Defying Malthus

Cultivating wheat provided much more food per unit of territory, and thereby enabled Homo sapiens to multiply exponentially.

one of the global challenges for the next century: the need to develop high-yielding varieties that require minimal inputs, so that impacts on biodiversity can be minimized.

This leads them to plant ‘safe’ crops, which consistently produce some food but — on average — far less

Other experts are working on different ways to solve the nitrogen problem. For example, some researchers are doing genetic work on new varieties of crops that can…

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he addressed the scarcity of fertilizer that threatened to unleash an unprecedented global famine at the beginning of the twentieth century.