Almost one out of ten people still do not get enough to eat. But hunger today is generally due to low incomes and poor food distribution, rather than failing to grow enough food. Farmers produce enough for everyone, but not all get what they need. Still, our daily lives are nothing like those of previous generations.

What happened? Modern agriculture.

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In the 1960s and 1970s, in what is called the “Green Revolution,” research scientists, government agencies, agricultural businesses, and farmers themselves put together a new, strikingly more productive version of agriculture — Farming 2.0, if you will.

Today, Farming-2.0-style agriculture — which began with innovations in field crops like wheat but spread to other parts of farming, such as cattle ranching and chicken-raising — is by almost any measure the world’s most critical industry. It is directly responsible for our daily bread. But despite its overwhelming importance, Farming 2.0 is in many ways unknown to most of us, because it has been so smoothly successful that we have almost no picture of the underpinnings of the vast system that provides us with breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Too few have any sense of its scope, what brought it into existence, and in what ways it will need to change.

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Today more than 1 percent of the world’s industrial energy is devoted to making ammonia fertilizer. “That 1 percent,” the futurist Ramez Naam says, “roughly doubles the amount of food the world can grow.”

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Farming 2.0 has transformed human life, but it has also wreaked environmental havoc. Agriculture has always caused erosion, water pollution, biodiversity loss, and other ecological problems. Green Revolution farming, which places more demands on the Earth, has worsened these issues, with irrigation mismanagement and fertilizer overuse being particularly alarming. Poor irrigation practice can poison the soil by filling it with the salts dissolved in water; fertilizer overuse can pollute rivers, lakes, and oceans with the runoff from fields. All these problems must be resolved.

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