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Bet you didn't know...
Just one type of land covers over 40% of the Earth's non-ocean surface area.
Is it...
- tropical forest
- desert
- tundra
- wetlands
- none of the above
If you picked e., give yourself a hand -
because the correct answer is: farmland.
That's right.
You'd probably never have guessed it, but farmland is taking up more space on Planet Earth than anything else.
Period.
As if that isn't amazing enough, the shocking thing is, we still don't have enough.
And it's a problem that's getting worse.
Right now, Earth has about 6.7 billion humans residents, a figure expected to grow to 9.2 billion by 2050.
But people like to eat, and tend to get ornery and violent if they don't...
So if we can't feed 6.7 billion of us with over 40% of the Earth devoted to farmland,
what are we going to do to do when the next 2.5 billion people come along?
Per-acre agricultural productivity has been stuck at a plateau for nearly fifteen years, as advances in field farming
technology have been counterbalanced by topsoil loss, decreasing freshwater supplies, pesticide-resistant bug strains, and fertilizer oversaturation.
Feeding another 2.5 billion people at current levels would take another patch of farmland the size of Brazil.
But nobody seems to have another Brazil sitting around.
And that's the problem.
Basically, all of Earth's prime farm real estate is already in use.
Antarctica is never going to grow many soybeans.
We're not going to harvest pomegranates in the Sahara or corn cobs in Siberia.
The Himalayas don't do strawberries.
To feed the people here on Earth today, we're already pushing nature to its limits and beyond.
There are regions in India where so much water is being pulled from underground aquifers (natural pools which fill slowly, over centuries)
that the underground water table is dropping by 20 feet per year.
When those wells hit bottom, crops will die, and food prices will skyrocket.
And that's just one example.
The unsettling fact is: Without major changes to our global food system, billions of people will go hungry -
and the social and environmental chaos those hungry billions will create will have a terrible ripple effect that reaches everyone else, rich or poor.
Luckily, radical innovations are taking place.
Scientists, farmers, researchers and entrepreneurs are tearing up the floorboards of agriculture, rethinking everything from the ground up, searching for solutions.
The coming decades will see changes to agriculture greater than anything since man first planted a seed in the soil.
Beanstalk is a film charting these changes.
Learn more about the movie...
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