Don Lloyd points to this old Richard Manning article in Harper's without much comment: "there must be controversy in there somewhere."

There's some, but it is yet another statement of themes Manning has voiced for a long time, most thoroughly in his book Against The Grain. (see Cereal Killer for discussion, and see The Wheel for more Manning related discussion.)

Manning asserts that the growing of field crops - mainly maize, wheat and rice - are a colossal blunder that has been extremely harmful for life on this planet. It wrecks the earth, sickens humans and drives other species to extinction. There's merit in his arguments. Grain is evil. But it is also the engine of civilization. While counting the sins of agriculture in general and grain in particular one must enumerate the blessings as well as the sins to get a full understanding. Ag and grain are mixed blessings, pornography with redeeming social value.

There was something fine about hunter/gardener human civilization that was lost with the advent of agriculture. The environment has suffered greatly and so has human society. Some of that is intrinsic to agriculture but some of it isn't. We don't have to have the social structures enabled by agriculture if we choose otherwise, and we can in time overcome the environmental ravages. It's a phase of human socio-cultural evolution rather than a permanent state. We can't go back, we can't stand still, but we can progress.

Manning not only leaves out the benefits part of the analysis, he exaggerates the costs. To make his case stronger he omits mitigating factors, ignores modern techniques and just plain gets some of the science wrong. I critique a few errors from his long article, but read it first for context.

All animals eat plants or eat animals that eat plants. This is the food chain, and pulling it is the unique ability of plants to turn sunlight into stored energy in the form of carbohydrates, the basic fuel of all animals. Solar-powered photosynthesis is the only way to make this fuel. There is no alternative to plant energy, just as there is no alternative to oxygen.

This is false. There is probably more life on earth powered by chemosynthesis than photosynthesis. No sunlight required. Deep under ground and deep in the oceans where the sun doesn't shine life goes on. Before there were plants there was life. Before photosynthesis evolved there was life. There are some chemosynthsizers more easily available to study in extreme surface environments too. This isn't esoteric knowledge.

Scientists have a name for the total amount of plant mass created by Earth in a given year, the total budget for life. They call it the planet’s “primary productivity.”

This is a half measure at best. It can be a useful half measure that gives a snap shot view of a portion of the biosphere, but its significance must be understood in relation to a far larger whole in the natural world.

. . . we humans, a single species among millions, consume about 40 percent of Earth’s primary productivity, 40 percent of all there is. This simple number may explain why the current extinction rate is 1,000 times that which existed before human domination of the planet. We 6 billion have simply stolen the food, the rich among us a lot more than others.

This is where Manning goes off the rails a bit. We could see it coming since that was the conclusion he searched for evidence to support, reasoning backwards from a belief, ignoring inconvenient contrary evidence. The conclusion is as false as the evidence since it implies that things could not be otherwise.

. . . more than two thirds of humanity’s cut of primary productivity results from agriculture, two thirds of which in turn consists of three plants: rice, wheat, and corn. In the 10,000 years since humans domesticated these grains, their status has remained undiminished, most likely because they are able to store solar energy in uniquely dense, transportable bundles of carbohydrates. They are to the plant world what a barrel of refined oil is to the hydrocarbon world. Indeed, aside from hydrocarbons they are the most concentrated form of true wealth—sun energy—to be found on the planet.

What about the gravitational energy that lifts our oceans in an absolutely reliable beat as the moon circles the earth? We could harvest that energy even if the sun went out (in principle, but frozen oceans don't have useful tides). What about nuclear energy, a true fossil fuel that was created in the death of stars millenia ago, just as was the carbon of our bodies. Solar enegy is not the foundation of everything. It is one source of energy among others, a nuclear furnace in the sky.

With the possible exception of the domestication of wheat, the green revolution is the worst thing that has ever happened to the planet.

For openers, it disrupted long-standing patterns of rural life worldwide, moving a lot of no-longer-needed people off the land and into the world’s most severe poverty.

All false. The green revolution didn't disrupt rural life, twentieth century governments did that, explicitly, as a matter of policy, because they wanted factory workers for industrial development. At the time a large percentage of people worked in agriculture yet famines were common. People died by the tens of millions, first in one nation then another, as traditional agriculture failed to reliably feed historically high populations. This was the era of population bomb nutters who predicted catastrophe with a gleam in their eyes.

The experience in population control in the developing world is by now clear: It is not that people make more people so much as it is that they make more poor people. In the forty-year period beginning about 1960, the world’s population doubled, adding virtually the entire increase of 3 billion to the world’s poorest classes, the most fecund classes. The way in which the green revolution raised that grain contributed hugely to the population boom, and it is the weight of the population that leaves humanity in its present untenable position.

And yet the fertility rate was falling. It wasn't that more people were being born in each family, it was that fewer died young, especially in childhood. Better medical techniques were a part of this, but greater wealth and better nutrition were primary drivers. It takes time for cultures to adjust to change. As wealth continues to grow with development, fertility rates continue to fall. That's why it is now predicted that population will peak in coming years at perhaps 8 billion. It's difficult to be precise since the rate of the drop in fertility continues to surprise those who do the estimates. Each year it seems the estimate falls further.

The common assumption these days is that we muster our weapons to secure oil, not food. There’s a little joke in this. Ever since we ran out of arable land, food is oil. Every single calorie we eat is backed by at least a calorie of oil, more like ten.

Natural gas, methane, is more of an issue than oil, but it too is usually of fossil origins at present. It doesn't have to be, it's just the cheapest source at this time. But Manning's goal is to demonize fertilizer by claiming that it requires fossil fuel, oil he says but gas is more correct. This is false. There are many sources of methane, some biological and some industrial. We can make it if we can't more cheaply find it.

David Pimentel, an expert on food and energy at Cornell University, has estimated that if all of the world ate the way the United States eats, humanity would exhaust all known global fossil-fuel reserves in just over seven years. Pimentel has his detractors. Some have accused him of being off on other calculations by as much as 30 percent. Fine. Make it ten years.

So? Is there a point here? If all fossil fuel was gone, and it never will be, we have other sources of energy and can synthesize agricultural chemicals. Oil is a phase just as biomass was in the past.

Nitrogen can be released from its “fixed” state as a solid in the soil by natural processes that allow it to circulate freely in the atmosphere. This also can be done artificially. Indeed, humans now contribute more nitrogen to the nitrogen cycle than the planet itself does. That is, humans have doubled the amount of nitrogen in play.

This is a nonsense graf. Nitrogen is the most abundant atmospheric gas. It makes up about 70% of the air we breath and has always done so. CO2 by comparison is a trace gas measured in parts per million rather than parts per hundred. Technologies that have increased the productivity of land necessarily speed up nutrient cycles. It isn't just more nitrogen in the cycles, it is more of everything. Nutrients locked up in rocks or unavailable in the atmosphere are used and reused more quickly.

This has led to an imbalance. It is easier to create nitrogen fertilizer than it is to apply it evenly to fields. When farmers dump nitrogen on a crop, much is wasted. It runs into the water and soil, where it either reacts chemically with its surroundings to form new compounds or flows off to fertilize something else, somewhere else.

It's difficult to apply it evenly with steam age technologies, but we now have precision agriculture which uses satellite data and ground sensors to apply the right amount at each place in a field. It isn't a pervasive practice but it is growing along with all other aspects of the information economy. In the past we had organic precision agriculture running on the good-farmer platform. Noses and eyes and such provided the same data as sensors and satellites do now.

Cattle are grazers, so in theory could live like the grass-fed lamb.

This isn't a theory, it is a fact. Most cattle, even in the US live off grasses and forbs.

Eighty percent of the grain the United States produces goes to livestock. Seventy-eight percent of all of our beef comes from feed lots, where the cattle eat grain, mostly corn and wheat. So do most of our hogs and chickens. The cattle spend their adult lives packed shoulder to shoulder in a space not much bigger than their bodies, up to their knees in shit, being stuffed with grain and a constant stream of antibiotics to prevent the disease this sort of confinement invariably engenders.

Well, no. Cattle spend 60-90 days of their lives in feed lots to fatten up just before slaughter. They spend over 200 days eating grass. And that's just the steers and heifers that are not kept for breeding. For every steer in the feedlot for 2 or 3 months there is a cow that lives her whole life eating grass. This isn't a defense of grain feeding, it just makes the point more realistic. We really don't benefit from the fattening, it's just a marketing practice that has become habitual in the past few decades since we have so much grain and it is cheap stored fodder.

The exception to this pattern is the confinement dairy industry where the product isn't meat, it's milk. These girls are professional athletes that eat at the training table since the energy needed to produce high volumes of highly nutritious milk is huge. They eat grain all their lives in large quantities. There are grass dairies that supply most if not all feed as forage, but they have lower per animal production and so proportionately higher equipment and labor costs. If grain wasn't cheap this would still pencil better. In countries that don't grow much grain, and don't subsidize it or import it, grass dairies are the rule. (Note that silage is a special case where the whole maize plant is chopped and then allowed to ferment in its own moisture. It's high quality feed but efficient since the whole plant is eaten and there is a nutrional benefit from fermentation. Grass silage is also made and fed.)

There are other defects of this kind in the article as well. Though the issues Manning raises are valid the errors in evidence and analysis prevent useful conclusions. Agriculture is a crime against nature and a burden to humanity, but we can grow past it in time. We can do it more benignly in the present. We can reform practices, in most cases by being more precise and frugal. We can plow less, fertilize less, water less, grow more in less space, use fewer pesticides and pollute less in every way including release of GHGs from the soil. We can also improve fertility and soil carbon content, in effect begin to restore exhausted lands, while reducing erosion and mineralization. As our technologies improve we use fewer resources to achieve larger results. As our policies improve we do less socio-ecological damage. We can reform agriculture rather than abandon it.

We will one day abandon it though. When we all have desktop (or pocket) nano-tech cornucopia machines to synthesize food from rocks and air no one will be able to afford agriculture except the very rich. It will be a semi-barbaric practice of boho elites. Understanding where we've been, where we are, and where we can go as we learn more allows perspective on these issues, supports useful policies and prevents emotional misbehavior. Being at peace with who we were and who we have become is an effective way to improve ourselves. Patience and insight required.