In the first few weeks of his second term, President Donald Trump created headache after headache for agricultural communities. From nominating health quack Robert Kennedy Jr. to head the Department of Health and Human Services to launching and then pausing tariffs on Mexico and Canada, the Trump administration has kept farmers and observers of U.S. agriculture on their toes.

As focus shifted in the past few weeks to trade relations with China, the impending reform (or repeal) of the Inflation Reduction Act, and new tariffs on steel and aluminum imports, some of that agriculture-related concern has waned. But, with tariffs on Mexican and Canadian goods still on the menu for later this month, U.S. farmers are still waiting to exhale.

United States agriculture produces almost everything, and does so more efficiently and with less environmental impact than other top producers. But overall the industry is dominated by livestock, grain, dairy and commodity crops. The United States exports the surplus of those products—often as raw ingredients or inputs into other products—and imports lots of fruits, vegetables, and products like cheese, wine, and beer. Tariffs on Canada and Mexico will impact the prices of those everyday food items. Retaliatory measures threaten to undercut America’s largest producers and challenge their main source of comparative advantage—large-scale, efficient production of commodity products.

Commentators from Center for American Progress to Mitch McConnell have outlined the outsized expected impacts of Trump’s proposed tariffs and the likely retaliatory tariffs from our trade partners to the north and south. For consumers, prices on food are likely to go up, contradicting Trump’s promises to end inflation. For producers, tariffs threaten export markets and the almost $60 billion in agricultural sales to Canada and Mexico. Indeed, consumer pain and producer unprofitability are almost certain.

What is less certain are the long-term consequences of the proposed tariffs on U.S. agriculture. Can tariffs really reshape American agriculture into an “America First” farm system? Can abrupt trade policy incentivize shifts in production from commodities like corn and soybeans to higher value crops? Can tariffs bring American farmers out of a supposed race-to-the-bottom competition with commodity crop producers in places like Brazil, where they can undercut U.S. farms on cost and drive down prices?

The answer to all of the above is “maybe”, but not without a great deal of pain in the short term. And even if it succeeds, the long-term consequences of trying to accomplish such a feat through significant and prolonged tariffs would likely be a diminished U.S. agricultural sector, long-term price inflation for American consumers, and far more global emissions and deforestation stemming from agricultural production.

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We Don’t Export What We Import

Although the United States has long been the global leader in agricultural exports, recent years have seen the balance shift, with greater growth in agricultural imports—mainly fresh produce, cheese, beer, and wine. In fact, in 2025 the United States is projected to see its largest agricultural trade deficit in recent history. While U.S. exports will reach close to $170 billion, imports will skyrocket to over $200 billion.

Mexico, Canada, and China remain the top importers of U.S. agricultural goods, with projected totals of $29.9 billion, $29.2 billion, and $23.3 billion, respectively, in 2025. Altogether, these three countries receive just under half of all U.S. agricultural exports.

On the other side of the coin, Canada and Mexico are projected to originate just over $90 billion in U.S. imported agricultural goods in 2025—Mexico is projected to be the leading food exporter to the U.S. with just under $50 billion. Canada is second, with about $42 billion in food exports to the United States. China is not a significant food exporter to the United States, with only about $6 billion in total food exports.

The USDA categorizes just about a quarter of U.S. agricultural exports as “horticultural products,” which includes fresh fruits and vegetables, as well as some processed products like beer and wine. Livestock, dairy, and poultry products; grains and feeds; and oilseeds and products each account for about a quarter of exports, and “sugar and tropical products” making up the small remainder.

On the other side of the ledger, a little more than half of U.S. imports are “horticultural products.” The remaining imports are fairly evenly distributed amongst the remaining categories.

In short, the United States overproduces (and sends to other countries) livestock, grains, and oilseeds. It underproduces (and imports from other countries) a lot of what we actually think of as food: fruits, vegetables, cheeses, yogurt, meat, and other goods we purchase at the grocery store.

A prolonged trade war with Canada, Mexico, and China could shift that balance, disincentivizing commodity crop production—soybeans, corn, etc—in favor of production of fruits, vegetables, and value-added lightly-processed foods.

To understand why, look at avocados. Americans consumed about 3 billion pounds of avocados in 2023. The vast majority of those avocados are grown in the Mexican state of Michoacan. A trade war that raises the price of imported avocados could incentivize some producers—mainly in places like California, Hawaii, and Florida—to produce them at home, and thus take advantage of high costs in the short term while growing a larger American avocado industry.

But the sheer growth needed for U.S. avocado production to come close to competing with Michoacan would be massive. In 2023, U.S. avocado producers grew and sold around 500 million pounds of avocados. In the same year, Mexico sold just over 2 billion pounds of avocados. To make up just half the total of Mexican imports Americans ate last year in addition to current production, U.S. farmers would have to grow the domestic avocado industry three-fold.

Growing more is not a matter of snapping one’s fingers. Farmers with the agronomic profile and access to the right equipment to grow avocados either are already doing so or are growing other specialty crops like citrus. The farmers and producers who will be losing grain, oilseeds, or livestock product sales, for the most part, will not be able to shift production to tropical fruits or vegetables. No matter how large a tariff Trump slaps on Mexican avocados, Iowa will remain Iowa. Michoacan will remain Michoacan.

There is room at the margins for shifting production. Perhaps tariffs could help dairy producers—who have long struggled due to punishingly thin margins—take advantage of Americans’ apparently insatiable appetite for cheese and other dairy products that would otherwise be imported.

But the fact of the matter is that while U.S. agriculture is a massive, diverse industry that efficiently produces a wide variety of products, the country’s real competitive advantage lies in commodity grain, soy, and livestock products that are grown hyper efficiently in the center of the country. Some of that production can be shifted, but not to a high degree.

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The Rise of Brazilian Farmers

American agriculture, long the breadbasket of the world, has been under threat for some time by international competitors, a threat exacerbated by recent trade wars. Concerted efforts from competitors around the world have brought foreign producers within striking distance of U.S. agriculture. Brazil, with its vast swaths of arable land and fertile soil in the Amazon basin and large-scale entrepreneurial farms, appears almost on even footing with the United States when it comes to agricultural competitiveness.

The massive growth in Brazilian agriculture in the past decades is the culmination of a set of national and regional policies combined with an activist agricultural sector built around huge estates that can wield economies of scale to boost productivity and invest in technological improvements. Brazil also got a boost thanks to Trump’s 2018 tariffs on China.

During the ensuing trade war, China replaced U.S.-produced goods by turning to Brazilian agricultural products. Between 2019 and 2023, Brazilian exports to China of oilseed and grain—primarily soybeans—increased by 19% annually.

U.S. agricultural exports have bounced back since the last trade war, but growth has been historically slow—and particularly slow compared to Brazil.

But how has Brazil been able to expand production so rapidly?

Mainly, through farmland expansion. In 2010, Brazilian farmers harvested soybeans on 23 million hectares. By 2023, soybean production in Brazil reached 44 million hectares, increasing by an area roughly the size of Ohio and Indiana combined in just thirteen years. In comparison, over the same period, American farmers increased soybean production by just over 2 million hectares.

Brazilian producers have also been able to keep up with, and even overtake their American counterparts when it comes to yields. But the majority of Brazil’s new advantage in soy production stems directly from expanded soybean production.

In 2018, the share of U.S. soybeans going to China dropped from around 60% to 18%, and never fully recovered. Brazil was able to take advantage of the 2018 trade war and become China’s primary agricultural trade partner. 2016 was the last year that the U.S. exported more soybeans than Brazil. While Brazilian exports have almost doubled since then, U.S. soybean exports have declined.

Brazil’s race to win the soybean market indicates some real shifts in the global balance of agricultural power away from the United States. But this is not to say that the era of American dominance in agricultural exports is over. Equally, Brazilian growth should not bait the United States into a new race to the bottom when it comes to agricultural trade and commodity production.

Rather, what the United States needs to do is find new markets for surplus agricultural production while incentivizing agricultural improvements at home. Brazilian producers can continue to expand soybean harvests while increasing yield. To compete, American farmers must be able to outperform on yields. Tariffs with Mexico and Canada, as proposed by Trump, could shift production to be slightly more in line with domestic consumption, but they’re more likely going to isolate the United States from key allies while punishing both American farmers and consumers. Tariffs will do little in the way of aiding producers in competing with Brazil, or whoever else hopes to take a bite out of the U.S. agricultural export market.

The World is Better When America Leads in Agriculture

The economic consequences of the proposed tariffs are real. In 2018, retaliation to Trump’s tariffs on Chinese goods cost U.S. farmers somewhere between $27 and 30 billion in lost export sales. In exchange, the Trump administration ushered in $28 billion in “emergency” payments to U.S. farmers—more than the federal government spent in 2018 on the Department of State, or the entire nuclear weapons program. In 2025, tariffs have a chance of being worse.

Yet commentary on the inflationary pressure that tariffs will have on consumers, or the squeezing of the American farmer miss out on the larger consequences of American agricultural isolationism. U.S. farm products are key to reducing greenhouse gas emissions related to agriculture and to relieving pressure on ecosystems around the world.

World-leading agricultural efficiency has kept U.S. farmers globally competitive in agricultural trade. Efficiency has also meant that the United States can produce more agricultural goods on less land and with fewer greenhouse gas emissions. Across the range of farm products, the United States is among the most greenhouse-gas efficient producers.

So when U.S. products are replaced in global export markets, not only do U.S. farmers miss out, but the global environmental impacts of agriculture get worse.

This is mainly due to the fact that the U.S. has been able to increase yields and expand production without increasing land-use. While competing agricultural exporters have similar, and in some cases, lower emissions related to input use, they have far worse impacts related to land-use change from farmland expansion—as much as 8.5 times more than the United States. Brazilian soybean production, for example, matches U.S. production when it comes to yield, but farmland expansion into the Amazon makes their product significantly more emission-intensive than soybeans from the United States.

Some of this comparative climate advantage for the United States simply comes from the fact that much of U.S. arable land has already been put into agricultural production. That is, the emissions and deforestation from cropland expansion in the United States already happened. While there are benefits, both locally and globally, to rewilding some of that land, there are far more from simply preventing deforestation or otherwise expanding cropland into areas with significant carbon sinks and biodiversity.

Of course, optimizing U.S. agriculture to feed the world solely for the environmental benefits at the expense of domestic consumers would also have negative consequences. Balancing U.S. domestic requirements with an eye to global consumption patterns requires maintenance of American agricultural export dominance with careful measures to reduce U.S. dependence on imports of value-added goods and niche produce. The United States can be a leading exporter of beef, corn, and soybeans while also relying less on Mexico for avocados or France for cheese and wine. But drastic, crisis-inducing tariffs are likely not the way to do that.

What’s the Point?

The goal of Trump’s proposed tariffs was never to completely reform U.S. agriculture or turn American food production on its head. Rather, Trump intended to use the tariffs to shift the balance of power between the United States, its allies, and China at the bargaining table for a raft of other, non-agricultural, interests.

Whether his strategy works is yet to be determined.

It is equally unclear how the Trump administration might weigh policy trade-offs that get in the way of some of its goals. Can Trump and his advisors see past immigration negotiations or Chinese competition and understand both the short- and long-term ramifications of tariffs or other policy decisions?

With the apparently effortless dismantling of USAID and the ignorance of ramifications on U.S. producers who sell food products for aid and the hungry people around the world who rely on that aid, the likelihood is that Trump’s short-term politicking will ultimately win out. Still, as the new administration bends, and sometimes breaks, existing institutions, the Overton window opens wider.

The ongoing tariff fiasco reframes the American agricultural system and its overproduction of commodity crops and underproduction of what U.S. consumers actually want in ways that alternative food advocates and activists could only dream of. Clearly there is room for change in how American producers feed the United States and the world, but a trade war is not the way to make that change.

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By Alex Smith

President-elect Donald Trump’s nomination of Robert Kennedy Jr. to lead the Department of Health and Human Service (HHS) resulted in a collective exhalation from the agricultural community. Everyone had been holding their breath, concerned that newly re-elected Trump would prioritize the nascent Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement in determining who would run the Department of Agriculture (USDA).

While pharmaceutical firms, conventional medical providers, and people who (rightfully) believe in vaccine effectiveness have legitimate concerns about RFK’s role at HHS, anxieties about the mess he could make for American agricultural producers have been, at least partially, muted. RFK’s vision for a future of U.S. agriculture chock full of grass-fed livestock, raw milk production, and limited to no pesticide use will have to wait, in part, for another day. From HHS, there is little risk that the environmental lawyer-turned-influence could enact his vision wholesale, but that doesn’t mean the U.S. food and farming is out of the woods.

RFK’s potential role at HHS still holds some power over how America farms and what America eats. RFK could alter how the Food and Drug Administration regulates biotechnology products or trace amounts of agricultural input chemicals like pesticides, and shape nutrition guidelines in ways that alter the economics of farming, potentially harming farmers or incentivizing less-productive and more environmentally destructive farming practices that will increase prices for consumers.

Altogether, an RFK-led HHS has the capacity to make life harder for agricultural producers, decrease food production, and increase food prices for the American consumer, all in the name of conspiratorial thinking and a poor understanding of both agronomy and economics. It will be important for Senators from agricultural states to oppose RFK’s nomination to head HHS.

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Not Out of the Woods Yet

At HHS, RFK would mainly wield power over U.S. agriculture through the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

With the exception of some meat, poultry, and egg products regulated by USDA, FDA regulates the foods that American consumers purchase and eat, with implications on how that food is grown. It also regulates products derived from new varieties of plants and animals, like GM or gene edited products. And finally, FDA regulates pesticide residues on produce.

Through these mechanisms, an RFK-led HHS has the capacity to alter pesticide use, curb biotechnology innovation, and potentially challenge GM products already on the market. Altogether, these will have a smaller impact than his stated overarching goals for U.S. agriculture, but he could still bring significant negative consequences for U.S. farmers and consumers.

An overhaul of pesticide residue regulations that either bans residues of certain pesticides or severely lowers the allowable levels below what is already deemed healthy would change what producers could use and how much they could use, opening up their products to increasing threats from a variety of pests. Pesticides have become a significant source of criticism for U.S. farmers since Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring led to the ban of DDT, but contemporary pushback against products like glyphosate go far beyond the scientific evidence.

Pesticide residues, as currently allowed, pose little threat to human health, and have not been linked to the litany of complaints made by anti-pesticide groups, which claim contemporary pesticides like glyphosate cause cancer, celiac disease, and far more. At the same time, modern pesticides are an integral part of maintaining agricultural yields in the face of growing pest concerns. They are tailored to specific crops, regions, and pests, and when used alongside precision agriculture, have targeted delivery systems that reduce overall use and secondary consequences for farmers and local ecosystems.

Threatening to either slow-roll biotechnology innovation or curb the use of existing GM products has significant downside risks as well.

The vast majority of U.S. corn, soybeans, and cotton are GM—more than 90 percent for each. The global adoption of GM seeds has allowed for an increased output of 330 million tonnes of soybeans and 550 million tonnes of corn since 1996. In the absence of GM seeds, the world would have otherwise needed to convert more than 23 million hectares of extra land to farmland—a land area equivalent to roughly the size of Ecuador. In the United States, increased yields combined with cost savings meant farmers saved more than $100 per hectare of crop production compared to conventional seeding. On a global scale, GM seed use increased global agricultural yields by 22 percent and increased farmer profit by 68 percent between 1996 and 2014.

Backtracking on this progress threatens both producers and consumers.

Turning back the biotechnology clock on agriculture would lower yields, increase crop prices, and increase global land-use for agriculture. All in, that would threaten biodiversity and likely have significant impacts on global hunger. In the United States, it would assuredly raise food prices while also making farms less profitable by increasing labor costs and use of pesticides and other inputs.

Slowing down the pace of innovation by making biotechnology regulation at FDA more burdensome would have similar effects on the future of U.S. agriculture. By leaving new technologies to fester in regulatory purgatory sacrifices yield improvements, cost reductions for consumers and producers, and threatens U.S. farmer’s ability to respond to novel pests and a changing climate. Given the Trump administration’s interest in gutting the civil service, attempts to gum up the regulatory process by RFK would likely have lasting impacts on the speed by which new technologies can come to market, limiting agribusinesses and producers from responding to constantly changing factors in agriculture.

The Kennedy Starvation Plan

To some, RFK’s potential impact on the FDA might seem insignificant. We shouldn’t be feeding children produce with pesticide residues, or foods that contain genetically modified organisms, they’d argue. And while many of those who either nod along to RFK’s ramblings about food, or have equally extreme positions have come to those conclusions based on truly caring for their own consumption and that of their family, the harsh reality of RFK’s position is a world without enough food. And to understand the real harm that RFK and his MAHA coalition can do, it’s important to understand the context of his ideas about food and farming.

The core of RFK’s vision for the future of food is a conspiracy: big agriculture and chemical companies, unhappy with their profits, have decided to poison the world through the green revolution and high productivity agriculture. They do so through genetically modified (GM) products, through pesticides that linger on fruits and vegetables as they make their way to your kitchen, and through grotesque hormones, antibiotics, and feed additives that get pigs, cows, and chickens unnaturally fat and ready to slaughter. This story is false, but longstanding and enduringly popular on both sides of the political spectrum. And that popularity is frightening.

If taken to its logical conclusion, RFK’s thinking on food—similar to that of the Rodale Institute, Michael Pollan, Alice Waters, the Liver King, Vandana Shiva, and the plethora of others peddling food quackery—is fundamentally dangerous to the health and livelihood of American farmers, the American consumer, and the rest of the world. That’s because the core of modern agriculture— high-productivity row crop and livestock production—is the source of the majority of calories in the United States, and a key contributor to affordable food for the rest of the global population. And while so-called alternative production practices, like organic and regenerative farming, have grown in popularity alongside an overarching critique of modern, large-scale agriculture, farms using those practices make up a small proportion of agricultural production.

In the United States, very large farms make up only 6% of the total number of farms, but account for more than 60% of total agricultural production. And this is a good thing. Large farms are able to take advantage of economies of scale, leverage larger amounts of capital, and improve productivity compared to smaller farmers who do not have the resources to employ the latest technologies that improve yields with fewer inputs.

Those large farms can utilize the latest developments in seeds—faster growing, higher yielding, and more resilient varieties that reduce the need for fertilizer, pesticides, or other physical interventions. They can purchase machinery that cuts labor needs, reducing costs for the consumer and allowing rural communities to diversify away from farming—or, relocate, as has been the case historically. Labor saving technologies can also reduce the drudgery of work that is part and parcel of food production, in some cases saving life and limb.

The process of agglomeration in agriculture has also made U.S. agriculture crucial to global food security. Despite growing competition from Brazil, China, Russia, and others, the United States is the world's largest food exporter, and is a top producer across a number of key agricultural commodities, making the American farmer a crucial lynchpin in global food prices.

Despite all this, RFK and his cohort of MAHA (Make America Healthy Again) influencers and alternative foodies want to kneecap American agriculture by breaking up big farms, getting rid of factory farmed meat, and banning GMOs and modern pesticides. High productivity agriculture, in this imagination, can be replaced with a more “wholesome” organic and regenerative production system that would provide products for local farmers markets. This would, according to RFK, be healthier, better for farmers, and the environment.

But, their imaginings are fundamentally wrong. Like most broad-scale critiques of industrial agricultural production, RFK’s fails to understand both the necessity of the system at hand, and the sheer scale of disruption that would quickly ensue if that system were to be sacrificed.

To RFK and his acolytes, modern agriculture signifies something like a fall from grace. We use to eat real food, they say, and not rely on unnatural interventions like biotechnology and pesticides. Their solution is a return to the promised land before technology went too far. But what they are unwilling to admit is that we are currently the best fed generation in history. American agricultural abundance, made possible by the technologies at which RFK sneers, has allowed for population and economic growth at levels unimaginable to our forebears, who drank raw milk and ate seasonal produce from their backyard gardens—and at times starved to death in the winter.

Between 1910 and 2020, the U.S. population grew from just over 90 million to over 330 million. Over that time, American agriculture has been able to more than quadruple its output, while drastically reducing the amount of labor needed. In 1900, 41 percent of Americans labored in agriculture, today less than 2 percent do.

Returning to the kind of agriculture that RFK finds healthy would mean massive productivity losses, a broad reorientation of American labor back to food production, and a massive increase in the price of food for everyone. It’s infeasible to imagine the sheer scale of change, mostly because it’s abjectly preposterous.

The recent example of Sri Lanka banning agricultural chemicals in April 2021 represents a microcosm of what a full scale shift to low-productivity agriculture might look like in the United States. Within months of Sri Lanka’s chemical input ban, agricultural yields fell, food prices skyrocketed, and social tensions erupted. By November 2021, Sri Lanka’s government removed the ban, but the damage had already been done, as food price inflation in Sri Lanka outpaced much of the world in 2021 and 2022.

The Sri Lanka chemical ban was influenced by Vandana Shiva, whom RFK called a hero when she joined his podcast in 2022. Shiva appeared on RFK’s podcast twice in recent years. During both interviews, Shiva and RFK expounded upon numerous conspiracy theories about Bill Gates, the Green Revolution, and industrial agriculture more broadly. At no point did either reference the harm that Sri Lanka’s ban wrought on its economy or population. Both would rather restore “harmony” to human-nature interactions, even if it means hunger and poverty for the masses, than to use the safe technologies we have to grow enough food for everyone.

If the United States were to follow the path advocated for by Shiva and RFK, American consumers would be unable to feed themselves and their families and the entire global agricultural commodity market would suffer. Prices would boom, and without a clear path in sight for the United States to return to higher productivity, those price increases would sustain. The United States would completely cede its role as food exporter to competitors such as Brazil, China, and Russia, foreclosing more than $170 billion in revenue from the farm sector.

RFK’s dream to see a return to nutritious food is really a nightmare for the rest of us. But for the ultra privileged observers of the food system like Shiva or Kennedy, high prices are just the “true” cost of improvement and health. For many around the world, prolonged high food prices are a recipe for hunger and starvation.

A Shaky Alliance

MAGA and MAHA are a shaky alliance at best. But their shared search for an alternative to mainstream frameworks for how to govern—the polity or the body—connects them. They both stand in opposition to their perceived technocratic, corrupted, and perverted enemies. While Trump’s electoral base may share a mental framework with the RFK-inspired and sometimes-led alternative food and health base, Trump’s institutional partners—namely, the pharmaceutical, insurance, and agribusiness communities—are firmly opposed to their vision for a radically altered medical, agricultural, or food system.

And the Trump administration clearly aims to work within these contradictions, as exemplified by its pick of Brooke Rollins, a relatively unknown quantity but one supported by agricultural industry groups, for USDA secretary. Rollins, a policy aide in Trump’s first term, has led the America First Policy Institute since Trump’s re-election loss in 2020. The majority of the institute’s agricultural work has focused on the threat of Chinese ownership of American farmland. Farm groups’ vocal support of Rollins and relative silence on RFK (to date) signals an inherent tension at the core of Trump’s cabinet picks.

Most are expecting Rollins to moderate RFK’s influence on the Trump administration’s decision making when it comes to agriculture. But, if the Senate confirms RFK’s appointment, there is little stopping him from hamstringing technological advances and proven farm practices key to the maintenance of U.S. agricultural abundance and global competitiveness. While Rollins will have the reins over USDA, RFK could still wreak havoc.

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By Alex Smith

In August, Vijaya Ramachandran and I wrote an essay pointing out the incredible myopia of New York Times coverage of food and agriculture. Reporters and columnists at “the gray lady,” we argued, were blinded by their own privilege and misunderstood elite tastes and preferences as challenges to the global food system.

Early in the summer, I wrote a separate essay on the burgeoning field of “true cost accounting” for food systems. True cost accounting frameworks seek to determine the full cost of a commodity—combining the retail cost of a good with the external costs associated with its production and consumption. The food we’re all buying, according to the proponents of true cost accounting, is drastically too cheap. Such a framework implies the burden of improving our food systems must be placed on the individual by paying the “true cost” for their food—a price determined by emissions accountants, true cost gurus, and the United Nations.

In September, these two pieces were married, but not by my hand. New York Times reporters Lydia DePillis, Manuela Adreoni, and Catrin Einhorn published a fawning profile of “true cost accounting” for food, with some neat graphics suggesting that the U.S. consumer ought to be paying up to 5 times more for beef, twice as much for chicken and cheese, and even about 1.5 times more for chickpeas. The New York Times, once again, expressed its food elitism, but, this time, wed to a radically immature framework of “true cost accounting.”

At its core, “true cost accounting” (TCA) seeks to “fix” our food systems by placing the onus on the consumer to make different, supposedly better choices. But, if TCA were to be taken seriously as an alternative to the status quo, the average consumer would likely be forced to spend upwards of twice as much for their food—making true cost accounting a political nightmare. In response to this problem, proponents of TCA consistently argue that they are not actually in favor of increasing the price of food. The analysis, they insist, serves to better align priorities about how to fix our food systems.

But, true cost accounting is not just politically braindead, it’s also just fundamentally wrong about what is and isn’t sustainable. Instead of adopting funky accounting schemes to make low-productivity agriculture look better, groups looking to improve the sustainability of our food systems need to focus on making cheap food more sustainable. The only way to do that is to embrace high-productivity agriculture. 

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The Braindead Politics of Raising Food Prices

The last few years have seen increasing prices for food in the United States and around the world. Rising prices have been caused by a multitude of factors, including the COVID-19 pandemic, the Russian Invasion of Ukraine, weather impacts of crop production, livestock exposure to highly pathogenic avian influenza, and corporate decision making. The overarching trend of increasing food prices has, thankfully, cooled, but the fast-approaching U.S. presidential election remains influenced by the fact that consumers feel they are paying more and more at the grocery store.

The New York Times has covered this consistently. A recent article highlighted how food inflation has slowed in recent months, but prices remain higher than in previous years which continues to strain budgets and sow discontent for the political party in power.

While American food prices have declined over the past century—thanks to massive increases in agricultural productivity—food prices remain a sticking point for many consumers in the United States. In 2022, America’s lowest quintile of income earners spent approximately 30% of their income on food while the second-lowest quintile of income earners spent close to 15%. Because food is an everyday and immediate necessity, high food expenditure means sacrificing spending on other crucial needs like housing, transportation, or education. But for many households—up to seventeen million of them in 2022—high food prices don’t just mean trade offs, they also mean hunger.

Outside of the United States and other wealthy countries, rising food prices are even more serious. Despite decades of declining hunger rates, 2023 saw 280 million people face severe food insecurity. Advocating for increasing food prices for environmental concerns rings farcical to the millions of people struggling to find their next meal today. 

This is likely why the advocates and proponents of “true cost accounting” claim that they are not actually proposing to increase food prices. The TCA framework, then, serves as something like an exercise. Or just another way to point out the challenges of sustainable agricultural production. But there are a plethora of other ways to measure the environmental harms of food production—examining biodiversity impacts, quantifying emissions intensities, tracking land-use and deforestation, to name a few. Why measure these impacts as a price for consumers?

Nudging You to Feel Bad

There are hundreds of academic and independent researchers tracking agricultural sustainability metrics. Life-cycle assessments of various food production systems are available from a number of academic journals, and research centers around the world produce highly technical analyses of various commodities’ environmental footprint. The majority of this work is relatively clear: some foods are more environmentally destructive than others (meat, but mainly beef). And yet, the world continues to eat meat and live in much the same way it would’ve if there weren't reams of research papers explaining those environmental impacts. 

That’s where the TCA proponents believe they can make a difference. By reframing the metrics of environmental harm as a dollar value, TCA advocates believe they can better nudge consumers to choose the food product that has a lesser impact on the environment. If grocery stores were to just label products with the actual price and the “true cost,” these proponents argue, consumers can make more informed decisions. 

This “nudging” technique may work to change the behavior of food-flexible consumers with the necessary income to purchase a range of foods. But, the dollar value that “true cost accounting” assigns to food products is falsely specific and, as it’s been proposed so far, does not account for the difference between different production techniques for the same product. 

TCA frameworks need to have far more information than is possible in order to correctly “price” agricultural commodities across the range of impacts they are trying to place a value on. They will need to be able to correctly source produce and meat, have detailed analyses of land-use patterns where those products are sourced from, and a complete understanding of the production techniques used. 

Take for example, two equally sized ribeye steaks. One ribeye comes from Marin County. The other ribeye comes from a conventional feedlot in California’s central valley. The Marin steer spent its entire life on pasture, eating grass and other forage. The central valley steer spent around half of its life on pasture before moving to a feedlot, where it ate a mix of feed that was primarily made up of corn and alfalfa. 

Under the simple TCA frameworks—like the one produced by the New York Times—both of these steaks have the same “true cost.” But, when you take into account the emissions, land-use, and other impacts of each steak, the difference is significant. A fully grass-fed steak will have generated 50-75% more emissions and used upwards of 8 times more land than the conventionally produced steak. According to the New York Times, about 85% of the hidden costs for beef stemmed from “using land to grow food for cattle.” Shouldn’t a TCA assessment for beef production take into account the vast differences in land-use for different beef production systems?

Similar, albeit less extreme, uncertainties abound across food systems. And these uncertainties grow as soon as other “harms” are accounted for—such as public health costs. As I argued in my first piece on “true cost accounting,” the science of nutrition and the field of “food as medicine” are contested and complicated. Making decisions about what studies influence the “true cost” of certain foods would necessarily require fudging boundaries and making assumptions.

Fortunately, some of the logic of the TCA framework already exists in the market today. Marin-raised grass-fed beef is significantly more expensive than the feedlot beef, thanks in part to the fact that raising cattle purely on pasture is massively less productive compared to a feedlot. That difference in productivity—combined with the massive upcharge of specialty goods like grass-fed beef—dictates the relative price, and reflects the relative ecological impacts of both. 

Flour, chickpeas, potatoes, onions, and other vegetables grown on high-productivity farms require fewer inputs, have less impact on the environment, and also cost less than those grown on lower-productivity organic farms. And yet, the proponents of true-cost accounting systems advocate for us to alter the economics of cheap food so that their preferred products—organic alternatives with higher land-use impacts, and worse emissions—are cost competitive. 

Cheap Food Is The Only Option

Accounting for the “true cost” of food serves to make consumers feel bad about their decisions and make different ones that align with the preferences of the authors of the TCA reports. What the proponents of TCA do not understand is that for many consumers, their food choices are dictated by a wide range of factors, often already including conceptions about sustainability, but for the majority, affordability takes precedence. 

The overarching trend of food systems around the world to reduce the cost of food by improving agricultural productivity, raising yields, and lowering land and labor inputs has been massively beneficial to the billions of people that can now live in relative comfort. Nudging consumers to spend a little money on one commodity and not another will do little to reshape the large economic forces that drive the agricultural and farm sectors. 

In the New York Times coverage of “true cost accounting,” one line stands out: “Roger Cryan, chief economist at the American Farm Bureau Federation, a group that represents farmers, faults true cost analyses for undervaluing the benefits of affordable food.” Affordable food has allowed for the continued growth of the global population and economy. It has reduced hunger, decade-over-decade. And, it provides a legitimate pathway for real improvements in our food systems. 

But in the New York Times story, Cryan’s line is a throwaway. Affordability is an illusion, according to the TCA proponents and their fans. 

But, affordable food, and its main driver, agricultural productivity growth, remains the key for reducing hunger, limiting deforestation, and improving the environmental impacts of agriculture. Productivity growth on U.S. farms over the past 60 years has reduced the land footprint of U.S. agriculture by a fifth and has significantly reduced the emissions intensities of American food products. Improving agricultural efficiency through the adoption of best practices and continued technological innovation is likely one of the largest levers to reducing the greenhouse gas and land-use footprints of agricultural production, at least until real breakthroughs can reduce emissions from livestock production or replace them. 

The advocates of “true cost accounting” and other demand-side interventions in agriculture will continue to try to muddy the economics of cheap food. They will continue to place the onus of, and in effect, the blame for, environmental problems on consumers, and balk at a food system that can affordably feed the world. When, in fact, the only way we can feed the world and reduce the ecological footprint of agriculture is to continually improve the high productivity systems that give the world cheap grains, dairy, and meats.

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By Alex Smith

In 2014, Scientific American published a short but ominous article titled “Only 60 Years Left of Farming if Soil Degradation Continues.” Similar claims popped up in the Guardian in 2019 and in the BBC in 2024. 

The BBC article, which proclaims that the world’s poorest areas already “have zero harvests left,” alludes to comparisons with “Mad Max”: apocalyptic wastelands with humans fighting over the last remaining morsels of a long-gone cornucopia. 

But the claim that earth has a small number of agricultural harvests is unfounded. In 2021, the data scientist Hannah Ritchie busted the myth for Our World in Data. Not only could Ritchie find no existing scientific citation for the claim, she found that such a claim could not possibly be defended. It is true that most soils around the world face some level of degradation. But the level and factor varies by region. Further, a majority of soils, even those managed with intensive agricultural practices—the main culprit of soil degradation, according to those predicting agricultural apocalypse—have many hundreds, if not thousands of years of harvests left.

The claims about soil degradation would not be the first time the media has bombarded the general public with excessively bleak depictions of our agricultural future with little evidence. Indeed, the general public is subjected to outright fear mongering when it comes to the future of food. Beyond soil degradation, climate change and its supposed impacts on agricultural yields are another cause for food panic.

For journalists heralding the “end of food” as we know it, the main sources are typically either activist researchers or long-standing critics of industrial food production with a vested interest in its alternatives—whether regenerative or organic agriculture. Whether it’s the BBC citing the Rodale Institute about declining nutrients in produce, or the Guardian advocating for regenerative farming practices by overstating soil degradation, their coverage of modern food systems sells the narrative that our food systems are crumbling and the only solution is embracing anti-technological farming practices. 

The problem is that this narrative isn’t just wrong; it is dangerous. The practices these food systems critique elevate will have worse impacts on climate, global food security, and the environment writ large.

Climate Change Hasn’t Been and Won’t be the Main Driver of Agricultural Productivity

Although climate change may reduce agricultural productivity compared to a world without climate change, there is no reason to believe that its impact can’t be completely negated through technological progress.

Hundreds of studies encompassing a range of data sets, methods, models, and variables have been published on the impact of climate change on agriculture. 

One major global study, that analyzed crop yields from 1974 to 2008, found that while responses in yields to climate change varied widely by location and crop, there was a global net 1% decrease in consumable food calories of 10 major crops compared  to a hypothetical world without climate change. Another recent study indicated that a range of potential warming and enhanced CO2 levels will actually increase global wheat, rice, and perhaps soybean yields and decrease maize yields. Most studies, however, tend to find that, on a global level, climate and CO2 changes are detrimental to yields. 

Even so, climate change’s detrimental effects pale in comparison to the overall productivity growth caused by technological and practical advances in agricultural production.

As I wrote two weeks ago with Vijaya Ramachandran, the past half-century has seen about 1 degree Celsius in global warming. And yet, global agricultural output has increased almost four-fold over the same period. This increase in agricultural output is responsible for the prevention of g more than 3 billion hectares of land being converted to agricultural land—about a quarter of the world’s total arable land.

These yield gains saved lives. We’ve seen a steady decline in hunger over the past five decades, despite an uptick in the past few years due to conflict, the COVID-19 pandemic, and, to be sure, extreme weather impacts. For example, the amount of calories produced per person globally has increased by a quarter since 1970, despite the world population more than doubling. 

Increased agricultural yields, which came despite a changing climate, were due to technological advances. These include synthetic fertilizers, modern pesticides, fungicides, and herbicides; fossil-powered mechanical equipment; expansive irrigation systems; advanced breeding, including genetic modification; confined animal feeding; and many other technologies, drove the incredible yield growth in both staple and specialty crops, and the massive leaps forward in livestock production. And there is no reason to believe, as BTI’s Patrick Brown, Emma Kovak, and I argued in 2023, that technological and socioeconomic factors will suddenly stop impacting agricultural yields. 

Advancing Agriculture: A Multi-pronged Approach

Combining public and private research and development, the agricultural innovations of the 20th century have saved billions of lives by reducing rates of hunger and malnutrition around the world. Altogether, these technologies could be summed up as the “chemical revolution.” Advances in chemistry enabled farmers to maintain soil nutrients, protect crops, and grow massive amounts of staple crops to feed both a growing population of humans and of livestock. 

In developed economies, these advances have been adopted at scale, enabling mass urbanization and the growth of middle classes. In less developed economies, agricultural improvement has been uneven and sporadic. 

Uneven agricultural development means there are multiple pathways for the kinds of technological advancements that can drastically increase agricultural yields, and in the long run, productivity. 

In developed economies, where the “chemical revolution” is mostly complete, increasing agricultural productivity will mean more and more innovation. In grandiose terms, a new revolution in agriculture will be needed. But, unlike what the advocates of organic, regenerative, or other forms of labor-intensive agriculture offer, this revolution will likely be relatively top-down and beneficial to the massive farms that characterize modern agriculture. 

Instead of a chemical or even mechanical revolution, the coming age of agriculture will be biological. Advances in crop and animal breeding, combined with new genetic technologies, and advances in the understanding of biological relationships in soil, crop, and livestock production systems will likely be the avenue by which modern agriculture continues being modern.

But these advances will require time and continued investment in both public and private research and development. Improvement in the practical application of existing technologies will continue to enable agricultural productivity growth in the short term, but long-term yield growth in already modernized agricultural systems will require technological breakthroughs like the ones that enabled the “chemical revolution.”

Meanwhile, in regions and economies that have not yet benefited from the many agricultural technological improvements of the 20th century, increasing agricultural productivity can be done at a massive scale, simply by supporting the adoption of the same technologies that enabled 20th-century yield growth in developed economies. This technological adoption is undoubtedly the largest lever on agricultural yields globally. Yield gaps between developed and developing economies are stark. Closing those gaps can more than offset even the most severe impacts of anthropogenic global warming. 

Growing Yields or Sacrificing Them

There is a deep irony to how critics of the world’s food systems use the supposed impacts of climate change on agricultural yields to advocate for their preferred alternatives—alternatives that are proven to have negative impacts on crop and livestock yields. 

Organic agriculture, on average, is about a fifth less productive than conventional agricultural production. The practices most closely associated with regenerative agriculture—cover crops, no-till, multi-paddock grazing—often have yield penalties. That is, if advocates like Volkert Engelsman of International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements, who was cited by Scientific American, got their way, farms would sacrifice far more in terms of yields than if climate change were to ravage our food systems. This is true, too, for the advocates of organic farming cited in the Guardian—Peter Melchett of the UK’s Soil Association—or the regenerative advocate cited by the BBC—Praveena Sridhar of Save Soil.

In theory, a global switch to organic or regenerative agriculture by 2050 would have a worse impact on food security, the farm economy, and political stability than climate change, especially when modelers account for technological change. For example, a 2022 UN Future of Food and Agriculture analysis that mapped climate impacts on agriculture as one of the 18 main factors for agricultural productivity estimated that global agricultural production would increase by 50% by 2050 even with a changing climate. The close to 20% reduction in yields that would result from a full blown transition to organic agriculture would be significantly more catastrophic than almost any imagined climate future.

A global switch to organic or regenerative agriculture, by the same logic, would also be far worse for climate mitigation than continuing to rely on high-efficiency conventional agriculture. Reducing agricultural yields would require an expansion of crop and pasture lands, resulting in significant carbon emissions in the short-term. In the long-term, emissions from wholly organic food systems—that would rely on animal agriculture to provide manure for fertilizer, and would still spray potentially harmful “organic” pesticides—would match, if not exceed, conventional systems, but would do so on a far larger land footprint, limiting the amount of forests, marshland, grassland, or other wildland that could serve as a global carbon sink. 

In practice, we already have examples of what might happen if the organic advocates won the agricultural transformation they dream of. In 2022, Sri Lanka decided to ban the sale and use of synthetic fertilizers at the behest of advocates such as Vandana Shiva. The ensuing months saw failing crop yields, skyrocketing food prices, and ultimately, a public coup that forced out President Gotabaya Rajapaksa. 

To be sure, climate change will likely impact our food systems. Some prices will go up, some will go down. But, technological breakthroughs and the adoption of existing technologies will also impact our food systems for the better. Rejecting industrial agriculture would be a grave mistake.

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By Alex Smith and Vijaya Ramachandran

Journalists, academics and policymakers often talk about the “global food system.” But if there is such a thing, it isn’t really global, it’s only partially about food, and it’s not very systematic. 

To be sure, some food commodities flow around the world. Grains, food oils, fish, and even meat can travel vast distances before they’re forked, spooned, or shoveled into a consumer’s mouth. Yet to describe the process by which Earth’s 8 billion people get their daily sustenance as a single “global food system” is a simplification. 

Populations in wealthier regions enjoy the benefits of globally-sourced groceries, but billions (of often poorer people) around the world depend on much more localized trade, combined with some external sources of food—some from trade and most from aid. 

Simply put, the “global food system” is really many food systems, each with its own flavors, luxuries, and standards.

So when people in western media refer to the “global food system,” what they’re often referring to is either something close to the American food system—that is, the network by which consumers in the United States get their food—or to global food prices. Global food prices are only partially about food; they’re largely driven by  the price of energy, which is used to produce the nutrients needed to grow food or is produced directly from agricultural production in the case of biofuels. 

Cue The New York Times opinion section. In a note announcing a new series titled “What to Eat on a Burning Planet,” Times opinion climate editor, Eliza Barclay, states that “we can see the early tremors [of climate change] starting to rattle the global food system.” The ongoing series includes pieces about the climate impacts on American grocery prices, a plea for drought-tolerant fine dining, a lament about the future of natural vanilla flavoring, and an ode to beans in American cuisine. 

With few exceptions, the series reflects elite preferences and Western blinders, and confuses U.S. fine dining, high cuisine, and luxury goods with the “global food system.” What does a $235 dollar tasting menu in Australia really tell us about a “revolution in consumption,” let alone food policy?

More importantly, however, the series underlines the lack of understanding—even by those writing for the New York Times—about how food is produced. Climate change may shift what food can be grown, where, and how much consumers must pay for it, but these changes are small when compared to the shifts unlocked by technological progress or societal change—both of which have long been the most significant drivers of food systems change.

The Climate of Hunger

In the opening essay of the series, journalist David Wallace-Wells offers a pessimistic view of what climate change might do to food production. He points to the fact that global hunger had been declining for decades but has recently ticked upwards. 

A recent report from the Global Network Against Food Crises and the Food Security Information Network found that more than 280 million people in 59 food insecure countries faced “high levels of acute food insecurity” in 2023, an increase of almost 24 million people from 2022. But, despite these recent upticks in food insecurity, global rates of hunger remained on a downward, if stagnating, trend. The Global Hunger Index, designed to comprehensively track hunger levels, marked a decline in hunger both globally and in almost all regions—Latin America and the Caribbean, excepted—between 2015 and 2023 (See figure).

Wallace-Wells argues that this recent uptick in food insecurity is a result of climate impacts reducing agricultural productivity. As evidence, he points to a 2021 Cornell University study. But this study did not find that climate change reduced agricultural productivity . Rather, it found that significant gains in agricultural productivity would have been even larger without climate change. And yet “The climate impacts to come,” Wallace-Wells insists, “loom even larger.”

Changes to the climate do not appear to be the main cause of this most recent increase in hunger; they are listed as the third-leading cause of food insecurity behind conflict and economic crises. Negative weather shocks which impact food supply may not have much to do with climate change. Hot and dry weather caused by the El Nino Southern Oscillation—a scourge on food supply for as long as agriculture has been around—is often the main driver of weather-related agricultural challenges. 

Conflict in Sudan, Gaza, and Ukraine have played a significant role by driving up prices, disrupting global trade networks and increasing food insecurity in poor countries. The Russian invasion of Ukraine more than two years ago sent shockwaves across the world. While initial disruptions have passed, the long-term impact of that conflict is still being felt in grain and cooking oil-importing countries. Similarly, the COVID-19 pandemic turned the world on its head, causing lasting economic impacts. 

Over the past 50 years, the global mean temperature has increased by over 1 degree celsius. In that time, global agricultural output has increased four-fold, and agricultural total factor productivity (a measure of productivity that includes outputs divided by all inputs) has increased by just under 80%. Meta-analyses cited by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) suggest that since 1960, climate change has decreased yields for wheat by 4.9%, maize by 5.9%, and rice by 4.2% compared to a hypothetical world without climate change. But those declines are tiny when compared to the global increase in yields in the same period

Climate change, at least to date, has played a much smaller role in determining agricultural productivity than factors like technological adoption, social change, and economic growth. And while positive trends in agricultural productivity may become more difficult to maintain in the future, there is little evidence to suggest that they will be out of reach altogether.

Even if climate concerns aren’t warranted, Wallace-Wells’ solution for them—raising agricultural productivity—is crucial for feeding a growing population while minimizing the impact on the local environment. Research and development for hybrid seeds, water control, and other agricultural technologies will drive productivity growth in countries like the United States that already employ technologically advanced farming practices. 

Fine Dining and Good Smells

It wouldn’t be the New York Times without a focus on fine dining and the preferences of coastal elites. 

Essayist Aaron Timms’ “Fine Dining Can’t Go On Like This” argues that American haute cuisine must learn from Australian chefs who have found a way to highlight drought-resistant foods on their menus. A noble cause, to be sure. Timms does not mention the ingredients that are the largest users of water in most fine-dining establishments: meat and dairy. 

And it is more than a stretch to claim that we are now in an era of “chronic drought,” as Timms poses. According to the IPCC, soil moisture (a common measure of drought relevant to agriculture) shows large spatial variability and no global trend over the past several decades. Using climate models to project the future, the IPCC shows that we are quite uncertain about even the direction of expected change and that there is a strong possibility of increases in soil moisture over much of the world’s land surface. One reason long term changes in drought are so hard to detect and project is that natural variability is simply much larger than any long-term trend induced by human-caused climate change. 

But the real problem with Timms’ essay lies in its basic conceit: that fine dining must reckon with climate change. In reality, it does not need to. Fine dining is just that—fine. It is expensive, exclusive, and not very impactful on drought, heat, or anything else to do with the climate. There are about 2500 Michelin-starred restaurants in the world. If every one of these restaurants served 100 people a day each (a massive stretch), they’d be feeding only 250,000 people daily; total calories served up would be a rounding error on global food consumption.

You could argue that fine dining sets the standard for how the rest of us eat. Regardless, the impact is just nowhere near as grand as the restaurants’ purveyors may like to believe.

Timms’ essay is not alone in confusing elite conundrums with global challenges. In “This is How the World’s Favorite Scent Disappears,” poet and essayist Aimee Nezhukumatathil reflects on what climate change might mean for the flavor and smell of natural vanilla. She frets that increasingly chaotic weather patterns may threaten the tiny regions in which vanilla beans are grown, thereby threatening the flavor and smell that we love in ice cream, perfume, and more. 

Nezhukumatathil writes, “Most people I know who brood and despair over climate change might know that extreme weather could soon threaten crops like corn and coffee. But you probably haven’t fathomed what it would be like to lose the scent and the taste of real vanilla.” In reality, natural vanilla is not something that most of us will ever smell or taste. Between 95 and 99 percent of products containing vanilla are made from synthetic vanilla flavoring, not the actual vanilla bean itself. In fact, vanilla bean has always been a luxury good, costly to grow and even more expensive to purchase.

And it’s not climate change that is making vanilla expensive. A recent surge in the popularity of natural vanilla has increased demand, thereby raising prices. Storms or other weather-related events may well have something to do with prices, but that has held true since the 15th century when the Totonac people began to grow and use vanilla in what is now Mexico.

Putting the Global into Global Food Systems

The New York Times is right that we need investment in the U.S. food system. But the real challenge lies in Africa and in Asia, where most of the world’s poor live. In these regions, people do not have enough food to eat—only 56 percent of Indians can afford three meals a day. In the poorest parts of Africa, farmers have not yet adopted some of the most fundamental 20th-century agricultural technologies such as fertilizer, tractors, irrigation, and modern crop breeds. These farmers are most affected by extreme heat and coastal flooding, driven by climate change. We need an honest and practical discussion about what it takes to grow enough food to feed the billions of poor people who live in the non-Western world.

Sub-Saharan Africa’s farmers desperately need to raise yields. In many cases, the innovations farmers need have been in existence for decades, but have yet to reach rural areas. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, Niger, and Sudan, increased yields will not come from yet-to-be discovered high-tech innovations, but from the application of tried and true productivity-boosting technologies such as synthetic fertilizers, machinery, cold storage, hybrid seeds, and irrigation. 

Some of these technologies come with climate concerns. Fertilizer uses natural gas as a feedstock. Irrigation and cold storage require the use of fossil fuels. But yield-increasing technologies like fertilizer and irrigation are nonetheless beneficial to humans and to the environment; they enable local communities to grow more food on less land and decrease reliance on rainfall. Extreme heat, drought, and floods have negative impacts, but we have the technological means to overcome them and to raise yields, both now and in the future.

In many ways, the problem with the so-called ”global food system” is that it is not global enough. We may have a system of global food prices, but producers in food insecure regions of the world lack access to the technologies and inputs that have made places like the United States so agriculturally productive. Perhaps then, when everyone in the world has the opportunity to be concerned with haute cuisine and luxury food products, the New York Times could produce good food coverage.

By Alex Smith

On a beautiful Sunday in June, a typical Professional Golf Association event was coming to an exciting (for golf) end on the 18th green of TPC River Highlands in Cromwell, Connecticut. The top ranked player in the world, Scottie Scheffler, held a 1-stroke lead over Tom Kim, a young but already decorated rival. 

Before Scheffler and Kim could stroke their respective putts for birdie, chaos ensued. Protesters wearing t-shirts that read “No golf on a dead planet” crowded the green complex, released canisters of red powder, and put a stop to the fun. 

Police and security tackled, handcuffed, and escorted the protestors away from the green as the crowd cheered. Scheffler missed his putt from just off the green. An apparently unfazed Kim sank his birdie putt and forced a playoff, where he finally did lose to Scheffler after one hole. 

The protest was just another in a long line of environmentalist escapades aimed at bringing awareness to what groups like Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil see as the existential threat of climate change. In the case of the Travelers Championship, Extinction Rebellion wanted to highlight “the worldwide danger of climate breakdown.” The “climate catastrophe,” it claimed, “threatens everything we love on this planet, including golf.” 

Golf is a particular bugbear for XR and similar groups. In the summer of 2023, an XR group damaged the greens on 10 golf courses in Spain to protest golf’s outsized water use while the country faced drought. In 2023, a group called Planet Over Profits stormed a fancy country club in the Hamptons. 

In some ways, environmental groups’ intense focus on golf is not all that surprising. New York Times journalist Cara Buckley, for example, has pointed to golf as a luxury activity that uses an outsized amount of land, water, and chemicals just to let high-wealth individuals recreate. Closing golf courses has been celebrated in Bloomberg, and advocated for in news outlets in Europe and Australia. For the left-leaning environmentalists, it does not help that the name “Trump” is plastered across golf clubs around the country.

In the United States, golf courses cover more land than the state of Delaware—about 2 million acres. They use about 2.08 billion gallons of water per day, or about 0.5% of total U.S. water consumption. In dry regions where golf is very popular, like Southern California and Arizona, golf courses stick out like a gangrenous thumb. 

At face value, then, the impacts of golf seem astounding: Deserts turned bright green for a game. Land use the size of a state. Gallons of water poured into that environmentalist pet peeve, lawns. 

But the environmentalist, and more particularly, the climate case against golf is surprisingly weak given the bluster the game provokes. And the common solutions that flow from those arguments—golf should be banned and courses should be rewilded and remade into public parks—are based on faulty logic. The climate movement has long held that to achieve purity and sanctity with nature, everyone must accord themselves with the aesthetic principles of environmentalism. 

That is simply not true.

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Golf and Nature

I must confess, I am a golfer. I started playing when I was around 10 years old. My father, an avid golfer, would bring my older brother and me to Anthony Decile’s, a long-gone driving range in the eastern suburbs of Cleveland. There I learned the pleasure of striking a ball in the center of a club face. The first time I actually played golf, I par’d the first hole—something I don’t remember, but my dad likes to bring up. 

Every few Sundays, the three of us would play 9 holes at Highland Park Golf Course in Highland, Ohio, a Cleveland municipal course with low greens fees and a long history as a place where Black Clevelanders gathered and played. My father remembers being heckled as a teenager on the first tee box by none other than Jim Brown, inarguably the greatest running back to ever play for the Cleveland Browns. 

Everything was bucolic. Except for the fact that I absolutely hated golf. It was boring. It was hot and usually humid. I hated carrying the bag. I hated putting. And I resisted. One day, I completely stopped. But in January 2022, I decided to try it again. 

Since then, I have been in love. The feeling of a pure strike is unmatched. The difficulty of the game keeps bringing me back—something my girlfriend has referred to as an obsessive impulse for improvement. And the competition of a round with friends makes me buzz. 

But the major difference between golf for me as a child and golf for me today is less a new relationship with the game and more a new relationship with the outdoors, with something that could be referred to as “nature.” 

For the majority of my life I classified myself as “indoorsy.” I thought camping was self-torture, and a walk through the woods seemed like a great way to get poison ivy and a few mosquito bites. When I moved to the Bay Area in 2019, I was stunned by the “outdoorsy” culture. Everyone I met was either on their way to a hike or on their way back from one. I didn’t get it, and in some ways, still don’t. But when I began to golf again, something in me changed. I began to crave the sunshine, to enjoy a long walk outside, and to find solace in solo time in  manicured, human-built nature. This was eye-opening. 

I call golf courses “nature” with some sarcasm—but not too much. Nature is, after all, a human concept full of puffed-up meaning. What makes a golf course different from a California state campground with fire pits, water spigots, and showers? A nice place for people to enjoy the outdoors complete with a beautifully constructed stairway down to the beach? Or even a national park carved full of hiking trails, roads lined with tourists, and even massive lodges? It’s all a matter of degrees.

Golfing changed my approach and understanding of all of these things. I revel in the sublime experience of a twilight round at the Metropolitan Golf Links in Oakland looking out over the San Francisco Bay. I snap pictures of the beautiful cranes, seabirds, and even eagles that populate the East Bay’s public golf courses. 

It has also made me appreciative of the rest of the outdoors. I like to hike more than I ever did before. I even went camping, and would do it again. The folks who presume that golf is an irredeemable environmental nightmare likely do not need some weird ball and stick game to make them appreciate the world outside. But I’d hazard a guess that I am not alone in being changed for the better by golfing. 

But Should Golf Be Banned?

Not for environmental purposes. Golf’s environmental impacts are doubtlessly greater than many other sports, but pale in comparison to the vast majority of human activity. 

The 2 million acres of U.S. land used for golf courses is significantly smaller than the 108 million acres of national park and wilderness preserves, and infinitesimal compared to the 215 million acres of public (i.e., excluding private) land used to graze cattle. The Delaware-sized chunk of land used for golf courses might be oversized, but with few (albeit clear) exceptions, the land that is currently used for golf in semi-rural, suburban, and non-residential areas, like that around airports, likely have few other potential uses. Or at least few uses that are particularly better than golf.  

When it comes to emissions, meanwhile, golf courses are relatively benign. A report published by the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews—one of the leading governing bodies in the golf world—and performed by Norwegian ecologist Michael Bekken, found that the carbon balance on four golf courses in the United States was negative for the first 30 years of operations, thanks to carbon sequestration in the soil and biomass, but became positive and increased as years went on. The majority, approximately 63%, of the emissions related to maintenance at the U.S. courses, came from electricity and fuel used to power maintenance equipment and irrigation. Reducing the use of fossil fuels for maintenance, and using clean power—either from the grid or solar panels—can thus drastically reduce the emissions of golf. 

Water, though, remains a pressing issue for golf courses. In places where water is plentiful and rainfall provides at least some of the hydration for turfgrass, golf courses should not raise red flags. But in places where water is scarce and little rain can nourish the thirsty fairways and greens, the water requirements of golf can be outlandish. In Palm Desert, a popular golf destination in California's Coachella valley, golf courses use about 57 million gallons of water a day, equivalent to the average use of more than 400,000 Californians. Similar issues arise in Arizona, where a growing retirement community’s thirst for tee times means that more golf courses are being built despite drought.

In California, for example, golf course water use falls under the category of “urban use,” which accounts for about 10% of total water use. Agriculture makes up about 40% of California’s total water use on average, and the remaining 50% goes to rivers, streams, and other functions in the environment. Improving water efficiency for golf could open up more freshwater to other activities and reduce the overall pressure on drought-prone regions. To that end, many golf courses use non-potable, recycled, or reclaimed water, effectively mitigating their heavy water dependency.

Social Golf

Banning golf, or even severely limiting golf for its environmental impacts makes little sense. There could be cases where specific course designs in specific regions threaten local ecosystems, but overall, the environmental case against golf is weak. The social case against golf, though, is less so. Or rather, the social case against private golf is relatively strong.

About 75% of golf courses in the United States are open to the public, of which about a quarter are municipal courses—publicly owned by a city or municipality. The remaining 25% of courses, approximately 4,000, are closed to the public and require membership to a country club or similar institution. Such clubs require initiation fees—sometimes upwards of $200,000—to join and charge monthly dues to members. They often have long waiting lists and opaque membership rules.

Historically, country clubs have either outright restricted membership to certain races or religions, or have had quotas. They are the bastion of wealth, privilege, and exclusion, and typically occupy prime real estate that could be better used for housing in areas with high homelessness rates or for public parks.

Take Claremont Country Club in Oakland, California for example. Claremont sits on a relatively small lot for an 18 hole course, but it still takes up about 80 acres of real estate in a city with more than 5,000 unhoused people.

 Building mixed-use housing and urban development on what is now Claremont Country Club could create thousands of new homes. At the very least, making land that is currently only accessible to a small population of hyper-rich individuals into something usable by the public is a no-brainer. 

As a counterpoint, consider Metropolitan Golf Links, an Oakland municipal course and Corica Park Golf Complex, the city of Alameda’s sole municipal course. 

Both courses sit next to the Oakland International Airport, where housing development is either impossible or would be unwanted. Both cater to a diverse population of golfers from their respective cities and the surrounding area. Both courses are far more affordable than a country club (although, Corica Park is, in my opinion, still too expensive). 

Above all, these courses provide a legitimate third place—neither home nor work—for their East Bay communities. Regulars mix with newbies, old golfers mix with young golfers. They are places where friends meet and strangers make friends. 

The Environmental Trap

To even consider banning these municipal courses for supposedly “environmental” reasons demonstrates the anti-social politics at the core of much of traditional environmentalism. Ethical life, for many climate and environmental advocates, requires bowing down to the aesthetic principles at the core of their movements: worshiping “pristine” nature, eschewing synthetic life, and avoiding any and all “waste.” Righteousness, under these principles, means an ascetic appreciation of humanity’s weakness in the face of gaia. Human pleasure is waste; golf is waste. 

Golf course architects mold landscapes and reshape natural undulations and waterways to meet the human expectations of what a golf course looks like. Greenskeepers manipulate flora to create ideal turf for the game, with punishing bunkers, hazards, woods, and rough. But, they do so within the limits set by the particular landscape they work with. Golf courses are a prime example of the hybridized nature that surrounds humanity. Their synthetic qualities belie the “natural” realities of golf—like the rest of our world, golf courses are simply nature manipulated to human ends. Like farms, parks, and campgrounds, golf courses reflect the human-nature continuum.

The aesthetic impulse within environmentalism denies hybridity in favor of a simplistic understanding of nature as either untouched, or touched only by environmentalists. There is no wiggle room for activities that fall outside of their own notions of “green.” They accept as good only those things that appealed to their hippie forbearers. 

It does not help that what environmentalists see as ethically pure and morally righteous shares many of the same issues with private golf. The farmers markets, organic produce, electric vehicles, and outdoor adventures that environmentalists percieve as proper recreation, resemble the other side of the coin of Country Club elitism. 

Where, then, are the calls to ban and rewild organic farms—which use about 2.5 times more land than golf courses in the United States, and often have no environmental benefit, compared to conventional farms—that cater to elite consumers, who can afford to make aesthetic choices about the food they eat? What environmentalists consider as appropriate use for land depends on their own preoccupations and aesthetics: Yes to national parks, small organic farms, and urban gardens, no to golf courses. 

This form of anti-social environmentalism perhaps explains the inability of the movement to garner real and lasting support in the American political landscape, which often requires embracing contradictions, wiggle room, and golf handicaps. 

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The first battle in President Lydon Johnson’s “War on Poverty,” launched in 1964, was figuring out how to measure it. A Social Security Administration employee, Mollie Orshansky, won the battle, and soon after, the measure of poverty in the United States—the poverty line—was set by the ratio of food expenditure to total income. Roughly, if an individual or family spent more than 15% of their income on food expenditures, they were below the poverty line. 

In 2022, the poorest 20% of the U.S. population, on average, spent almost 30% of their income on food, while the second quintile of American earners spent just over 15%. Today, food expenditure likely does not have the same significance for a measure of poverty as in the 1960s. For example, the rate of food purchases away from home—at restaurants, fast food establishments, and more—is significantly higher, even for lower-income individuals and families. This is in part due to costs of food, especially major commodity crops, declining since the 1960s, a relative success story, and, in another part, to time constraints on lower-income people needing to work longer hours in more precarious circumstances. 

And yet, food prices remain stubbornly high for the lowest-income earners in the U.S. On the global scale, food prices are an even greater concern. Around the world the high cost of food keeps children hungry, forces migrations, and reduces the life expectancy of impoverished communities.

And yet, a growing contingent of environmental economists, activists, and others likes to claim that food is actually “too cheap.” Headlined by a 2023 report of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) entitled “Revealing the True Cost of Food to Transform Agrifood Systems”, the burgeoning field of “true cost accounting” aims to set the record straight on what food really costs.

Among others, the Global Alliance for the Future of Food, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the “scientific group” for the 2021 UN Food System Summit, have performed their own true-cost studies, finding high externalities and “hidden costs” of our food system beyond the price consumers pay at the grocery store, restaurant, or market. These groups contend that by understanding the hidden costs of the food system—externalities like environmental degradation, greenhouse gas emissions, and diet-related health care costs, to name a few—policymakers, companies, and investors can better prioritize how to change the food system.

But these studies peddle in false specificity and risk creating perverse priorities for food system transformations. At their core, they tell us very little. Of course the food system produces externalities—all aspects of our economy does—and no observer would deny that these costs are important. That assertion is nothing new. 

What is new, rather, is the faux precision that these reports use to justify their modest proposal: that we all should be paying more for food. 

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Is Food Really Too Cheap?

“True cost accounting” (TCA) is an economic method that seeks to account for the full cost of goods and services—including costs external to the purchase price. It is not a new idea. Externalities, as a concept, date back to the late 19th century and the economist Alfred Marshall. The ideas were further elaborated by Arthur Pigou in the early 20th century. For the food system, TCA analyses take into account the environmental impacts wrought by food production and transportation, the healthcare costs associated with food consumption, un- or underpaid labor of workers in the food system, and more. According to most studies, the true cost of food is often at least double the price of any given product in the market. 

FAO’s recent TCA study found that the global food system costs at least $12 trillion dollars annually above what food products are sold for. For comparison, the total actual value of the food system was about $14 trillion dollars in 2022. The majority of these “hidden costs,” according to FAO, stem from the healthcare costs of “unhealthy dietary patterns,” with additional hidden costs from nitrogen pollution, land and water use, and climate impacts. 

The Rockefeller Foundation performed a similar analysis of the U.S. food system and found that whereas the commercial value of food in the United States sat at just over a trillion dollars, beneath that lay over $2 trillion in “hidden costs.” According to the Rockefeller report, every dollar spent on food in the United States, should actually be about $2.90. 

More than half of the “hidden costs” of the U.S. food system uncovered by the Rockefeller Foundation, around $1.1 trillion, are related to the health impacts of food. They include impacts of obesity and being overweight, as well as those from cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes, and hypertension. In their study, the authors claim to have limited the “impacts” to only health conditions that “have clear attribution to diet or the food system.”

Similarly, FAO’s 2023 report found that 73% of their reported “hidden costs” of food came from dietary-related health impacts, roughly $10 trillion globally. 

These findings align with what advocates have called “food as medicine,” the idea that food is a primary driver of long-term health outcomes for humanity. “Food as medicine” works from the principle that food consumption is central to our individual health outcomes. Non-communicable diseases and conditions like obesity, diabetes, and certain cancers, in this logic, directly stem from patterns in food production and consumption. 

While food is, by nature, integral to health outcomes, placing the burden of human health—in the abstract—on food production and consumption patterns elides social contexts and takes a very limited idea of health. Quantifying the “costs” of the connection between food and health relies, instead, on a deterministic understanding of the field of nutrition—a field that has its fair share of confusion, reproducibility issues, and overstated findings.

Obesity, for example, would seem to have the most immediately “logical” relationship between food consumption and human health, but it's not so simple. The fundamental relationship between food consumption and human weight is perhaps one of the more contentious scientific concepts of our time, at least as it relates to society. The diet industry sells promises of slim waists and “beach bodies.” Individual diets tell consumers they will achieve their fitness and health goals if they simply follow what the diet prescribes as “healthy” eating. But, food is not the sole driver of obesity or weight gain. Things like environment, physical activity, income level, and education all play a role in obesity rates around the world. Simply, obesity is not a challenge of the food system, and the food system alone.

The health consequences of obesity are also not entirely clear. Doctors constantly tell patients who sit above the “normal” BMI range they must lose weight, and that whatever physical ailment they are facing are a direct result of their weight. But there is less actual scientific consensus about the health impacts of obesity. Some studies, for example, have claimed that “healthy obesity” is a myth, while competing studies have found that “healthiness” and “weight” are not inextricably tied. There are significant health impacts and costs related to Class III obesity, formerly known as “morbid obesity,” which makes up a much smaller portion of the population classified as obese.

Food and human weight are obviously tied, but to put a specific price tag, as these TCA analyses have, on the “health costs” of that relationship is laughable. And even if we can assume direct relationships between food consumption and the non-communicable conditions that FAO and Rockefeller price out, the idea that higher food costs can somehow improve those health outcomes is laughable. After all, while poor diets and unhealthy food is bad for people’s hearts, colons, and blood sugar, to name a few, undernourishment from overpriced food is arguably worse. 

Will Knowing the True Cost of Food Change Much?

These reports, according to their authors, share a goal: to influence policymakers and “reset” the conversation about food systems and agricultural production. Ultimately, these reports aim, in the words of Rajiv Shah, president of the Rockefeller Foundation, to “shift the incentive structure that perpetuates our unsustainable food system today.” 

For many TCA report writers and advocates, the goal of assessing “hidden” and “true” costs is not to increase the price of food, but to simply highlight new ways to prioritize policy making. They recommend small-scale solutions to their supposedly multi-trillion dollar problems. But in doing so, they inevitably feed a wide-ranging chorus of environmentalists and food system critics who are happy to broadcast their headline assessment result: “food is too expensive.”

Such a position can only be taken by those in places of privilege. For the many Americans who spend a disproportionately large portion of their income on feeding themselves and their families as best they can, making real the “hidden” costs of food would be devastating. It would be even more devastating for the more than 300 million people who already face chronic hunger around the world.

Today, food prices are down from the price spikes following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, but remain high, according to the FAO. Increasing those food prices, even if they were to help internalize the food system’s external costs, threatens to increase the population of people facing severe food insecurity. The costs of inaction may be high, as these reports suggest, but the cost of bad action, such as raising prices, could be even higher. 

It is also a recipe for political disaster. Broad economic inflation over the past years resulted in significant political stress for parties in power. The Biden administration’s attempts to push past the inflation discourse through large-scale investment bills like the Inflation Reduction Act created long-term economic benefits, but have not outright reduced the burden of inflation on the average American. Elsewhere in the world, inflationary pressures were even greater. Creating policy priorities around the idea that food is too cheap ignores the political opposition to rising prices and assumes that the priorities of the technocratic report writers supersede those of the average consumer. 

Only six years ago, the Gilet Jaunes protests erupted in France in response to rising cost of living associated with increasing prices for fuel. Since then, protests in the Netherlands, Italy, France, and more, have pushed back on climate policies that place the onus on consumers.  Increasing food prices in the name of environmental, climate, and even public health concerns, opens the door for the same kinds of political pushback. 

Like for energy, it’s much more difficult to try to affect change by making the perceived bad thing more expensive. Instead of worrying about the “true cost” of food, advocates should find ways to make good, healthy food cheaper and more appealing, not price out the average consumer from “bad” food. 

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In May, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed into law a bill that bans the production and sale of cultivated meat—also known as cell-cultured, or lab-grown meat—in his state. It apparently didn’t matter that no cultivated meat was being produced in Florida, nor had any ever been sold there.. Quickly thereafter, Alabama Governor Kay Ivey signed a similar bill into law. As in Florida, no cultivated meat production nor sales had ever occurred in Alabama. 

The bans are not limited to the United States. In November 2023, Italian lawmakers outlawed cultivated meat to, in the words of the Italian minister of agriculture, keep Italy “safe from the social and economic risks of synthetic food.” Italy isn’t the only European country scared of futuristic “meat.” Representatives of the French and Austrian governments have also expressed concern over the social and economic impacts of cultivated meat on traditional farming. 

These concerns are off base. For now, companies have been able to make small batches of cultivated meat products, but at nowhere near the scale or price-point that could come close to disrupting the conventional meat industry. Plant-based meat, which is already in supermarkets, restaurants, and kitchens around the world, has likewise come nowhere close to significantly displacing conventional livestock and poultry products. 

Why, then, are all these politicians on the warpath against alternative proteins? 

In part, because of marketing gaffes from some of the biggest names in alternative proteins. Patrick Brown, the founder of Impossible Foods, has publicly stated that his goal is to “get rid of the friggin cows.” In a 2019 New Yorker profile, Brown predicted that, by 2024, Impossible would have already set the death of the beef industry in motion  and would be on its way to bankrupting the pork and poultry industries as well.

Brown’s inflammatory prophecy—which later proved wrong—incited quick opposition. Left-leaning foodie activists like Mark Bittman found the Silicon Valley brashness of Brown and the rest of the alternative protein industry distasteful. Conventional meat producers found the claims ridiculous. Rightwing politicians latched onto threats to kill meat as an opportunity to win a culture battle against climate-focused democrats and coastal elites.

The naturalistic fallacy is prevalent across the wide spectrum of alternative protein opposition, as well. Senator John Fetterman, a democrat from Pennsylvania, tacitly supported the Florida ban, mainly citing the “unnatural” quality of the product. In Europe, where the slow food and anti-globalization movements have found homes on both the left and right, opposition to cultivated meat is as much about protecting farmers as the “natural” and culturally appropriate forms of consumption. For many on the right, as well, conceptions of masculinity revolve around eating meat and other animal products, making alternative proteins a threat to their own sense of manhood. 

While these cultural oppositions to meat alternatives are unlikely to be solved through new analyses, two new economics studies (not yet peer reviewed) allow a more empirical look at what these novel alternatives mean for livestock producers. 

The first, by Michigan State’s Vincenzina Caputo, Oklahoma State’s Jayson Lusk, and BTI’s Dan Blaustein-Rejto, uses an economic experiment to estimate the potential of plant-based meats to replace conventional meats and other products at varying prices. The paper also looks into how plant-based meat prices will influence livestock and poultry production in the United States.

The second paper, by University Torcuata di Tella’s Nicolas Merener, Blaustein-Rejto, and myself, evaluates the potential impact of plant-based meat adoption on global crop prices, and what those prices might mean for crop producers. 

Although focused on separate issues, these papers tell a clear story: alternative meats, even if they do meet the alternative protein industry’s projected short-term goals, will not meaningfully hurt the bottom line of conventional livestock and crop producers. 

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Consumer Choice and Livestock Replacement

The concern that alternative proteins will kill the meat industry relies on the assumption that, if successful, alternative proteins can serve as a substitute for a significant portion of meat consumption. To date, alternative protein has not come close. Plant-based meat sales dipped in 2023, falling from $8.2 billion to $8.1 billion. And the sale of cultivated meat remains infinitesimal. By contrast, conventional meat sales in the United States increased by 0.7% to $122 billion in 2023. 

Analysts and proponents of the alternative protein industry argue that, as alternative protein prices go down, consumers are bound to purchase more plant-based products and less conventional meat. Although this may be true in the long-run, substantial short-term substitution of beef, chicken, and pork with plant-based alternatives will not come from declining plant-based meat prices alone. 

For example, Caputo, Lusk, and Blaustein-Rejto surveyed more than 1,000 respondents to assess whether plant-based meat products acted as substitutes for conventional meat. They broke their survey into two categories, food consumed at home (i.e. groceries) and food consumed away from home (restaurants, fast food, etc.). 

For groceries, the authors found, plant-based meats are complements for conventional meats. 

When prices of plant-based meats were lowered in the experiment, consumers generally purchased more of both plant-based and conventional meat. This is counterintuitive, but aligns with other recent studies of supermarket scanner data. This could be the case for a few reasons: consumers might be purchasing both plant-based and conventional products to compare them; when prices for plant-based meat are low, consumers can purchase more of it, and still afford to buy some conventional meat in addition; or, consumers purchase both plant-based and conventional meat simultaneously to satisfy the preferences of everyone they’re serving at home. All-in-all, that plant-based meats and conventional meats are complementary for grocery shoppers is surprising. 

At restaurants, the authors discovered, consumers are far more price-sensitive about their choices compared with shopping for groceries, meaning that changes in price have a bigger effect on what consumers choose. 

The differences do not end there. In contrast with grocery consumption, plant-based and conventional meat products do substitute for (rather than complement) each other when consumers eat away from home. As prices go up for conventional products at restaurants, plant-based food consumption increases, and vice-versa. Still, consumers were far more likely to choose a conventional meat product over a plant-based alternative. 

Caputo, Lusk, and Blaustein-Rejto use their findings to assess what a 5% decrease in the price of various plant-based meat products, tofu, and salmon would mean for the farm level production of chicken and beef. For groceries, the authors find that a 5% decrease in plant-based beef would actually increase the total quantity of conventional beef and chicken “parts” produced (although by less than 0.1%) and would lead to a 0.01% decrease in chicken breast. Across the board, a 5% reduction in the price of meat alternatives resulted in a small increase in the amount of cattle and chicken produced at the farm-level (See Table).

For restaurant and other food away from home, the authors saw larger impacts on conventional meat from a decrease in prices of plant-based products, but the overall scale remained insignificant. The study projects that a 5% reduction in the price of plant-based beef products at restaurants would reduce sales of ground and non-ground beef by 0.09% and 0.11%, respectively, leading to a minimal (0.06%) decrease in farm-level cattle numbers. A 5% reduction in plant-based chicken nuggets had even less impact, with a 0.04% reduction in ground-beef production and a 0.06% reduction in chicken “parts.”

In contrast with the impact of grocery prices, a 5% reduction in meat alternative prices at restaurants resulted in a slight decrease in total farm-level production of cattle and chicken. But, the impact remained relatively insignificant. The reduction for plant-based beef resulted in a 0.06% reduction in total cattle produced, and a 0.01 decline in chicken produced at the farm level. Reductions in plant-based chicken prices saw an even smaller effect—farm-level cattle numbers would decline by 0.001% and farm-level chicken by 0.01%.

The authors conclude that “our findings from the economic model indicate that lowering prices of plant-based beef and chicken alternatives is unlikely to significantly impact conventional poultry and livestock production.” 

Conventional meat producers have little to fear when it comes to the displacement of their products by plant-based meats. Caputo, Lusk, and Blaustein-Rejto’s findings even give more reason for why large meat companies should develop their own plant-based product lines as both an alternate revenue stream, and an opportunity to take advantage of complementary consumption. 

Alternative Proteins and Global Grain Markets

Caputo, Lusk, and Blaustein-Rejto show that falling prices for plant-based meats will not likely trigger a significant displacement of conventional meat. That does not mean displacement is impossible, or even unlikely. But rather, if it happens, it will likely take time, improvement in product qualities like taste, appearance, texture, and changes in broader culture and consumer preferences. Alternative proteins will need something to get opponents over the “ick” factor other than price changes. 

If plant-based meats do find their way into customers’ shopping baskets and force some small displacement of conventional meat, the impact may be greater for the producers of feed inputs for meat rather than the meat producers themselves. The paper by Merener, Blaustein-Rejto, and myself finds that the small amount of displacement that is plausible in the short term will likely impact crop prices for common feed crops like corn and soybeans. 

If by 2031, for example, plant-based meats induced a 4% decrease in conventional meat production on a global scale (as compared to 2031 projections for meat production), prices would decline by as much as 12.51% and 18.16% for corn and soybeans, respectively, Merener, Blaustein-Rejto, and I found in our paper. Those price declines could harm the farm sector in countries with high corn and soy production like Argentina, Brazil, Ukraine, and the United States, with varying degrees of severity. Smaller exporting countries would see little impact. Price declines for corn and soybeans would, invariably, occur alongside price increases for inputs to plant-based products—including peas and legumes—although it’s unclear to what degree the additional income could offset the lost income due to lower corn and soy prices.

One positive side-effect of this would be lower food costs for developing countries that rely on staple crops for a larger portion of their food supply. Because the impacts would mostly be felt by the largest exporters of crops, net importers could benefit from the price shifts and potentially improve food security. 

When estimating the result of more local substitution of plant-based products for conventional meat, the impact is far less significant, even when accounting for a range of elasticities of demand and supply. If 4% of U.S. and EU beef consumption was replaced by plant-based meats, for example, corn and soybean prices would decline by 0.21% for corn and 0.02% for soybeans at the most. A substitution effect for pork would induce a 1.35% price decrease for corn and 1.68% decrease for soybeans, and the effect for chicken substitution would be 1.26% and 2.32%. Plant-based substitution of beef has a much smaller impact on crop prices than pork or chicken mainly because a smaller portion of cattle feed comes from staple crops. 

While these impacts on prices are not completely insignificant, they are much smaller than crop price impacts from other factors. The COVID-19 pandemic and the Russian Invasion of Ukraine sent crop prices skyrocketing due to threats to exports of both Russian and Ukrainian grains. In turn, from spring of 2020 to spring of 2022, corn prices more than doubled. So did soybean prices. Annual variation in crop prices can be large, and have many factors. Any crop price impact that plant-based meats will have in the future might be totally overwhelmed by other, larger influences.

Overall, the displacement of conventional meat with plant-based products would have some effect on global agricultural production and markets, but the precise effect would depend on the extent of displacement, where it occurs, and what kind of meat is being displaced. 

The Great Displacement Theory

The two papers clearly show that fears of conventional livestock’s displacement caused by plant-based meat are overstated. That would be equally true for cultivated meat, which is significantly more expensive than both plant-based and conventional products, at an earlier stage of technological and commercial development, and is generally unavailable to the public to try, let alone purchase. 

A more thoughtful approach, from both the critics and the proponents of alternative meat would be realistic about potential impacts, both on producers and consumers. It would drop the “winner-takes-all” mentality—as most rational observers already have—and focus on improving the livelihoods of all involved. 

Ironically, “big meat” seems to have already gotten this memo. Brazilian giant JBS has its own plant-based protein product lines and, in 2023, invested in a cultivated-meat research facility in Brazil. Tyson Foods, another giant meat company, also sells plant-based meat and has invested in the cultivated meat firm, Upside Foods (previously known as Memphis Meats), and plant-based meat firm Beyond Meat, prior to their IPO. For these firms, the success of alternative meats would also mean the success of the meat industry. 

After all, growth in alternative proteins must be understood in the context of a quickly growing global market for meat, of all kinds. The OECD and FAO project that between 2021 and 2031, global meat consumption will increase by 14%. So, if anything, displacement of conventional meat by alternative proteins will simply slow the growth in livestock and poultry production, not shrink animal agriculture. 

There are plenty of things for politicians to do to support agricultural producers. It’s abundantly clear that banning cultivated meat or attacking plant-based products is not one of those things. 

It’s also abundantly clear that alternative proteins won’t save the world, at least not by themselves. 

Yes, alternative proteins have environmental benefits, even if they simply limit the growth in demand for conventional livestock—especially beef. But as long as they are not on track to significantly displace conventional meat, they will not be a meaningful strategy to reduce the carbon footprint of agriculture. 

Rather, improving livestock production efficiency, adopting methane reduction technologies for beef production and manure management, and working on piece-meal strategies to decarbonize livestock production must also be taken seriously as ways to reduce the greenhouse gas impact of agriculture. 

None of this will radically change the face of agriculture. Ranchers will ranch. Farmers will farm. That’s an unappealing future for the many advocates and activists who wish to see factory farms shuttered, society veganized, and farm animals set free. It’s an equally unfortunate future for the politicians and pundits who need to create chaos to win the culture war. 

But at the end of the day, it’s a future where abundant meat—whether conventionally produced, made in a factory, or produced from plants—can feed a cleaner world.

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With Congress finally starting to make progress on reauthorizing the long delayed Farm Bill, a showdown over funding for so-called “Climate-Smart Agriculture” is brewing. Environmentalists are set on protecting Inflation Reduction Act funding for USDA conservation programs that would incentivize things like the use of cover crops and regenerative farming practices. Republicans want to shift the funding into the Farm Bill and broaden eligibility to include traditional conservation program activities.  

Representative Glenn “GT” Thompson (R-PA), who is chairman of the House Committee on Agriculture, recently proposed taking the money back and instead putting it into the next Farm Bill as additional funding for conventional agricultural producers. A recent report from Senate Republicans made the same case: extend the “climate-smart” agricultural funding to all conservation activities, effectively diluting the funding into broad support for agricultural producers.

Environmental NGOs have, predictably, balked. A sign-on letter from UCS—with support from the who’s-who of the climate and environmental movement—tried to make the case that IRA conservation funding, as currently conceived, is both an economic and climate win for farmers. The Environmental Working Group, National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, EarthJustice, and others, have also sought to protect the IRA “climate-smart” agriculture fund status quo.

From a climate perspective, though, neither proposal makes any sense. The almost $20 billion set aside by the IRA to fund USDA conservation programs to incentivize “climate-smart” farming might encourage adoption of some practices with climate and productivity benefits, but the majority of what counts as “climate-smart” does little for the climate. Instead of legitimately reducing emissions from agriculture, or even increasing productivity, the IRA agricultural funding is set to fund the adoption of practices that have the potential to increase costs for farmers, reduce yields, and raise global emissions from agriculture. 

Shifting the entirety of IRA’s funding to oversubscribed conservation programs, as Republicans have proposed, could have some productivity benefit—and thus some climate benefits too. Investment in conservation programs at USDA is a popular way to incentivize the use of agricultural practices that farmers want to adopt. It is also a sound investment in rural economies. But, it is not, by itself, a climate policy. 

At the end of the day, neither proposal for the IRA funding will have much impact on greenhouse gas emissions from the agriculture sector. 

There is a strong case for reallocating the IRA investment towards more effective programs. If Congress is going to do so, both farmers and the environment will be far better served by redirecting IRA agriculture funding toward innovation, R&D, deployment of new technologies, and industrial policy measures for agriculture than either continuing to spend that money on the dubious practices it is presently committed too or shifting it back into existing conservation programs. 

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IRA Agricultural Funding Has Never Been Climate-Smart

In theory, there is nothing wrong with giving more money to the USDA’s conservation programs. They play an important role in U.S. agriculture, yet are chronically underfunded. Among other programs, the Environmental Quality Incentives Program, the Conservation Reserve Program, and the Conservation Stewardship Program provide cost-sharing for adopting certain practices, incentivize water and on-farm conservation practices, and pay farmers to take land out of production—and let native flora and fauna grow—when agricultural prices are low. Across the board, these programs are oversubscribed and are all more or less beneficial for a healthy and abundant agricultural sector. 

In other words, it could make sense to provide funds to these programs to incentivize climate-smart practices. But here’s the problem: The way USDA defines “climate-smart” agricultural practices is neither smart nor particularly focused on the climate. 

For example, the Natural Resource Conservation Service (NRCS)—which oversees USDA’s conservation programs—provided a breakdown of what it counted as “climate-smart” in 2023, and added to that list in 2024. The list includes a number of on-farm conservation practices such as alley cropping, silvopasture, and other agroforestry practices; pasture and rangeland management practices including various forms of prescribed grazing; “soil health” practices such as cover cropping and reduced or no-till farming; and nutrient management practices to reduce nitrogen and other nutrient run-off.

With some exceptions, these practices are better classified as “environmental”—that is, focused on local conservation—rather than “climate-smart”—that is, focused on carbon emissions. These practices do have benefits in terms of local conservation, improved soil organic matter, regional water quality, and so on. However, they largely do not mitigate carbon emissions from agriculture.

For example, on-farm conservation practices can reduce the emissions produced at a specific farm by removing land from agricultural production or reducing yields by other means. This could mean a decline in absolute emissions on one farm, but not necessarily regionally or locally. This is because reduced efficiency and productivity in one place tends to increase crop prices and incentivizes agricultural production elsewhere, sometimes in places that had not previously been farmed. 

The actual mechanisms here are nuanced. The use of narrow wind-breaks—an on-farm conservation practice in which strips of land between farm plots is given over to trees and/or shrubs—can increase yields enough to mitigate the carbon emissions from indirect land-use change. There are other benefits to wind-breaks, such as reducing soil erosion, and potentially adding other on-farm revenue from fruiting trees, or timber sales. But, most of the time, wider windbreaks do not increase yields enough to account for the land taken out of production, meaning a net increase in farm land and, subsequently, a net increase in agricultural emissions. 

Practices sold as promoting “soil health” are even murkier. Cover cropping and reduced- or no-till farming—the poster children of soil carbon sequestration—can increase the amount of carbon held in agricultural soils rather than released into the atmosphere. They also increase soil organic matter, helping to keep both soil and crops healthy. But they often do so at the expense of yields and at high cost for farmers. When these practices do decrease yields, their adoption can lead to land-use change elsewhere. Further, while these practices can increase soil carbon levels alongside soil health co-benefits, the permanence of that newly sequestered soil carbon—how long it remains in the soil before it returns to the atmosphere—is uncertain. Whether these “soil health” practices can be called “climate-smart” is yet to be seen.

Pasture management solutions present similar tradeoffs. The cause célèbre of so-called “regenerative” ranching, practices like rotational grazing and multi-paddock systems can increase carbon sequestration in animal agricultural soils. But they also come with massive reductions in efficiency compared to feedlot and other confined feeding systems. And once again, reduced efficiency means increased emissions intensity of agricultural products and indirect land-use change elsewhere. 

Herein lies the fundamental problem with IRA agricultural funding. As it stands, “climate-smart” agriculture is a misnomer. Some practices under that label can reduce emissions, but many, if not most, are more likely to have  little to no impact on emissions. In the worst scenarios, where “climate-smart” practices decrease yields, they can even increase global agricultural emissions through indirect land-use change, in exchange for short-term local benefits. We simply do not have the technologies, practices, or techniques to fundamentally reduce the emissions from American agriculture, at least not yet. 

Rethinking Agricultural Policy for the Future

So far, the Republican position on IRA agricultural funding appears more sensible than the environmentalists’. If the climate benefits of IRA agricultural investment are for not, perhaps it is better to extend that funding to support agricultural conservation, broadly, and not just “climate-smart” practices.

But dropping the “climate-smart” guardrails on the IRA’s conservation investments moves no needles either. It will not improve climate mitigation in U.S. agriculture. It will not help bring food prices down. It will not dramatically increase agricultural productivity, or profitability. It will be just another drop in the ocean of subsidies agricultural producers in the United States have received. 

To be sure, those subsidies are not the worst thing. Since 1933 and the passage of the Agricultural Adjustment Act, American farmers have been the recipients of massive government outlays. That money has protected U.S. farmers from the vagaries of global markets. Combined with investments in innovation through the USDA, American farms have been able to  increase agricultural productivity, reduce food prices, limit agricultural expansion, reduce global food insecurity, and, in recent years, lower the emissions intensity of agricultural products. 

Yet in recent decades, the fundamental technologies of 20th century agriculture like synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, transgenic crops, and tractors have grown stagnant, and public investment in agricultural research and development has declined. Subsidies and promises about progress and conservation have become emptier. Conventional agricultural interests talk about sustainability (and at times, conservation), but their interests are clearly, and rationally, tied to profitability. Farming is, after all, a business. In fact, to the extent they do talk about climate change, they tend to focus on practices, technologies, and programs aimed at lining farmers’ pockets. Among others, they like voluntary incentive programs and low-risk financing for adopting practices—like “regenerative” agriculture—that allow them to upsell products but do not actually reduce emissions. 

The United States is left with an agricultural sector stuck in the past. One that right now lacks a legitimate path toward reducing emissions or increasing productivity to match the growing demand for food from both the American and global populations. 

This is not to say that American agriculture has completely stagnated. Agricultural productivity has continued its century-long upward trend, but the rate has slowed since the 1970s. This slowdown stems from a number of factors, including but not limited to: processes of farm consolidation and concentration, and their associated benefits from economies of scale, have slowed down since 2007; the radical technological shifts in farming of the early twentieth century like tractors and fertilizers have not been repeated; and, the long-term decline in the growth rate agricultural R&D and innovation investment has meant less consistent growth rates for productivity. 

While there have undoubtedly been beneficial technologies introduced into American agriculture over the past half-century. Precision farming technologies, the plethora of biotechnology and gene edited products, and, more recently, microbial fertilizers, have all seen positive results and hold continued potential for productivity growth. It is also true that in many cases—and particularly outside of the US, in developing economies—the incredible agricultural developments of the 20th century have yet to be adopted evenly.  

Increasing agricultural productivity growth while reducing emissions from food production will require R&D investment and innovation. It will require technological progress matched with support to deploy those technologies. 

Although there is bipartisan support for agricultural R&D investment—and something of a consensus around R&D as a powerful mechanism to push long-term decarbonization—federal investment has been dwindling for over two decades. That pattern looks set to continue; despite potential bipartisan support and the legitimate climate benefits, it is unlikely that 2024 will see increases to agricultural R&D investment. That is a shame.

Currently, the conservation programs funded by the IRA are one of the few means by which USDA can fund the deployment of technologies and new practices. US agriculture also needs  programs that can help build the industries capable of modernizing, and subsequently decarbonizing, agriculture. That means taking a page out of the Department of Energy’s playbook and supporting new technologies from ideation to commercialization, and beyond. 

Invest in the Future of Agriculture

American agriculture produces around 10% of all U.S. emissions. It pollutes waterways. Kills animals. Releases toxic air pollution. Rewards big businesses. Uses fossil fuels. It is responsible for countless “sins” in the minds of its many critics. 

It also provides safe and affordable food to hundreds of millions of Americans and many more millions of people around the world. It is not possible to decarbonize U.S. agricultural production or systematically address agriculture’s other “sins” with the technology we have today. To completely remove these externalities of agriculture would mean getting rid of agriculture altogether. 

Legitimate agricultural decarbonization policy must, then, focus on innovation, technological development, and the scaling up of industries to produce technologies that can mitigate carbon on a global scale. To direct such a gargantuan task, the United States needs a real industrial policy for agricultural decarbonization and abundance. One that can build the technological industries needed to increase agricultural productivity, reduce emissions, and keep food cheap for the millions of people who rely on American farms and food production. 

Reallocating the $20 billion in agricultural funding appropriated in the IRA to more effective programs represents a real chance for a legitimate investment in the future of agriculture. As Democrats look wearily towards the possible future of a Republican White House—and what that might mean for the funding from the Biden administration’s legislative wins—it is doubly important that those funds are used as effectively as possible. Leaving those funds to simply finance existing “climate-smart” or conservation practices shirks the responsibility of the federal government and the USDA to provide the means for American agricultural producers to grow more food, on less land, with fewer emissions. 

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