High-Yield Agriculture Slows Global-Warming

Jennifer Burney and associates at Stanford University published a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (July 2010) demonstrating that high-yield agriculture slows the pace of global-warming. They reported that advances in high-yield agriculture over the latter part of the 20th century have prevented massive amounts of greenhouse gases (equivalent to 590 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide) from entering the atmosphere. Such yield improvements reduced the need to convert forests to farmland – which usually involves burning of trees and thus generation of greenhouse gases. The researchers determined that, if not for increased yields, additional greenhouse-gas emissions from clearing land for farming would have been equal to one-third of the world’s total output of greenhouse gases since the dawn (in 1850) of the Industrial Revolution. Consumers concerned with carbon footprints and global warming might benefit from information regarding where food comes from because it would allow them to avoid consuming food produced the “old-fashioned” (i.e., low-yield) way.