The incremental improvements in agriculture every day will get us two-thirds of the way to a sustainable future, director of University of Nottingham Food Systems Institute Dr Jack Bobo has said.

Instead of blaming agriculture for not getting all the way, the sector should be helped get across the finish line, he told the Agricultural Science Association (ASA) conference at the Kilashee Hotel on Thursday 7 September.

“Often people are beating up on agriculture for what it is not doing, but not talking about what it is doing.

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“The resources necessary to produce a bushel of corn in the US between 1980 and 2011, we do it with 35% fewer greenhouse emissions, there’s 40% less land needed to produce that, there’s 40% less energy, 50% less food and 60% less erosion on the land.

“If you look at the dairy industry here, you’ve seen dramatic improvements in productivity, perhaps not as much on beef and crops, but over time there have been dramatic improvements.

“These are dramatic improvements in agriculture and I don’t think people appreciate where we’ve come from, where we are and where we are going,” he said.

Food to Fork strategy

Some of the things the Food to Fork strategy asked farmers to do was reduce pesticide use by 50%, reduce fertiliser use by 40% and move to 25% organic.

However, if the EU was to achieve all the goals laid out in the strategy, the result would lead to a 15% reduction in food production in Europe, Bobo said.

“Which means you will import a lot more food. The country that sends the most food to Europe in many years is Brazil. I’m not sure it makes sense to export your environmental footprint to arguably the most biodiverse country on the planet,” he said.

Innovation

Europe, he said, needs to step up in terms of innovation and it needs to find ways of improving productivity, so that it doesn’t have to export its environmental footprint.

Things, in terms of innovations, are getting better, but not at a fast enough rate, he argued.

“We have produced dramatically more food in the world today than we did back in 1960 on almost exactly the same landscape or the amount of acres under cultivation.

“There are about 3.6bn hectares of forests left on the planet and what people forget is that without innovation, if we were farming today the way we did in 1960, we would need 1bn additional hectares of land to produce the food that we do,” he said.

This, he said, is what agriculture has delivered and this has only happened due to improvements in agriculture.

“We forget that innovation in terms of technology and management practices, that’s what has saved those billion hectares of forests.

“Agriculture may be the biggest driver of deforestation, but it is also the biggest reason forests exist,” he said.