Land of plenty

Kathy Carlson remembers her gardening days fondly. Back in the 1970s, she canned a lot. Green beans. Tomatoes. These days, she tends a few plants recreationally, but the Iowa native relies on her local grocery store for the majority of her fresh produce. “I don’t can anything anymore,” she said.

Carlson isn’t the only Iowa farmer who reverted to the local supermarket, and the state’s agricultural landscape reflects it. Stick-straight corn marches like soldiers in identical rows across massive swaths of farmland, interspersed with sprawling soybean fields, only the occasional grain elevator interrupting the monotonous horizon. Very few picket fences guard lush gardens. It’s an almost unbroken golden sea.

The Hawkeye state used to be a major apple producer, believe it or not, said Jeremy Hummel, a professor of agriculture at Dordt University. A typical Iowa farm in the mid-1900s would have also cultivated cattle, horses, chickens, hogs, oats, hay, cherries, and potatoes, in addition to corn. “We have a lot less crop diversity on our landscape,” he notes.

But Carlson says she eats many more fruits and vegetables today than when older generations managed thriving gardens. Aside from the couple of short months when they harvested their produce, Carlson said, her family used to rely on canned versions of the vegetables throughout the year. You couldn’t get much fresh food at the store either. Grocers only sold fresh carrots, celery, apples, and oranges.

“We kind of grew up on things that were canned,” she said. “We didn’t have access to avocados and blueberries and raspberries and broccoli and cauliflower.”

Such a sparse produce aisle is a reality most Americans today can’t imagine. That’s because the majority of us grew up after a wholesale agricultural transformation of global food systems known as the Green Revolution. Technological innovations kick-started by the end of World War II and the rise of new global supply chains gave residents of most developed countries access to a greater variety of food—and more of it—than ever before. For the first time in human history, the majority of the earth’s population had enough food to eat.

But critics of the movement toward industrialized agriculture note this new approach to farming left a trail of erosion, pollution, and overconsumption of ultra-processed foods in its wake. Proponents of alternative agriculture, who champion a set of practices known as organic farming or agroecology, are gaining cultural traction, joining forces with the Make America Healthy Again coalition to argue that the chemicals we spray on our food are undermining our health. Others tie the push for more natural methods to Christian ideas about stewardship.

But does Biblical stewardship require Christians to eschew industrial farming altogether? It’s easy to blame Big Agriculture for our health and environmental problems, but not too long ago, most people in the world didn’t have enough to eat, some agricultural experts caution. Without Big Agriculture, that could still be the case. And scaling up chemical-free methods could come with its own set of hefty environmental consequences.

Mixed fields of soybeans, grain corn, maturing oats, and alfalfa in Clayton County, Iowa. Timothy Hearsum/Design Pics Editorial/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

CARLSON’S EYES GROW WARM behind a pair of stylish glasses outfitted in leopard-print rims when she thinks back to the start of her farming operation. She and her husband, Roger, began with a combined $8,000 in their bank accounts and a modest 300 acres. The couple joined their savings to purchase their first tractor. Fifty-one years later, Carlson and her two adult children manage one of the largest farms in Montgomery County, Iowa.

The Carlsons measure their farm’s productivity in terms of bushels per acre. In the 1970s, the Carlsons considered 120 bushels of corn and about 30 bushels of soybeans per acre a good yield. Last year, the family harvested a staggering 300 bushels of corn and 80 bushels of soybeans per acre.

Their fantastic yields are the direct result of Green Revolution research between the 1950s and 1990s, when agronomists, often funded by governments and large foundations, discovered how to create high-yielding, pesticide-tolerant versions of major grains, focusing especially on corn, wheat, and rice.

These developments—fueled by equally significant advances in irrigation and fertilizer technology—arrived not a moment too soon.

Well into the 20th century, hunger was still a major problem. People struggled to consume enough calories, even in parts of Europe. In 1946, the United Nations released a report spanning 70 countries whose residents accounted for about 90% of the earth’s population. It found that the pre–World War II food supply couldn’t provide enough calories for more than half the globe’s inhabitants, with those living in Asia and Central America experiencing the most deficiencies.

The report issued a recommendation equal parts ambitious and chilling: To keep up with population growth, the world would have to double its food supply. “Nothing less is involved than a transformation of life in all its aspects which challenges the best efforts of science and industry, governments and peoples,” it warned.

But that’s exactly what happened during the next few decades.

As World War II drew to a close, the American government enlisted the Rockefeller Foundation and Norman Borlaug, an American agronomist known as one of the fathers of the Green Revolution, to improve Mexico’s corn crop in hopes of staving off worrying political unrest. Borlaug eventually switched his efforts to wheat and employed an accelerated breeding technique, known as shuttle breeding, to produce a variety that could withstand common fungi and diseases. He went on to breed the plant to have shorter, thicker stalks that could hold far more wheat berries.

Combined with heavy use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides, the new wheat tripled yields. The United States and other countries like Pakistan and India quickly switched to using Borlaug’s seeds, and researchers employed his methods to create new corn and rice varieties. Studies estimate that these new high-yielding crop varieties increased yields by 44% between 1965 and 2010. Green Revolution research enabled India, the world’s most populous nation, to shift from importing grain to self-sufficiency. By the 1990s, these new grains accounted for 70% of the wheat and rice planted in low-income countries.

When Carlson cups one of these remarkable seeds in her hand, it typically appears an odd pink or green color. That’s because both the corn and soybean seeds are treated with insecticides and fungicides even before they go into the ground.

These grain varieties are also especially nitrogen-hungry, so the Carlsons apply a highly concentrated nitrogen fertilizer called anhydrous ammonia to the soil several months before planting season in mid-April. Gone are the days of using a bean hook for weeding. “We put the crop in the ground, and we run a sprayer through this field,” she said. Carlson told me she isn’t thrilled about the amount of chemicals they layer on the soil and spray on their crops as they grow, but at her scale, it wouldn’t make sense to revert to old methods, she said.

Underpinning what’s now the conventional approach to farming are ideas about soil fertility with roots stretching back to the late 1800s, said Hummel, the agriculture professor at Dordt University. German chemists discovered that agricultural productivity hinged on three chemical elements: nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium. Farmers could improve their yields if they gave a plant just the right amount of all three, or in other words, got the chemistry right.

The technological infrastructure required to implement these scientific developments, which had been simmering for decades, took off after the World Wars, Hummel noted. Companies repurposed wartime chemical factories to produce fertilizers and pesticides. Fossil fuels cranked new pumps pulling trillions of gallons of water from the Ogallala Aquifer in the American Midwest to satiate the extra-thirsty, high-yielding grains.

The system’s productivity is stunning—but so are the environmental ramifications. Monoculture crops that require excessive fertilizer application can cause soil erosion over time and chemical runoff that upsets the natural habitat in bodies of water as far away as the Gulf of America. And researchers at Texas State University predicted that current irrigation practices will drain the Ogallala Aquifer 52% before 2060.

“The consequences have been a gradual pollution of soil, air, and water, and a negative impact on human health,” said Emile Frison, a Belgian agricultural researcher and a member of the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems, or IPES.

Ernest Borlaug inspects wheat fields in Atizapan, Mexico. Pictorial Press Ltd/Alamy

WHILE A FIXATION ON CHEMISTRY drove much of the practices undergirding industrial farming, proponents of alternative methods emphasize the importance of soil biology.

Plugging fertilizers into a chemical formula grows plants, but it can still produce food lacking in essential nutrients. That’s because only healthy soil, fostering a full-bodied ecosystem of microbes, can fuel healthy food, Frison said.

Frison advocates for a set of practices collectively known as agroecology, a movement he said is often mischaracterized as “looking backwards,” when, in fact, agroecology is on the cutting edge of microbiome research. Frison told me about research in Andhra Pradesh, India, for instance, where 6 million farmers are involved in the world’s largest agroecology experiment, scientists from the United States and Australia are studying how soil microorganisms change production. Their research includes cultivating the microorganisms from a cow’s microbiome and inserting them into the soil.

Increasing microbial activity in the soil would naturally provide plants with more nitrogen, Frison noted, since microbes use the chemical as an energy source. He believes this could allow farmers to cut out synthetic fertilizers without experiencing drastically lower yields. Applying man-made fertilizers and pesticides on the soil year after year kills these microorganisms, he said.

Still, scaling up organic farming methods like agroecology would come with its own set of environmental challenges, said Dan Blaustein-Rejto, who heads up the food and agriculture program at the Breakthrough Institute. He told me his organization, which promotes technological solutions to environmental issues, often clashes with other environmental groups advocating for alternative agriculture.

Chemical pesticides and fertilizers boost yields and reduce the portion of crop lost to pests, enabling farmers to produce more food on a smaller amount of land. “One of our top goals is to minimize the land footprint of agriculture,” Blaustein-Rejto said. “We often see the trade-offs of many modern inputs as being very worthwhile.”

A meta-analysis of data from 105 studies comparing organic and conventional farming found that organic farms produce about 18% less on average. Other studies estimate the yield gap to be somewhere between 29% and 44% depending on the specific crop. Basic economic theory dictates that a reduction in the food supply and a rise in prices would spur farmers to expand, Blaustein-Rejto noted. Some studies indicate that scaling up organic farming to match industrial farming’s current output would require farmers to cultivate two to three times the amount of land currently in use around the world.

A farmer sprays natural pesticide on his farm in Pedavuppudu village in India’s Andhra Pradesh state. Associated Press/Photo by Altaf Qadri

ALTERNATIVE AGRICULTURE PROPONENTS, along with supporters of the Make America Healthy Again movement, point out that while industrial farming has lowered the cost of food, the Green Revolution’s laser focus on commodity crops has also lowered the quality of what people are eating.

Modern diets center around a small number of grains and legumes, often at the expense of traditional crops with higher nutrient counts like millet, sorghum, rye, barley, and cassava. The iron content of the world’s most-consumed grains declined 19% between 1961 and 2011. While these custom-designed grains are “rich in calories, they often lack essential micronutrients found in fruits and vegetables that aren’t a part of the industrialized diet,” Frison with IPES noted. To make matters worse, agribusiness companies funnel a large portion of these commodity crops into factories that transform them into ultra-processed food.

Travis Lybbert, a professor of agriculture and resource economics at the University of California, Davis, told me that while some places still struggle with outright hunger due to supply chain disruptions, corruption, and poverty, most countries are reckoning with “diseases of overconsumption” and the results of eating unhealthy food. One IPES report noted that about 2 billion people worldwide suffer from “hidden hunger,” or a lack of essential micronutrients. Roughly 3 billion people are also obese or overweight, according to the World Obesity Foundation.

As food prices plummeted, healthcare expenditures for the average American simultaneously climbed. In 1950, Americans shelled out roughly 20% of their disposable income on food. Only about 7% went to healthcare. In 2024, Americans spent about 10% of their income on food and used between 16% and 34% to cover healthcare costs.

But a more local and diverse cropping system wouldn’t necessarily improve human diets or health, Blaustein-Rejto with the Breakthrough Institute observed. “In many ways, people’s diets are more diverse than they historically have been,” he said. “That’s not to say that diets today and human health are by any means optimal, but I think there’s a danger of romanticizing past diets and agricultural practices.”

Cathy Carlson’s garden proves that point. Today’s global market supplies Carlson with fresh produce through every season, not just one or two months out of the year. Not only did very few people have year-round access to fresh food just a few decades ago, but it wasn’t too long ago that acute hunger plagued every continent, Lybbert, at the University of California, Davis, points out.

“Organic food production will always be a tiny sliver of total global food production, and we should hope it doesn’t get big,” Lybbert said. “It’s easy to forget … in the middle of the 20th century, outright famine was a major concern.”

TEACHING AGRICULTURE at a Christian university, Hummel understands the spiritual appeal of methods seen as more natural. But he’s wary of automatically rejecting technologies or practices outright. Still, he argued that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be “thoughtful critics” of waste and environmental harm.

He notes that there are ways to improve pesticide and fertilizer use without throwing them out altogether, such as technologies to help farmers calculate a more exact nitrogen fertilizer rate to minimize runoff. Today, farmers often apply more fertilizer than they expect to need in case of a bumper crop.

In his classroom at the College of the Ozarks, a tiny college situated on its own farm in the Ozark Mountains of Missouri, professor of agriculture Micah Humphreys delves even deeper into how a Christian should approach farming. Among other classic farming treatises, his students read The Marvelous Pigness of Pigs by renowned organic farmer Joel Salatin. Humphreys uses these texts to raise the question: What is the standard by which we do agriculture?

Most alternative agricultural movements argue that nature should be that standard.

“Whatever’s happening in the ecosystem becomes what you measure your agricultural system against,” he told me during our interview. That’s a key thrust in Salatin’s book—honoring the pigness of pigs and the way God created them. The problem is, the Scriptures don’t direct us to use nature as our measuring stick, Humphreys said. Instead, they seem to suggest that nature wasn’t intended to be wild, and humans are called to develop and civilize the earth.

So what should that look like in our fields? Humphreys says he still has more questions than answers about whether we should use chemicals to grow our food. But Christians do have some clear Biblical principles to guide their farming practices, he argued.

For instance, he points out, industrial farming has resulted in a shrinking agricultural population as farms expand to specialize in one or two monoculture crops. Increased mechanization and chemical use mean less manual labor, larger fields, and smaller towns. The Bible is clear about the importance of strengthening human communities, so rebuilding these rural communities should be at the center of any farming initiative.

In other words, there’s a Biblical mandate to care for the people who farm the land, not just the land, Humphreys said.

CARLSON LOVES DRINKING IN THE SMELL of spring soil when she takes her cultivator or planter out into fields that lay untouched all winter long. But nothing compares to autumn when the plants are standing tall in “beautiful, straight rows,” she said. “You know you’re raising something that’s going to affect somebody a long way from where you live.”

Stewardship of her crops and land includes giving God what you can’t control, she said, as well as making small, beneficial changes to the things you can. Carlson said she’s learned not to worry about weather, yields, or grain prices, and instead to trust the Lord with those outcomes. The couple planted many trees on their acreage and did their best to minimize soil erosion and chemical runoff to keep it out of nearby rivers. She said that’s something most farmers try to do.

But Carlson doesn’t believe stewardship means reverting to her grandparents’ farming practices.

“I don’t think I can see the world going back to the 1930s and ’40s and farming the way they did before. It’s so labor-­intensive, it would cost so much,” she said. “I just don’t know that that can happen in today’s world and make it cost-effective to be able to grow a crop that the world can benefit from.”