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By Root 525 0

that’s optimistically assuming that yields would have remained at the same level in the newly cultivated land, taken from the rainforests, the swamps and the semi-deserts. If yields had not increased, therefore, rainforests would have been burnt, deserts irrigated, wetlands drained, tidal flats reclaimed, pastures ploughed – to a far greater extent than actually happened. To put it another way, today people farm (i.e., plough, crop or graze) just 38 per cent of the land area of the earth, whereas with 1961 yields they would have to farm 82 per cent to feed today’s population. Intensification has saved 44 per cent of this planet for wilderness. Intensification is the best thing that ever happened – from the environmental perspective. There are now over two billion acres of ‘secondary’ tropical rainforest, regrowing after farmers left for the cities, and it is already almost as rich in biodiversity as primary forest. That is because of intensive farming and urbanisation.

Some argue that the human race already appropriates for itself an unsustainable fraction of the planet’s primary production and that if it uses any more, the ecosystem of the entire globe will collapse. Human beings comprise about 0.5 per cent by weight of the animals on the planet. Yet they beg, borrow and steal for themselves roughly 23 per cent of the entire primary production of land plants (the number is much lower if the oceans are included). This number is known to ecologists as the HANPP – the ‘human appropriation of net primary productivity’. That is to say, of the 650 billion tonnes of carbon potentially absorbed from the air by land plants each year, eighty are harvested, ten are burnt and sixty are prevented from growing by ploughs, streets and goats, leaving 500 to support all the other species.

That may seem to leave some room for growth yet, but is it really practical to expect a planet to go on supporting such a dominant monoculture of one ape? To answer this question, break the numbers down by region. In Siberia and the Amazon perhaps 99 per cent of plant growth supports wildlife rather than people. In much of Africa and central Asia, people reduce the productivity of land even as they appropriate a fifth of the production – an overgrazed scrubland supports fewer goats than it would support antelopes if it were wilderness. In western Europe and eastern Asia, however, people eat nearly half the plant production yet barely reduce the amount left over for other species at all – because they dramatically raise the productivity of the land with fertiliser: the grass meadow near my house, sprinkled with nitrate twice a year, supports a large herd of milking cows, but it is also teeming with worms, leatherjackets, dung flies – and the blackbirds, jackdaws and swallows that eat them. This actually gives great cause for optimism, because it implies that intensifying agriculture throughout Africa and central Asia could feed more people and still support more other species, too. Or, in academic-ese: ‘These findings suggest that, on a global scale, there may be a considerable potential to raise agricultural output without necessarily increasing HANPP.’

Other trends too have made modern farming better for the planet. Now that weeds can be controlled by herbicides rather than ploughing (the main function of a plough is to bury weeds), more and more crops are sown directly into the ground without tilling. This reduces soil erosion, silt run-off and the massacre of innocent small animals of the soil that inevitably attends the ploughing of a field – as flocks of worm-eating seagulls attest. Food processing with preservatives, much despised by greenchic folk, has greatly reduced the amount of food that goes to waste. Even the confinement of chickens, pigs and cattle to indoor barns and batteries, though it troubles the consciences (mine included) of those who care for animal welfare, undoubtedly results in more meat produced from less feed with less pollution and less disease. When bird flu threatened, it was free-range flocks of chickens, not battery farms,