded the Rockefeller Foundation to support a special collaboration with Mexico to improve farmers’ crop yields. (He had failed to convince Congress.) Until then, aid had come in the form of donations. Wallace’s idea was to send the best American agricultural scientists to train their Mexican counterparts in the latest
breeding science. A young scientist and developer of agricultural chemicals for DuPont liked the idea and agreed to join the effort. His name was Norman Borlaug.

Borlaug was born in Iowa and attended college in the Midwest at the height of the Dust Bowl. That great environmental disaster had many people reconsidering large-scale modern agriculture, but Borlaug saw it as proof that technology and a greater emphasis on high-yield farming were the only options for the future of food production. The International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT), formed as a collaboration between the Rockefeller Foundation and the Mexican government, allowed him to put his ideas to work.

Borlaug was ferociously dedicated. He spent fifteen-hour days in the fields, examining different crops and soil conditions and heading a small team that managed to cross more than six thousand distinct varieties of wheat. His research showed that adding fertilizer to wheat production could triple growth, but the kick was so powerful that the wheat stalks shot up too quickly. Without full development and enough strength to support their heavy seed heads, they fell over and rotted on the ground. Harvesting was nearly impossible.

Then, in 1952, word arrived of a newly developed short-straw wheat from Japan called Norin 10. Using samples of Norin 10,
Borlaug began growing new semidwarf crosses and found that fertilizer enabled this wheat to mature more quickly without falling over. Within a few short years, Borlaug had produced wheat that yielded three times more than its predecessors. By 1963, 95 percent of the wheat grown in Mexico was his semidwarf variety, and the country’s wheat harvest was six times what it had been when he arrived. Encouraged by the results,
Borlaug next sent his dwarf wheat to India, which was on the brink of mass famine. Farmers planted the new seeds and followed the fertilizer regimen, and within a few years the results were just as incredible: crop yields had more than tripled, and India became a net exporter of wheat.

The new varieties continued to spread throughout Asia, with the same effect—displacing local landrace varieties (and thousands of years of genetic refinement) and upending the traditional practices of millions of farmers. New strains of “miracle” rice soon followed, which matured fast enough to allow farmers to grow two crops in a year instead of just one.

Such was the power and, indeed, the aim of the Green Revolution: to increase food production without bringing more land under cultivation.
From 1950 to 1992, harvests increased 170 percent on only 1 percent more cultivated land. Today,
more than 70 percent of the wheat grown in the developing world carries genes that Borlaug developed in Mexico. And semidwarf varieties make up the majority of wheat in the United States as well.

It is estimated that a billion lives were saved by Norman Borlaug’s work, which makes questioning the success of the Green Revolution complicated. How do you argue against a system of agriculture that saved a billion people?

One way has been to look at the
global increase in diet-related diseases since the 1970s. Certain types of cancers, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and obesity are, many argue, the enormous collateral damage the revolution inflicted. Lives were saved by providing calories, but the Green Revolution ultimately altered the way we eat, and, for the most part, not in a good way.

Without question, it altered the way we grow food on a large scale. The world is now awash in monocultures of genetically uniform varieties, fed by chemical fertilizers. And their legacy has been disastrous for soil health. The short wheat came with equally short roots, like those whispery filaments I saw on Wes Jackson’s banner, diminishing important highways of bacterial and fungal activity. Soil became compacted, degraded.

“They took beautiful stuff like this,” Glenn explained as he pointed to his test plot, “and dwarfed it, dwarfing the roots, too, limiting their ability to uptake micronutrients from the soil. Questionable nutrition and zero flavor.”
(There was nothing dwarfed about Glenn’s wheat. Every stalk reached to my chest, and a few them extended well above my head. “Tall straw, deep roots,” he said.)

The dwarfed root systems also retained less water, a shortcoming that many countries have compensated for with enormous, government-backed irrigation projects.
From 1950 to 2000, the amount of irrigated farmland tripled. One-fifth of the grain grown in the United States is irrigated; in India, it’s more like three-fifths, resulting in the rapid depletion of the country’s groundwater sources. According to author and activist Vandana Shiva, India’s water crisis is clearly linked to the introduction of Borlaug’s green-revolution varieties. “
Although high-yielding varieties of wheat may yield over 40 percent more than traditional varieties,” she writes, “they need about three times as much water.”

Green Revolution varieties consume fossil fuels, in the form of
synthetic fertilizers, just as greedily. As Cary Fowler and Patrick Mooney note in their book
Shattering: Food, Politics, and the Loss of Genetic Diversity,
the relationship between dwarf seeds and chemical fertilizers is “
akin to the relationship of the chicken and the egg. The fertilizers made the new varieties possible. The new varieties made the fertilizers necessary.”

By conservative estimates, more than a third of the Green Revolution’s yield gains are owed to synthetic fertilizers, which, as many have pointed out, makes the revolution not exactly
green
in the environmental sense. Modern, commerically bred seed varieties depend on chemicals now more than ever. To get them to work, you need the chemicals; once the chemicals are in use, soil organic matter falls off, and the soil is less able to transport nutrients to the plants efficiently. The result is that
more chemicals are needed to get the same kick.

All true. And yet . . . a
billion
lives.

Susan Dworkin, a former assistant to a breeder who worked alongside Borlaug for many years, once described how breeders working on hunger tend to see the problem purely in terms of yield. “How much food could you
get out of an acre? How many people could you feed? That’s where they are. That’s what they think,” she said. “They are not looking at the dinner table.
They’re looking at the swollen belly.”

With a billion lives at stake, the single-minded pursuit of yield is both defensible and important. But what if, all along, our math has been wrong? What if, in our mad dash for greater productivity, we’ve miscalculated the
true
yields?

Consider the farmer who grows a variety of semidwarf wheat. He applies the requisite chemical fertilizers and sits back, with hopes of watching his yields (and his profit) soar. But shorter straw means less to plow back into the ground to become food for soil organisms. Or, if the wheat is being used as food and bedding for cattle, dwarfed straw means there’s less feed for the cows. Either way, it amounts to less food for someone. And not just anyone. As Klaas liked to remind me, soil organisms and cows are partners in making a healthy system work. In the modern calculus of efficient farming, those things are left out of the equation because they’re not feeding our bellies (at least not directly). And it’s a critical omission.

There is another miscalculation, too. I once attended an agriculture conference where a scientist argued that organic agriculture could not feed our growing population. One of the studies he cited compared a small plot of conventionally fertilized corn with another small plot of organically grown corn. A photo showed the two plots planted right next to each other: same variety, same soil. The conventional corn was tall, vigorous, and thriving. The organic corn looked dry and stooped over, a sickly cousin. The photo, as convincing as Wes Jackson’s side-by-side analysis of annual and perennial wheat, seemed to prove that yields for conventional corn far surpass those for organic corn.

It wasn’t until Glenn pointed to his landraces, and then to the university trials, with their military uniformity, just beyond, that I could consider another side-by-side comparison. And this one looked different. Glenn’s wheat wasn’t a shriveled, sickly cousin (with its varying heights, it was more like a crazy uncle), because Glenn had prepped the soil. He had rotated in different
crops—cowpeas, barley, and oats—to ensure fertility. He gave his wheat a fair shot at thriving.

Of course, even thriving landrace wheat might not yield as much as the conventional varieties, at least not consistently. Growing one variety with fertilizers usually wins. But that doesn’t mean the corn study was right. It was wrong—and here’s the heart of the bad math. Barley and oats make a good meal. They are delicious and full of nutrition. So, while an acre of conventional wheat may yield more than an acre of organic wheat, that does not mean it yields more
food.
It just yields more wheat. The equation is missing the sum total of its parts: barley plus oats plus wheat will yield more food than wheat on its own.

“It is often said,” Vandana Shiva has written, “that the
so-called miracle varieties of the Green Revolution in modern industrial agriculture prevented famine because they had higher yields. However, these higher yields disappear in the context of total yields of crops on farms.”

But total yields of crops on farms matter only if we’re eating all of the farm’s crops—the math holds up only if we eat the barley and the oats. If the farmer can’t sell the barley and oats because there isn’t enough demand, the logic of growing wheat (or corn, or soy) in monocultures is difficult to compete with. It feeds on itself. As long as we don’t eat the diversity, the pull to produce more of the primary crop is too strong.

Which brings us to cuisine.

The challenge of making delicious use of various ingredients is at the heart of all great cuisines, and it evolved from diversity. Cuisines did not develop from what the land offered, as is often said; they developed from what the land demanded. The Green Revolution turned this equation on its head by making diversity expensive. It empowered only a few crops. And in the process, it dumbed down cuisine.

Of all the arguments against the Green Revolution, dumbing down cuisine sounds like the most insignificant—an acceptable sacrifice on the road to bringing agriculture out of the Stone Age and feeding the hungry. But nature writer Colin Tudge reminds us that the world’s population at the beginning of the agricultural age, ten thousand years ago, stood at about ten million. By the time industrial agriculture came into favor, in the 1930s, it was three billion. A three-hundred-fold increase,
achieved with old-world farming techniques—organic farming before there was such a thing as organic. Not bad for an agriculture system now considered archaic. But more to the point: small-scale, old-world farmers produced not just a lot of food but a lot of really good food.

Legendary Soviet botanist Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov, who traveled the globe in the early twentieth century mapping the world’s greatest centers of crop diversity and collected specimens along the way, came to believe that the landrace crops he discovered were “
the result of intelligent, innovative minds—and often the work of geniuses.”