Eat This Podcast

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How should we measure what farms produce? The answer drives some pretty important trends. For the past 60 years and more, the key metric has been yield – tonnes per hectare or equivalent. And it has resulted in extraordinary improvements in productivity, at least as measured by yield, and at least for some crops. Over the past 60 years, the productivity of the three major cereals – wheat, rice and maize – has gone up 3.2 times, more than keeping up with the 2.3-times increase in population. And the total production of those three has gone up from 66 per cent of all cereals to 79 percent over the same period. Largely as a result, we no longer see the same large-scale famines that we used to.

Yield, however, isn’t everything. Nor are calories, which some people have embraced as a better measure than yield. The world produces enough calories for everyone (ignoring for now the fact that there are problems with distribution) but calories are not enough.

As Ruth DeFreis says in the podcast, “If calories were everything, why would we have a billion iron-deficient people?”

Ruth and her co-authors have come up with an alternative measure, nutritional yield: “The number of adults who would be able to obtain 100% of their recommended DRI [dietary reference intake] of different nutrients for 1 year from a food item produced annually on one hectare”.

To me, this makes intuitive sense. Food – as opposed to, say, biofuel – is for nourishing people, not powering machines. So of course there’s more to it than calories. I’ve tried saying as much to pundits gung-ho for yield or calories, even before I read the paper, but with no great success. So when the topic came up again I jumped at the opportunity to speak to the lead author.

Notes

1. Ruth DeFries recently published The Big Ratchet: How Humanity Thrives in the Face of Natural Crisis.
2. Metrics for land-scarce agriculture is in the 17 July 2015 issue of Science.
3. My side of the little rant is at the Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog. The calorie-fans can put their own side up if they’re so minded.
4. A couple of weeks later, my compadre Luigi wrote about the Science paper and added his own views.

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The Dark Ages ran for about 400 years, from around the fall of the Roman Empire, in the middle of the 6th century, to around the 10th or 11th centuries. It was dark because the light of Rome had been extinguished, while that of the Renaissance had not yet burst into flame. And it was supposed to be a time when the culture and economy of Europe slumped. Peasants in scattered rural settlements scratched out a living in ignorance and obscurity. Recent archaeological excavations, however, have changed the way people look at the Dark Ages.

Richard Hodges, President of the American University in Rome, wrote a book back in the 1980s called Dark Age Economics, and it subscribed, more or less, to the prevailing wisdom. Recently, though, he has completely written the story, and Dark Ace Economics: A New Audit reinterprets this fascinating period in Europe’s development. He presented a very brief introduction at the recent sustainability conference organised by the American University of Rome and the American Academy in Rome, where he said that farming in the Dark Ages was much more productive and sustainable than people previously thought. Luckily, the American University in Rome is close at hand.

There is a lot more I would have liked to go into; the spread of the plough, animal breeding, the wool economy. I confess I find this sort of thing very beguiling, and I hope you do too. Maybe another time.

Notes

1. Dark Ace Economics: A New Audit is published by Bloomsbury.
2. I remember reading Marshall Sahlins’ The Original Affluent Society when it first came out, and it made a huge impression. (As did Marv Harris, but that’s a story for another day.)
3. The extreme weather events of 535–536 were news to me; they shouldn’t have been.