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The environmental costs and benefits of high-yield farming

An Author Correction to this article was published on 26 March 2019

Abstract

How we manage farming and food systems to meet rising demand is pivotal to the future of biodiversity. Extensive field data suggest that impacts on wild populations would be greatly reduced through boosting yields on existing farmland so as to spare remaining natural habitats. High-yield farming raises other concerns because expressed per unit area it can generate high levels of externalities such as greenhouse gas emissions and nutrient losses. However, such metrics underestimate the overall impacts of lower-yield systems. Here we develop a framework that instead compares externality and land costs per unit production. We apply this framework to diverse data sets that describe the externalities of four major farm sectors and reveal that, rather than involving trade-offs, the externality and land costs of alternative production systems can covary positively: per unit production, land-efficient systems often produce lower externalities. For greenhouse gas emissions, these associations become more strongly positive once forgone sequestration is included. Our conclusions are limited: remarkably few studies report externalities alongside yields; many important externalities and farming systems are inadequately measured; and realizing the environmental benefits of high-yield systems typically requires additional measures to limit farmland expansion. Nevertheless, our results suggest that trade-offs among key cost metrics are not as ubiquitous as sometimes perceived.

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Fig. 1: Framework for exploring how different environmental costs compare across alternative production systems.
Fig. 2: Externality costs of alternative production systems against land cost for five externalities in four agricultural sectors.
Fig. 3: Overall GHG cost against land cost of alternative systems in each sector, including the GHG opportunity costs of land under farming.

Data availability

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon request.

Code availability

The R codes used for the analyses are available from the corresponding author upon request.

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Acknowledgements

We are grateful for funding from the Cambridge Conservation Initiative Collaborative Fund and Arcadia, the Grantham Foundation for the Protection of the Environment, the Kenneth Miller Trust, the UK-China Virtual Joint Centre for Agricultural Nitrogen (CINAg, BB/N013468/1, financed by the Newton Fund via BBSRC and NERC), BBSRC (BBS/E/C/000I0330), DEVIL (NE/M021327/1), U-GRASS (NE/M016900/1), Soils-R-GRREAT (NE/P019455/1), N-Circle (BB/N013484/1), BBSRC Soil to Nutrition (S2N) strategic programme (BBS/E/C/000I0330), UNAM-PAPIIT (IV200715), the Belmont Forum/FACEE-JPI (NE/M021327/1 ‘DEVIL’) and the Cambridge Earth System Science NERC DTP (NE/L002507/1); A.B. is supported by a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit award. We thank F. Brendrup, E. Caton, A. Dobermann, T. J. Florindo, E. Fonte, O. Leyser, A. Mazzetto, J. Murthwaite, F. P. Kamali, R. Olea-Perez, S. Ramsden, C. Ruviaro, J. Storkey, B. Strassburg, M. Topliff, J. N. V. da Silva, D. Williams, X. Yan and Y. Zhang for advice, data or analysis, and K. Willott for much practical support.

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A.B., T.A., H.B., D.C., D.E., R.F., P.G., R.G., P.S., H.W., A.W. and R.E. designed the study and performed the research; D.M.B., A.C., J.C., T.F., E.G., A.G.-H., J.H.-M., M.H., F.H., A.L., T.M., B.P., B.I.S., T.T., J.V. and E.z.E. contributed and analysed data and results; and all authors contributed substantially to the analysis and interpretation of results and writing of the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Andrew Balmford.

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Balmford, A., Amano, T., Bartlett, H. et al. The environmental costs and benefits of high-yield farming. Nat Sustain 1, 477–485 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-018-0138-5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-018-0138-5

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