Conventional agriculture is often disparaged by the mainstream, largely urban populace. Sometimes it seems the industry’s detractors would like crop production to return to simpler times. Farms should be smaller, they say. Fertilizer and chemical use should be reduced along with genetically modified crop development.The agricultural industry must reduce its carbon footprint, detractors say. It is a major contributor to climate change.But a study released last week by Stanford University researchers calculates agriculture’s greenhouse gas emission contribution at 12 percent. More importantly, it says advances in high-yield agriculture have slowed the pace of global warming.How does it feel to learn that, instead of contributing to climate change, while incidentally helping to feed people, farmers and ranchers are reducing a GHG burden that would otherwise be 590 billion tons greater? Pretty good, yes?Lead Stanford researcher Jennifer Burney says advances in high-tech agriculture have prevented the conversion of forests and other land into cropping, which would have been necessary to feed a larger population. Such conversion would have required the burning of large amounts of biomass, adding to GHG accumulation. By increasing the productivity of existing cropland instead, farmers have been able to feed more people. To match current production levels, several billion acres of new crop production area would have been needed.”Although greenhouse gas emissions from the production and use of fertilizer have increased with agricultural intensification, those emissions are far outstripped by the emissions that would have been generated in converting additional forest and grassland to farmland,” writes Louis Bergeron of Stanford News Service, in summarizing the study.He quoted researcher Burney: “Yield intensification lessened the pressure to clear land and reduced emissions by up to 13 billion tons of carbon dioxide a year.”Our results dispel the notion that modern intensive agriculture is inherently worse for the environment than a more old-fashioned way of doing things.” So maybe modern agricultural isn’t so bad after all.
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