Unsustainable Food Production
Notes from the Insight Vault on… Feeding Everyone
Here is a carrot.
When it left the farmer’s field, it was a little dirtier and carried more than bright colour and crisp texture. In the colourful root is phosphorus, nitrogen, and trace minerals extracted from the soil.
That single vegetable represents a tiny fraction of a debt older than steam engines, a debt written not in the sky by smokestacks but in the ground by harvest after harvest.
Here we follow four insights from the Mindful Sceptic Insight Vault for a different take on the story of our food.
The Extraction That Defines Us
Agriculture has always been, at its foundation, an extractive enterprise. From the first cleared fields in the Fertile Crescent 12,000 years ago to today’s industrial operations, farming systematically removes nutrients and biomass from the land to feed humans elsewhere.
And before you jump to any conclusions or even think about blaming farmers for poor management, realise that this nutrient export is a feature of agriculture itself.
Every grain of wheat, every head of lettuce, every apple contains phosphorus, nitrogen, and trace elements. Even the most regenerative farms still ship their produce to market. That grass-fed beef embodies phosphorus and trace minerals extracted from the pasture.
Agriculture is extractive, period.
Without continuous inputs from recycling crop residues, composted urban waste, imported fertilisers, or atmospheric nitrogen fixation, the system runs down.
Nutrient export has consequences. Here is one…
Soil Carbon Losses
Over the last 150 years, agricultural practices have released an estimated 176 gigatons of carbon from the world’s soils into the atmosphere.
When soils are disturbed, microbial decomposition speeds up, converting stable soil carbon into CO₂ that escapes to the atmosphere. Since the late 19th century, land-use change and agricultural intensification through deforestation, ploughing, repeated tillage, overgrazing, and the replacement of perennial vegetation with annual crops have accelerated this oxidation of soil organic matter.
Given the atmosphere holds approximately 800 gigatons of carbon, it means that loss of soil carbon equivalent to more than 20% of the carbon currently in the atmosphere.
Most climate narratives focus exclusively on industrial emissions, presenting Big Oil as the clear villain and technological innovation as redemption. This storyline is dangerously incomplete. Because we have treated the soil like a credit card with no limit, borrowing its carbon to fuel our growth, climate change is about what we burn, but it’s also about how we eat.
We are not allowed to say this out loud, but agriculture, forestry, and land-use change are directly responsible for up to 24% of total anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions annually.
And yet the food keeps coming to fill the supermarket shelves. It must or there will be chaos…
The Illusion of Surplus
The conventional wisdom calls modern agriculture a triumph of efficiency, delivering more food from less land. It is true that global harvests feed billions and food remains cheap for those who can shop in supermarkets.
Efficiency means more food and more people prospering.
But here’s the thing.
Profit is the benchmark for efficiency, and it’s measured in dollars, not surplus. The modern food system, made possible by fossil energy but designed to make a dollar, transformed agriculture from a net energy provider to a net energy sink.
So, machinery replaces muscle, but only by siphoning petroleum. Fertiliser fattens crops, but only by strip-mining natural gas to make fertiliser. We solved the ‘agriculture is extractive’ problem by turning it into an input-output system and a net energy consumer.
Behind the triumphant yield graphs is the reality that Western food systems use up to 10 times more energy growing, shipping, and cooking food than the calories actually consumed.
Modern agriculture is not feeding the world through efficiency. It is feasting on the world’s fossil reserves and leaving the bill for the next generation.
But surely efficiency is a good thing…
When Efficiency Devours Itself
Economists promised us that if we make things more efficiently, we will use fewer resources. Design smarter irrigation systems, and farmers will use less water. Improve fuel economy in cars, and we will burn less petrol.
Except, efficiency does not reduce consumption.
Jevons Paradox reveals that when technology makes resource use more efficient, total consumption typically increases rather than decreases. Make something cheaper and easier to use, and people use vastly more of it.
Cars became dramatically more fuel-efficient over the past 50 years, yet global fuel consumption soared. The average driver now travels about 20,000 kilometres per year, up from significantly lower averages in the mid-20th century. In the 1960s and 70s, a car reaching 160,000 kilometres was considered to be at the end of its life. Today, it is common for well-maintained vehicles to exceed 320,000 kilometres, with some modern models (particularly from brands like Toyota and Honda) frequently reaching 400,000 kilometres or more.
Precision agriculture that reduced input costs per hectare encouraged farmers to cultivate marginal lands previously considered uneconomical. For example, GPS-guided precision fertiliser and variable-rate seeding lowered per-hectare input costs on a Midwestern U.S. grain farm, making thin, low-yield field edges and previously idle sandy soils profitable enough to plant, so land that had been left fallow or in pasture was brought back into annual crop production.
Because efficiency reduces the cost of using a resource, that resource is now accessible to more people for more purposes. Unless that resource faces absolute physical constraints, total consumption climbs.
Real resource conservation requires constraint, not cleverness.
The uncomfortable truth economists refuse to acknowledge is that using less means using less, not using more efficiently.
Relevance to Mindful Scepticism
Mindful scepticism asks us to see the full balance sheet. It refuses the comfort of partial truths, the narratives that explain half the problem while obscuring the rest.
Being a mindful sceptic about agriculture does not mean dismissing efforts to farm more sustainably because regenerative practices do genuinely improve soil health, reduce erosion, and enhance biodiversity.
But to pretend that any form of agriculture can escape thermodynamic reality is foolish.
Nutrients extracted must be replaced. Energy borrowed must be repaid, and being efficient is not enough. The question is not whether agriculture is extractive. It always has been…
Mindful Momentum
Do the nutrient audit... Pick a regenerative farm you have read about. Calculate the nutrients leaving the farm in harvested crops and animal products. Then identify where replacement nutrients come from. Is the system truly closed-loop, or does it depend on inputs from elsewhere?
Apply the time test... Take any agricultural practice, from ancient terracing to modern permaculture. Could this system maintain current productivity levels for 1,000 years without external inputs? What would need to be true for that to work?
Audit the narrative... Find a mainstream article or report on solutions to climate change. Tally how many proposed solutions focus on energy, transport, and industry versus how many focus on soil management, land use, and agricultural reform. What does the ratio tell you about the blind spots in the dominant climate story?
Key Points
Agriculture is inherently extractive, exporting nutrients and biomass from natural systems at rates far exceeding natural replenishment.
Agricultural practices have released an estimated 176 gigatons of carbon from soils, representing more than 20% of atmospheric carbon and making food production a primary climate driver.
Financial profit in agriculture often conceals ecological depletion, transforming the food system from a net energy provider into a fossil-fuel-dependent energy sink.
Efficiency improvements paradoxically increase total resource consumption through Jevons Paradox, making technological solutions insufficient without absolute constraints.
Curiosity Corner
Here are some better questions to ask about food production…
What if we measured agricultural success by nutrient retention rather than yield?
How would food prices change if the full energy cost of production were included at the checkout?
Which foods in your diet carry the largest soil carbon debt, and could you trace that debt back to specific regions?
What absolute constraints would be necessary to prevent efficiency gains from increasing total resource consumption?
If natural systems do not export their productivity to cities, can any form of agriculture feeding urban populations be truly sustainable?
In the Next Issue
We’re going to talk about “enough”. It might be the most subversive idea you can hold in a civilisation engineered to keep you mildly dissatisfied.
This is not a minimalist aesthetic. It is not a guilt-trip. It is a threshold you can feel in your bones, and a political choice we keep pretending is not on the table.
Once you notice how the post-war machine pivoted from building tanks to building cravings, the pattern shows up everywhere. The treadmill passes as ambition. Status gets sold as identity. Comparison does most of the heavy lifting behind the phrase “consumer choice”.
Next time, we’ll separate needs from manufactured wants and ask a question that sounds gentle right up until it threatens the entire business model.
What would your life look like if it didn’t require you to keep wanting more?