A History of Unsustainability in Agriculture

Abstract

Throughout history, farmers have sought to maximize yield, because growing bumper crops gives them a competitive advantage over their neighbors. Nations have sought to maximize agricultural yield, because it gives them an economic advantage in the world marketplace. The history of agriculture is the history of how producers, from farmers to nations, have maximized agricultural yields through maximizing energy subsidies to farmers’ fields and to nations’ farmers. But maximizing yield always had a downside. Early agriculturalists in Mesopotamia subsidized their crops with irrigation. As populations grew, more crops were needed until excess irrigation resulted in salinization of the region’s soil. The drive for more crop production in Greece and Rome resulted in deforestation that stripped the land of its ability to prevent erosion. Over-exploitation of the land to increase yield in Medieval Europe instead led to crop declines. The Mayan civilization declined, in part, because the demands they placed upon their environment grew beyond the carrying capacity of the land. For the first 9,700 years of agriculture, the use of energy subsidies including draft animals, slaves, and peasant farmers increased gradually, and cultures were able to adapt to problems caused by the subsidies. But with the advent of the industrial revolution, the pace of energy subsidies increased, and by the time the “Green Revolution” (industrial agriculture) appeared in the mid twentieth century, problems of energy pollution and energy scarcity have been increasing at an increasingly rapid rate.