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Journalist Jan Rübel interviewed Bioland President Jan Plagge about the imbalance of the German food system, farming in 2050 and the challenge of feeding the world.
What’s going wrong with nutrition in Germany right now?
For instance, the entire system is experiencing consequential costs – these having developed over decades. This starts with concentrated animal husbandry involving cycles that no longer function at all and with a supposedly successful industrialised agriculture – which has indeed produced winners in some cases, yet has resulted in thousands of losers in society as a whole and on many farms.
Why is that?
By focusing solely on the rationalisation of production in order to achieve competitiveness on the world market. We’ve completely forgotten the function of agriculture for the region, for the villages, for the environment, for drinking water, for the climate and for animal welfare. Compared to other industries, however, agriculture is always location-based – so there will always be a location where production is cheaper; this focus has driven farms into a dead end. The system has made us all believe that it’s good if food is cheap. Ever cheaper animal protein, ever cheaper sugar and ever more expensive fruit and vegetables on the same scale have brought us into a nutritional and health crisis. Germany experiences four billion euros worth of nutrition-related damage and illness every year.
Pretty well stemming from an unbalanced diet…
…which does not follow the recommendations of the German Nutrition Society (DGE); and certainly not a Planetary Health Diet – which would not only be good for the body, but also for the environment and future generations.
The media are full of nutrition tips, with lots of lifestyle and also a trend towards less meat consumption, towards more health as an event.
Sure, these trends exist, especially among young people – but less for health reasons than for ethical or environmental reasons, where sometimes the baby is thrown out with the bathwater and there is no real systemic understanding of a future agricultural and food economy.
Should food become more expensive?
Certain food that’s neither good for me nor for the environment must get an honest, true price – in other words, become more expensive. So if I choose some beef from a cleared rainforest – which ideally would not exist in the first place – it should not be the cheapest. The external costs – which are currently borne by indigenous populations or future generations deprived of fertile soil – should be reflected in the price.
Then the Hartz IV recipient would say: So I have to pay the bill.
No. If a low-vitamin diet becomes more expensive than one with fruit, locally grown vegetables and regionally produced organic meat, then there are two effects: Firstly, you need less money for good food. Secondly, you’re healthier and feel better. This income effect – be it income or that of single parents and Hartz IV recipients – has been proven: If they follow the DGE recommendations, they haven’t automatically spent more money at the end of the month as a result.
If all this is proven – will it catch on?
Yes, it will catch on. The pressure to act is so great. There’s no longer any discussion at European level about whether we’re in this impasse – only about how to get out of it.
How would this affect a farm?
By steering investment decisions in a different direction. Today, a farmer asks himself: Do I still have any prospects at all, or should I quit? The neighbouring farm is happy if he gives up, because then it has a chance to expand its barn or arable land and thus reduce costs – so as to clean up the overall market in a cost-reducing way. That’s the situation today. But what the Green Deal and Farm to Fork strategies negotiated at EU level say is: We’re building a new investment framework for more circularity, more climate neutrality and shorter value chains. Then the farm will already come up with the idea of reducing its livestock, strengthening its own feed base and not seeing biodiversity as a burden and a requirement. They might even educate themselves in species knowledge and feel more responsible for their own marketing channels – many regional canteens are asking for this.
Is that still a dream of the future?
No, it's what we're seeing everywhere at the moment. Wherever possible, farms are investing in species-appropriate stables, in halls for vegetable processing for canteens.
What will the farm look like in 2050? Will it have an insect barn and the algae pool next to it?
This is not what the classic farm in Central Europe will look like. Due to climate change, however, it will have a much more diverse crop rotation. In addition, there will be more legumes, a wide variety of oils and – thanks to increasing robotics – not everything will be cultivated in fields, but in strip cropping and partly in new agroforestry systems. That will be the broad practice. We’ll also continue to have livestock because grassland management is one of the most important carbon stores in land use – along with peatland and forest. Grassland is best and most intelligently used via a circular economy with ruminants. One thing is certain: Meat from in vitro laboratories is not the panacea – but rather less meat overall, fewer animals, and much more of it within the framework of land-based agriculture.
What are the arguments against in vitro meat?
In my opinion, a lot. It doesn’t solve the problem. It’s a very simple and monocausal strategy that ignores the interactions: Where does the energy for protein to grow meat cells come from? As a rule, it comes from arable land – which is therefore in direct competition with food. And what happens to the grassland? What’s the most efficient way to convert photosynthesis on grassland into multiple benefits for society – i.e. not just energy, not just protein, but also biodiversity? I have yet to see a petri dish that provides flower diversity in a meadow. What the many scientists probably don't know either: Without cows and sheep, I don't get a diversity of herbs and flowers on the pasture, but rather scrub encroachment and desertification.
How digital will the farm be?
Extreme. Drones, robots and satellite-based area and crop evaluations are becoming part of everyday life – if only to be able to react to the extreme weather changes caused by climate change. These are very good tools, as long as sovereignty over the data and its use remains with the farmers and people do not pay with their data, as is the case in the consumer or search engine sector.
This digitalisation is not in opposition to the concept of transforming industrialised agriculture?
Not from my point of view. Digitalisation can help our limited brains to better understand complexity and manage it on the farm. Sure, you could use digitalisation to turn a hundred-cow farm into a 10,000-cow farm. But it will help a family farm to create diverse rotations and crops.
Is enough being invested in the digitalisation of agriculture?
In a European comparison, Germany is an absolute developing country. The 16 formats of the land use certificates in the 16 federal states alone are a horror. The core data that every farm has are the area and animal data. And for the most part, these are not compatible from one federal state to another, nor can they be analysed together. It’s really incredible that things are so far behind in Germany – the coordination between the federal and state governments is a huge hurdle.
Which countries in Europe are doing better?
The Baltic States are a prime example. They started digitalising almost all the processes a farmer has to do 15 years ago and have taken the farms with them. We can now see how much desk work this saves. In Germany, farmers sometimes have to enter their data four or five times for the same questions.
Is there too little investment in German agriculture in general?
I don't have that impression. It's just that investments are often made in the wrong way – in machines that are far too big and will have to be scaled down. This is because they create too much pressure on the soil, which compacts it more – thereby resulting in lower yields and more greenhouse gas emissions. With high compaction, there is the problem of increasing nitrous oxide emissions from the soil. That’s why all soil scientists say: We need to reduce the pressure and have much more smaller machines that are intelligently networked and can also work the fields autonomously. This is already happening in other countries. When I look around at trade fairs in Germany, I see ever more gigantic machines. It's the same with stables: Even today, stables are being promoted that are not at all eco-friendly or cannot meet the highest husbandry standards. In the last ten years, so many stables have been built that could be demolished in five to ten years because an Aldi supermarket, for example, says: We won't buy your meat from these stables any more.
Could the entire agricultural sector be converted to organic farming?
In terms of principles and approaches, definitely. Organic farming and the organic way of life are not static and have always lived from the fact that they are constantly evolving – without dogmas. The problems we encounter in practice – such as lower yields or problems with crop rotation, animal and plant diseases – require constant further development. So it’s important to always think of food and agriculture together here. Yet the basic principles have proven themselves and – as the EU Commission has also stated – form a model for the future.
The world's population is continuing to grow. What should be done to ensure humanity remains fed?
We need decentralised and resilient agricultural systems. Centralised, industrial, input-based production has turned out to deliver the opposite: Volatile markets from which rural people suffer – when they can no longer work for their own livelihoods. The consensus in the scientific community is that the question is no longer: How much protein and calories are produced? But rather: Who produces it and how, adapted for the relevant population. It’s farmers who feed the world. The revolution in agriculture must come from them. Industry can provide assistance. But without people on the land we’ll not solve the distribution problem, the problem of waste and loss and, above all, the conflicts that lead to hunger time and again. What’s needed is an image like the one that Federal Minister Gerd Müller helped to initiate: We need knowledge hubs on how to build a locally adapted circular economy in which the population can participate.
In Africa, agriculture is very small-scale. Don't certain concentrations make sense there?
If you have an answer, what should people do then – should they all build cars? Make toys or cheap shirts? Do we have too few consumer goods? I think it’s an aberration to believe that – as in the days of the Industrial Revolution – people everywhere will be freed up in agriculture to make industrial or consumer goods. I’d like to hear an answer to that. Of course, in many systems we have inefficient production, there is a lack of know-how in many places – and women are not involved enough. There are examples on every continent of cooperatives sharing knowledge, equipment and seeds, working together to provide irrigation or composting and marketing to the outside world. The big question is: How do you get the millions of farmers to cooperate with each other?