Intensive farming

• 1. Introduction

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  Intensive farming produces most of the meat, dairy products, eggs, fruits, and vegetables you find in a supermarket. It is a kind of agriculture defined by higher levels of input and output for every unit of farmland. More capital, more labour, more agrochemicals, more water go in. More crop yield per unit of land comes out. The land also rests less often, with a low fallow ratio keeping fields in near-constant production.

  This approach goes by several names. Some call it conventional agriculture. Others call it industrial agriculture, a label reserved for the forms that lean hardest on industrial methods and technologies built to push yields higher. The term "factory farming" gets used too, often as an insult.

  How did a single field come to produce many times what it once did? Why does crop irrigation now swallow 70 percent of the world's fresh water? And what happens when 9.7 billion people, the projected world population by 2050, all need to eat from land that cannot simply keep expanding? The answers reach from a flooded rice paddy in Bali to a burst waste lagoon in North Carolina.

• 2. From Enclosure To Engines

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  Agricultural development in Britain between the 16th century and the mid-19th century brought a massive increase in productivity and net output. That surplus fed unprecedented population growth and freed a large share of the workforce, helping make the Industrial Revolution possible. Historians point to four innovations as the most important: enclosure, mechanization, four-field crop rotation, and selective breeding.

  By the early 19th century, improved techniques, implements, seed stocks, and cultivars had pushed yield per land unit to many times what farmers saw in the Middle Ages. The first phase of industrial agriculture was a steady march of machinery. The horse-drawn McCormick reaper transformed harvesting, while the cotton gin cut the cost of processing. Steam-powered threshers and tractors followed.

  In 1892, the first gasoline-powered tractor was successfully developed. In 1923, the International Harvester Farmall tractor became the first all-purpose tractor. That moment marked an inflection point in the replacement of draft animals with machines. Combines, planters, and transplanters arrived next, letting a single farmer manage steadily larger farms.

• 3. Feeding The Soil

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  Nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium, the trio known as NPK, were identified as critical factors in plant growth. That discovery led to the manufacture of synthetic fertilizers and another jump in crop yields. In 1909, the Haber-Bosch method to synthesize ammonium nitrate was first demonstrated. After World War II, synthetic fertilizer use increased rapidly.

  NPK fertilizers also stirred the first concerns about industrial agriculture. Critics worried about side effects like soil compaction, soil erosion, and falling soil fertility, along with the prospect of toxic chemicals entering the food supply. Those anxieties helped give rise to the organic movement and a market for sustainable intensive farming.

  Livestock benefited from parallel breakthroughs. The discovery of vitamins and their role in nutrition, in the first two decades of the 20th century, produced vitamin supplements. By the 1920s those supplements let some livestock be raised indoors, away from harsh natural elements. Antibiotics and vaccines reduced animal disease, while advances in logistics, refrigeration, and processing made long-distance distribution feasible.

• 4. Animals At Scale

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  Concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOs, can hold staggering numbers of animals, some up to hundreds of thousands of cows, hogs, turkeys, or chickens, often indoors. The essence of such farms is concentration in a given space. The aim is maximum output at the lowest possible cost, with the greatest level of food safety. Food and water are delivered to the animals, and farmers often use antimicrobial agents, vitamin supplements, and growth hormones. Growth hormones are not used on chickens, nor on any animal in the European Union.

  Confinement breeds stress, and stress breeds undesirable behaviors. The response has included a search for docile breeds, physical restraints such as individual cages for chickens, and physical modification like the debeaking of chickens to reduce harm from fighting. The CAFO designation itself came from regulation. The 1972 U.S. Federal Clean Water Act, written to restore lakes and rivers to a "fishable, swimmable" quality, led the United States Environmental Protection Agency to classify certain animal feeding operations as "point source" groundwater polluters.

  Waste is the heavy burden. The federal government requires animal waste to be stored in lagoons, some as large as 7.5 acre. Without an impermeable liner, a lagoon can leak into groundwater, and in 17 U.S. states isolated cases of groundwater contamination were linked to CAFOs. In 1995, a lagoon burst and released 25 million gallons of nitrous sludge into North Carolina's New River. The spill allegedly killed eight to ten million fish.

• 5. The Green Revolution

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  "Miracle seeds" carried farming technologies into many developing countries during the Green Revolution. The seeds came bundled with pesticides, irrigation, and synthetic nitrogen fertilizer, methods that already existed but had stayed mostly inside industrialized nations. In the 1970s, scientists created high-yielding varieties of maize, wheat, and rice with greater nitrogen-absorbing potential.

  More nitrogen brought a problem: cereals that absorbed it tended to lodge, or fall over, before harvest. Breeders solved this by adding semi-dwarfing genes. Norin 10 wheat, developed by Orville Vogel from Japanese dwarf wheat varieties, proved instrumental for new wheat cultivars. IR8, the first widely implemented high-yielding rice from the International Rice Research Institute, came from a cross between an Indonesian variety named "Peta" and a Chinese variety named "Dee Geo Woo Gen".

  Shorter plants invest less in the stem and redirect nutrients toward grain, amplifying the yield effect of chemical fertilizers. The biology behind this was later traced to specific mutant genes, including reduced height, gibberellin insensitive, and slender rice, all cellular signalling components of gibberellic acid. There is a catch for the farmer. Hybrid vigour boosts yields, but the advantage is lost in the progeny of F1 hybrids, so seeds for annual crops must be purchased every season.

• 6. Water And Earth

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  70 percent of the world's fresh water goes to crop irrigation. Flood irrigation is the oldest and most common type, and also the most wasteful, since parts of a field get drenched just to deliver enough to other parts. Overhead irrigation, using center-pivot or lateral-moving sprinklers, spreads water far more evenly. Drip irrigation is the most expensive and least used, but it delivers water to plant roots with minimal losses. Recharge pits capture rainwater and runoff to replenish groundwater wells and reduce soil erosion.

  Terracing reshapes the land itself. A terrace is a leveled section of a hilly cultivated area, built to slow or prevent rapid surface runoff. Stacked into steps, terraces define the rice landscapes of Bali and the Banaue Rice Terraces in Banaue, Ifugao, in the Philippines. In Peru, the Inca turned unusable slopes into farmland with drystone walls, creating terraces known as Andéns.

  Flooded fields tell another story. A paddy field is a flooded parcel of arable land for rice and other semiaquatic crops, common across east and southeast Asia and found as far afield as Piedmont in Italy, the Camargue in France, and the Artibonite Valley in Haiti. The flooding favors the rice strain while staying hostile to weeds. The water buffalo, the only draft animal comfortable in wetlands, works widely in Asian rice paddies. A newer approach, the System of Rice Intensification, was developed in 1983 by the French Jesuit Father Henri de Laulanié in Madagascar. By 2013 between 4 and 5 million smallholder farmers were using it.

• 7. Synergy On The Land

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  Rotational grazing moves herds or flocks systematically to fresh, rested paddocks while other sections recover. Resting grazed land lets vegetation renew its energy reserves, rebuild shoots, and deepen roots for long-term biomass. Grazers thrive on the more tender younger plant stems, and parasites left behind in vacated paddocks die off, reducing or eliminating the need for de-wormers. With higher productivity, animals may need less supplemental feed, so farmers can raise stocking rates.

  Pasture intensification reverses degradation, the loss of forage and carrying capacity that follows overgrazing, poor nutrient management, and weak soil conservation. Practices such as irrigation, soil scarification, and the application of lime, fertilizers, and pesticides improve soil and grass. Integrated crop-livestock and crop-livestock-forestry systems push further by combining ecosystems into one framework. ICLF systems can yield beef cattle productivity up to ten times that of degraded pastures, plus crops of maize, sorghum, and soybean, and greatly reduced greenhouse gas balances through forest carbon sequestration.

  Pasture cropping plants grain directly into grassland with no herbicides first. The perennial grasses become a living mulch under the grain, and the pasture is intensively grazed before and after grain production. This system can match farmer profits while building new topsoil and sequestering up to 33 tons of CO2 per hectare each year. The Twelve Aprils grazing program, developed by the USDA-SARE for dairy production, plants forage crops into a perennial pasture.

• 8. The Cost Of Plenty

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  14 to 28 percent of net greenhouse gas emissions come from industrial agricultural practices, making them one of the main drivers of global warming. The system consumes huge amounts of water, energy, and industrial chemicals, and herbicides, insecticides, and fertilizers accumulate in ground and surface waters. Nitrogen compounds from the Midwest travel down the Mississippi and degrade coastal fisheries in the Gulf of Mexico, producing oceanic dead zones.

  Many wild plant and animal species have gone extinct on a regional or national scale as agro-ecosystems were profoundly altered. Heavy use of insecticides and herbicides drives rapid resistance among pests, making those chemicals steadily less effective. Agrochemicals may be involved in colony collapse disorder, in which the individual members of bee colonies vanish, a serious threat given how dependent fruit and vegetable production is on bees.

  Disease finds new pathways too. Intensive farming creates conditions for parasite growth and transmission unlike anything in natural host populations. The infectious salmon anaemia virus, an orthomyxovirus, is causing significant economic loss for salmon farms. It has two clades, one European and one North American, that diverged before 1900, suggesting an ancestral form existed in wild salmonids before cage-cultured salmonids appeared. A study for the U.S. Office of Technology Assessment found, at a statistical level, a negative relationship between rising farm size and the social conditions of rural communities. The global population is projected to peak around 2085 at roughly 10.3 billion, and the potential for agricultural expansion is limited, since converting more land would damage forests, grasslands, and wetlands.