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Prophets of industrial ag maintain that farm practices that are good for the land, like organic, produce far less food on far more land than conventional, chemical-based systems. Bowles insists this isn’t true. His lab found that cover crops increase yields in low-carbon soils, for starters. Additionally, comparing a field of conventional monoculture crops to one of organic monoculture crops does indeed show a yield drag, he said in the debate. But that “that yield gap goes from about 20 percent to about 5 percent when … organic farms are using more complex crop rotations [and] polycultures.” As a bonus, polyculture farms also support biodiversity — less than an intact forest, say, but considerably more than a field of soybeans alone. “The people who benefit from keeping [the yield] argument alive,” says Anderson, are “the pesticide people, the synthetic fertilizer people, and very large-scale farmers and traders, who benefit from large quantities of product.” She points out that in the U.S. we actually have an overproduction problem. “There’s so many incentives to grow way too much food,” she says, including subsidies for the biggest commodity crop farmers. Food waste continues to be a massive problem, too. The most recent stats show that surplus food in the U.S. added up to almost 74 million tons in 2023 — that’s 442 pounds per person, for a total value of $382 billion. “When you look at the number of calories that we produce, it’s enough for every single person on the planet, from infancy to old age,” says Lappé. “That should be evidence enough that the problem … of feeding ourselves is not about yield or about productivity.”

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Anatomical Venus, from the Fontana Workshop, Italian, 1780-85