The shrinking salad bowl: Houses and malls becoming the fastest-growing crop in California

…as we get hungry we will be motivated as never before to protect soil fertility and water reserves, and learn to feed ourselves without using fossil-fuel-based fertilizers and pesticides. Organic and sustainable farming will no longer be trendy. We will feed ourselves according to our ability to replicate the soil food web’s systems of nutrient and carbon cycling and nature’s biodiversity, and to learn from long-surviving species.

Feeding the World under Climate Change

The debate over sustainable agriculture has gone beyond the health and environmental benefits that it could bring in place of conventional industrial agriculture. For one thing, conventional industrial agriculture is heavily dependent on oil, which is running out. [Considers both climate change and Peak Oil]

World Population, Agriculture, and Malnutrition —Pimentel, Wilson

Increases in food production, per hectare of land, have not kept pace with increases in population, and the planet is running out … of arable land. As a result, per-capita cropland has fallen by more than half since 1960, and per-capita production of grains, the basic food, has been falling worldwide for 20 years.