Farm Productivity is the Key to Sustainability

Tim Hammerich

News Reporter

It’s likely that the farm of the future will not only need to feed a lot more people, but it will have to do so with fewer environmental impacts, and that includes lowering the carbon footprint of the food system. Richard Waite is a senior research associate at the World Resources Institute. He says lowering this carbon footprint will mean reforestation, and more productivity needed from agriculture.

Waite… “If the world's agriculture kind of stayed as it is today. And we had to feed a lot more people and you get a lot of deforestation. If it continues to improve as it has over the past decades and you can kind of reasonably expect it will, we still get quite a bit of deforestation. If you want to get that deforestation down to zero, and not only that, if you want to then open up some areas that are currently producing food, to put some trees back where they were before, you're going to have to improve productivity even quicker than you ever have before. Right. So we had the green revolution. We kind of need to do that again, plus, and do it without some of the environmental impacts. So that's kind of the big issue: we need to produce more food while freezing agriculture's land footprint, you know, stopping encroaching on forest and even free up some land for reforestation. And so that's going to require kind of unprecedented productivity improvements.”

Tune in tomorrow for more details on Waite’s analysis for creating a more sustainable food future.