The Green Revolution got off to a rocky start. In the fall of 1944, Norman Borlaug, who would become known as the revolution’s father, moved to Mexico to set up a plant-breeding program. Right away, he came down with a stomach crud. It was, he would later tell an interviewer, “the usual tourist thing,” except that it lasted for weeks. Though he had found his previous position, with DuPont, to be boring, in those weeks Borlaug decided that maybe it hadn’t been so bad. “If I could have gotten my job back at DuPont, I would have,” he said.
Borlaug had gone to Mexico specifically to work with wheat, which was being devastated by a fungal disease called stem rust. When he got well enough to travel around the country, he became depressed by what he found. In the Bajío, a region northwest of Mexico City, the farmers were desperately poor. Their wheat didn’t seem to grow so much as “fight to stay alive,” Borlaug wrote to his wife. “These places that I’ve seen have clubbed my mind.”
Borlaug threw himself into an effort to produce a new variety of wheat—one that would be both rust-resistant and higher-yielding. With the help of two Mexican agronomists, he gathered seeds from thousands of local varieties, planted them, and waited for them to mature. Most of the resulting plants succumbed to rust; the few that made it were crossed with one another to produce the next generation. To maximize his workdays, Borlaug often slept in a shack near his test fields, and, to speed up the breeding process, he shuttled between central Mexico, where wheat was grown in the summer, and northwestern Mexico, where he could get in a second crop in the winter.
This went on for years. Progress was made; then it was unmade when a different “race” of stem rust swept through. Meanwhile, a new issue emerged. Mexican wheat varieties tended to send up tall, slender stalks. If they were dosed with fertilizer, they became more productive but grew so top-heavy that they fell over—a problem known as lodging. Borlaug began experimenting with a variety of dwarf wheat from Japan. He crossed the Japanese wheat with some doubly rust-resistant varieties he had developed. Finally, he got lucky. The transpacific crosses proved to be not just vigorous and high-yielding but also surprisingly versatile. They grew well across a range of climate zones and light conditions. In 1960, Borlaug invited farmers in the northern state of Sonora to visit a plot planted with a number of his best-performing dwarf wheat strains. The farmers went wild. They had been instructed to remain at a distance from the plot, but they refused to listen. Some grabbed at the wheat heads and pocketed the seeds. According to Charles C. Mann’s “The Wizard and the Prophet” (2018), Borlaug—the wizard of the title—was secretly pleased by all the tumult. It was to him the “soundtrack of success.”
In later years, Borlaug liked to recite statistics illustrating his seeds’ superiority. In a speech he delivered in Australia in 1968, the year the term “Green Revolution” was coined, he noted that average wheat yields in Mexico, which had been around seven hundred and fifty kilos per hectare when he’d arrived, had since climbed to almost twenty-eight hundred kilos per hectare—a roughly fourfold increase. In western Pakistan, where versions of the Mexican varieties had been introduced in 1965, the results were similarly dramatic: average yields had risen, he found, by almost fifty per cent in just two years.
But, as proud as he was of his seeds, Borlaug also saw their limits. When he received the Nobel Peace Prize, in 1970, he used his Nobel address to caution against complacency. The new varieties of wheat he had bred, along with new strains of rice and corn which had subsequently been developed, represented, he said, only a “temporary success in man’s war against hunger and deprivation.” The world’s population, he predicted, would continue to grow, and eventually the demand for food would again outstrip the supply. “Perhaps the term ‘green revolution,’ as commonly used, is premature,” Borlaug worried out loud.
Today, there are some 8.2 billion people on earth, more than twice as many as there were when Borlaug won his Nobel. This figure is expected to rise to almost ten billion by 2050. A few months ago, more than a hundred Nobel laureates released an open letter that echoed Borlaug’s concerns. They predicted “a tragic mismatch of global food supply and demand by mid-century.” By their reckoning, “we are not on track to meet future food needs. Not even close.”
Do we need a second Green Revolution? And, if so, what form should it take? Two new books, Michael Grunwald’s “We Are Eating the Earth: The Race to Fix Our Food System and Save Our Climate” (Simon & Schuster) and Vaclav Smil’s “How to Feed the World: The History and Future of Food” (Viking), pursue these questions with varying degrees of urgency.
Grunwald is a journalist whose previous books include a history of the Everglades. Humanity, he says, is facing “some terrible math.” On one side of the equation is the growing need for food; Grunwald estimates that, to keep pace with demand, agricultural production will have to increase by fifty per cent over the next twenty-five years. On the other side is climate change. Agriculture is a major source of greenhouse gases; depending on how you calculate it, the sector is responsible for between a tenth and a third of global emissions. To stabilize the climate, this figure has to drop to pretty much zero. We need to “feed the world without frying the world” is how Grunwald puts it.
Grunwald spends a lot of “We Are Eating the Earth” interviewing people who have ideas about how this balancing act might be brought off. One group is pushing what’s called “regenerative agriculture.” Grunwald visits a ranch in Northern California co-owned by the billionaire investor and former Presidential candidate Tom Steyer. Instead of rotating his cows among fields every few weeks, Steyer restricts them to a small area and moves them more frequently. The practice, known as “adaptive multi-paddock grazing,” is supposed to increase the amount of carbon stored in the ranch’s soils. This, in turn, is supposed to counteract some—or all—of the emissions from the operation’s ruminants, which are constantly burping out methane, a powerful greenhouse gas. “If we can show scientifically that this stuff really works,” Steyer says, “that would be priceless.”
A second group wants to take agriculture indoors, thereby freeing up land to plant carbon-sucking forests. Grunwald tours a “vertical farm” built on the site of an abandoned steel mill in Newark. The farm—which is, in fact, an enormous warehouse—is filled with lettuce seedlings growing under banks of lights in a mist of chemicals. The plants will never see the sun or touch soil. “The future is happening a lot faster than we expected,” David Rosenberg, then the C.E.O. of AeroFarms, the company that owns the warehouse, assures Grunwald.
A third group wants to eliminate farm animals, or at least reinvent them. Chickens, pigs, and especially cows consume many more calories in the form of plants than they yield up in the form of eggs, chops, and burgers. Getting rid of the middleman—or, really, middle creature—will, it stands to reason, make the food system that much more efficient. Grunwald talks to Ethan Brown, the founder of Beyond Meat, and Pat Brown—no relation—the founder of Impossible Foods, both of whom have created beef substitutes out of plant-based ingredients like apple extract and pea protein. Grunwald samples ice cream that has been made without any cream, “egg whites” that have been produced without any eggs, and chocolate mousse made from microbes. (The ice cream, he reports, is tasty; the mousse, “bland.”) He interviews entrepreneurs who are trying to produce meat from animal cells grown in vats. These include a twentysomething from Australia named George Peppou, who wants to culture meat from exotic species, like Galápagos tortoises. “Let’s create brand-new experiences!” Peppou urges.
Grunwald began his reporting for “We Are Eating the Earth” pre-COVID. What exactly he was expecting to discover is hard to say, but he seems to have set out on writing the book optimistically. The “good news is that remarkable people are working on the eating the earth problem,” he writes in his introduction.
Most of the ventures Grunwald tours, however, turn out to be duds. Steyer hires a research group to monitor his ranch. He learns that though some metrics are improving—there’s less erosion, for example—the soil is not absorbing more carbon. On the contrary, it is absorbing less carbon. “Those results are a bummer,” a member of the group acknowledges.
Vertical farming and fake meat prove, if anything, more disappointing. Even with highly efficient L.E.D. bulbs, it takes an awful lot of energy to mimic the sun. Grunwald calculates that to grow just five per cent of America’s tomatoes indoors would require “every megawatt” of the country’s renewable-electricity supply. This has financial as well as climate implications. AeroFarms ends up going bankrupt in 2023 (though it has since emerged from Chapter 11). Many of its competitors follow suit.
Grunwald interviews Beyond Meat’s Ethan Brown just a few months after the company has gone public. Thanks to investor enthusiasm, it has a market capitalization of more than ten billion dollars. This figure has since dropped by ninety-eight per cent. Impossible Foods is privately held; what little information is available about its finances suggests that its value, too, has crumbled. Many other fake-meat ventures, meanwhile, have gone the way of AeroFarms. SCiFi, a company that wanted to create burgers out of a combination of plant-based ingredients and cultivated cells, went belly-up in 2024. Motif FoodWorks, a company that was using yeast to produce a meaty-tasting protein called Hemami, went out of business the same year. (Motif’s problems were caused, in part, by a patent-infringement lawsuit filed by Impossible.)