25-10 - Flipbook - Page 63
October 2025
ty increases have spared 1.8 billion hectares (4.4 billion acres, or around 35 Spains) of
land from being brought into cultivation.
We've also squeezed more efficiency improvements in animal agriculture through intensive farming, productive animal strains and optimised feeding regimes. As these systems intensified, lower productivity lands have been abandoned in many countries.
But it's not all about intensification. We have also replaced some land-hungry crops
with near-landless alternatives: wool and cotton have been to a major extent replaced
by synthetic fibres; tobacco is rapidly being replaced by synthetic nicotine; flavourings
in food such as vanilla are now largely synthetic; the global caffeine (although not coffee) market is dominated by production in labs; synthetic sweeteners have replaced
substantial amounts of sugar
cane and sugar beet. We
estimate that these synthetic
substitutes have spared over
110 million hectares (two
Spains) of land from farming.
One particularly striking example is the shrinkage of the
global wool industry. Produc-
tion has fallen by around 50%
from its peak in 1990. Grazing
lands in Australia, New Zealand and Argentina 3 countries that use to be amongst
the largest wool producers 3
have declined by 25%. Large
areas of pasture have returned to nature, some of
which is actively protected
and home to unique species.
For example, the huge
70,000 hectare (173,000 acre) White Wells sheep farm in Australia is now the Charles
Darwin Reserve, home to 700 species of plant and 230 animals. Another 70,000 hectare
(173,000 acre) area in Argentina, previously the Chacabuco sheep ranch, is now a nature reserve and home to the rhea or ñandú, an uncommon bird related to ostriches
and emus. There are many similar examples worldwide.
While the use of synthetic alternatives has taken pressure off land, they have come with
other issues, particularly plastic pollution and an increased reliance on fossil fuels. There
are solutions to these new problems however, such as landless biodegradable bioplastics based on fungal mycelium or microbial processes, and they are beginning to
scale up. Further, while agricultural land use has declined, not all of it has been replaced by natural forests; there has been a huge growth in plantation forestry for tim-
