The Evolved Eater

by Nick Taranto

  The glut of cheap corn and soybeans has directly and negatively influenced how we as a society produce our food. Factory farm animals that are raised on grain and soy are significantly cheaper to produce, which leads to more profits. These profits are reinvested in achieving greater scale, in turn generating even more profits, and even larger factory farms. Despite significant scale and profit advantages, subsidies continue to distort the market for corn and soy.

  Although some subsidy programs are intended to provide a safety net for small farmers in cases of low production or poor profitability due to weather, market price variations, and other factors, most farmers in the United States do not benefit from subsidies. Various restrictions often prevent small farmers from enrolling in subsidy programs and collecting payments. None of the family farmers that I met received direct payouts for their grain production. Between 1995 and 2009, 10 percent of farmers received 74 percent of farm subsidies, and 62 percent of U.S. farmers did not collect any subsidies.4

  From Farm to Factory

  At dinner, I asked Ron if we were eating the same corn that he grows in the fields. “Oh no.” He guffawed. “This is the nursery variety, not the Roundup type—I don’t want to eat that stuff.” I thought that was a strange comment, since he grows hundreds of acres of corn but paradoxically doesn’t eat any of it, and I asked what he meant by Roundup.

  Since the 1990s, the Monsanto Company has been developing and selling “Roundup Ready Corn” seeds. Roundup Ready plants are genetically engineered to be resistant to Monsanto’s herbicide Roundup. Farmers that plant Roundup Ready seeds must use the Roundup herbicide to prevent weeds from growing in their fields. The products, when used in tandem, work remarkably well. Over the last thirty years, Ron has been able to double his corn yield per acre by introducing the Roundup product suite to his cornfields. This magnitude of leap in efficiency is a true marvel of modern technology.

  But Ron cautioned against unbridled optimism. He concluded, “I don’t know exactly what the Roundup spray and seeds are doing to my land, but my dad always used to say if you think things are too good to be true, they probably are. And I imagine that’s what we are going to be saying about Roundup ten to fifteen years from now.”

  Farmers by nature are concerned about the future. This is rooted not only in the seasonal cycles of growing but also in the fundamental uncertainty of agriculture. Farmers have historically been at the mercy of droughts, floods, and other “acts of God.” Bad years were bound to come, and as a consequence, since the start of the Agricultural Revolution, the future became a farmer’s obsession. Where farmers depend on rain to water their fields, like South Dakota, this means that each morning brings prayers and hopeful glances at the horizon. Is that a storm coming? Will there be enough water for all my crops? Is that hail, and is it going to destroy the corn?

  The stress of farming formed the foundation of modern society. Throughout history, farmers rarely realized the future financial security they worked so diligently to achieve in the present. People and processes were always emerging to deprive farmers of their surplus food, leaving them scratching by with subsistence. Food surpluses were forfeited for the ruling elite, and this powered governments, armies, entertainment, and innovation.

  Until the twentieth century, more than 90 percent of the world was farmers. The extra food they produced fed the elite minority, folks like politicians, generals, priests, and artists. As one historian wrote, “History is something that very few people have been doing while everyone else was plowing fields and carrying water buckets.”5

  The largest accomplishment of modern society is that food is much more widely distributed and that most Americans are no longer farmers. I’m not degrading farming or farmers but admiring technology’s ability to improve productivity and well-being. Yields and efficiency on everything from farm tools to fertilizers to crops have improved dramatically. This has allowed tens of millions of Americans to break free from the yoke of indentured servitude to the land. In 1900, around 41 percent of America’s labor force worked on a farm. Today, the proportion is below 2 percent. But because of technology, the shrinking proportion of Americans working as farmers is still able to feed the vast urban majority—and more.

  Not Sustainable or Designed for Health and Happiness

  Agriculture is now a $7.8 trillion worldwide market, but despite this enormous size, with current farming technology, in a few decades, we will be unable to feed our country—and the world.

  As the global population races toward ten billion, the current level of food production will have to increase by 70 percent in order to adequately feed everyone.6 We’ll have to do it as climate change rewrites the weather rules around the globe—and as ever more of that population achieves middle-class status and wants to eat accordingly.

  Depending on where they live, farmers will increasingly wrestle with either intense rainfall or ongoing drought and the insects and diseases that come with them. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concludes that changes in climate are already slowing the average growth rate for crop yields by up to 2.5 percent per decade globally. And in some parts of the world, the urgency has already reached a fever pitch. “It’s going to require an incredible leap in productivity,” says former U.S. secretary of agriculture Tom Vilsack. Even America, the breadbasket for the world, will have trouble keeping pace. During Vilsack’s lifetime, the United States increased production by 170 percent on 26 percent less farmland. “More advanced agriculture economies aren’t going to be able to make that kind of leap in the next twenty-five years,” he says.7

  Unless something big changes.

  Thirty to forty percent of all perishable food is thrown away in the United States every year—that’s the equivalent of hundreds of billions of dollars in food waste annually. If we could reduce this to Plated’s food-waste number, this initiative alone would get us halfway to the goal of feeding the world as the population balloons to ten billion by 2050. But we’ll need more than just waste reduction.

  We are most likely not going to create more farmland. Consequently, the growth in food production must come from more efficiency and higher yields. Agriculture has undergone yield-enhancing shifts in the past, including the introduction of new crop varieties and agricultural chemicals in the green revolution of the 1950s and 1960s. Yet yields of important crops have now stopped rising in many places, a phenomenon called yield plateauing. To go beyond these plateaus will require better technology.8

  No part of solving this problem is going to be easy. Farmers tend to fear change, since the downside of losing an entire harvest rarely outweighs the upside of experimentation. Yet if technological solutions play out as many—including me—hope, a technology-driven change in food production may be close at hand.

  Silicon Valley Meets Silicon Prairie

  In December 2015, a Virginian farmer named David Hula won the National Corn Growers Association’s annual yield contest by squeezing 532 bushels of corn out of a single acre—a world record that trounced the 2015 U.S. national average by a factor of more than three.9

  Hula had to get everything perfect to reach that prize-winning yield: planting his rows the right distance apart, treating the soil with the precise microbes needed to keep it healthy, applying the ideal amount of nitrogen fertilizer at the ideal moment. Farmers make some forty decisions like these each season—decisions that were once made largely by tradition and training but that are now reached increasingly with the help of data.

  “Precision farming” (using data to optimize agricultural output) has begun to revolutionize food production. One way to view farming is as calculus. A farmer must constantly juggle a large set of variables—the weather, the cost of fertilizer, seed selection, threats to crops from pests, and the price that he will get when he harvests and sells. If he does the math correctly, or if it is done on his behalf by machines, he will optimize his yield and maximize his profit. In the world of miniscule margins, where a few dollars per acre can make the
difference between profitability and bankruptcy, this optimization is essential. Precision farming’s success will be enabled through the adoption of sensors, software, digital connectivity, and most importantly, data.

  On my way back to New York, I stopped in Sioux Falls at Farmers Business Network (FBN) to see what the future of farming looks like. After working at Google for several years, Charles Baron, one of my college roommates, saw an opportunity to harness data and technology to improve farmers’ lives, and he started FBN. I met up with Andy Cahoy, who runs the Midwest headquarters of FBN in a nondescript, single-story office next to a dialysis center on the outskirts of Sioux Falls.

  Andy looks like a lot of the guys who went through infantry training with me: tall, lean, and reserved with a close-cropped shock of wheat-blond hair that hadn’t seen an army razor in a few years. He grew up in South Dakota, went to West Point, deployed to Afghanistan as an infantry officer, and recently completed his MBA at Stanford.

  We talked about missing military life, his deployment to Afghanistan, and his decision to turn down Google to return to South Dakota to help build FBN. He was taciturn at first, but when we started talking about FBN, his excitement was palpable. “Farms these days are generating tons of data! The changes that have happened in the last ten years are unbelievable! You’ve got planting data, seed treatments, pest information, chemical applications, harvest data—the challenge for farmers has always been ‘What do we do with all this data?’”

  Farmers take enormous amounts of risk every year in making their decisions. Prior to FBN, the best way for farmers to understand how they were performing was for them to ask their fertilizer and seed dealers. There are pretty obvious perverse incentives to asking a salesman about your performance—it’s like asking the car dealer if you should upgrade to the luxury model.

  FBN has built an independent, unbiased farmer-to-farmer network. They connect dozens of pieces of farm data from millions of acres of land across thousands of member farmers all over the United States and use that data to help farmers find actionable insights on their operations—ways that they can cut costs, save money, and increase yield through transparency. The idea is that there is power in numbers, and the value doesn’t just come from yourself—the value is looking anonymously at what farmers are doing around you and seeing how you may be able to implement those same practices to be successful on your farm.

  Big Data is essential to the business model.10 “The idea here is kind of like money ball for farming,” Andy explains. Farming is a game of statistics that farmers unwittingly play every day. By looking at the average yields and what the data tells you, there are a lot of powerful decisions that you can make based on that information that farmers weren’t able to make before. They would, and still do, go off and plant one- or two-acre test-plotted corn, and say, “Okay, that test plot yielded this many bushels per acre, so I think I can get that everywhere.” But the reality is that data like that is highly flawed, and it’s not relevant, real-world information. FBN has a large network and database of real-world performance information, thousands of seed varieties, based on real-world conditions in real-world soil types that are highly relevant to farmers in each growing area.

  “If I had one wish for farming today,” Andy tells me, “it would be to make it more transparent. Farming just has so many barriers today. It’s an oligopoly; access to farmers is completely controlled by five or six big-name companies. In other industries and eras, this kind of behavior is illegal. It’s like monopolistic behavior that happens all over America, and these local communities and people suffer because there is just no access to information.”

  The problem runs deep. Farmers work with sales agronomists, someone who knows about agronomy—but, oh, by the way, he’s also trying to sell them chemicals. So there are conflicts of interest everywhere in the industry. It’s hard to find independent, nonbiased advice, to the point where it is hard to break that barrier. The sales agronomist that the farmer is working with will try to convince the farmer not to sign up for FBN because it obviates the need for what services that particular agronomist offers and competes with the price of the chemicals he is trying to sell.

  Andy argues that the level of transparency needs to improve because today it hurts the farmer. “The industry is definitely ripe for disruption, and that’s what I’m really excited about,” he says. FBN wants to break those barriers and make the industry function like any other industry does in the twenty-first century. Farmers should know what they need to pay and what a fair price is for the enormous costs that are going into every planting and harvest season.

  Some folks I talked to make the analogy of FBN being the Amazon.com of agriculture. I asked Andy what he thought about that. “I think that would be awesome!”

  Technology is the future of farming and food more broadly. The renowned venture capitalist Marc Andreessen famously said that technology is eating the world. In this case, the world is starting to eat more and more technology—or at least its by-products.

  At Plated, we are proud to plant a flag and paint a vision of what the future of food will look like. The same transformations toward transparency and optimization have happened in countless industries over the last twenty years—online shopping, airline tickets, home buying, personal finance, media—but food is the final frontier. One key part of our future vision is leveraging technology to improve how food is produced.

  After my trip to South Dakota, I was feeling optimistic. There is certainly a lot of hard work ahead, and there are many entrenched interests who conspire against small businesses, our health, and the environment. But it seems increasingly apparent that the problems associated with traditional farming are potentially solvable with technology and bit of grit and gumption. Unfortunately, the next step in the food supply chain is significantly more complicated.

  5

  The CRAP Trap

  Let’s turn to the impact farm subsidies have on what we eat. Most farm subsidies go to corn, wheat, cotton, and soybean production—fruits and vegetables are largely left out. Fruits, vegetables, nuts, and legumes for human consumption receive only about 2 percent of all subsidies, although these foods should constitute the majority of Americans’ daily food consumption. If we ask how agricultural support programs affect consumption (and thus health), we need to look at their impact on price and food availability. The vast majority of crop subsidies directly or indirectly support the production of the least healthful foods.

  This conflict between health and agricultural policies was highlighted by the President’s Cancer Panel in a recent report:

  Efforts to halt and reverse current obesity trends are unlikely to succeed without the participation and collaboration of governments, non-governmental organizations, industry, educators, and individuals. For example, current agricultural and public health policy is not coordinated—we heavily subsidize the growth of foods (e.g., corn, soy) that in their processed forms (e.g., high-fructose corn syrup, hydrogenated corn and soybean oils, grain-fed cattle) are known contributors to obesity and associated chronic diseases, including cancer.1

  There is little question that abundant, low-cost commodity inputs distort the market for unsubsidized products and give a competitive advantage to unhealthful foods like refined fats and corn-based sweeteners. The federal government also ensures against risks of production with subsidized crop insurance that is not available for nuts, legumes, fruits, and veggies.2 Producers who might grow fruits and vegetables, like my family in South Dakota, have a strong disincentive to do so.

  To sum up what we’ve learned in the last few paragraphs: High-quality, nutritious food is expensive, and low-quality, unhealthy food is cheap due in large part to the pervasiveness of subsidies for commodity crops like corn and soy.

  Why Is CRAP Such Crap?

  One afternoon, Uncle Ron and I drove a semitruck filled with freshly harvested winter wheat to the local grain elevator. From the back of the truck, a high-powered vacuum sucked the thousand
s of pounds of grain up into storage silos. Twice per week, a train from BNSF pulls up to the elevator and fills twenty-six boxcars with thousands of tons of grain. If the grain in question were corn, the train would haul its load to a manufacturing facility like the Clinton Corn Processing Company, the corporation that first discovered and started marketing high-fructose corn syrup in the early 1970s.

  HFCS has two interrelated advantages over other natural and artificial sweeteners. First, it is easier to process and handle than table sugar, so it can be shipped around the country and world. And second, due to the rampant American corn subsidies discussed earlier, it is significantly less expensive than other sources of sweet.

  The consumption of HFCS increased over 1,000 percent between 1970 and 1990, far exceeding the changes in intake of any other food or food group. HFCS now represents more than 40 percent of caloric sweeteners added to foods and beverages and is essentially the sole caloric sweetener in soft drinks in the United States.3 There is no question that HFCS has had a fiftyfold growth in annual per capita consumption and that this occurred in lockstep with the four-decade obesity epidemic in America (see the preceding graph). There is now research to support that a marked increase in the use of HFCS preceded the obesity epidemic and may be an important contributor to the obesity epidemic in the United States and around the world.4

  While Big Food insiders will argue that this is correlation and not causation, it should certainly raise some eyebrows and questions.