More is Less?

Michael Grunwald and the values behind sustainable intensification

Episode description

Michael Grunwald is an environmental journalist who sees maximizing efficient production as the most important sustainability strategy. His book, “We Are Eating the Earth,” brings fresh attention to an old debate.

Episode links

• We Are Eating the Earth

• Grunwald, M. (2024, December 13). Opinion | Sorry, but This Is the Future of Food. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/13/opinion/food-agriculture-factory-farms-climate-change.html

• The Useful Idiot, Land Food Nexus rebuttal to Grunwald’s NYT piece

• The Enduring Fantasy of Feeding the World, Spectre Journal

• Historians rethink the Green Revolution

• The Globalization of Wheat: A Critical History of the Green Revolution

• Max Ajl’s A People’s Green New Deal

• On the contribution of yields to hunger abatement:

  Smith, L. C., & Haddad, L. (2015). Reducing Child Undernutrition: Past Drivers and Priorities for the Post-MDG Era. World Development, 68, 180–204. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.worlddev.2014.11.014

• On the role of intensive agriculture in failing to reduce deforestation:

  • Ceddia, M. G., Bardsley, N. O., Gomez-y-Paloma, S., & Sedlacek, S. (2014). Governance, agricultural intensification, and land sparing in tropical South America. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 111(20), 7242–7247. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1317967111

  • Pratzer, M., Fernández-Llamazares, Á., Meyfroidt, P., Krueger, T., Baumann, M., Garnett, S. T., & Kuemmerle, T. (2023). Agricultural intensification, Indigenous stewardship and land sparing in tropical dry forests. Nature Sustainability, 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-023-01073-0

  • Thaler, G. M. (2017). The Land Sparing Complex: Environmental Governance, Agricultural Intensification, and State Building in the Brazilian Amazon. Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 107(6), 1424–1443. https://doi.org/10.1080/24694452.2017.1309966

  • Land sparers feel thier oats

  • Thaler, G. M. (2024). Saving a Rainforest and Losing the World: Conservation and displacement in the global tropics. Yale University Press.

• The IEA on competing theories of Indirect Land Use Change and biofuels: Towards an improved assessment of indirect land-use change – Evaluating common narratives, approaches, and tools

• More Work for Mother: The Ironies Of Household Technology From The Open Hearth To The Microwave | Ruth Cowan

• Munro, K. (2025). Reconsidering the relationship between home appliance ownership and married women’s labor supply: Evidence from Brazil (No. 2509).

• The Global Alliance for the Future of Food call for investment in food systems transition

• The World Resources Institute report on Denmark’s Green Tripartite Agreement

• Behind the Danish Green Tripartite – Democracy, Smallholders and the Rights of Rural People

• Grunwald debates an agroecologist

• At COP30, Brazilian Meat Giant JBS Recommends Climate Policy

About Landscapes

Landscapes is produced by Adam Calo. A complete written transcript of the episode can be found on Adam’s newsletter: Land Food Nexus. Send feedback or questions to adamcalo@substack.com or Bluesky. Music by Blue Dot Sessions: “Kilkerrin” by Blue Dot Sessions (www.sessions.blue).

Introduction

This episode of the podcast is different than usual. The main motivation of the show is to search out ideas and individuals who I think have new and insightful things to say about how landscapes are shaped or how they ought to be shaped.

This episode is featuring neither a new idea, nor something I find that insightful. But the theory of change showcased today, while I think is flawed, is incredibly powerful. The idea of sustainable intensification as a food system solution has kicked around for decades. Every student of the food system encounters both misty-eyed reverence for the Green Revolution, as well as tireless environmental histories that show how Norman Borlaug’s innovation driven campaign to install monocultures worldwide was neither green nor revolutionary.

For some, the evidence of yield expansion under new regimes of agricultural modernization spared untold forests from hungry peasants exploiting the land and saved a billion lives from abject hunger.

For others, like Glen Davis Stone, author of The Agricultural Dilemma, summarizing his investigation of the Green Revolution policies writes,

“The new histories lead us to revise the number of lives saved from a billion to a lower number. Like zero.”

So when Michael Grunwald published an article in the New York Times with the title, Factory farms are our best hope for feeding the planet, I read the article expecting for there to be some kind of new information that would motivate such a confident vision for sustainable food. In my opinion, there was nothing new.

It was simply Green Revolution 2.0

Grunwald’s new book We Are Eating The Earth doubles down, writing in the introduction,

“This idea that making more food per acre reduces the pressure to clear more acres to make food originally known as the Borlaug hypothesis, now usually called sustainable intensification, is central to this book.”

And so when Grunwald’s book appears to be having popular appeal being showcased on The Daily Show, numerous positive reviews and many shortlists, that raises an important question.

What’s interesting to me here is why this idea never goes away. How does it end up enrolling what we assume is a neutral environmental journalist into its logic and advocating for its adoption?

I do think that’s a question worth engaging with. For me, sustainable intensification, propped up by a Green Revolution style argument, just has so many red flags that we shouldn’t take it at face value. Just as I would be suspicious of any moral that centers a wondrous parable for how one man from the global North changed the world with technological supremacy, the hype of techno-driven sustainability achieved through individual talent is no different.

Max Ajl in A People’s Green New Deal is also skeptical of this type of eco modernist solution making. He asks,

“Can everything stay the same while everything changes? The discourse of technological progress is the siren of industrial and post-industrial capitalism, distracting from political conflict over who gets what, while placing politics beyond the reach of the common person.”

Sustainable intensification where nothing really needs to change about the politics of the food system to get us to sustainability is what Ajl calls “a sweet but perilous song.”

And so after I penned some responses to Grunwald’s writing, he suggested we hash it out in person rather than over dueling op-eds. But that does raise a challenge for how I normally do this podcast. I always send my questions to my guests ahead of time. I’m not interested in, nor really skilled at gotcha moments or Jubilee style debate.

I know that Grunwald is rather entrenched in his stance and would deliver many arguments that I simply would not be able to counter in pursuit of my larger goal, which is finding out the values behind the belief in the sustainable intensification worldview.

So what I hope you take away, which I certainly did, is not the entertaining debating of the facts of the case—although there is some of that—but the attempt to understand the deeper principles that shape one’s understanding of what counts as a sustainable food system.

And while I think I struggled sometimes in getting past the talking points, you will hear appeals to laws of supply and demand, to accounting, to the power of price mechanisms, virtues of efficiency, the promise of modernity, and yes, one-sided retelling of the Green Revolution. It’s those value laden foundations that possess the power to reproduce faith in the idea of sustainable intensification, and of course, thus powers policy makers and farmers to turn those ideas into practice.

Interview transcript

*The transcript is edited lightly for comprehension

Adam Calo: Mike Grunwald, welcome to the podcast.

[00:04:43] Michael Grunwald: Thanks so much for having me.

[00:04:45] Adam Calo: I want to try and set the goals for this conversation. I’ve read your book and a lot of your recent food reporting. I’ve written a blog and a kind of lengthy article rebutting some of the main claims that you made—

[00:04:56] Michael Grunwald: Yeah. I noticed that.

[00:04:58] Adam Calo: Yeah, the blog was snarky, but the other article was longer and tried to connect to other issues, so that you’re not the only target here.

It’s clear that we see pathways to sustainable food differently. But you also reached out and you said, that you are genuinely trying to understand this stuff. And I sensed that in your book. And so in that spirit, instead of trying to kind of confront you with an in-person debunking, my hope is that we think together through some of these thorny issues. What do you think?

[00:05:28] Michael Grunwald: I’ll try to be more useful and less idiot.

[00:05:31] Adam Calo: Okay. As a shortcut, I’m going to try and summarize the main argument of your book as strongly as I can so that you don’t have to explain it. And then you can kind of correct me what I got wrong. And then after that, I will dive into some of the key assumptions that I think would be interesting to explore in more depth.

The main argument of the book, as I see it, is that, if we really want to get serious about agriculture’s impact on the climate, we have to do a much better accounting of how any change in agricultural production is influencing forested land or other really important lands elsewhere.

And this key insight is born out of this character study from Tim Searchinger, head of the WRI, the World Resources Institute. It really started with thinking about biofuels, from that accounting perspective and says, “Wait a second, if we drastically alter productive lands towards biofuel crops and that ends up driving demand for crop fuels in the tropics that leads to deforestation, we can no longer claim that biofuels acts as a climate solution.

And then that insight is taken forward to say that anytime we have some kind of production decision, we have to think beyond the boundaries of what’s happening on the individual farm. And in this case it says sustainability is achieved through producing more food on less land because of land use conversion to agriculture, that’s the real climate and nature destroyer. As I saw you wrote elsewhere, you said that your book is “a narrative about lifecycle accounting of indirect land use change.” Very exciting, right?

[00:07:05] Michael Grunwald: Well look, I think you sort of focused on the production side of—to the extent there’s an argument to the book—and I think that’s fair. I guess the overarching idea is that land matters. And as you said, it’s not just the land right in front of you, but global land, this idea that agriculture is eating the earth, right?

That that is the biggest environmental problem on our planet is this idea that we are losing a soccer field worth of tropical forest to agriculture every six seconds. That agriculture now covers a landmass the size of all of Asia, plus all of Europe. And that essentially both on the demand and supply side, it’s going to be really important for us to reduce our demand for land. And at the same time that we basically increase the supply of food to feed people. So yeah, on the [00:08:00] supply side, definitely. I’m focusing us on this idea that the true environmental disaster of agriculture is the fact that it is taking over the world.

[00:08:11] Adam Calo: I guess this is the main point of contention where therefore in the book, it appears that the true environmental solution is this sustainable intensification narrative. And when you apply that–which is one of the best parts of the book—where you can then go through these different food system solutions with this lens, it allows you to evaluate some of them.

And in my read of the book, you come away with the only ones that are really going to work are the ones that have this ability to intensify without being as disastrous as whatever came before it.

[00:08:41] Michael Grunwald: Possibly. I mean, remember that’s on the supply side, that’s generally true. I think on the demand side, like if everybody in the world went vegan tomorrow, which is something that I don’t think is going to happen, but that would solve a lot of these problems because it would dramatically reduce our demand for land. Or even if just everybody who ate beef decided to eat chicken instead, that would suck for the chickens. But that would dramatically reduce our demand for land. Then on the supply side, yes, I do focus a lot on this idea that we need to make more food with less land and less mess, fewer emissions and that often involves some kind of sustainable intensification.

[00:09:23] Adam Calo: So let’s look at this supply side argument. I think one of my contentions is that these demand and supply are interrelated so we have to be thinking about them together. But let’s just focus on the supply because this argument of sustainable intensification really relies on two key assumptions. The first is that increasing production addresses hunger and the second is that increasing production results in a climate or biodiversity positive land use change. So to start, convince me that increasing commodity production is the way to reduce hunger in the world.

[00:09:58] Michael Grunwald: I guess what I would convince you is that you can’t without it. I think, and not to pick on you, but I think a lot of the critiques from the sort of regenerative, organic, low yield agriculture arguments, have sort of hand waved away this idea that sustainable intensification matters or is even possible by just pointing out like, Well, we’ve done a lot of industrial agriculture, we’ve done a lot of intensification, and there’s still deforestation. Or there’s a rebound effect. And I’m not denying any of that. I think this is, as I say in the book, this is a really wicked problem. It’s a really hard problem. But I will say is that we’re going to have a couple billion more people, certainly more in 2050 than we did when I started working on this book. And right now the projections are for them to demand for meat to increase about 70%, which is going to dramatically increase the demand for land. So we’re not going to solve these problems without more food.

Now you are suggesting that just increasing production and having more calories out there is not going to solve the problem, and I’m not going to fight you on that. It’s true. It’s harder than that. But I will say we won’t be able to feed people if there isn’t enough food.

[00:11:30] Adam Calo: I think that’s fair. I just think that it’s not about hand waving away that food availability is important. It’s just that we have good evidence that national food availability is in general a minority part of the drivers of food insecurity. And so to be focusing on that so intensely and then saying, Wow, it’s a wicked problem. Hungers a wicked problem. It’s like, Well, if we think about our food system sustainability solution with knowing what addresses hunger, then maybe we shouldn’t be just focusing on commodity production.

[00:12:00] Michael Grunwald: This is a good. Actually, maybe we should drill down a little bit more. Because again, I don’t want to get too deep into the weeds, but I think when we talk about what makes people hungry. I mean, I would think, and again, we’re wildly oversimplifying for all this stuff.

Because there are 8 billion people and quadrillions of calories of food. But in generally it’s sort of food shortages and there’s not enough food and food is too expensive. Those are the biggest, or at least without fixing those problems, people are going to be hungry.

There are other problems too. But those are really important problems, and those are both solved by making shit tons of food right? In the same way we’ve seen some of this argument with housing, where people point to a lot of different problems of why housing has become unaffordable or out of the reach of the middle class in the United States.

But in general, the most important thing is you got to build more housing and then the price goes down. That’s kind of basic economics. And as we’ve seen with all basic economics, the world is not this profit maximizing, homo economicus, automaton thing where this guy makes more food and instantly the price goes down around the world and people who are living on a dollar or two a day in Sub-Saharan Africa are instantly able to afford as much food as they want. But I think it’s going to be really hard to feed the poorest of the poor, unless food is cheap and food is plentiful and, and they’re both solved by making lots of food.

[00:13:43] Adam Calo: You’d be surprised that I don’t think that increasing market rate housing is the key to solving the housing crisis. But I think I’m just going to make an one more pushback. That is, if you look at the data … analysis of how food availability influences something like childhood stunting, it’s things like access to safe drinking water, sanitation capacity, gender equity. These are stronger determinants of addressing food security than food availability. Let me, just try and--

[00:14:09] Michael Grunwald: You are talking about poverty, I mean, you’re talking about the poorest places in the world. Those are the places that don’t have clean water. Those are the places that have highest infant mortality. These are the places with all of these problems.

And so a big part of the answer is to make people less poor and to make food more affordable. And those are … You want to increase the supply, and reduce the price.

[00:14:42] Adam Calo: One in Eight on SNAP in the US right? Is it because we don’t have enough food available In the United States?

[00:14:49] Michael Grunwald: I think, I mean, we’re not talking about feeding the world. I mean, in the United States it’s mostly fed. And there, I think there I agree that that’s not, that when I talk about how we need to feed the world without frying the world, I’m much more talking about Sub-Saharan Africa than I am talking about the United States where, where I agree there’s plenty of food.

[00:15:13] Adam Calo: So the people who are on SNAP …

[00:15:15] Michael Grunwald: And in fact in the United States, we do a really good job of producing food efficiently.

[00:15:21] Adam Calo: Alright. Well let’s think about this in terms of one of the examples from your book. You have a corn farmer whose last name is Rice. And he says in the book “we feel a responsibility to feed the world.” If Rice increases their production, who are they feeding? Where is Rice’s corn going?

[00:15:42] Michael Grunwald: Well, that’s a … I mean, this is a somewhat different discussion, but I bet on some of this stuff we’re going to wildly agree. So him in particular, or if you take him as the typical US corn farmer, about 40% of it is going to go to ethanol, to somebody’s SUV, which as I think is like an epic environmental catastrophe. And I think maybe we agree on that. But I would also point out that the reason it’s a catastrophe is because ethanol is eating the earth. Ethanol is eating about a Texas worth of the earth. While agriculture is eating 75, Texases worth of the earth.

So it’s not the biggest problem. But in the United States, that’s where we’re pissing away 40% of his crop. And then another 40% about is going to livestock. And, and that’s why I do focus a lot on these demand side issues as well. And only maybe 20%, in some areas less, is going to actually, whether it’s like kind of the tortillas that corn farmers like to talk about, or whether it’s Doritos, the kind of empty calories. But yeah. But a lot of it is going to meat, or is laundered through animals and to meat. And then some of it is going into food and some of it is going into fuel. But if, again, the demand side things I think we should put aside. The idea is that to the extent that we have enough in the United States, we can export more to the rest of the world and hopefully they will use it for food calories that’ll help feed people.

[00:17:31] Adam Calo: I think when I was reading that section on Rice, what I thought about it was that you are holding up the farmer’s commitment to efficiency as a model for sustainable intensification. But when we think about that contribution to hunger, does that intensification actually address hunger?

To me, when you describe when this corn goes to Doritos, to maybe some meat to ethanol … then I don’t think that this is going to feeding the people who need to be fed.

[00:17:58] Michael Grunwald: I think I get what you’re saying, but I mean, in a way you’re kind of making an anyway error that I describe in the book. You’re saying like, “We need to look at this differently because that corn shouldn’t go to biofuels.” And there we agree. But okay, let’s imagine that none of it went to biofuels.

You would still want it to be more efficient, right? We need to do that anyway. It’s not like you can’t say like, okay, if we didn’t have to use all that land for biofuels, well then we could grow corn really inefficiently. I mean, we should grow corn efficiently we shouldn’t use biofuels. Those both contribute. Both of those changes would contribute to us making more food with less land.

[00:18:48] Adam Calo: I think the more kind of basic point that I’d make here with regards to the feeding people side of it is, when you increase yields, I think that the evidence strongly shows that you might be able to address hunger, you might have no effect on hunger, and you might actually exacerbate hunger by displacing people’s economic livelihoods and that each case is important to understand rather than this blanket “All efficiency is good. All intensification is good.”

[00:19:14] Michael Grunwald: Well, no. I think at the margin, efficiency is going to be good. And that includes for small holder farmers in the developing world who are often kind of like valorized in these discussions. But are some of the poorest people on earth. And they desperately need more efficiency. And this idea that, it’s what I heard again and again at Climate Week where I’d go to these events where there would always be some regenerative chef talking about how food needs to be more expensive. And some organic farmer kind of making similar arguments. No. I think food needs to be plentiful and farming needs to be more efficient. And then we should leave the land that we don’t need for farming to nature when we can, wherever that is.

[00:20:12] Adam Calo: Yeah, I think we’ll get to the challenges of the good food movement, a little bit later. I think one of the themes here, reflecting on your book, it feels like when we talk about, “farmers want efficiency,” I think that’s a means and ends confusion, right? So I would argue that, at least the farmers I talk to, they want economic security. They want a good quality of life. They just don’t necessarily want efficiency. That might be a means, but if it’s not, then I think that we shouldn’t always hold efficiency as a universal good. Lemme jump to another question that I had, which is that you have this UC Davis scientist, van Eenennaam.

[00:20:51] Michael Grunwald: Oh yeah, the biotech woman.

[00:20:52] Adam Calo: They say “Efficiency is sustainability. That’s fundamental.” Is that something that you agree with?

[00:20:57] Michael Grunwald: I think at the margins, yes. I think it’s more sustainable than inefficiency. That doesn’t mean, look, I think a lot of people have taken that to mean like, oh, he hates regenerative agriculture. And my feeling is high efficiency, regenerative agriculture is way better than low efficiency, regenerative agriculture. And as I wrote in the book, like I saw in Brazil, there are some farmers and ranchers using regenerative practices and having incredible, incredible yields, and I think that’s awesome. But at the margins, yeah, I think if the question is just do you want to be more efficient or less efficient?

Yeah, more efficient is more sustainable. As I’m sure you’ll point out and we will discuss, like if, if more efficiency requires, using tons more fertilizer that all ends up in the river, that could end up being worse. But in general, more efficiency would mean more of that fertilizer ends up in the crop rather than than the river.

And rather than volatilizing into nitrous oxide. So in general, I think the more efficient farming is going to produce better environmental outcomes.

[00:22:14] Adam Calo: I guess I’m curious just what you think about this idea at a more philosophical level. I feel like I have a zillion apps on my phone that are making me more efficient, but I have absolutely no time. Our cars are more efficient, but we have more cars on the road and our aggregate emissions are up, right?

So in a general level, how do you feel about the efficiency tools that you have in this world and how they lead to sustainability or not?

[00:22:37] Michael Grunwald: That’s an interesting point. I mean, you sort of raised two different examples. The second was this kind of rebound effect, right? Which is this idea that if you make food more efficiently and I discussed this in the book particularly. The obvious example is in Africa or in South America where the first thing a farmer is going to do if they can figure out a way to increase their yields or if the government helps them, provides them with whether it’s irrigation or fertilizer or something else or a tractor or something else that can increase their use yields …The first thing they’re going to do is basically deforest. Clear more land so that they can make more money.

And that is a kind of rebound effect that, if beef gets expensive, cattle ranchers want to make more money that way too. I think the rebound effect is a good thing to worry about, because that will take away from some of the efficiency gains. And I talk about how that has to be dealt with through policy mechanisms.

The more general I point that you’re making about all these different efficiencies in our life. Yes, like a washing machine is more efficient than washing laundry by hand. But has that was seen back in the fifties as this was going to be this great liberating force for women. And has it really? I mean, I would say like probably if you’re the person who has to use the washing machine versus, washing the clothes by hand, I bet you would appreciate that efficiency. And, in general, yeah, I do think that having the option of efficient production, that’s the sort of thing that farmers who would otherwise have to do it inefficiently. And then the eaters who would have to pay the cost of inefficient production. I do think that’s something that people appreciate.

[00:24:42] Adam Calo: That’s so funny because I use the washing machine example when I teach this in my class. So you brought it up. There’s a great book called, More Work for Mother that talks about indeed the character of the labor changes with this new tool for washing. But the time spent doing it increases, and because it goes through our gender relations, it becomes more women’s labor than it was in the past.

[00:25:03] Michael Grunwald: No, it’s an interesting point. And yet like, how many people are voluntarily giving up their washing machines? And is it the washing machine’s fault? Or is it a problem of general gender relations? That is a little bit, I would say beyond the scope of my analysis of agriculture and productivity. I wrote about a bunch of solutions for how you can make agriculture more productive and less destructive. And some of them are really promising and some of them are less promising and none of them really have any traction yet. I didn’t really write about a lot of solutions for how we can make this a more just society. How we can make it a society that values the labor of working people. Those are … I’m sure those are important questions that I’m not sure my research gives me any great insight into. Maybe yours does.

[00:26:08] Adam Calo: I just think that they’re connected. And of course you don’t have to do everything in one book, but I think these questions of if you are thumbing your finger on the scale of some food system solutions that might graft on to some injustice or some unintended rebound effect, then we should be able to, perhaps in a later book or with future thinking, to integrate these issues to increase that lens of analysis.

[00:26:33] Michael Grunwald: What I would say. I sort of more focused on the thing itself rather than maybe the thing beyond the thing. And like, on the rebound effect, I have very specific policy, suggestions about for instance, produce and protect. The idea that we want to tie the carrots to the sticks.

That if you’re going to do that part of global assistance that helps make developing world farmers more efficient it should be tied to sticks. Conditioning that money to the forest staying up. And that’s really important. Because, as I mentioned in the book, I mean, if, right now, if yields don’t increase in a Africa alone, just deforestation in Africa by 2050 could blow the entire world past two degrees warming.

And that’s even if we all stopped using fossil fuels tomorrow. So these are like really important problems. Like the downside is really bad. If we don’t do these things, you are correctly pointing out that there can be some unintended consequences to doing those things. And I’ve tried to sort of point out some of the ways to mitigate some of those.

Those downsides on the fertilizer side. Or just generally with Big Ag, what I’ve suggested is that we kind of want some sort of general bargain where instead of the current situation, which is just kind of like the big guys can do whatever the hell they want. Like we are not going to demonize you for making lots of food however you do it, whether it’s industrially or regeneratively or some combination of those. But we are really going to be strict about making sure you don’t make such of a mess. And that is hard because the political economy of that stuff is hard. But all of this stuff is hard. If it were easy, somebody would’ve done it already.

[00:28:26] Adam Calo: The downsides are bad. But let’s get into the second main assumption of this argument that aims to protect forests. The second main assumption here is that when you intensify production, it’s good for the climate and biodiversity because it reduces pressure on forested or some other richly biodiverse land elsewhere.

Walk me through an example of how this works. Say that there’s a monoculture soy farm that’s very high yielding by your standards and they read an article from me and they say that the pesticides are making it not safe for their kids to swim in the local river.

And they decide to transition their hundred acres into mixed crop production model. Maybe they even plant some Kernza, which you dislike. By your calculations, the yields per acre go down, and then that fixed demand for food will inevitably cause the forest to be felled to replace that lost soy. These farmers, they’re hurting the climate, right?

[00:29:14] Michael Grunwald: Pretty much. Kernza is not a climate solution because it has a third, the yields of wheat, and to the extent any kernza rreplaces wheat, you’re going to have to grow it elsewhere.

This is this, this is just basic math, right? That if you makeone thir d as much food per acre, you are going to need three times as many acres to make the same amount of food.

And this is like a great, and since we should mention the Green Revolution, since it’s the exact same math, right? The Green Revolution since the sixties has tripled global crop and livestock yields. If we hadn’t done all that stuff, we would need three times as much land to make the same amount of food that, that we’re making right now. And again, it doesn’t mean that every acre, every time you make an acre you can pinpoint exactly where that acre is being replaced. It’s a global food system. But I think we can say in the same way that … just as we know that the 40 million acres of corn in the United States that are going into some gas tank, we know that at some level that is, that corn is being replaced in the food system somewhere else and is quite having some kind of environmental impact, even though we can argue about how much.

In the same way, we know that by tripling global yields and reducing by two thirds the amount of food we need, the amount of land we made to make a certain amount of food, we have reduced the amount of land that we need to create food. And we’ve saved a bunch of forests.

We can argue about exactly how many and how many people there would be on earth if we hadn’t done these and done made these innovations. And I guess, which couple of billion of people we want to get rid of if you think that’s been a bad thing. But I think the general point is that, yeah, that if you make, if you make less food per acre, you need more acres to make food and you kind of can’t get around that.

[00:31:20] Adam Calo: With a math equation, it makes sense. But you still weren’t able to answer my question which was in that instance, like, walk me through where a farmer or someone else says, wait there’s, 10 acres less of wheat out there--

[00:31:31] Michael Grunwald: It’s a price mechanism. It goes through a price mechanism would be the larger … I mean, if over time--

[00:31:40] Adam Calo: Where does the signal that the price--

[00:31:42] Michael Grunwald: If tomorrow, every wheat farmer in the United States decided to grow Kernza instead, there would be massive, wheat shortages.

And because suddenly the US would be pro producing much less grain and, the price mechanism would be that suddenly the wheat would become a scarce or good, and the price would go up and farmers would say like, Hey at the margin I can make more money plowing plowing down more grasslands or to make more wheat or turning more of my X crop into wheat and then they have to tear down a forest to make X crop.

Obviously there’s a long daisy chain of this stuff, but the supply and demand. That, again, can’t be hand waived away. There’s like, and again, it’s common sense if that if you take a lot of food out of the food system that people were demanding before, there’s going to be a change.

There’ll be a change of the price, there’ll be a change of the supply, and then the de demand and supply interaction will shift, and you’re going to have to create more supply.

[00:33:00] Adam Calo: I think it’s interesting. I mean, I think we can keep arguing about this, including the Green Revolution, but I think it just reveals that you kind of have a market dependency or to be more fair a market fundamental approach to the food system where I would see the decisions that farmers make to be much more than about price.

This goes back to this housing issue too, right? There was a part in your book that I thought was illustrative here, where you were kind of going through the rebuttals to Searchingers biofuels claims and one of the rebuttals you waved as off too jargony. And you said it was “academic gobbledygook.” But I looked at the paper where you were analyzing this and they just said,

“the conclusions of both papers depend on—these are the biofuels papers—the misleading premise that biofuel production causes forests and grasslands to be converted to agriculture. However, field research, including a meta-analysis of 152 case studies, consistently finds that land use change in associated carbon emissions are driven by interactions among cultural, technological, biophysical, political, economic, and demographic forces within a spatial and temporal context, rather than by a single crop market.”

Now there’s certainly some academic jargon here, but if these authors are saying, “Hey, there are other forces that are going to determine what shapes land use and not just price,” then maybe we should be curious about that?

[00:34:16] Michael Grunwald: Of course there are going to be lots of forces about everybody who makes any decision. But we also know that, and some of this, this idea, it’s kind of like sticking your hands in your ears and saying, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la. We’re not going to think about price, we’re not going to think about demand. We’re not going to think about supply. This is, this is obviously going to have an effect in the same way that the fact that we are using a Texas worth of land for biofuels. If that has an effect, we know it does. It’s like, it would be insane to say that it doesn’t. And now it would also be insane to say that it’s the only thing that matters, and I’m not saying that, but at the margins, like, yeah, if we use less land for biofuels, we are going to have more land available for food and we are not going to need as much of that land.

We will be able to leave more land alone for forests. And again, some of these have to do with …you can do the models and decide your elasticities and decide the price signals and decide the stickiness of farmers planting decisions. Those are all legitimate. But we all know that when prices go up, people demand less of it. And suppliers want to make more of it. I mean, these are just basic things. And I understand the instinct to say like, hey, it’s not all about price. That makes perfect sense to me. But what I hear again and again, which is this kind of like, the world doesn’t need more food. The price doesn’t matter. none of this has any impact on farmers’ decisions. That all just seems cuckoo to me.

[00:35:57] Adam Calo: So I think my argument to you here on the land sparing piece here is that when you intensify agriculture, at best, you are getting a really fickle friend to that goal that you have of reducing land expansion. We talked about the rebound effects. And this suggests to me that if you have these two prerequisites where increasing yields are not the most important tool to address hunger, and also increasing production to stem land conversion is not always going to be the main determinant for preventing land degradation.

Then to me it doesn’t make sense to focus on yield as a central factor, as the unifying factor along many, in the pursuit of feeding the earth without frying it. I mean, from in your New York Times piece, you have this quote where you say, “The more grain their farms can grow for the world, the less new farmland will need to be wrestled away from Mother Nature on the other side of the planet.”

This just seems way too extreme given the complexity that we’ve already been able to get into here.

[00:36:58] Michael Grunwald: I still think that’s just basically true. I mean, we can argue about how much, but again, like I said, since the Green Revolution, we have tripled yields. I mean, there were all these famous bets where, Paul Erlich said we’re going to have mass starvation. We’re going to have all these terrible mass famines and mass malnutrition. And basically we’re all going to have this horrible Malthusian situation that has not materialized because we made a lot more food. And you would’ve expected for us to have used like way more land now. In fact, we’ve used a lot more land, but nowhere near the amount of land that you would’ve expected from that massive increase in food production. And that is like, to me that’s a great achievement. And now some people are pointing out that there have been some real downsides. Like, there’s a dead zone, the size of Connecticut in the Gulf of Mexico. And all these algal blooms in my beloved Everglades and the Great Lakes and basically all kinds of other bad shit that’s been done by industrial agriculture and just agriculture in general. And what I’m saying is like those are real problems that we should be focusing on. How can we solve those problems?

But the idea that instead we should go back to not making enough food. Since again, we already are not making quite enough food, but we’re way closer than you would’ve expected on our previous trajectory. I think when you look at the numbers and you say like, oh shit, we’re going to have to increase yields even faster than we have over the last 60 years during the next 25 years, and we’re going to have to make even more food over the years than we’ve made over the last 12,000 years. How can we do that without this environmental catastrophe? I think if sustainable intensification isn’t at least part of your solution, you’re not really taking the numbers seriously.

[00:39:11] Adam Calo: I think, talking about the green revolution, all these arguments you’re making really have this accounting mindset and you say “common sense” and “everyone knows.” I think my broader point here is that I think it’s a big mistake to view these food system issues as an accounting issue.

At one point in the book, Searchinger is doing the math about biomass as a climate solution. And you write quote,

“what really scared him as banal as it sounds, was the accounting. He liked to say that if you want to screw the world up a little, do a bad thing. But if you want to screw up the world a lot, set up accounting rules that incentivize everyone to do the bad thing.”

So convince me you’re not making the same mistake.

That you haven’t collapsed the food system into a few finite variables—price, production, land area—and concluded that yield ought to be the top priority. And you end up incentivizing everyone to do the wrong thing, which is to place our hopes in the hands of agribusiness and factory farms and hope that they can produce more with less.

[00:40:06] Michael Grunwald: I think the hope is that whoever can produce more. And what I have heard, and it’s been, nice to hear and I wrote about it in the book, is like a lot of people saying like, “Hey, these regenerative solutions can actually produce awesome yields. And why aren’t we investing more in research to help them do that on at scale?”

And I’m all for that. I think anything that can make more food with less mess and less land is definitely going to be part of the solution. But what I think what Tim was talking about with accounting was this idea that the current accounting does not take land into account. That that needs to be part of our thinking. That is the real change. And I think if we had a basic accounting that sort of took into account like how much food we need and how much food we’re making and how much land we’re using, those are pretty important variables. And people point out like, well we shouldn’t waste so much food. And I’m like, hell yeah, We should not. And let’s work on that and how can we cut food waste in half? And I talk about a ton of different solutions. And that will all make it close these gaps that Tim talks about in his big report. This idea that we have a food gap, we have a land gap, we have an emissions gap that we all need to close.

We’re going to have to use less land, we have to make more food, we have to do fewer emissions. And so we should be looking at all different kinds of ways to, to do that. But what I’m saying is that those three gaps are real. And that has to be a prerequisite that if, to the extent that those gaps persist, those gaps translate into human and environmental damage and catastrophe. And, and I think that they have to be addressed. Now, I’m trying not to be prescriptive and I think, particularly the headline that New York Times article, probably was more prescriptive than I would’ve wanted to be about how we’re going to make all this food and how we can do it with less land. Butif you’re going to call me overly simplistic about the fact that we do need more food with less land and less mess, I’ll plead guilty to that.

[00:42:24] Adam Calo: All right. We’re making progress. I only have two more antagonistic questions and then we’ll move on. Let me confess, this is the hardest part of the book to read, okay? It comes from Searchinger’s journey of thinking about what are real solutions once you have this mindset. And you write quote,

“It gradually dawned on him that big Ags industrial efficiency, while motivated by profits, reduced emissions by reducing demand for farmland, an unsettling challenge to his environmental worldview. At EDF, he had associated factory farms with river fowling manure pits, not forest sparing productivity. It never occurred to him while he was litigating to keep pesticides and fertilizers out of the air and the Gulf of Mexico, that they also protected nature by boosting yields.”

So, I feel like there’s two problems here. For one, there’s the value judgment here that protecting “nature” is worth pursuing more than avoiding river fouling maneuver pits.

But second, it seems like this land sparing rhetoric, it really traps you. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy that agribusiness has to be a key partner in our sustainable future, rather than a key actor that has been causing harm to our environments, to injustice and all the rest.

It’s just such a gift to actors here that are happy you’re doing their work for them.

[00:43:38] Michael Grunwald: Let me … those are, again, two different questions. So let me take the first one. I think you’ve probably heard me talk about this a little bit, and this may be somewhere where we really disagree, because I do think, and, and I’m not hand waving in a way, and in fact I’m working on a piece about this for the Times right now, that the intensification of agriculture, from the rustic regenerative Michael Pollan sanctioned farms of yore, that were, I always say where the animals have names instead of numbers and the soil is treated with love. And that this sort of intensification of those into these chemical drenched monocultures and the sort of evil, automated factory farms where the animals are treated like widgets.

There has been a real environmental cost and the main one has been the kind of nutrient pollution. They’re making a mess. They’re terrible. And they’re unregulated, which is absurd. They’re factory farms. They should be regulated like factories. They’re dumping a lot of poop. It’s animal poop. It should be regulated like human poop.

People are pissed. And I’m pissed too. It is true that I think there’s been way more environmental damage from extensification than intensification. The fact that agriculture now uses two of every five acres of this planet. Those all used to be natural, and now they’re farms and pastures. They’re agricultural. That is the transformation. That is the reason that agriculture is the leading driver of water shortages using 70% of our fresh water. That’s the reason it’s the leading driver of biodiversity, loss of habitat, loss of deforestation, of wetland, destruction of the disappearance of the grasslands and the prairie. All those bad things. It really is the fact that like we have this massive agricultural footprint. And so, yeah, that, I do think that is the main focus. That has to be the first focus. I don’t know how you fix that problem without doing something about yields.

You will point out that doing something about yields will not fix that problem and we will agree, it’s not enough, but it’s an absolute prerequisite. All right. The second part, so remind me again--

[00:46:06] Adam Calo: Yeah, the first part is, it’s a value judgment about what a harm is.

[00:46:10] Michael Grunwald: Exactly. Which harm is it? You’re kind of accusing me of saying that the eating of the earth is the worst environmental problem of agriculture and I’ll plead guilty to that too. Yeah.

[00:46:24] Adam Calo: Cool. But the second was that you kind of end up holding the bag for big Ag by being trapped in this argument.

[00:46:29] Michael Grunwald: And there, this is tough. I mean, it’s sort of like, when you support capitalism, does that mean you support, the big companies that are doing a lot of capitalism? It’s true. There are a lot of efficiencies and a lot of advantages to big Ag. and they have a lot of political power as well, which makes … and I’m not my head in the sand and saying that it’s just a pure coincidence that there’s no regulation of these factory farms that are dumping their poop in the river. I’m saying that’s something that has to be fought. Look I think it’s kind of unrealistic to just say like, oh, we’re just going to … like the The Global Alliance for the Future of Food, which is kind of suggested that if we just spend $4 trillion, which surely somebody has in their couch cushion somewhere, we can just have this global transition to agroecology that would get rid of big Ag and industrial ag and extractive ag.

And yeah, I don’t really think that’s like a very realistic way of looking at the world. I do think there’s a reason that 99% of our meat in the United States is factory farmed. In the same way there’s a reason that most of our toys are factory manufactured as opposed to made by hand. There are these economies of scale and automation that industry has been … I get why ag has gotten big. and I get why people are upset about it. And I agree that that’s a hard trend to reverse. What I would say, I don’t know if now I should get back into the nut nuts and bolts of policy. I think we need to push back against Big Ag, not against their bigness or their productivity necessarily, except insofar as their anti-competitiveness. We need to push back against their mess, against the environmental damage that they’re causing. And I think it’s not necessarily true that big ag necessarily causes more environmental harm than small ag. And I’m not just talking about in eating the earth terms, I mean even in pollution terms.

But that said, I think there needs to be a real effort to treat agriculture like any other business. That applies to big business as well as small business.

[00:49:03] Adam Calo: I think some of that is fair. I think the challenge here is when you do a lot of work to equate—and it’s not just you—to equate sustainability with intensification, that just creates this incredible shield for those whose only goal is just to produce for profit or at least their primary goal.

[00:49:22] Michael Grunwald: Let me just say, because I think that’s in some ways a fair critique. Because what you are saying is that my emphasis on yield is something that JBS and Tyson and Archer Daniels Midland like too. And that’s true. I kind of can’t help that.

I’m still saying we need to be much tougher on JBS and Archer Daniels Midland and Tyson Foods and they should not be running the show at the COP. The fact that they are more efficient and that that can have good secondhand effects on the planet, or less bad secondhand effects on the planet than inefficient agriculture does not give them a pass for their environmental harms.

But it is true. I’m sure there are a lot of bad actors in Big Ag who find it comforting that I’m defending at least their productivity. And I guess it’s a little bit like that, that onion meme about the, the worst person just made the best point.

[00:50:34] Adam Calo: Well, in this similar vein, I want to talk about Denmark, which I think I’ll be a little bit more vulnerable and you can score some points here. So in the book you frame the Green Tripartite Agreement in Denmark as a model solution. I found some interesting reporting that you had in there because—I’m speculating a little bit, you know more cause of your reporting here—but I’ve been following the case. This agreement is saying, Hey, let’s bring together different sectors of the Danish economy and stakeholders to figure out what we’re going to do with agriculture’s impact.

And we’ll hash it out in talks and then, that will create legitimacy for a future kind of new agriculture environmental policy. And against all odds it comes through. But, but in the book, according to your writing, it’s the agricultural lobby in Denmark that approaches the World Resources Institute and Searchinger to effectively defang a potential sea change in the structure of production where livestock production and intensive production is really getting pointed out as a key driver of environmental harm.

And so, if you look at some of the reporting in Denmark about the agreement, those who saw a chance for a paradigm shift, they were sidelined. They felt like they couldn’t get their wishes of agroecology to feature in the new agreement.

And they felt betrayed by these policies. So, you see some of the policies and WRI wrote a report about it as the future thing to do. And, I see it as something dangerous. A classic case where sustainable intensification allows the agricultural lobby to keep doing what it’s doing.

So, where does our difference come here from?

[00:52:04] Michael Grunwald: I saw Greenpeace has been upset, but most environmental groups ended up endorsing the tripartite agreement. And the fact that tripartite also suggests that it was supported throughout the political spectrum in Denmark, which has become a little broader than those of us who have our caricatures of Denmark might expect. Yeah, this is one where I think it is kind of the Mike Grunwald Agricultural Reform Act of 2025. Because what Greenpeace was pushing for was essentially their bottom line was, we want fewer pigs, we want fewer cows. We want our old Denmark back.

We want less poop. The fact is, if Denmark has, I think it was the most efficient dairy industry in the world, and the third most efficient pork industry in the world. And if you just say what the Enviros wanted, which was just like, only use half as many cows and half as many pigs, all you would be doing is outsourcing your pork and dairy production to less efficient countries abroad and outsourcing your emissions, outsourcing your deforestation, while what they did in Denmark is really, I think, kind of a best case scenario where, first of all, I should say it only happened because they’ve done such a great job decarbonizing the rest of their economy, where suddenly ag was this huge outlier where other businesses were like, how come we have to clean up our mess but agriculture doesn’t? They’re going to be half of our emissions and they’re only like one or 2% of the economy. Ag, as you suggested, ag did have to come to the table and they had to come up with a plan of their own. The plan that Tim helped them devise back in, I remember I went in 2020, so it was right before COVID hit in I think February, 2020. And he was coming up with, he had this crazy idea that like, no, you should go ahead.

You should make even more food. But the government should force you to do it with less mess, with less nitrogen pollution. You have to do a better job managing your manure. And also the government should use you as like a global experiment to test the kind of innovations like feed additives that will help your cattle burp less methane or gene edited feed crops that will have higher yields and use less fertilizer and be more resilient in a warming world. And at the same time, after you make more food with less land, we’re going to take a million acres of your land and return it to nature, which is going to be a huge environmental victory.

And at the same time, we’re going to promote plant-based eating. We’re going to invest in alternative proteins. That will help reduce Denmark’s impact on global demand for meat. And we’re going to tax agricultural emissions. So we’re going to do all the things. The one thing we’re not going to do is just say like, Hey, you can’t do high efficiency meat production anymore because meat is bad.

And it did acknowledge that like there is global demand for meat and if it’s going to be produced, it ought to be produced in an efficient place like Denmark. So yeah, I think it’s going to be … it’s a win-win there. It’s going to be a laboratory for the world. I expect real innovations to come out of their experiments. And I also expect a million acres of their farmland, which is like, I think it was like a sixth of their farmland to be returned to nature. which is something that environmentalists in Denmark have been clamoring for.

[00:55:52] Adam Calo: Let’s clip this so we can watch this as it goes. I think the worry there from a biodiversity perspective is that when you are pairing industrial production next to your land that you are supposed to then be sparing, the biodiversity doesn’t respect those boundaries and so you actually reduce the environmental quality of land that you have in between.

So I think this kind of shows some of my worldview that it’s that the politics of compromise there, that may have prevented a grand or structural change, which is clear from what I’ve learned from you in this conversation. You’re kind of thinking through what’s pragmatic, what can be done, especially given the urgency.

I don’t want to continue on the antagonistic questions. I think what you’ve been doing with writing about, equating the MAHA movement and naturalistic reaches for good farming narratives in a romanticized way has been clever.

From an academic’s perspective, the critique of the good movement is fairly known. But, you have told me that you offended Alice Waters at a Berkeley event. I’ve also written skeptically about Chez Panisse. So why do we agree here? What’s the problem here, in your view?

And what should be done?

[00:57:04] Michael Grunwald: I don’t know exactly why Alice Waters was glaring daggers at me during my entire debate with an agroecology professor from Berkeley. But I assume it’s that she just doesn’t like this idea that her $300 a plate meal that’s grown in glorified gardens is not really a climate solution or an environmental solution. That it’s in fact just a kind of indulgent, luxury good that is actually coming at the expense of a forest and grasslands. And that she is certainly one of those people who believe that food should be more expensive. That that would be a good thing and I just don’t think that true. I would like to see more production, lower prices, more accessibility, and more affordability.

[00:58:00] Adam Calo: I think where we might disagree here is I think that gastronomy is an important piece of a food system solution. It matters not just what is grown or the yields—what are yields? What are you measuring here?—But who is being nourished? How are they being nourished?

Can people’s cultural relations to food be maintained through whatever kind of sustainability solution? And I think from the local good food movement, I think you probably agree that if you go to visit these farms, they are really nice places to be. And the food is delicious.

And I think that the practices that some of these farmers use are important lighthouses for what could be done elsewhere. But I think the theory of change through, kind of elite to elite consumption and production cycles, I don’t think that’s, especially, under the urgency of some of these climate and social problems, that’s going to be what’s going to do it for us.

[00:58:51] Michael Grunwald: I think that’s true. But now, maybe we should just join arms and agree that on this that I’m not totally a useful idiot. But I actually do want to point out that I do like some of these farms and they’re great. And one of the reasons they’re great is that they’re often growing a lot of vegetables and a lot of fruit. Which is really cool because I think we need more fruit and vegetable production. although I’ll say like, I live in Florida where we have kind of industrial fruit and vegetable production and that makes healthy food too. It makes it with like a lot of pesticides and a lot of nastiness and I wrote a book about the Everglades where some of these guys have been a real menace.

But what I will say, and this is where I’ve gotten often crosswise with MAHA people is that I think the good food movement generally, and really I think just people, tend to overstate the connection between how food is grown and how healthy and nutritious it is. Like a soybean can be an edamame or it can be fed to a chicken and become like a Chick-fil-A crispy chicken sandwich.

It can be Twinkies. It can be anything. And I think there are a lot of people’s complaints with the industrial food system and ultra processed foods and things like that are actually somewhat disconnected from the question of how this stuff is grown.

I mean, just because like a lot of organic farms send their stuff to the farmer’s market and people assume that kind of stuff is generally healthier and which healthier is, like fruits and vegetables are healthier, not taking in more calories than you burn is healthier. And not eating too much sugar is healthier and not eating too much red meat is healthier. It is true that we eat a lot of shit in the United States and a lot of it is grown industrially, but it’s not shit because it’s grown industrially. It’s just shit because it’s shit.

[01:01:00] Adam Calo: Health and production style is too linked. I think that’s where we agree. But I think we should question why those shit products are being made and who gets to decide.

One of the themes of the book that comes out a lot is that you have this faith in, in the wizards or the technological advances. That they’re more rational and useful than the prophets.

I did notice reading the book that it spends a lot of time in the corner of long shot techno fixes that appear to be failing time and time again. But explain your belief in the wizard theory of change and kind of how do you square that with the struggling nature of the food techno fixes that you chronicle in your book.

[01:01:39] Michael Grunwald: I like prophets too. Remember, like I said, my first book was about the Everglades. I’m a nature guy. Like you said, I don’t think I am gloss about, about technology. I write about all kinds of big technological ideas that are struggling in the marketplace and are just in some ways … I guess you’re the sort belief in organic farming and agroecology, in a way that’s sort of tends to be lumped in with, with prophets in the wizard prophet makeup. But in a way, those are technologies too. And in fact in Brazil I wrote about how some of them are working really well, particularly on the, pasture regenerative intensification side. What I will say, and it is true, is that I think as a species we’re not awesome at making great sacrifices for future generations and the health of the planet. But we are really good at inventing stuff. So I do think that to the extent that we can come up with whether it’s new technologies or even new practices that allow us to make more food with less fertilizer or at least less fertilizer waste, or make more beef with less land and less methane emissions.

I do think those are the kinds of problems that humans are good at solving. But as you say, we haven’t solved them yet. And I don’t pretend that we have.

[01:03:26] Adam Calo: I think if you want to view politics as a technology then, the breakdown between wizards and prophets just becomes a lot more fluid. But kind on that point about agroecology, let’s assume for a moment that the flawed land sparing model is correct and that yields should be the alpha dog of sustainable food.

Given that we have good empirics, today, that agroecological methods can be competitive with industrial monocultures purely in terms of yields, not about any of the other additional benefits that we might care about. But they control vastly less control over land and capital.

Why won’t you go long on agroecology as you do these other technologies? Like what’s the difference between--

[01:04:03] Michael Grunwald: Oh, I do

[01:04:04] Adam Calo: You do? But then why do you say that this 4 trillion investment (From GAFF) is not a good idea? I was so surprised to read the amount of money being thrown into the cell ag in the book, which is startling.

It was like, again and again, you were just listing all the, all the investment figures.

[01:04:19] Michael Grunwald: Well, actually, but actually this is a good, like, no, I don’t think it’s startling. It’s like we’ve invested $3 billion in cell ag in its entire history. There was like $500 billion invested in solar last year. I mean, I think cell ag is like a really exciting technology that can help solve, or at least really chip away a big a lot of these problems over time. I would like to see much more investment in that. I also agree that there should be investment in organic and regenerative technologies to help. And practices to help with a focus on yield. I think that’s great. And I think you’re seeing Brazil, they’re starting to do quite a bit of that.

[01:05:07] Adam Calo: I guess just kind of one final point on this is, if you’re trying to evaluate potential winners here and you’re an investor and you’ve got one that have had this head start, and you have this other, which has vastly overperformed but doesn’t have as much resources. That seems like the clearer one that you might want to bet on.

[01:05:23] Michael Grunwald: Which is what, I mean, agroecology been around for I don’t know 12,000 years, right?

[01:05:33] Adam Calo: But the amount of investment in ecological practices, the amount of land that is controlled by farmers doing it and the ability to come close into yields or sometimes exceed yields based on some of these exemplars. It sounds like if you have a model that can produce in situ biodiversity and get close to the yields that you think is very important, right?

That seems, even under the land sparing logic, a clear investment target.

[01:05:58] Michael Grunwald: Absolutely. But that’s not where they’re getting their $4 trillion. I mean, like we were talking about many orders of magnitudes different and this is why Tim’s line about how we need to hurry the fuck up and figure shit out. I would absolutely apply that to regenerative and organic systems as well. There I one hundred percent agree. I think we should be, on the research side, we should be treating this as like a five alarm fire, on every piece of the agricultural system. It’s just when they talk about spending $4 trillion to transform global agriculture.

They’re not talking about research.

[01:06:36] Adam Calo: How would they transform global agriculture with that, money if not research?

[01:06:39] Michael Grunwald: I mean, I think this is like paying out the bad guys. And that’s the Rockefeller Foundation thing is basically just like paying farmers to do this stuff. It’s not like a research plan.

[01:06:56] Adam Calo: You have been doing a bunch of interviews after your book. Who has surprised you? Who’s changed your mind? Who has added something to what you think is an interesting way to think about this problem?

[01:07:06] Michael Grunwald: Well, this hasn’t changed my mind, but it’s certainly a point of emphasis and you raised it, is this idea, like when the book first came out, there was a lot of pushback from people, from foodies, from hippies, from, regenerative and organic types saying like, basically low yield agriculture is better. Productive production sucks. As you’ve seen, I push back against that pretty hard. I have started to hear more of this idea that like, hey, regenerative and organic can have high yields too. How come there isn’t more investment in the research and development side for those kinds of approaches to agriculture? As I said, that’s a good point. I’m with you on that. And to the extent that we’ve overinvested in big ag yield research and underinvested in regenerative ag yield research, I think that’s a really good point that I talked about some in the potential of regenerative practices to create kick-ass yields in Brazil in the book. But it’s something that I’m now thinking about and emphasizing more.

[01:08:31] Adam Calo: I want to end by, by making a pitch for your next book

[01:08:33] Michael Grunwald: My wife’s going to kill you.

[01:08:34] Adam Calo: Or your next article. The best part of your book for me is how you bring to life these different solutions. So you have reporting skills, you’re writing in an accessible way.

You’re bringing this big picture idea that agriculture is really important for the climate to the fore. I think that’s great. You also have a background in political reporting. The last line in your book is “Every Acre is Sacred.” I felt, reading through your book, if you read between the lines, every time Searchinger comes up against trying to get what he believes is right, the role of politics on land use change is everywhere.

Not just indirect land use change, but the way politics shape how land get used. What do you think about a story about the politics that shape what happens on the land and not just the economics? Who would you call instead of Searchinger, how would you tell the story and does that interest you?

[01:09:21] Michael Grunwald: I don’t know if you saw it, but a couple months ago I had actually did two New York Times columns in the last few months, in different ways. Banging my spoon in my highchair about the way the United States government treats agriculture. One of them was specifically, I think the headline was Democrats Should Stop Pandering to Farmers. It was about how there’s this traditional deal where we would support these absurd corporate welfare farm subsidies for the biggest farmers, turn a blind eye to their environmental messes. And in exchange, Republicans would support food stamps. Remember there used to be a fair amount of rural Democrats too. But now of course there aren’t and Republicans have turned their back on the food stamp part of the situation. So I’m saying this is an awesome time to actually have this fight and to start thinking about … I’m talking about US politics, but instead of having both parties focused on, the 2 million farmers in America, how about have one one party that cares more about the 350 million eaters?

And right now you look at the stuff Trump is doing it’s an awesome opportunity for a party that was willing to piss off some big farmers. But, you would be against tariffs, you’d be against cracking down on migrant farm workers. You’d be against biofuel mandates. These are all things that increase the price of food. You’d be against the US Sugar Program and all those other … the way crop insurance is done and some of price loss replacement programs that all basically put a floor under food prices.

So I think like there are opportunities, especially now that generally and food affordability in particular has become such a potent political issue. I’ve definitely been pushing on this idea that this is a great opportunity to rethink the politics of this stuff. It’ll be hard, but everything I write about is hard.

[01:11:33] Adam Calo: I think it’s a great place to end. Mike Grunwald, thanks for coming on the podcast.

[01:11:36] Michael Grunwald: Well, thanks for having me.