Breeding a sustainable agriculture: experiments under way around the planet are leading to techniques and crop varieties good for the long term. Now, about those subsidies ...

• Author: Lowe, Marcy

Author Wes Jackson warned us 20 years ago we're not getting any smarter. Critiquing modern farming in his book Altars of Unhewn Stone, he showed us how, in this age of overwhelming information, we're actually losing wisdom. So distracted are we with our own cleverness, we don't see that with every inch of topsoil that erodes, with every liter of water that's fouled, with every farmer who leaves the land, we're losing nature's wisdom, the kind we need if we are to survive.

If you don't find Jackson's warning alarming, consider this: he wrote it in 1987, before the Internet. Already we were distracted by the wrong kind of information? And this was before spam? Pop-ups?

Jackson, for one, has fortunately not spent these years clicking on celebrity trivia ads. Instead he's been making good on a promise he made in Altars: to devise a better way to grow food. Even though the current agricultural model renders higher yields than ever before, this productivity comes at a prodigious price. Jackson would like a system that can feed us well into the future without destroying, depleting, or contaminating its raw materials.

Most people realize that conventional farming depends heavily on finite petroleum. Fewer recognize, though, that it's not just the oil that's finite, but a more fundamental raw material: the soil. Modern plant varieties, including those of the much-touted Green Revolution (the "miracle seeds" introduced in developing countries in the 1960s), require heavy doses of chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides, all of which degrade the soil. To keep yields up, farmers have to apply more fertilizer, and, as pests become resistant, more pesticide. Many high-yield varieties' thirst for water can lead to irrigation methods that erode the soil.

Soil erosion is disastrous; if you're visually oriented, please see Timothy Egan's bestselling 2005 book, The Worst Hard Time, about the blinding black blizzards of the Dust Bowl in the 1930s. The United States and Europe have made progress checking erosion through soil conservation methods, but estimates for much of the world are truly grim. According to the United Nations' global figures, 300 million hectares of cropland (an area about one-third the size of the United States) is so badly eroded it can no longer produce food. More than 10 million hectares of cropland are degraded or lost every year, in a relentless process hastened by slash-and-burn methods and farming on marginal lands and steep...