korrents · piece

Raising Agricultural Yields Spares Land

Linus Blomqvist · 13 Mar 2024

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Raising yields on land already farmed is what keeps farming from taking more of the wild world.

Their wordsIn other words, land sparing almost always occurs—it is just a question of where.

Also said by George Monbiot

Read the piece on thebreakthrough.org ↗

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Linus Blomqvist did not write this page.

Every claim below was made in this piece, quoted word for word and numbered in the order the piece makes them, so you can read it there rather than take our word for it. The sentence above each quote is our reading of the claim, not their wording. Each quote was checked against a stored copy of the page at build time; where the two differ, the quote is the fact.

Our reading
Believing that higher yields do not spare land would push investment away from the thing that actually protects wild habitat.

Their wordsClaims to the contrary could lead to a misallocation of investments and, consequently, worse environmental (and social) outcomes.
Our reading
Whether higher yields spare land or take more of it depends on how open the market for the crop is, so staples spare land and globally traded crops often do not.

Their wordsTherefore, land sparing is more likely to take place, even at the local level, when yields of staples go up. The situation is different for some internationally traded products like soy and palm oil.
Our reading
Raising yields on land already farmed is what keeps farming from taking more of the wild world.

Their wordsIn other words, land sparing almost always occurs—it is just a question of where.
Our reading
Without the yield improvements of the last half-century the world would have cleared more than twice as much cropland.

Their wordsWithout yield improvements, therefore, we would have seen more than double the cropland expansion.
Our reading
Making American farms more productive shrinks cropland in the rest of the world by more than it adds at home.

Their wordsNelson Villoria estimates that for every 1% gain in Total Factor Productivity (inputs required per unit of output) in the US, croplands in the rest of the world shrink by 0.7%.
Our reading
The claim that higher yields backfire and end up increasing farmland is much weaker than the literature assumes.
Mental modelCheaper means more, not less

Their wordsIn sum, land sparing is common at the local level and the norm at the global scale, in contrast to recent appeals to Jevons' paradox.
Our reading
Higher yields alone do not protect habitat locally; they have to be paired with zoning, payments or certification or the land is cleared anyway.

Their wordsYield-boosting measures, however, always need to be thoughtfully paired with other measures to ensure that outcomes—environmental as well as social—are acceptable at the local level.
Our reading
The case for raising yields, especially among smallholders, is humanitarian as much as environmental.

Their wordsWhat this also tells us is that, at the end of the day, the argument for boosting yields—especially among smallholder farmers—is not just environmental: it is humanitarian.

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