Yet, despite all of this devastation, the past century has also seen a miraculous change in our ability to produce food. We’ve managed to feed more people using less space than ever before. Currently we farm 38 percent of all the land in the world. If production rates had remained as they were in 1961, we would have needed 82 percent to produce the same amount of food. This is what petrochemical-backed agricultural intensification has made possible. The challenge going forward is to replace this unsustainable brute force with a considerably more nuanced approach. If we can learn to work with
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