Agriculture tends to be the fall guy for all our planet’s ills. While it’s true that agriculture is one of the main drivers of global land use change, productivity gains from the adoption of improved crop varieties has limited some of farming’s more negative impacts. In fact, a new study from Purdue University shows how crop improvements over the past six decades have resulted in global benefits to the environment and food system sustainability.
Agriculture covers about 37% of the world’s land area and generates one-fourth of greenhouse gas emissions that humans produce. The study, led by Purdue’s Uris Baldos, research associate professor of agricultural economics, found that improved crop varieties generally lowered commodity prices, which reduced incentives to expand cropland except in those areas where productivity gains outweighed price declines. The net global effect of technology adoption was to limit the conversion of natural habitat to agricultural use, although it did cause cropland to expand in some areas.
Baldos and his co-authors estimate that adoption of improved crop varieties in developing countries saved on-net more than 39 million acres worldwide from 1961 to 2015. At the same time, crop production increased by +226 million metric tons while crop prices dropped by nearly -2% as a result of the improved crop varieties.
Additionally, the study found that, globally, reduced agricultural land use resulting from improved crop varieties saved 1,043 animal and plant species. Saved plant species numbered 818, along with 225 amphibian, bird, mammal and reptile species. “We find that roughly 80% of the avoided losses in plant species are located within 31 out of 34 biodiversity hot spots which are mapped in our model,” the team reported.
The study is the first to undertake a fine-scale analysis back to the early 1960s. The team incorporated global data from approximately 100,000 grid cells using Purdue’s global model of agriculture, land use, and the environment, called the Simplified International Model of Agricultural Prices, Land Use, and the Environment—Gridded, or SIMPLE-G. The model incorporated a novel decades-long dataset of variety adoption and farm-level crop yields provided by co-author Keith Fuglie, an economist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture Economic Research Service. The full study is available HERE.
