Beyond Yield: Climate, Nutrition and the Future of Farming

Global agriculture changed dramatically during the 20th century as small, traditional farms were replaced by large-scale, monoculture farming in many parts of the world. This shift led to a dramatic increase in food production, helping to feed a global population that today exceeds 8 billion.

Yet the revolution in agriculture has created a new set of challenges. Modern farming is more resource-intensive than ever, requiring substantial investments in machinery and a heavy reliance on chemical inputs like synthetic fertilizers and pesticides. These shifts have introduced new economic risks for farmers, who can struggle to keep up with rising input costs and volatile markets. Meanwhile, the widespread cultivation of bulk cash crops has often come at the expense of soil health, crop diversity, and the nutritional quality of the food we grow and consume.

On the podcast, Lindiwe Majele Sibanda—Kleinman Center visiting scholar, professor of agriculture at the University of Pretoria in South Africa, cattle farmer in Zimbabwe, and board chair of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR)—discusses current efforts to make agriculture more resilient and sustainable. These include the revival of traditional crops, regenerative soil management techniques, and innovations aimed at reducing reliance on fossil fuels. Sibanda also examines how such practices can support environmental and climate goals while improving farmer livelihoods and strengthening long-term food security.

Full Transcript

Andy Stone: Welcome to the Energy Policy Now podcast from the Kleinman Center for Energy Policy at the University of Pennsylvania. I’m Andy Stone. Global agriculture changed dramatically during the 20th century as small, traditional farms were replaced by large monoculture farming in many parts of the world. The result has been a dramatic increase in food production, helping to feed a global population that today exceeds eight billion. Yet, the revolution in agriculture has created a new set of challenges. Modern farming is more resource intensive than ever, requiring substantial investments in equipment and technology, and reliance on inputs like chemical fertilizers. These changes expose farmers to new types of economic risk, and in many areas of the globe, the advent of bulk cash crops has come at the cost of soil quality and the nutritional value of the food we grow.

On today’s podcast, we’ll explore the tension between modern agriculture and its impacts on environment, nutrition and farming economics with Lindiwe Majele Sibanda. Lindiwe is a Professor of Agriculture at the University of Pretoria in South Africa, and a cattle farmer in Zimbabwe. She is also Board Chair of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research, a global partnership of agricultural research centers focused on food security. She’ll explore current efforts to further improve farming by revisiting traditional crops and adopting practices that may lower reliance on fossil fuels, enhance soil management, and offer climate benefits. Lindiwe, welcome to the podcast.

Lindiwe Majele Sibanda: Thank you.

Stone: So you have a very broad resume. You are a Research Professor, a cattle farmer, and Board Chair of CGIAR. What has been the focus of your research and your work with that organization?

Sibanda: My work with CGIAR is really about the governance of a system. CGIAR, as you know, is a grouping a partnership of 13 centers plus two others.

Stone: And those are agricultural research centers?

Sibanda: And these are all agriculture research centers. What are we working on? We have a common vision to transform food systems, land systems, water systems, in the face of climate change, all in an effort to make the world food secure and nutrition secure.

Stone: So that is to improve or change agricultural processes in light of the added pressures of climate change?

Sibanda: Yeah, I like the way you say agriculture processes. We like to talk more about food systems. And the difference between the two is that, in 2021, a big change that came into our world is that we moved from just agriculture into food systems, and food systems talks about from farm to fork. Previously, agriculture was just concentrated around inputs that come to the farm and production on farm. Now, we move out of the farm into harvesting, storage, processing, distribution, and consumption at household level. So in our centers, our focus is food systems from the farm to the fork, which is what people eventually eat.

Stone: So the whole chain from start to finish to the table.

Sibanda: Exactly. But more important, focusing on the nutritional quality of what we produce. It’s no longer just about commodities, corn is a commodity, wheat is a commodity, it’s more what are we doing in the food system space for people to consume nutrient dense foods?

Stone: So as you just mentioned, you work at the intersection of nutrition, environment, and also the economic viability of farming for farmers, and a lot has changed over the last century in terms of farming practices. But before we discuss the issues and the challenges that that has brought us to and it’s gone through what we’ve called the Green Revolution of the past century, could you tell us a little bit about what traditional farming looked like? And I understand that you grew up on a farm in Zimbabwe that looked much more like farming used to look than it does today. Tell us a little bit about what that was like and how things have changed.

Sibanda: That brings a lot of smiles to my own face, because it takes me back to my grandmother, Gogo Miambe’s [?] farm in Zimbabwe, like Low Aguero [?] Village. What was unique about that farm in the ‘60s, like many other small holder farms then, it’s a one hectare farm, but that farm served as my grandmother’s nutrition garden. It served as a food garden. It served to feed her for income, to feed her family, and we fed the soil. That’s how she looked at it. But most important, she called it her pharmacy, because all the herbs that kept us healthy came from that farm. Now that speaks to diversity.

Can you imagine a one hectare farm that produces all the cereals we needed for our staple? And our staple was corn, and it still is corn for most of Zimbabweans. But in addition to corn, we had sorghum, we had millet, and there was this special variety of sweet sorghum, which you could harvest from the field and just chew and get your sugar from it continuously. That’s for cereals. We also had beans, three, four varieties of beans on the same farm. We had vegetables. We had fruit trees, mangoes, pawpaws. The most common fruits there was guava, which we could harvest any time when they were in season.

But most important, we had livestock. We had free ranging chickens. We had goats. And every time we came as grandchildren from the city to visit grandma, a goat was slaughtered for us to eat. So we were spoiled. We had meat every day, but it was less than 20 grams per person per day. The rest was the vegetables and the syrup from the garden. We also had a dairy cow, one dairy cow, and that’s where we got our milk, and my grandmother was big in making cottage cheese. So you can imagine the diversity in our diet. Sweet potatoes for breakfast. For lunch, we would have a sorghum meal, and for dinner, we’d have the corn meal with diverse types of vegetables and protein sources.

Stone: So that was plenty. That was a very well balanced diet.

Sibanda: Well balanced, diverse diet. And not only fed the grandchildren, but my grandmother’s six children. So we had enough from just one hectare farm.

Stone: Modern agriculture, monoculture, has replaced a lot of that traditional farming that you’ve just described over the last, again, century or so. What drove that change? What problems was it trying to solve, particularly given that you’ve just said that you had this farm that really provided everything that was needed?

Sibanda: Yeah, So Gogo Miambe’s farm, the grandmother farm I described, was really a subsistence type of production. Schooling was close to free. Medical hospitals were for free. But things changed. There was no demand for income, and the push was to get your income from the resource that you had, which is the land. In Asia, it was different. They had mass starvation in the ‘60s, early ‘60s, ’63, ’64, ’65, and Swaminathan, who is the Father of the Green Revolution, linked up with Norman Borlaug, who was a scientist working out of Latin America, and they produced hybrid, high quality seeds that would increase the yield, but that increase in yield meant that you needed more fertilizers, you needed more water, the way of irrigation, but also pesticides to deal with the diseases that were associated with accelerated growth.

Stone: So those new crops couldn’t handle diseases if they weren’t indigenous to particular areas, is that what happened?

Sibanda: Yeah, yeah, but all that had been researched, and it was a heavily mechanized system. It was good for farmers. It did boost the income of farmers. It achieved new food security, but that food security was mainly in terms of calories. They were able to produce wheats without the wheats rust, which was an endemic disease in the area. All that was good as long as people were fed.

But fast forward, 20 years later, we got a challenge, where the soils were denuded of their nutrients. It was the same crops over and over again that were extractive in terms of the nutrient quality of the soils. Most important, people were malnourished. They were fed, but they were not nourished, because the food did not have the diversity. No one food can meet the requirements of our bodies. You need a diverse diet.

Second, the foods that were produced were non-nutrient dense. That led to malnourished soils, malnourished people, but worst, it was the impact on the environment. Can you imagine all that fertilizer and the emissions that were released from the excess fertilizer that was flowing into the soil and also into the waterways?

So we woke up to a situation where Green Revolution on its own is not good enough. Asia moved to an Evergreen Revolution, and luckily, Swaminathan, who turns 100 years this year, was still alive to recognize that damage and began the push towards Evergreen Revolution, which is going back to planting the pulses, which had been removed for monoculture, for high yielding cereals. So we need the diversity. We are almost going back to what my grandmother had, but now with more diverse crops, which have been researched to produce more for less.

Stone: I want to talk about that Evergreen Revolution in a moment, but just going back. So basically, what the situation was is you had mono crops coming in.

Sibanda: Yeah.

Stone: The crops themselves weren’t diverse enough to provide all the nutrients that people needed. Plus you had depleted soils from the practices that, I guess, reduced the amount of nutrients that were inherent in the foods that were available, and that was really bad for providing people the nutrition that they needed. Another element that you just mentioned a few minutes ago was the economics of farming, and this changed the economics of farming for farmers, made them more tied into the broader economic system for good and for bad. What was the impact of that?

Sibanda: Well, farming is tough, and you’ve got to do your maths to break even. So if you get a crop that doubles your yield, it means more money in the pocket. And as I said for my grandmother, it was feed your pocket, feed your family, and feed the soil. But what that Green Revolution did was to feed the pocket but not feed the egg and not nourish the people. What does that money do? This is how you move from low to middle income.

The people are now able to afford protein dense foods from the supermarkets. They were able to buy cheese. They were able to buy animal source foods like meat, which previously would have been beyond their reach. They were able to afford cars. I’ll speak about my own village. Once you have made it and have had a good income and good agriculture season, you move from sitting on the floor when you eat to a dining room table. You move from a handset radio to a television set. You move from sleeping on the floor to buying beds for your family. And that is the measure of development. That’s the aspiration in a village for every farmer. But most important, you start paying for good quality education for your children.

Stone: Now, if the farms fail or don’t produce as much, then you’re also tied into that economic system as well.

Sibanda: So it’s not only failure at the farms, it’s really a transition. Not everybody makes it. Like any technology adoption, there are the early starters who get it, and they rise up the ladder. But there will always be those laggards who are still on a one hectare farm, are not producing enough, cannot buy the high quality seeds. Because remember, my grandmother used to keep her best quality seeds from her own farm and replant them. But with these high quality hybrid seeds, you have to buy them, and you cannot replant them. When you replant, the yields nose dive downwards.

Now, it’s not going to be for everybody to adopt that technology, and not everybody can afford the fertilizer requirements that are prescribed for the soil. So there’s always going to be people who make it through agriculture. Those are the lead farmers in any village. And then there are those who just get maybe just one bucket of corn per year, and the rest of the time they are dependent on food aid or some support.

So technology is what drives improved productivity, and the challenge has always been, how do you help farmers access affordable technology? And that’s where the issue of smart subsidies comes in. To introduce a technology, farmers are averse to risk, but if a few adopt it and showcase that it works, others will latch on, but there will still be those who can’t afford, and you want them to all access. So governments, through policy, introduce what is called smart subsidies, which is subsidized new technologies with a plan to withdraw once farmers have made enough income and are able to finance the next season.

Stone: I want to take a step back here for just a moment and talk about climate change and its impact. You mentioned that also a few minutes ago. And climate change is something that is frequently in the news, that it affects particularly developing areas of the world most noticeably. What impacts are you seeing on your farm and the areas that you work that are a result of climate change, and what challenges are these presenting for farmers and food systems generally?

Sibanda: The one reason I’ve remained a farmer is that it has humbled me to relate to the science we generate, and to understand how difficult it is for farmers on the ground to prepare and to produce food. Five years ago, we had our worst nightmare in Zimbabwe on my farm, where I lost about 20 percent of our cattle because we didn’t get enough rain, and our storage, water storage, ran out. And there’s nothing as painful as having an animal come and push the fence, the boundary to your homestead, because they can see a tap that you’ve got on for your drinking water. Can you imagine a herd of 100 animals surrounding your homestead, bellowing away to say, “Give us water. Give us water.” We lost some, but I was lucky, I was able to transport some of the animals to my father’s farm.

Stone: Was that type of drought unprecedented?

Sibanda: It was unprecedented, but wait until you hear about last year. 2024 season, we had El Nino. The good thing about that season, even though it was the worst in living memory in the past 15 years, was that we were warned. Our early warning systems came into effect. And for most farmers, when we get that, we are like, “Did they get it right?” But I was smart. For once, I reduced my herd by 50 percent and that’s the best thing I did. We ran out of water. All the crops failed, and we did not have sufficient water.

But luckily, because I had reduced the herd, we had sufficient to meet, though rationed, the animal requirements. They did not have the luxury of hard labor term [?] drinking, but at least we had sufficient to keep them alive. We did not experience any deaths. In other farming areas, mortality was up to 100 percent just because animals had no water. The feed was a problem, but you can ship in feed. You can buy food from other areas and bring it in. How do you ship in water when your animal needs 100 liters per day? It’s just impossible.

So those are the challenges we’ve come head on with. My herd has gone down. I’m not complaining, because I could have lost through death, but we can build better. And this year, 2025 season is one of the best I’ve had in the last 20 years. So farming is a risk, and unless you have climate mitigation strategies, one of them is investing in water harvesting, but also having irrigation systems, because a rain fed system is the most risky type of farming. And unfortunately, irrigation coverage for most of Africa is no more than five percent. Most people depend on rain fed systems, And that’s why the impact of climate change is heaviest, because you are not ready to mitigate the risk, and we need more investment in irrigated systems.

Stone: There has been an arc of development in agriculture, and it goes from these very diverse farms, the rainbow farm, as you’ve called it, that you grew up on, to much larger plots, monoculture farms. And now, looking forward to meet needs of nutrition and the environment and managing the soil, the idea is to move back to something known as opportunity crops, at least that’s kind of the current buzz word. Tell us what the opportunity crops are. Is it simply just going back to the way things were on your grandmother’s farm, or does it look a little different than that?

Sibanda: But Andy, before I go into opportunity crops, I spoke about water being a challenge during drought years as a result of climate change. One of the things that have hit us hard is diseases. We are experiencing new diseases in our livestock that we have never known. And as a result, we don’t have the vaccines that are relevant. Your health management system shoots over the roof because you have to vaccinate more. But unfortunately, even the vaccines we are using are not effective because we don’t know what we’re dealing with. And no wonder we are dealing with anti-microbial resistance, because farmers are just jabbing the animals just to try and catch up with the diseases. All that is because we’ve got extreme heat and extreme humidity at times. And it’s just a yo-yo. You just don’t know what’s in store and how to deal with it. And all that is effect of climate change.

Stone: Well, you brought up a very interesting point also in a talk that you gave here at the University yesterday. You said the cost for farmers are going up for inputs, for fertilizers, for pesticides, and herbicides, for vaccines, for cattle, but the price at market is the same.