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“You have to get up early if you want to beat Otto” was the saying in Oregon’s Rogue River Valley, where I grew up. Otto was Otto Bohnert, “an awesome farmer—always experimenting,” says Dick Dunn, his nephew, also a farmer. Otto was famous for his 120-bushel-an-acre wheat crop in the late 1960s—in the midst of the green revolution, the movement to increase food yields by using new technology. His yields, thanks to superior wheat varieties, irrigation, and chemical fertilizers, were double the normal in our valley.
The green revolution was so successful that some experts hold that its increased rice yields made it possible for the Earth to support 700 million additional people. Today, though, growth in food production is flattening, human population continues to increase, and the toxic consequences of pesticide use and drying aquifers are painfully obvious. Demand outstrips production; food prices soar.
I wish Otto were still around to ask about the fix we’re in. When I asked Dick, he said: “I think Otto thought he’d give this green revolution a shot, but he’d also be thinking there’s no free lunch.”
In this month’s story “The End of Plenty,” Joel Bourne and John Stanmeyer report on the green revolution that helped feed millions—and its consequences. They discover Otto was right: There is no free lunch.
Photo: John Stanmeyer
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Comments
May 15, 2009 12AM #
Somehow I expect National Geographic to "take me away" not drop me in my 8th grade shoes. Otto Bohnert; the Dunn boys; the Green Revolution; and lots of herbicides. One of the other big crops in the Rogue Valeey was growing grass for seed. That meant no other grass species in whatever the crop was. Herbicides and more herbicides. I know because my dad was the herbicide applicator. And we knew 30 years ago that there was no free lunch. Further we suspected that the industrial agri-business model was not appropriate for other economies. Now it looks like industrial farming and cattle raising may not be appropriate for our economy either.
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