The End of Plenty

Agronomy

Agronomy merges “soil and plant science” to further “row crop production.” Everything you eat stems from the discoveries and practices of agronomy. Cities exist because rural areas provide foodstuffs by conducting industrial farming on an immense scale. Agronomic advances since the 1920s culminated in the so-called green revolution. Between the 1960s and 2000, grain yields nearly tripled due to improved seeds, increased fertilization, advanced pesticides and modern irrigation. This created massive food surpluses and reduced poverty worldwide by making sustenance cheaper and more widely available. The world had three billion people in the 1960s; that population doubled to six billion by the year 2000. However, at the same time, the combination of agronomic practices and burgeoning populations wreaked havoc.

In 1962, Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring presented evidence of pesticide-related environmental disasters. Agribusiness discredited her warnings, and pesticide use continued. Large-scale farming modeled after practices in developed countries displaced family farming in underdeveloped nations, such as Haiti. Irrigating cropland, which increases...