Loss of topsoil is another major problem. A U.N. study in 2015 estimated that, at the rate our vital topsoil is currently declining, one-third of the world’s total will be gone within the next 100 years. Other estimates put the percentage even higher and the time-frame much sooner. There are many causes – deforestation, soil erosion, dust storms, salt build up in irrigated soils, overuse of agricultural pesticides and other chemicals, droughts, the over-grazing of grasslands, and the conversion of farmland to housing and commercial uses. Even in the areas where the soil is not severely degraded, its productivity is being undermined in many cases by modern agricultural practices that destroy the vital organisms in the soil – symbiotic bacteria, mycorrhizal fungi, and the all-important worms, not to mention depleting essential minerals. As President Franklin Roosevelt put it in a 1937 speech, “A nation that destroys its soils destroys itself.”
So why does the world have only 7 million biointensive farmers? Why not 70 million, or 700 million? At the very least they could feed many of the 1 billion people who do not have enough food even now. They could provide a life-and-death food insurance policy for an increasingly hungry world. They could also diversify our food production efforts and spread the risks. And, not least, they would use our increasingly threatened agricultural resource base much more efficiently and sustainably. The answer to these “why” questions can be boiled down to three words – technology, economics, and poverty – and politics, of course.
Technology has been a driver for the rise of civilization in many different ways, and this is especially true with food production. One early horticulturalist could support about five people. In the U.S. in the 1930s, with the advantages of motorized tractors, disc plows, mechanical seeders, mowing machines, trucks, and more, an American farmer could feed about 10 people. Today, armed with much more powerful tractors, greatly improved plows, seed drills, combines, mechanical harvesting equipment, improved seed varieties, GPS satellite data, robots, and many other developments, one American farmer can feed about 100 people.
But if modern industrial agriculture has become vastly more efficient in terms of labor inputs, it is very inefficient in the use of land, water, and fossil fuels, not to mention being a major source of CO2 emissions. For example, an onion that is grown using conventional, mechanized farming methods returns only about 90 percent of the energy required to produce it. With the biointensive system, the energy returns are over 40 times greater. In a capitalist market economy, production costs, especially labor costs, are all-important in determining the prices that consumers must pay. Any adverse consequences for the soil, the water supply, or the atmosphere, are treated as “externalities” and don’t affect the prices – unless, of course, they are regulated and the cost of mitigating them is “internalized.”
In contrast, the biointensive system is highly efficient in the use of land, water, fossil fuels, even capital costs, but it is also very labor intensive compared to industrial agriculture.