The Future

Farming

The so-called “green revolution,” the process which improved the productivity of many of the world’s basic food crops in the 1970s and 80s, averted a major global food shortage, notably in Asia. However, the potential of genetic manipulation of the key food plant species, which effectively led to these increases in food productivity, has been largely exhausted.

As China, and ultimately India, continue to industrialize, the resulting commercial development with its associated housing, roads, parking lots and other construction are absorbing large areas of agricultural land. China can ill afford to lose these lands. China is already buying significant quantities of grain on the world market.  With their increasing level of meat consumption (largely pork and poultry), their cereal and vegetable protein needs are significantly increasing, not only for direct human consumption, but also for intensive livestock production. This, combined with failing ground water resources in some areas (for irrigation purposes) will mean that China and India, within the next 20 years, will be competing in the world market not only for all forms of raw material for manufacturing but for basic foodstuffs as well.

Only two countries, Brazil and the U.S., are capable of significantly increasing grain and soybean output at the present time. If Brazil responds to these financial incentives, there is a considerable risk that we will see further significant loss of the Amazon Rain Forest. U.S. cereal production is more efficient than that in South America. Soybean production is on a par. What may then happen is that although this will be good news for American cereal and soybean farmers, it will almost certainly push up food prices here at home as well.

If we add to those pressures the increasing needs of the global intensive livestock industry (mainly pigs and poultry, with some beef) and incentives to grow more crops for biofuel production, our agricultural lands will reach full capacity and may have difficulty keeping up with all this demand. The 20-year future will literally see the gas station competing with the supermarket. It may also see the cost of meat production rise significantly and as a result, the industry (intensive livestock production) will probably reduce in size. Some of that protein demand may be taken up with increased fish farming, which is a more efficient way of using vegetable protein and cereals for conversion to animal protein.

Around our cities, we will see a notable resurgence in small-scale, highly efficient horticultural production of everything from tomatoes to grapes, with much of it produced under glass and plastic. That production will be run by a new generation of highly-skilled, highly-trained younger farmers with sales either on their own premises, in cooperatives, through farmer’s markets, or by sale to supermarkets within an hour drive. Only fruits and vegetables that have to be grown in a different climate to that in North Carolina will be transported considerable distances, but the costs of those, such as citrus fruits (grapefruit and oranges) will rise considerably.