This video is sponsored by Audible. Let the record show Ragusea is staunchly anti-famine. I realize
this is a bold position for me to stake out here, but I am pro-growing enough food for everybody.
And I'm pro-science too. This is one of the University of Tennessee's experimental farms. That
said, just because the Green Revolution has been a net good doesn't mean there aren't bad things
about it. I mean, I think the internet has been a net good in the world, but like, have you seen
it? I mean, yikes. The Green Revolution, sometimes called the Third Agricultural Revolution, refers
to a couple of things the way that people tend to use it. There's kind of a broad definition and a
narrow definition. Under the broad definition, Green Revolution refers to a period from the
mid-20th century onward in which nearly the entire world has adopted a set of agricultural practices
that have dramatically increased productivity. Talking about the cultivation of new
high-,yielding plant varieties, heavy irrigation, heavy use of fertilizers and pesticides often
of synthetic origin and mechanization of jobs historically done by human hands or draft animals.
And these practices have become so widespread that now we sometimes refer to them as "conventional
agriculture," even though, historically speaking, they are the opposite of conventional. But
anyways, this broad definition of Green Revolution would include the revolutions
that have occurred in places like China and Russia, whereas the narrow definition would not.
The narrow definition of Green Revolution refers specifically to a Cold War-era U.S. foreign
policy. American diplomat, William S. Gaud seems to have originated the term in this 1968 speech.
The Green Revolution was an alternative to the "Red Revolution" of the Soviets.
There was this massive transfer of agricultural knowledge and technology from the United States
to Mexico first and then to India and then the Philippines and a bunch of places where the United
States was really afraid that people were going to turn to communism soon if their living standards
didn't start to improve. So that's the narrow definition of Green Revolution. I'ma to steer
clear of that whole minefield and say that I'm referring in this video to the broad Green
Revolution, the thing that's happened pretty much everywhere, and that has had obvious benefits.
"The downside is that it really resulted in a shift in who's doing agriculture."
That is Dr. Catherine Zabinski, professor of Plant and Soil Ecology at Montana State
University here in the U.S. And she's talking specifically there about Mexico — the 1950s
and '60s when Americans introduced new seeds and new ways of growing them south of the border.
"A lot of smallholder farmers couldn't afford to put in irrigation systems and
didn't have access to fertilizer." Now, look. There's this romantic and rather
naive notion that a lot of us have that farming has always been a totally accessible profession,
something that any man could do. No matter how on the margins of society he was,
no matter how uneducated, how poor, he could always draw living from the earth, from the
ground with his own hands and provide for his family. That's never really been the whole story,
has it? Since the dawn of civilization, there have been elites controlling the land and who
gets to farm it and who gets the profits. In Mexico, you had the Hacienda system — giant farms
established by Spanish conquistadors. They and their descendants got obscenely rich and lived a
decadent urban lifestyle whilst armies of peasants in the countryside did the actual work.
The Mexican Revolution of 1910 and 1920 — this was to a great extent about land redistribution and it
succeeded to an extent. In the mid-20th century, you did have comparatively more people actually
owning the land they cultivated and reaping the rewards. But the Green Revolution effectively
raised the barrier to entry for those farmers. "It wasn't a system like we have here now where
farmers are getting large loans to buy the chemicals, the seed,
the equipment that they need and then, based on the harvest, they can repay that loan back
and then the next spring take out another loan. So frankly, a lot of people lost land because
those who could afford to invest in fertilizer and irrigation could also afford — so now they had
higher production, they could buy out or displace a lot of small-scale farmers. And that story has
been repeated in a number of places." So that's an argument against the Green
Revolution. Yeah, we have a lot more food, but we also have a lot more inequality. A counterargument
to that would be, Who cares? We have a lot more food — a rising tide. It's raising all boats.
Who cares if some of the boats raise a whole lot higher and a lot faster than the other ones?
"We've got fewer people in Mexico who are starving,
so ... I don't know." Yeah, I'm right there with you,
doc. Though there is an argument that the Green Revolution has created a whole new host of
health problems — human health problems, nutritional health problems. Though,
I suppose starvation is the number one nutritional health problem, at least in terms of severity.
However, yeah, there's other things. Basically in the richer two thirds of the world, we now have an
excess of calories — cheap empty calories yielded by ultra efficient monoculture of grains like corn
or oil crops like oil palm. Fats and simple carbs are so cheap now and they are so easily packaged
into shelf-stable processed foods that are super cheap, and they keep us alive, but they give us a
whole host of other health problems too. And yeah, there are health implications to the
environmental degradations of modern agriculture too — the animal runoff. Sorry, y'all.
And then there's the agrochemicals and things like that that tend to get put under the heading
of sustainability and I think that's maybe a bit of a misnomer. I mean, we can keep getting cancer
all night long as long as we keep ourselves fed. But are we sure we can keep feeding ourselves?
"Another criticism of the Green Revolution is that while it may have addressed starvation —
which we can all agree, it's not good to have people starving — it also allowed for
an increase in population, because people have more food. And we're just in this rat's wheel of —
how do we manage all of that?" Indeed, considering that post-Green Revolution
agriculture is dependent on non-renewable resources —things that are literally going
to run out at some point. That's what not sustainable really means. Take a plane ride
over the great American interior and you'll see what looked like extraterrestrial crop circles.
Those are center pivot irrigation systems, giant arms on wheels that spin around spraying water.
Much of U.S. farm land is semi-arid. You can farm it, but you'd better not have a drought year.
If you do, you get the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. Center pivot irrigation changed all of that, but
where does the water at the center of the pivot come up from? Well, a lot of it comes
from aquifers — water-soaked rock and sand deep inside the earth. Some aquifers fill up every year
with the spring rains and the snow melt, but other aquifers are what they call "fossil water" — water
that took millennia to accumulate down there, and once we bring it all up it gone.
Of course, that water goes back into the environment and there's no overall shortage
of fresh water in the world, but that's a totally different question from whether or not you have
enough water in the places where you need it. It is not as yet economical to pipeline irrigation
water everywhere you need it. We simply use way too much of it for that. At universities like this
one, there's all kinds of new research into these cool, low-water farming techniques. Maybe those
will save the day when the time comes. Of course, there's the tractors and the trucks and the giant
cargo ships that all run on fossil fuels, and at some point the oil wells will run dry.
Geologists keep coming up with new ways to drill oil fields that were once considered
inaccessible, but there remains only so much dead dinosaur juice down there.
Maybe the tractors can all run on solar panels one day. Lord knows there's a lot of sun out
here in the fields. What about the fertilizers that we put on the fields though? Synthetic
nitrogen fertilizer is key to this new way of farming, and we make most of that with natural
gas. Natural gas is both an energy source for the process and a raw material for the process.
Gas deposits ain't going to last forever, nor will all the other mined fertilizers, like phosphorous.
This new farming is dependent on phosphate rocks like this. Some scientists have predicted that the
phosphate mines could run dry really soon — like, this century, in our lifetime. It's kind of like
oil where they keep discovering new deposits or new ways of accessing deposits that they thought
they couldn't get to before. Plus, people at universities and such are researching all
kinds of new ways of recycling phosphorus out of wastewater and stuff like that. I don't know.
Personally, I have a lot of faith in humanity to keep inventing brilliant solutions to our
problems. I mean, this is what we've always done. But the Green Revolution has merely "won
a temporary success in man's war against hunger and deprivation. It has given man a breathing
space," that's all. Says who? Says the father of the Green Revolution, the American scientist
Norman Borlaug. What I just said was a direct quote from the lecture that he gave upon
receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970. This is the guy who personally developed and popularized
the new high yield wheat. Borlaug's whole Nobel acceptance speech was shockingly un-celebratory.
It was a plea for population control. He believed population growth would eventually
outpace the ability of his profession to keep everybody fed. But here now the outlook has
changed a lot since Borlaug's day. The latest United Nations projections have
the global population plateauing by the end of this century. Birth rates are plummeting,
in part due to the rising prosperity that people like Norman Borlaug helped create.
Most of the world is getting richer, getting more access to reproductive health, more education and
opportunities for women. But you don't have to have population growth in order to have
consumption growth. You just have to have rising living standards. And so far it seems you tend
to get one or the other. They are inversely proportional. As population growth declines,
standards of living increase. Those are related variables. More and more people all around the
world are not only getting richer, but they're getting to expect a richer diet like the one that
I enjoy here in the United States, and who the hell am I to say that they shouldn't have it? But
can the new agriculture feed all of us so well in perpetuity, even after the oil and the gas and the
phosphate and the fossil water and all the other non-renewable agricultural inputs run out?
"Can we provide these things? That is only part of the question. The full question is, can we provide
these things without wrecking much else?" That's a good question too, from the journalist
Charles Mann in his book, The Wizard and the Prophet. The wizard is Borlaug.
It's a book all about these issues and I listened to it on Audible, the sponsor of this video. I'm a
workaholic with young children, which means basically the only time I have to read is
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Start with a free 30-day trial, go to audible.com/adamragusea
or text AdamRagusea to 500-500. Link is in the description, a free 30-day trial and it's
super cheap after that. Thank you, Audible. And thanks to all the farmers and scientists who are
searching for solutions to these problems out in fields like this one. A great man once said,
"I just want to tell you both good luck. We're all counting on you."
Oh hi, geese.