The article I’m about to write about talks about the evolution of agriculture and the effect it had on the world. It talks about the processes of agriculture from hundreds of years ago and how us humans have helped that evolve to help the growing population of the world. It also talks about how the world went from starving and nervous, not knowing if food production will keep up with the growing population, to a population of people who are becoming obese.
In the article, “Breakfast for Eight Billion” by Charles C. Mann, the author talks about the development of agriculture in our world over hundreds of years. He explains how the world went from starving to a staggering amount of people being obese. He also explains how much Farming 2.0 drastically changed the way farmers produced food. They found new ways that fertilization, irrigation, and genetics can help improve the production of food and create new strains of food that grow and taste better.
The author starts off this article with the fact that in today’s world the average person needs about 2,000 to 2,500 calories to survive. Up until the 1800’s, most people, including the wealthy, were unable to reach that caloric goal. Even dates past the 1800’s there are parts of the world that suffered through famine. With the world constantly growing and population increasing, there was a worldwide fear that people would starve to death if the population rate kept up like this. Thankfully, this did not end up being the case. Instead, farmers increased their harvests and continue to do so to keep the world turning. The cause of harvests increasing has the world dealing with a different problem. Today, people consume, on average, 3,000 calories a day which is increasing the obesity rate. Yet the article states that there are still 1 out of 10 people who do not get the food they need.
The author goes on to talk about the cause of the boom in the production of harvesting. The cause was the Green Revolution. This process used two different ways to increase production; they used old ways like fertilization and irrigation combined with a new way called genetics. With the combination of these three, the agriculture world changed drastically.
Fertilization has been proven to increase the quality of plants. The article talks about how scientific discoveries of how the nitrogen in fertilizer is what adds to the plants and helps them to grow. The scientists found that the plants couldn’t break down the nitrogen alone, it needs other elements such as hydrogen, carbon, and oxygen because these elements are able to be broken down by the plants. In the mid-nineteenth century, scientists realized that chemical fertilizers could substitute for manure. After World War 2 was over, countries across the world built fertilizer factories and now ammonia fertilizer has doubled the amount of food the world is able to grow.
The author then moves on to talk about how irrigation has aided in the Green Revolution. Irrigation is when farmers divert water from rivers and lakes to water their crops, but there were geographic problems in some regions because the rivers and lakes were lower than farmland. However, throughout time they have created pumps to bring the water to the farmland. Over time, the pumps that were being used had improved but it was proving to need more energy than they had to pump the water to farmland. They tried to use wells to bring water up from the ground, but they could only reach down 30 to 60 feet, and the wells were expensive to build. In the mid 20th century, they created a pump that was fueled by fossil fuel and this discovery enabled farmers to reach farther down, going as deep as 300 feet. The author then talks about how when they couldn’t get water from underground, they moved on to create dams to store irrigation water. Which has proven to be very effective in increasing the worlds food supply.
The author writes that the third addition to the Green Revolution, genetics, helped to create varieties of plants that would thrive better with the new processes of fertilization and irrigation. He states that the modern use of genetics started with a young scientist in Mexico, Norman Borlaug, who took female and male parts of separate wheat plants and bred them together to try and create a strain of wheat that could fight against a common problem of stem rust. He would take the female reproductive parts of wheat plants and dust it over the male wheat plants and breed them together, then he would take the products of this, plant them, and then expose them to stem rust. He continued this process until he could breed together strains of wheat that are resistant to stem rust. He was finally able to create rust-resistant wheat plants. Mexico went on to being a huge wheat exporter and this inspired other countries like Asia.
In Asia, they started to use this process to increase their rice quality and production. Two foundations, the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, created the IRRI, the International Rice Research Institute, to see if they could use the method of genetics to improve rice production. The articles states that, “rice is humankinds single most important food”, which I find to be true because there are so many dishes that are based around rice. In the 1960s and 1970s, the IRRI used Borlaug’s method for wheat to helps increase rice production. They wanted to create new and highly productive strains of rice. After doing so, by the 21st century, the calories consumed by the Asian population had increased by 30%. According to another article I found called, “The Complex History of the Domestication of Rice”, rice has been around going back to 8000 B.C. with different kinds of rice which are domesticated and wild rice. It talks about how the process to domesticate rice was a long road. “Positive mutations that occurred later in the domestication process may be absent from the wild gene pool or early landraces, but would be ubiquitous among more recently developed cultivars.” This quote from the article tells the reader about how during the process of domesticating rice created positive mutations that cant be found in wild rice anymore.
In this article, the author goes on to say that although Farming 2.0 helped our world grow more food and escape the fear of starvation, it has impacted our environment immensely. Things like poor irrigation practice can poison the soil, and overuse of fertilizer can pollute rivers, lakes, and oceans with the runoff from farming fields. Both the problems seem to be feeding off each other. The author states that as the population grows the whole world should be included in solving this problem to continue to supply food for everyone.
I never really thought of the evolution of agriculture throughout the years, but it was interesting to read. The ways in which it has improved our world which went from starving to obesity throughout hundreds of years. This article has opened my eyes to the processes behind it. In today’s world and the easy access that we have to food, it’s easy to forget that for hundreds of years most people in the world were starving and wondering how they would survive with such little food. I mostly remember learning about obesity in school and how much of a problem its continuing to be despite the efforts of important figures pushing us to eat better.
It’s not a surprise that the process of agriculture is ruining the earth. We are constantly taking from the earth so that we can eat but it begs the question of what is that going to do to our planet? Surely the earth will one day will not able to keep up with our growing population. This brings on a huge problem for agriculture that they need to solve in order to keep farming moving forward.
Mann, Charles, “How the System Works”, Breakfast for Eight Billion, winter 2025, https://research-ebsco-com.ezproxybrcc.helmlib.org/c/njhtfa/viewer/pdf/isscvfyyef?route=details
Department of Plant Breeding and Genetics, Cornell University, “The Complex History of the Domestication of Rice”, October 2007
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2759204/#:~:text=The%20panicle%20structure%20has%20changed,seeds%20than%20the%20wild%20ancestors.