Will vegan, organic, or industrial farming feed the 10 Billion?
One image, two very different responses. A group of combine harvesters process across a vast, dusty field, harvesting a crop that expands beyond the horizon. One take, when tweeted by a farming union (I cannot name them because they have since deleted the tweet), was how it highlighted the natural beauty of the agricultural countryside. Another response, from the animal welfare charity Compassion in World Farming, is rather that such scenes are evidence of “a faceless, heartless, relentless machine… Intensive farming causes immense harm to wildlife and is one of the biggest drivers of species extinction on the planet.”
The scene above also depicts a battleground. Feeding a world population expected to grow by 2.2 billion by 2050 will involve huge changes in agricultural production and diet. Currently, just four crops — wheat, soy, rice and corn — are grown on almost half the world’s agricultural lands. These four crops are typically vast monocrops with high levels of fossil-fuel derived fertiliser and pesticide leading to low-levels of biodiversity.
Peter Stevenson, Chief Policy Advisor of Compassion in World Farming, tells me: “One thing is certain: the current intensive model of crop and livestock production cannot feed the world long-term as it is undermining the core factors — soils, water and biodiversity…
