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The greening of the green revolution

Nature volume 396, pages 211–212 (1998)Cite this article

In comparison with conventional, high-intensity agricultural methods, ‘organic’ alternatives can improve soil fertility and have fewer detrimental effects on the environment. These alternatives can also produce equivalent crop yields to conventional methods.

It is not clear which are greater — the successes of modern high-intensity agriculture, or its shortcomings. The successes are immense. Because of the green revolution, agriculture has met the food needs of most of the world's population even as the population doubled during the past four decades. But there has been a price to pay, and it includes contamination of groundwaters, release of greenhouse gases, loss of crop genetic diversity and eutrophication of rivers, streams, lakes and coastal marine ecosystems (contamination by organic and inorganic nutrients that cause oxygen depletion, spread of toxic species and changes in the structure of aquatic food webs)1,2. It is unclear whether high-intensity agriculture can be sustained, because of the loss of soil fertility, the erosion of soil, the increased incidence of crop and livestock diseases, and the high energy and chemical inputs associated with it1,3. The search is on for practices that can provide sustainable yields, preferably comparable to those of high-intensity agriculture but with fewer environmental costs1.

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Figure 1: Typical effects of different agricultural practices on the total organic carbon or nitrogen content of soil.
Figure 2

IACR-ROTHAMSTED

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  1. The Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior, University of Minnesota, Minnesota, 55108, St Paul, USA

    David Tilman

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Tilman, D. The greening of the green revolution. Nature 396, 211–212 (1998). https://doi.org/10.1038/24254

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