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How 300 Years of Urbanization and Farming Transformed the Planet
Three centuries ago, humans were intensely using just around 5 percent of the Earth’s land. Now, it’s almost half.
Humans are transforming the Earth through our carbon emissions. Arctic sea ice is shrinking, seas are rising, and the past four years have been the hottest since record-keeping began. But long before the first cars or coal plants, we were reshaping the planet’s ecosystems through humbler but no less dramatic means: pastures and plows.
Environmental scientist Erle Ellis has studied the impact of humanity on the Earth for decades, with a recent focus on categorizing and mapping how humans use the land—not just now, but in the past. And his team’s results show some startling changes. Three centuries ago, humans were intensely using just around 5 percent of the planet, with nearly half the world’s land effectively wild. Today, more than half of Earth’s land is occupied by agriculture or human settlements.
“Climate change is only recently becoming relevant,” said Ellis, a professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. “If it keeps going how it is, it will become the dominant shaper of ecology in the terrestrial realm, but right now the dominant shaper of ecology is land use.”
In contrast to the typical division of the world into ecological “biomes,” Ellis and his team at the Laboratory for Anthropogenic Landscape Ecology map what they call “anthromes,” or “anthropogenic biomes.” These show the intersection of ecology and human land use.
Using a range of sources, Ellis’s team mapped out that land use, dividing the planet into grids and categorizing each cell based on how many people lived there and how they impacted the land. The densest areas were cities and towns, followed by close-packed farming villages. Less populated areas were categorized by their dominant land use—crops, livestock pasture, or inhabited woodlands—while other areas were marked as largely uninhabited.
Below is an animation using a simplified version of Ellis’s data:
Even with only one snapshot per century, the animation makes some of the trends obvious. Large swaths of Russia and the United States become cropland over the 19th century, while livestock occupies increasing amounts of previously semi-wild land in Africa and Asia.
“Asia is pretty much the dominant transformed area, and transformed the earliest,” Ellis said. “Europe is also pretty dense ... The rest of the world has a different trajectory. Much slower, less dense.”
All of this is a mixture of estimates and approximations. One reason Ellis and his team only looked every hundred years and divided the world into cells that stretch for miles was to avoid giving a false impression of precision.
People ask Ellis, “‘What was my backyard like?’” he said. “Well, we don’t have any solid evidence … The further back in time you go, the more you have to consider [this], in a sense, educated guesswork.”
Even more recent data can have issues, based on political decisions that countries make about how to self-classify their land. Saudi Arabia, for example, reports “almost every part of their country as being rangeland” even though much of that arid land is seldom if ever grazed.
Humans shape even “seminatural” biomes
Significant portions of the world, both now and in the past, have been what Ellis’s team terms “seminatural.” These are areas—frequently forests—with low but real human habitation. This could reflect a large cell of the grid that has a farming village or two but mostly natural forests. But frequently, Ellis says, humans have taken a much bigger role in shaping seemingly natural wilderness than people think.
Take the “pristine myth”—the idea that the Americas before European colonization were dominated by pristine wilderness untouched by human hands. In fact, modern researchers believe that indigenous tribes had actively shaped their landscapes through agriculture and regular burning of American forests.
Because of this, the devastating spread of epidemics among indigenous populations after 1492 also had a huge impact on climate—and not just locally. Some scholars believe disease-ravaged peoples significantly cut back on their management of American forests, which meant far less carbon dioxide put into the atmosphere from fires and far more absorbed into newly grown forests. The combination could have played a significant role in the “Little Ice Age” that lowered global temperatures for several centuries between around 1500 and 1850 C.E.
This kind of active land management was done not just by sedentary populations, but by hunter-gatherers, too. This, Ellis says, is a shortcoming in the data.
“There’s no direct mapping of hunter-gatherers’ land use in these datasets. That’s something we’re trying to rectify now,” he said, noting that evidence suggests even non-agricultural people have major effects on the environment.
The data also shows the massive impact made by cities, the most dramatic way humans transform their environment. In 1700, a negligible portion of the Earth’s surface was covered by cities. Over the three centuries that followed, this boomed by around 40 times. Cities are still just half a percent of the planet’s land area, but they have had the most dramatic increase in impact of any of Ellis’s “anthromes.”
Densely populated farming villages—which often have similar concentrations of people per square mile as American suburbs—are also big, especially in the developing world. (Ellis’s team don’t map any urban areas in the Americas or Australia before 1900, and never apply the “villages” category to those continents, because those areas didn’t have “histories of intensive subsistence agriculture.”)
Huge portions of India and China are occupied by these kind of villages. So, too, were the hinterlands around major European cities before improvements in transportation enabled produce to be brought from farther away. Paris, for example, used to be surrounded by suburban “market gardens” which, historians André Jardin and André-Jean Tudesq note, could produce five or six harvests per year and had a “virtual monopoly of the Parisian market” for food until the second half of the 19th century.
How cities drive land-use changes
That kind of intensive agriculture to feed a demanding urban market is part of the huge impact that cities have on the use of land even well outside their boundaries. Those thousands or millions of urban dwellers aren’t producing their own food, and thus need more food produced elsewhere in order to eat.
Ellis describes two different ways that cities impact far-away anthromes through their demands for food—one of them devastating to natural ecosystems, the other surprisingly beneficial.
The first sees new land being put under the plow, as societies try to produce more food for a growing population. This is often low-productivity agriculture, reflecting the marginal quality of the farmland: If it was good for farming, it would have been farmed already. But later, as populations grow, comes an “intensification” process as technology increases the yields on low-productivity farmland.
Agricultural expansion has a massive impact on natural biomes, and has for millennia. But the second process, intensification, has the potential to restore some of the natural biomes that humans previously plowed under.
“Dense cities actually have the potential to help areas recover, because dense populations in cities often are basically pulling people out of the rural areas where they’re farming low-productivity land,” Ellis said. The increased production on good land means the marginal farmland is no longer needed.
Author Charles Mann described this process taking place in New York’s Hudson River Valley in his 2018 book, The Wizard and the Prophet. In the late 19th century, this region was dominated by “hardscrabble farms and pastures ringed by stone walls.” Now many of those “hardscrabble farms” are gone. Six counties in the lower Hudson Valley had around 350,000 people and 573,000 acres of timberland in 1875; today those same counties have more than 1 million people but three times as much forest.
“Many New England states have as many trees as they had in the days of Paul Revere,” Mann writes. “Nor was this growth restricted to North America: Europe’s forest resources increased by about 40 percent from 1970 to 2015, a time in which its population grew from 462 million to 743 million.”
But while this intensification of agriculture is allowing the return of nature in parts of developed countries, the first phase—expansion—is still playing out in the developing world. Erle’s maps show the expansion of crops and livestock into areas like Africa’s Sahel and South America’s Amazon rainforest over the past century.
“Land transformation is the big story of biosphere transformation so far,” Ellis said. “If you’re trying to understand how we produced the ecology we have now, it’s the story of land-use transformation.”
What’s next for Earth
So what will a future mapmaker show for the world’s land use in 2100? Ellis said he expects urbanization to continue, at least doubling the share of the planet’s land devoted to urban areas over the next century.
Similarly, he expects developed countries to see an intensification of agriculture that enables marginal land to be returned to the wild—a process already under way in newly developed countries like China. Poorer countries, on the other hand, may continue to convert marginal wild land into farmland.
“It’s only poor farmers without much investment that can make that work,” Ellis said. “When you’re investing large amounts of money in farm equipment and fertilizers, you don’t invest that in marginal land.”
Much depends, however, on political, economic, and technological changes that will unfold over the next 80 years. For example, Ellis said, the United States has recently seen “a huge shift from beef to chicken” in consumer demand. “That changes the kind of land that’s in demand, from grassland to production of maize and soy.”
Among the factors that could affect the future of Earth’s land use are political decisions in Brazil, where new President Jair Bolsonaro wants to open up more of the Amazon rainforest to agriculture, and technology, where a potential breakthrough in electrical generation such as fusion power could enable transformative changes such as vertical urban farming. Conservation efforts, or lack thereof, could also impact areas of intensive agriculture in developed countries.
“The future of the biosphere… depends partly on economics, partly on politics, but also partly on vision,” Ellis said. “It depends on what people’s values are.”
Can We Grow More Food on Less Land? We’ll Have To, A New Study Finds
If the world hopes to make meaningful progress on climate change, it won’t be enough for cars and factories to get cleaner. Our cows and wheat fields will have to become radically more efficient, too.
By Brad Plumer
Dec. 5, 2018
WASHINGTON — If the world hopes to make meaningful progress on climate change, it won’t be enough for cars and factories to get cleaner. Our cows and wheat fields will have to become radically more efficient, too.
That’s the basic conclusion of a sweeping new study issued Wednesday by the World Resources Institute, an environmental group. The report warns that the world’s agricultural system will need drastic changes in the next few decades in order to feed billions more people without triggering a climate catastrophe.
The challenge is daunting: Agriculture already occupies roughly 40 percent of the world’s land and is responsible for about a quarter of humanity’s greenhouse gas emissions. But with the global population expected to grow from 7.2 billion people today to nearly 10 billion by 2050, and with many millions of people eating more meat as incomes rise, that environmental impact is on pace to expand dramatically.
Based on current trends, the authors calculated, the world would need to produce 56 percent more calories in 2050 than it did in 2010. If farmers and ranchers met that demand by clearing away more forests and other ecosystems for cropland and pasture, as they have often done in the past, they would end up transforming an area twice the size of India.
That, in turn, could make it nearly impossible to stay below 2 degrees Celsius of global warming, the agreed-upon international goal, even if the world’s fossil-fuel emissions were rapidly phased down. When forests are converted into farmland, the large stores of carbon locked away in those trees is released into the atmosphere.
“Food is the mother of all sustainability challenges,” said Janet Ranganathan, vice president for science and research at the World Resources Institute. “We can’t get below 2 degrees without major changes to this system.”
Less meat, but also better farming
The new study, the result of six years’ worth of modeling work conducted in partnership with French agricultural researchers, is hardly the first to warn that feeding the world sustainably will be a formidable task. But the authors take a different view of the most plausible solutions.
In the past, researchers who have looked at the food problem have suggested that the key to a sustainable agriculture system is to persuade consumers to eat far less meat and waste far less of the food that’s already grown.
The new report, however, cautions that there may be limits to how much those strategies can achieve on their own. The authors do recommend that the biggest consumers of beef and lamb, such as those in Europe and the United States, could cut back their consumption by about 40 percent by 2050, or down to about 1.5 servings a week on average. Those two types of meat have especially large environmental footprints.
But the authors are not counting on a major worldwide shift to vegetarianism.
“We wanted to avoid relying on magic asterisks,” said Timothy D. Searchinger, a researcher at Princeton University and the World Resources Institute and lead author of the report. “We could imagine a significant shift from beef to chicken, and that by itself goes a long way.” (Poultry production has about one-eighth the climate impact of beef production.)
So, in addition to actions on diet and food waste, the researchers also focused on dozens of broad strategies that could allow farmers and ranchers to grow far more food on existing agricultural lands while cutting emissions, a feat that would require a major shift in farming practices worldwide and rapid advances in technology.
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A farm in the Pays de la Loire region of France. Cows have an especially large environmental footprint.CreditLoic Venance/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
For example, they note, in parts of Brazil, the best-managed grazing lands can produce four times as much beef per acre as poorly managed lands — in part owing to differences in cattle health and how well the grass is fertilized. Improving productivity across the board could help satisfy rising meat demand while lessening the need to clear broad swaths of rain forest.
The authors also pointed to possible techniques to reduce the climate impact of existing farms. For instance, new chemical compounds could help prevent nitrogen fertilizers from producing nitrous oxide, a potent greenhouse gas. And scientists are exploring feed additives that get cows to burp up less methane, another big contributor to global warming.
The report notes that producing 56 percent more calories without expanding agricultural land could prove even more difficult if, as expected, rising temperatures reduce crop yields. But, Mr. Searchinger said, many of the recommendations in the report, such as breeding new, higher-yielding crop varieties or preventing soil erosion, could also help farmers adapt to climate change.
Conserving the world’s remaining forests
The researchers emphasize that strategies to improve the productivity of existing croplands and pastures will have to be paired with more rigorous conservation policies to protect existing forests in places like Brazil or sub-Saharan Africa. Otherwise, farmers will just find it more profitable to clear more forests for agriculture — with dire climate consequences.
“In the past, we’ve often seen agricultural policies and conservation policies moving in parallel without a lot of interaction,” said Linus Blomqvist, director of conservation at the Breakthrough Institute, who was not involved in the study. “The big challenge is to link the two, so that we get more intensive farming without using more land.”
In another contentious recommendation, the report’s authors call for a limit on the use of bioenergy crops, such as corn grown for ethanol in cars, that compete with food crops for land.
Money is also a hurdle. The report’s authors call for large increases in research funding to look at ideas like fertilizers that can be made without the use of fossil fuels, organic sprays that can reduce waste by preserving fresh food for longer, and genetic editing techniques that might produce higher-yielding crops. They also urge new regulations that would encourage private industry to develop sustainable agricultural technologies.
Over the past three years, 51 countries have spent roughly $570 billion a year to support food production, said Tobias Baedeker, an agricultural economist at the World Bank, which contributed to the new study.
If those subsidies were overhauled so that they helped support more sustainable practices, Mr. Baedeker said, “we could have a real game-changer on our hands.”
Disappearing Farmland: Little Protection Exists For Midwest Farmland
America has lost millions of acres of farmland over three decades to urban and rural development.
By Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting
9/25/2018
Christopher Walljasper
America has lost millions of acres of farmland over three decades to urban and rural development.
Despite conservation efforts by state and local governments and increased financial incentives for farmers, urban development and the expansion of rural residential real estate over the last 25 years has eliminated farmland across the country at levels not seen since the early 1970s.
Since 1992, nearly 31 million acres of farmland have been developed for residential use around urban centers and rural communities, according American Farmland Trust’s latest report, “Farms Under Threat.”
And as residential development mingles with agricultural production on the outskirts of major metropolitan areas, the tension between the two increases. Recent clashes include lawsuits in North Carolina over odor and disease from Smithfield hog operations and new research on pesticide drift affecting schools and adjacent homes.
MIDWEST LAGGING ON PRESERVATION
In Kane County, Ill., leaders saw the threat and made a commitment to keep half the county’s land dedicated to agricultural use and open spaces.
But that’s a rarity in the Midwest and in Illinois, a state that has lost more than 735,000 acres since 1997.
While nearly 100 counties and municipalities across the country have implemented some form of farmland protection policies, less than a dozen of them are in the Midwest.
In Kane County, the solution was to offer farmers the opportunity to sell the development rights of their land to the county, using something called a conservation easement. Easements ensure the land stay in agricultural production, in perpetuity.
“We were trying to create some balance in terms of what gets developed and where,” said Janice Hill, Farmland Protection Manager for Kane County. While the county was facing development around both suburbs and rural communities, the county didn’t distinguish between the two. “It’s just the pattern of development, because large lot estate zoning is, in some ways, the worst development for ag soils.”
SOME CONSERVATION EFFORTS WORKING
From 1976 to 2016, more than 23,500 parcels of land have been acquired through conservation easement programs at the municipality, county or state level, totaling more than 3.6 million acres of farmland protected nationwide.
Most of these programs are on the east coast, with only Michigan, Ohio and Wisconsin offering state-level easement programs in the Midwest.
Most programs are funded through taxes, bonds or appropriation spending, though Kane County primarily funds its easement program through gaming revenues. More than $5.7 billion has been paid to farmers through easement programs at the state and local levels in the last 40 years, according to the Farmland Information Center.
Map: State easement spending. The darker states have spent more at the municipal, county and state levels to protect farmland through easements. Click on the states to see specific figures.
One of the biggest concerns about conservation easement plans is that they are permanent. But Hill said that’s also the appeal for farmers concerned about the legacy of their land.
Read More: Database: Disappearing Farmland
“At any point in time you have to think about policies that are going to work over a 50-year period or a 100-year period, not just what the market is interested in,” said Hill. “If the land becomes a forever farm, as some of our families say, that really gives a lot of peace of mind, especially the families that have their land for generations and pass it down through generations. They truly feel a calling to keep their land in agriculture.”
But there are barriers to conservation easements. Hill said one reason more counties in the Midwest haven’t started programs is that it takes a significant financial investment to start a program. While Kane County easements are primarily funded through gaming revenue, planners are looking at other funding sources, including fees from urban development within the county.
Another reason the Midwest has so few county protection plans is that the threat is still too intangible. Much of the Midwest is still flush with agricultural land.
PREFERENTIAL TAXATION
A more widely adopted method of incentivizing landowners to keep land in agriculture has been preferential taxation, where taxes are paid based on the land’s value in farming, instead of its market value.
“You might have an acre of land that, in a developed use, would be worth $10,000, but only pays its property tax on $800,” said Lori Lynch, professor of agricultural and resource economics at the University of Maryland.
She said tax incentives have gone a long way to slow down farmland development in the Northeast. Unlike conservation easements, preferential taxation doesn’t lock the land into farming forever. When land is no longer used for agriculture, a conversion tax is paid.
“The county or the state has been getting a lower tax revenue from this land for quite some time,” Lynch said. “This is a way for the county and state to recoup some of that benefit that the landowner received.”
More than easements or preferential taxation, the 2008 recession significantly slowed the development of farmland. But Hill said farmers still wanted to protect the legacy of their land.
“Even when the development pressures slowed down due to the recession, we still had a strong interest in the program. So to me that says that it's not just about the context of the surrounding land pressure for development,” Hill said. “It's also about true conservation principles and protecting the family farm.”
WHO BENEFITS FROM FARMLAND PROTECTION?
Clearly, farmers and ranchers benefit from easements and tax breaks for agricultural land use. But Paul Gottlieb, associate professor of agricultural, food and resource economics at Rutgers University, points out that it’s not the farmers leading the charge for farmland protection.
“Urban and suburban residents in relatively affluent areas have been driving this movement,” Gottlieb said. “Not only driving it but putting up money to pay for the purchase of farmland and for the purchase of development rights.”
Gottlieb said for urban and suburban residents, farmland and open spaces are an amenity. Beyond crop production, farmland provides protection against congestion, traffic, cultural grounding and access to local food. But those benefits to a community aren’t factored into the price of land, which may be why taxation and conservation efforts exist, according to Lynch.
“Those desires are not represented in the market,” she said. “To some extent, that's why the government did come in and set up some of these programs.”
NEW APPROACHES TO THE SUBURBAN/RURAL DEBATE
Kane County continues to evolve its strategy around farmland protection. Realizing that permanently committing land to agriculture may not be realistic for every parcel, planners have created a temporary, or “term” easement, where a landowner with smaller acreage could promise agricultural productivity for 10 to 15 years.
Hill said these short-term plans are ideal for fruit and vegetable producers who operate on smaller farms than traditional row crop farmers. This dovetails with Kane County’s efforts to combat obesity and health problems through a strategy to bring fresh fruit and vegetables to area schools and hospitals.
“I think that also allowing for these term easements to support vegetable farms of any size and other farms that support food for human consumption, that really brings it home for the consumer when they understand that their food could be in the path of development,” Hill said.
Hill said the county has even opened up some of its public land for animal grazing, realizing that preserves and parks may have better use than simply large swaths of grass. She said municipalities should be asking themselves, “Is our land suited for something better than sod? Should we think about leasing it to a small farmer?”
The private market is also looking at blending agriculture into the suburban landscape. In northern Kane County, Serosun Farms is a new housing development that is integrating agriculture into the community, much like parks or a golf course might be woven through a traditionally developed subdivision.
John DeWald is the developer heading up the project, which is more than 400 acres. He said 70 percent of Serosun will remain in agricultural use, including public barns, farmers markets and community farm plots. The area will also include orchards, test plots and conservation woodlands and wetlands.
Communities that mix agriculture and residential development in this way have been around since the 90s but began taking off when the recession pushed developers toward more intentional development. DeWald said researchers have identified more than 100 of what are being dubbed “agrihoods.”
“There are different kinds of farm and food elements to these developments,” DeWald said. “Some of them are more occasional gardens. There’s a participation element to them. It’s a gathering place. Others are large enough and functional enough that they can serve the community to some extent. The intent here at Serosun over the long haul is to build up a much bigger farming and food operation that serves well beyond the borders of the community.”
Serosun is focusing more on integrating fruit and vegetable farming, not large-scale commodity crops or confined animal feed operations.
“It’s something that’s fantastic for people who want their kids or grandkids exposed to farming but still live in a modern suburban home,” Hill said.
DeWald said even though Serosun is residential development of farmland, he is working with Kane County to meet conservation goals as he builds out the residential aspects of the community. But he warns that all “agrihoods” may not be dedicated to responsible development of agricultural land.
“The concern is that developers will use this as a way to get concessions to redevelop agricultural land. They put an acre garden in there and ‘Whoo! We’re an agrihood!’ ” DeWald said. He said while there’s no specific ratio of farmland to development needed to call a development an “agrihood,” it’s a matter of intention. “One of the focuses is preserving agricultural land.”
A LACK OF URGENCY, A LOT AT STAKE
Whether the issue of land development is a far-off concern or knocking on the door, Gottlieb said he appreciates AFT’s focus on the issue.
“I'm all about prudence in acting early to forestall problems associated with the depletion of natural resources,” Gottlieb said.
But without a sense of urgency, it can be hard for the issue to get the attention of lawmakers, or even advocates of the agriculture industry.
“We’ve had so many variables and challenges and threats in agriculture. You’ve got subsidies, you’ve got pests, diseases, markets, international trade. The list goes on and on. It’s a litany of challenges,” said Ann Sorenson, director of research for American Farmland Trust. But she said it all starts with the land. “You're not going to have farming, you're not going to have ranching unless you have the land base.”
This story is the second in a two-part series about farmland loss. To read more about the problem of farmland loss, read Small-Towns Trade Farmland for Residential Development.
Written by Christopher Walljasper for the Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting. The Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting is a nonprofit, online newsroom offering investigative and enterprise coverage of agribusiness, Big Ag and related issues through data analysis, visualizations, in-depth reports and interactive web tools. Visit us online at www.investigatemidwest.org
Read more about Farmland
Here’s How America Uses Its Land
What can be harder to decipher is how Americans use their land to create wealth.
There are many statistical measures that show how productive the U.S. is. Its economy is the largest in the world and grew at a rate of 4.1 percent last quarter, its fastest pace since 2014. The unemployment rate is near the lowest mark in a half century.
What can be harder to decipher is how Americans use their land to create wealth. The 48 contiguous states alone are a 1.9 billion-acre jigsaw puzzle of cities, farms, forests and pastures that Americans use to feed themselves, power their economy and extract value for business and pleasure.
Methodology Land use classifications are based on data published in 2017 by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service in a report called the Major Uses of Land in the United States (MLU). Data from the report provide total land-use acreage estimates for each state across six broad categories. Those totals are displayed per 250,000 acres.
Data from Alaska and Hawaii are excluded from the analysis. Special-use land and forestland make up the biggest land types in those states.
Bloomberg referenced the USDA data against estimates from the National Land Cover Database to generally locate these categories within each state.
Miscellaneous uses are defined as wetlands, rural residential lands, non-harvestable forests, desert, tundra and barren land of low economic value. Unlike all other land-use categories in the USDA data, a component breakdown for miscellaneous uses by state is not provided in the MLU.
To locate miscellaneous areas, Bloomberg referred to the National Land Cover Database to generally calculate and locate acreage by miscellaneous uses. “Rural residential lands” in the USDA data make up most of the 69 million-acre miscellaneous-use category. This category does not equally correlate to data in the National Land Cover Database, so Bloomberg subtracted the total of the other miscellaneous components to arrive at a rough estimate of “rural residential lands”—about 50 million acres.
Total pasture/range areas are proportionally divided by animal group based on National Agricultural Statistics Service livestock counts.
Data showing the 100 largest landowning families are based on descriptions of acreage and land type in The Land Reportmagazine. Representative amounts of acreage were subtracted from private timber and cropland/range to show this category, which is not a part of the USDA data.
Sources: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service: Major Uses of Land in the United States, 2012; U.S. Department of the Interior, National Land Cover Database, 2011; U.S. Census Bureau; State governments; stateparks.org; American Farmland Trust; Golf Course Superintendents Association of America; USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service; USDA Census of Agriculture; U.S. Bureau of Land Management; U.S. Forest Service; Weyerhaeuser Co.; The Land Report magazine
"North American Diets Require More Land Than Available"
The researchers found that global adherence to United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) guidelines would require one giga-hectare of additional land—roughly the size of Canada
If the global population adopted recommended North American dietary guidelines, there wouldn’t be enough land to provide the food required, according to a new study co-authored by University of Guelph researchers.
hoto by Gary Csoff
The researchers found that global adherence to United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) guidelines would require one giga-hectare of additional land—roughly the size of Canada—under current farming practice. Their findings were published in PLOS ONE.
“The data shows that we would require more land than what we have if we adopt these guidelines. It is unsustainable,” said Prof. Madhur Anand, director of the Global Ecological Change and Sustainability lab where the study was undertaken.
Prof. Madhur Anand
“This is one of the first papers to look at how the adoption of Western dietary guidelines by the global population would translate into food production, including imports and exports, and specifically how that would dictate land use and the fallouts of that,” she said.
Although the dietary guidelines are viewed as an improvement on the current land-intensive diet of the average American, the researchers say that dietary guidelines should be further developed using not just health but also global land use and equity as criteria.
“We need to look at diet not just as an individual health issue but as an ecosystem health issue,” said Anand, a professor in U of G’s School of Environmental Sciences (SES).
The authors found a strong east-west division worldwide. Most Western Hemisphere countries would use less land by adopting a USDA guideline diet, while most Eastern Hemisphere countries would use more land.
Co-authors of the paper are U of G Prof. Evan Fraser, holder of a Canada Research Chair in Global Food Security; SES graduate student Sarah Rizvi; Chris Pagnutti, an NSERC post-doctoral researcher in SES; and Prof. Chris Bauch, Department of Applied Mathematics, University of Waterloo.
“We need to understand human and environmental systems in a coordinated manner, and this is where the interdisciplinary aspect of the work shines. This is also why we worked with an applied mathematician,” said Anand.
The authors call for international coordination of national dietary guidelines because global lands are a limited resource.
Prof. Evan Fraser
“This could be similar, at least in principle, to how greenhouse gas emissions are increasingly being coordinated internationally to address another major global problem: climate change,” Anand said.
Fraser, scientific director of the Food from Thought project and director of the Arrell Food Institute at U of G, added: “One of the 21st century’s great challenges is to develop diets that are both healthy for our bodies and sustainable for the planet.
“Developing the technologies and insights to help industry and consumers is part of what many of us at the University of Guelph are working on through the Food from Thought initiative.”
This research was supported by an NSERC Discovery Grant and is associated with the University of Guelph’s Food from Thought project, supported by the Canada First Research Excellence Fund. The project is intended to increase the sustainability and productivity of global food production through leading-edge data science, agri-food research and biodiversity science.
Source: University of Guelph
Publication date: 8/10/2018
Embracing ‘Citified’ Agriculture Means Rethinking Land Use Priorities, Says U of A Researcher
May 18, 2018
Embracing ‘Citified’ Agriculture Means Rethinking Land Use Priorities, Says U of A Researcher
Although beneficial, urban agriculture only scratches the surface of how cities need to be rethought.
Michael Granzow says projects like community gardens in cities are beneficial, but they need to be part of longer-term planning that also looks at issues like land use, housing and income inequality. (Photo: Supplied)
By BEV BETKOWSKI
Community gardens, the feel-good darlings of the growing season, are great for raising awareness about sustainability—but they’re just scratching the surface of a much larger harvest, according to a University of Alberta researcher.
They and other ag-based initiatives bring a bounty of benefits to cities by drawing people together, creating common spaces, boosting biodiversity, adding to local food production and in some cases, like the U of A’s Green and Gold Garden, raising money for good causes. But while those benefits should be celebrated, there are bigger-picture questions to consider, said Michael Granzow, who is studying the issue for a Ph.D. in sociology through the Faculty of Arts.
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“To deal with problems like food insecurity and address underlying issues, we need to also consider factors like income inequality and availability of affordable housing,” he said.
Although projects like community gardens and vertical farming—where produce is grown stacked in layers—are great, we have to be careful not to overstate their ability to feed cities, he believes.
“We need to ask some hard questions about land use and to question the development priorities that continue to shape Edmonton and many other North American cities". Michael Granzow
The idea of citified agriculture is still budding for many cities in Canada, but Edmonton, Granzow noted, was one of the first to include food as an urban question, first in its 2008 municipal development plan and then in 2012 by launching fresh, a food and urban agriculture strategy that included creating a food council. And though that’s a good start, concrete policies are still lacking, he believes.
“The city has moved in the right direction. Fresh is an ambitious policy, but some of the language is vague and it includes few hard targets. There’s still uncertainty about what urban agriculture will look like in the city 20 or 30 years from now,” he said.
Ultimately, cities like Edmonton need to address political questions about food access and the environment, he said.
“It’s important we think about how urban agriculture projects are working in a larger context and how they’re actually addressing social, environmental and food-related concerns, as opposed to how we assume they’re doing this.
“There’s a need to specifically define what urban agriculture is and how it might differ from one urban context to another.”
That means governments need to decide whether and how they’ll make room for related issues like entrepreneurial food ventures and how that will be reflected in land-use policy, Granzow said.
“It’s easy to support the idea of using vacant lots for community gardens, but that ultimately is a temporary use until the lot is developed. We also need to think about these projects on a long-term basis.”
Adding to that theory is a recent U of A report revealing that prime farmland surrounding Edmonton is being eaten up for residential and industrial use instead of being preserved for crops, Granzow noted. “Beyond focusing on backyard bees and hens, policy around urban agriculture has to consider ways to slow urban sprawl.”
Though he’s still developing his findings, it’s clear that some difficult decisions come with embracing large-scale urban agriculture.
“If we’re going to think about it as part of a response to environmental concerns or food insecurity, it’s going to require some major changes. We need to ask some hard questions about land use, and to question the development priorities that continue to shape Edmonton and many other North American cities.”
It’s an exciting opportunity, he added. “It raises awareness about the importance of local food and helps us rethink our reliance on a food system dependent on an unsustainable model of industrialized agriculture.”
Meanwhile, city-driven projects, including vacant lots for gardens, beekeeping and backyard hens, along with other community gardens such as the U of A-based Prairie Urban Farm, where Granzow volunteers and serves as an adviser, are important to what is a much larger movement in reimagining what a city is and what it could be, he believes.
“They all contribute to challenging a sanitized view of the city as separate from processes of food production.”
Citified agriculture also brings a whole new urban planning element to the table, Granzow noted.
“It’s a new way to think about the idea of the city and its relationship to the environment. You start to see the city differently through this lens and ask new kinds of questions. What can we grow here? Is there enough sunlight? Where’s the best soil? How can we capture and distribute water?
“Urban agriculture isn’t going to be the answer to all of our problems, but it’s a space of hope—a small but crucial part of a larger move towards ecologically and socially inspired models of urbanism.”