A More Diverse Agriculture for the Future of Our Planet
Zia Mehrabi
University of Colorado Boulder, USA
Claire Kremen
University of British Columbia, Canada
Laura Vang Rasmussen
University of Copenhagen, Denmark
& Ingo Grass
University of Hohenheim, Germany
Winning article: Joint environmental and social benefits from diversified agriculture (Science, 2024)
“The time has come, and the options exist, to ensure that the damages and losses done in the past do not continue into the future.”
If you had to pick the single most important thing driving the overshooting of multiple planetary boundaries, it would be the food we eat and how we produce that food. The environmental grand challenges of our day, biodiversity loss, climate change, freshwater use, and pollution, all tie back to our food systems. So also, do our social challenges: as of writing, one in four people around the world do not have reliable access to nutritious food. Our food systems need transformation. They must become environmentally safe and socially just.
For years, ecologists have advocated for designing our food systems to be diverse like ecosystems, to help bring the planet into a safe operating space for humanity. And despite clear examples of both innovative and more traditional farmers around the world doing this in practice, governments have remained skeptical due to the opposition this idea poses to mainstream agricultural development policy. We set out to explore if mainstream thinking surrounding agricultural development was wrong and, if so, what adding diversity back into agricultural systems might do to correct farming systems around the world.
We worked with >50 researchers, working with thousands of farmers across 11 countries covering five continents, to test the idea. We covered vastly different food systems from maize production in Malawi, to silvopastoral cattle farming in Colombia, winter wheat in Germany, to strawberries in the US, and more.
One unique feature of our approach was that all co-authors participated actively in the study design to interweave the many data sets spread across the world. Our project was far from a standard research initiative; it was highly interdisciplinary, involving the co-production of knowledge among researchers from various fields and farmers. Further, a stakeholder committee, including representatives from different levels of government, UN organizations, NGOs, and various national farmers’ organizations, was engaged in co-production through workshops and engagement activities.
We all worked together to answer a basic question: if more diversity is added into, or kept on, farms, what happens to the environmental and social outcomes we care about? Do we create a better world for people and nature?
The outcomes we looked at were directly related to planetary boundaries on reducing environmental pollution, land use, biodiversity loss, and the disruption of biogeochemical flows. But, unlike earlier studies, we also assessed social outcomes at the same time, including human well-being, crop yields, and food security. This integration allowed us to assess whether both positive environmental and social outcomes can be achieved at the same time, something that had never been done before in this way.
What we produced was novel: the first-ever cross-continental, multi-farming system, and culturally contextual evidence from real food systems that diversifying agricultural systems helps move agriculture towards where we want it to be. We found that the benefits of diversification differed depending on the practices and farming systems they were tied to. But saliently, we found that across systems, a general rule emerged: the more diversification done at a farm, the better. And even more promisingly: this was especially true when it came to improving food security and biodiversity at the same time, two outcomes that have previously been juxtaposed in policy, and that need the world’s urgent attention, today, more than ever before.
Critically, our study was not theoretical or abstract, nor was it run on field stations or in laboratories. It was conducted with farmers on real-world operating farms. The main effects we identified held up to a range of different ways to do the analysis. We even came up with a list and typology of on-farm interventions, all clearly defined, for practical implementation and support by governments, NGOs, research for development organizations, and civil society groups. Importantly, the significance of these interventions is already recognized as a possible pathway towards change and was a key focus of the UN Food Systems Summit. Our work provides robust evidence that investment in these areas will yield the desirable outcomes, bolstering ongoing initiatives by governments and the private sector to support these transformative actions.
Our research demonstrates that diversification represents a significant, tangible, and policy-relevant step towards achieving more sustainable food systems globally: one not just grounded in theory or anecdotes, but supported by rich data, covering a vast range of farming systems across the world.
Other observations made during our research project include the insight that farmers in many locations have already been actively working against the odds, finding ways past barriers to diversification. We’ve found this in Malawi, Brazil, and the USA, where grass-roots communities of farmers and social networks are mobilizing knowledge, land, seeds, equipment, processing infrastructure, and markets to support this movement. Policymakers and practitioners can now support these groups by lowering the structural barriers that have limited their growth and the growth of diversified farming to date.
We are now at a critical juncture where agricultural development policy requires urgent attention. While the action will be location dependent – diversifying systems that have been made far too simple to function properly, and retaining diversity in systems where diversity is threatened – the time has come, and the options exist, to ensure that the damages and losses done in the past do not continue into the future.
Figure 1: Images of all co-authors for the USA’s winning research paper.