The Fate of Food by Amanda Little

The global food supply faces many challenges and headwinds in the decades ahead. The world population is projected to grow by several billion people in the 21st century, with most of that growth happening in places with low agricultural productivity. Significant amounts of high-quality farmland have been lost or degraded in recent decades due to topsoil erosion, pollution, and urbanization. Weeds and pests are evolving resistance to pesticides that have historically kept them at bay. The nutritional value of common crops has continued its millennia-long decline, driven by farmers’ prioritization of quantity and palatability over quality. There is a high prevalence of overweight but undernourished people in the developed world, and the developing world’s obesity levels are likewise rising.

Agriculture is both the largest contributor and largest victim of climate change. The negative effects of climate change are already being felt and will continue to intensify. In temperate climates, milder winters are causing multi-year crops to come out of winter dormancy prematurely, only to get wrecked by spring frosts. Springtime rainfall is increasing, including the frequency of days with very high rainfalls that are damaging to crops. In arid climates, droughts are intensifying in their magnitude and duration. Rivers dependent on mountain snowmelt are suffering from reductions in their water flows. All over the world, the geographic range of various pest species are shifting, introducing them to places that haven’t dealt with them before.

The IPCC projects that agricultural yields will decline 2-6% per decade for the remainder of the century if agricultural practices stay as they are. However, this “nothing changes” baseline is definitely not the timeline we will end up seeing because agriculture is changing rapidly all over the world. Farmers everywhere are interested in improving yields and reducing toil, just as they have always been. The industry understands that cannibalizing your legacy business is preferable to losing it, so it is open-minded about new ways of doing things.

As the agricultural sector evaluates the legacy of 20th century factory farming, it faces the question of which trends to double down on and where to backtrack. Big Agriculture has damaged its public reputation with procesed foods that turned out unhealthy, pesticides that turned out harmful, and other high-profile mistakes. Backtrack approaches like organic farming have found niche markets among the wealthy, but they suffer from serious scalability problems. Telling people to suck it up and accept higher food prices is also a non-starter; the world’s poorest people already spend a large fraction of their income on food and food price spikes are a reliable harbinger of political unrest. The greatest innovators in the food industry today are departing from this binary model, often finding new ways of doing things or putting a novel twist on old ideas. Despite the race against time, there is optimism within the agricultural industry about what a more technologically-advanced humanity can accomplish.

Better crops. Starting in the 1990s, intentional genetic engineering has allowed food scientists to systematize a once-haphazard process. There is an overwhelming scientific consensus that genetically-modified crops are safe. Public mistrust, labelling requirements, and legal restrictions against GMOs exist in many countries, but they are usually motivated more by mistrust of Big Agriculture than by the technology itself. Farmers in the developing world see GMO crops as their best bet for increasing their yields and shrinking the productivity gap with the developed world. With modern gene-editing techniques, the cost of bringing a new crop to market is projected to fall substantially and the industry is projected to become more accessible to startups. The industry is most interested in improving crops to be resistant to pests, require less water, improve nutritional value, and improve shelf life.

New crops. Food production is currently highly concentrated, with two-thirds of the world’s calories coming from just four crops. The food industry is interested in exploring obscure and lesser-known crops, especially those that have high nutritional value or have shown the ability to thrive under difficult conditions. Such crops usually have problems that have historically impeded mass production (lack of uniformity, high fragility, bad taste etc), but some businesses are betting that modern technology makes such plants farmable. No new crop is likely to become a major global staple anytime soon; a more likely outcome is that they will follow a trajectory like quinoa, the most successful “ancient crop” of recent times. We can expect a few new crops to become farmed more intensively in their native ranges, become a larger part of local diets, see some limited cultivation outside their native ranges, and get marketed to developed-world consumers as a specialty food. Aside from plants, a growing number of businesses are experimenting with systematically farming algae and insects, though usually as a source of protein for animal feed rather than for people.

Mechanization. Farming benefits from economies of scale but also suffers from labor shortages, creating relentless pressure to automate as much of it as possible. The long trend towards mechanization is ongoing, even in developed countries. Modern grids of “internet of things” sensors can offer unprecedented telemetry on farm conditions, reducing the burden of manual inspections and guesswork. AI models for computer vision have gotten good at telling apart healthy crops from unhealthy crops or weeds. Tedious tasks such as deweeding and harvesting are increasingly performed by robotics. Modern robotics can spray precise and targeted doses of water, fertilizer, or pesticides at specific points of ground, significantly reducing unnecessary usage. Whereas many past technologies improved farm productivity at the expense of the environment, many newer technologies are promising to benefit both.

Indoor farming. Taking mechanization even further, some businesses are interested in moving to a factory-like model and moving farming to indoor hydroponic or aeroponic facilities. Vertical farming offers the prospect of total environmental control and the ability to grow crops unsuitable for the local climate. Indoor farming requires much less land, water, and chemicals, but has much higher start-up costs and higher energy consumption. The ideal crop for indoor farming has a rapid lifecycle, high sensitivity to environmental conditions, few inedible parts, and high vulnerability to spoilage; leafy green vegetables are the most popular candidate. The world’s major staple crops do not tick these boxes and are unlikely to ever be farmed this way.

Fish farming. Wild fish stocks are declining around the world while demand is rising, so fish farming is growing out of necessity. Fish farming has existed since ancient times, but industrial-scale fish farming is still an immature industry compared to other forms of animal farming. The industry is iterating rapidly on how to best deal with practical problems like fish feed, parasites, escape prevention, and fish droppings. Fish have a rapid lifecycle and can convert feed to meat much more efficiently than any land animal, so fish have the potential to be the most affordable source of meat if the industry can solve some of its scalability problems.

Meat and alternatives. Red meat is the most economically inefficient, environmentally damaging, and morally problematic element of the Western diet. Meat is strongly ingrained in many cultures, but there is widespread interest in eating less meat among the younger generations of the developed world. Eating lower on the food pyramid is both economically and environmentally beneficial, but meat is a uniquely satisfying and craving-inducing food for reasons that science doesn’t yet fully understand. Alternative “meats” made from plant-based ingredients started gaining mainstream popularity in the 2010s and are still rapidly improving. There is also some interest in lab-grown meats grown from cellular cultures with no associated animal; such meats promise faster turnaround and higher quality than meat from real animals, but it remains expensive and hard to scale. Animal meat will not go away any time soon, but the market will likely become more differentiated and offer consumers more choices.

Water management. Agriculture accounts for 70% of humanity’s freshwater consumption, but farms in many regions are under stress due to shrinking freshwater supplies and competition with growing cities. There are many measures that can be taken depending on a region’s desperation. Many utilities still don’t have usage-based water billing or other incentives to discourage wasteful usage. About one third of all extracted freshwater gets lost due to unseen pipe leaks and bursts; modern telemetry is getting better at tracing such problems down to their source. Cities are increasingly pumping their wastewater into treatment plants and using it again, either to the city itself in a circular model, or onward to farms, where the requirements for water quality are not as high. Irrigation systems are becoming more efficient. Crops can be replaced with more water-efficient ones or optimized to be less water-hungry, though the latter has so far been a tough problem for GMO producers. If all else fails, desalination of ocean water is an option too; desalination has become much less energy-intensive in recent years but will never be competitive with freshwater extraction. Places like Israel and southern California have already had to take all of these measures; they have proven that it’s possible to survive despite a desert climate, high population density, and a large agricultural sector, though doing so is not cheap.

Food waste. About one third of all food production in the world goes to waste, an enormous economic, environmental, and moral problem. Some food is lost early in the supply chain due to pests or spoilage, but much of the problem is driven by the behavior of end consumers. The food industry is frustrated by the impossible factory-like perfection and uniformity that consumers have come to expect from food. Food with a sub-standard appearance can often be sold to restaurants or processed food manufacturers, but perfectly edible food is often left on farms to rot. An increasing number of large grocery stores and delivery services are offering misshapen or blemished produce at reduced prices, hoping to offer a lower-cost option and drive an attitude shift among consumers. Most consumers have a misleading mental model of how foodborne illnesses occur (most bacterial contamination happens early in the supply chain) and are too quick to throw out perfectly edible refrigerated or frozen food (anything that looks normal and smells normal should still be good). Many major grocery chains and governments are interested in simplifying, standardizing, or even removing the confusing “sell by”, “use by”, and “best before” date labelling that leads to stores having unsellable stock and consumers pre-emptively discarding old food. Grocers are increasingly donating their near-expired unsold food to soup kitchens and other charities, sometimes for good PR, sometimes to reduce the fees they pay for garbage disposal, and sometimes because legislation orders them to. An increasing number of cities are separating compostable waste from regular garbage; this organic material is sent back for usage on farms rather than left to rot uselessly in a landfill.

Disaster management. The most dreaded outcome in agriculture is a mass crop failure across a wide region. Cloud seeding, which involves blasting fine salt crystals into clouds in the hope of triggering precipitation, has been attempted in many drought-prone climates, though it requires the presence of overhead clouds and cannot produce nearly enough rain to compensate for a drought. Due to poor road and storage infrastructure, much of the developing world is limited to eating food that was grown within a relatively local radius, leaving the populations vulnerable to famine. Getting outside food is the easy part of famine response; rapid and widespread distribution of it is the harder part. There will always be crop failures, but as infrastructure improves and poor remote regions become more reachable, the famines of the future should be much less deadly.