From horses to AI: Jennifer Clapp on how fossil fuels shaped agriculture

Is the battle over who controls and owns agricultural data one of the most important—and least discussed—fights in 21st-century farming? In this conversation, Jennifer Clapp (prof at the University of Waterloo and member of IPES-Food) explores the deep ties between fossil fuels and our food system, tracing their influence from fertilizers and pesticides to farm mechanization and digital agriculture. She unpacks how fossil-fueled inputs have shaped—and continue to shape—modern farming. 

For more info and resources, please visit our episode webpage.

Guests

• Jennifer Clapp, IPES-Food

Edited by Matthew Kessler. Audio engineering by Adam Titmuss. Cover art by The Ethical Agency. Music by Blue dot sessions.

Fuel to Fork is powered by TABLE, IPES-Food and the Global Alliance for the Future of Food.

Transcript

Matthew

This is the Fuel to Fork podcast, where we expose and explore the fossil fuels in our food. I’m your guide Matthew Kessler. 

Earlier in the series, we interviewed Jennifer Clapp about the history and future of farming systems, and there were so many interesting details in our conversation that I couldn’t stop thinking about them weeks and even months after we talked.

Jennifer

They're all investing and developing products for precision in digital agriculture. So it opens up a potential pathway for these firms to merge with each other in the future if we consider data as like a new input into agriculture.

Matthew

So we’ve got a bonus episode for you with Jennifer Clapp, Professor and Canada research chair at the University of Waterloo, member of IPES food, the international panel of experts on sustainable food systems, and author of the new book: Titans of Industrial Agriculture: How a Few Giant Corporations Came to Dominate the Farm Sector and Why It Matters.

What I really love about this conversation is how Jennifer connects the past to the future. Our first part of the conversation starts in the 1800s, dive into the history of mechanization in agriculture, and how that set the scene for much of today’s farms run from fossil inputs. And in the second part, we ask if data is the new frontier for agricultural inputs?

 A few notes for the listeners. If you’ve already listened to the Fuel to Fork series and this topic sounds familiar, we pretty much cover entirely new ground in this episode.

 If you’d prefer to skip the history, and head straight to the race to control the future of farming by owning agricultural data, then skip forward to about 18 minutes into the episode..

Matthew

I want to start this conversation in a place where people who aren't really nerdy and deep into all the food, energy, and climate conversations are, and just talk about fossil fuels in our food system and what are the actual connections to some of the ways that they show up in the food system. So maybe we could just start with what are the fossil energy connections around fertilizers or nitrogen fertilizer specifically?

Jennifer Clapp

I mean, that's a good question because I think we typically think of fossil fuels in the food system as like liquid fuels that are powering machinery and moving food around or maybe moving a tractor around. But fossil fuels are embedded in almost all of the inputs that are going into food and farming today.

So with respect to fertilizers, what we have today is a fertilizer production system, especially the nitrogen fertilizer, that's basically synthesizing nitrogen through a chemical process that requires enormous amounts of energy. And most of that process is done with fossil energy.

Matthew

In short, Nitrogen synthesis is the process of converting nitrogen from the air (N₂) into ammonia, a form that plants can use to grow.

Jennifer

And so the primary method by which that reaction is done is basically using very high temperatures to react nitrogen in the atmosphere with hydrogen gas to create this ammonia, which is very rich in nitrogen. And that method requires huge amounts of natural gas to get the heat and temperatures necessary to synthesize that nitrogen. So that's a huge connection between nitrogen synthesized fertilizer and fossil fuels. But the other nutrients that we use typically as fertilizers, phosphates and potash, are also mined substances. And those substances are mined with big heavy equipment that is powered by fossil fuels. So all three of the nutrients of nitrogen, phosphorus, and potash or potassium are all connected to fossil fuels in one way or another.

Matthew

Okay, so that's nitrogen synthesis. How about another farm input: pesticides? What are the fossil connections there?

Jennifer Clapp

Pesticides are also deeply connected to fossil fuels. In fact, the synthesis of pesticides that began in the 1930s through the process of organic chemistry, it’s deriving chemicals from carbon. I mean this is basically - scientists were using fossil fuel byproducts like coal tar and experimenting by creating chemical compounds and then testing them for pesticidal quality. So the synthesis of pesticides themselves are actually coming from fossil fuel derivatives.

And we also have to consider that the production of pesticides is also a huge energy consumer. So there's a lot of energy used. So when you think about pesticides, every aspect of them are deeply connected to fossil fuels. They're derived from fossil fuel byproducts. And also they take a huge amount of fossil energy just to produce them in these large facilities. And we often don't think about those fossil fuel connections to pesticides, but they're definitely there.

Matthew

Why do you think that is? We pay perhaps more attention to greenhouse gas emissions, to climate, to food security. I don't know if I'm answering my own question, they feel like the more immediate needs. But I think there's been a whole conversation built around climate that wasn't there historically. So why do you think the connections of these fossil fuels isn't as apparent as some of these other, say, incredibly pressing issues?

Jennifer

I think we tend to think of these as products and not always where they're coming from. And it's interesting because pesticides used to be based on natural substances like minerals that were mined or plant extracts, things that people kind of knew what they were. But then when pesticides started to be derived from chemistry and organic chemistry, these kinds of products, it kind of, definitely, didn’t just kind of, itdefinitely de-skilled farmers and the rest of us, we just don't really know what these chemicals are. And so when we don't have a good sense of where they came from, it's really hard to make those connections back.

We think of chemicals as a chemical, we don't necessarily think of all the fossil energy and byproducts that went into deriving it in the first place. And I think we have to reclaim our knowledge about what's going on. And yeah, so I think that's a big part of it is we've been really distanced from what it is. And we just think of a pesticide as, yeah, it's just a chemical that kills pests. But yeah, we got to dig deeper.

Matthew

Fertilizers and pesticides are typically classified as industrial emissions rather than food systems emissions. For example the Environmental Protection Agency and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change does this. Like Jennifer said, the emissions are happening outside of the farm, so we don’t automatically connect the two to each other, even though it’s an integral part of industrial food production.

We’re not going to retell the rest of the fertilizer story here as we did on our second episode “the rise of fossil fuels in our food system”. So if you want to hear about the rise and fall of guano, or how scientists in the early 1900s found a solution to adding more nitrogen to farms through the Haber-Bosch process, you can listen to episode 2 and hear how these events radically changed the way we eat and grow food today. 

Here, Jennifer traces another history. The history of mechanization and how that shaped today’s food system.

Jennifer Clapp

For me, the rise of farm machinery mechanization actually was probably the driver, sorry, apologies for the pun, was probably the driver of the increased need for these other inputs as well into the industrial farm process that has become so fossil fuel dependent. 

Yeah, so the origins of farm mechanization, I mean, obviously farmers used tools for digging the soil and tools for harvesting, but they were usually hand tools that maybe were forged by local blacksmiths in earlier days, going back hundreds, if not thousands of years. But when we talk about mechanization, we usually start that story around the 1830s.

Often people speak of Cyrus McCormack who was in Virginia in the United States and he crafted what he called the mechanical reaper out of iron. So he basically made this machine that could be pulled by a horse that would basically radically increase efficiency in terms of how many acres a farmer could harvest in a day. So with a horse and maybe a couple of people instead of a whole field full of agricultural laborers or a single farmer working days and days to harvest that same amount.

So it was a major transformation, the invention of this mechanical reaper. But also we have to think about plows as well. And I consider plows part of farm machinery, even though we typically think of them as just something you pull with a tractor.

They used to be pulled by a horse, but they were also fashioned from iron. So again, using wood or coal to create the energy for that kind of thing. But then eventually they became steel tools. And the same with the reapers. They were made in these huge, ginormous factories that were among the biggest industrial facilities in North America by the 1880s, were actually these farm machinery companies. And when you think about the fact that, you know, 60 to 80 % of the population at that time were farmers. These were really, really important companies. But anyway, these machines were really important in transforming farming more generally.

Basically, it allowed farmers to farm larger and larger tracts of land, which then kind of demanded more of these other inputs. Because once you were farming a large tract of land, you were then typically growing crops in a monoculture fashion. This made them more susceptible to pests. And it also exhausted the soil more efficiently because plowing was very disruptive to the soil. And then it led to a need for more fertilizers to be added to the soil. So these three inputs are deeply connected to each other in terms of their locking in of this suite of technologies.

Matthew

Some call this the “technology treadmill.” Not only does it create a specific farming system that requires a set of inputs - derived from fossil fuels -  to improve productivity. It makes it really hard to get off, especially as related inventions – like the steam engine – made the whole farming system more efficient.

Jennifer

It was really at the turn of the 20th century with the rise of gasoline engines. Gasoline powered engines for the automobile industry. This created a huge transformation in the farm machinery sector. And it's an interesting example where the first invention was the creation of the Reaper or the steel tip plow that came from the farm sector. But the gasoline engine was outside of the farm sector, but it was brought in. And it was brought in quickly, brought in by the big same large companies that were making farm machinery and led to these self-propelled tractors, combine harvesters, picking machines, a lot of these kinds of machinery emerged in the early 20th century.

And this as I said, was a hugely transformative process. Because farms became larger and farmers could rely on fossil energy now to do a lot of these tasks on the farm, it led to a huge displacement of labor. So as farms became bigger, many of the people who were farming, they often were, you know, black farmers, other kinds of marginalized farmers, poor farmers, they might not have owned their own land. They might have rented. And then when a farmer had machinery, they could just kick people off their land or force others who didn't have the money to buy the machines to sell their land. And so this led to the massive growth in the size of farms and the use of fossil energy now to replace human energy.

Matthew

What's interesting here is how Jennifer connects the story of the rise of farm machinery - and modern agriculture - with the rise of fossil fuels.

Jennifer

As I mentioned already, this led to larger farms, it meant more plowing and the need for more fertilizers, it meant more monocultures and the need for more pesticides. And also once hybrid seeds came around in the 1920s and 1930s, these seeds to produce higher yields needed more application of fertilizer. So it sort of all reinforced this kind of fossil energy dependent industrial agricultural model.

So yeah, farm machinery, I think for me was one of the earliest transformations, but also one of the ones that was really driving the other ones as well. Even though the history of all these inputs goes back into terms of the rise of a commercial industry for these inputs dates back to around the 1830s, 1840s.

In every one of these cases, because even before that, these were not typically market goods, certainly not produced on a mass scale. But yeah, things started to change. And then when fossil fuels became more readily available in the transformation of farm machinery, it just really turbocharged the whole rest of the process.

Matthew

That's really fascinating to think that 200 years ago, approximately, is when the commercial side of these sectors started to develop. And then over the next 100 years, there were a number of technological advancements that perhaps increased the efficiency, increased the length of the supply chain, all the way up to 100 years ago. So this is really like this, this has a deeper history.

Just one other statistic I wanted to bring in here was, I know this for the United States, at the turn of the century in 1900, just over 40% of people were working in the agricultural sector. And 100 years later in the year 2000, it was less than 2%. So talking about all this displacing of labor.

Jennifer

Exactly, and I think, and we forget about the huge social disruption that came with that. Like in the 1940s when tractors were - because when tractors came around, farmers weren't necessarily at first that interested in them because they had horses and horses could do multiple things on the farm. Horses could take you to church on Sunday and horses could get you to town to do your errands. You couldn't do that on a tractor. So if a farmer made a shift to a tractor, they also had to get an automobile. Or keep their horse, but they were interested in the fact that horses were kind of expensive to keep. You had to set aside fields for their feed. You had to have some hired hands to take care of the animals. You needed a barn that they could live in. So once tractors came along, farmers were really having to make a difficult decision about which way to go. I mean, there were studies going back in the 1930s, even down to the fact that horses can work better in the rain.

They can make sharper turns in a field. You know, so there were lots of considerations going on. But once that transition was made, it was hugely consequential. And there are, you know, I found a really interesting study about machinery on the farm from the 1940s from the US Department of Agriculture. And a big theme, the primary theme in that report was about the labor displacing tendencies of farm mechanization and the social consequences because people were leaving rural areas, moving to urban areas. And there were a lot of, in the U.S. in particular, there were a lot of racial dynamics because freed slaves often were working as sharecroppers or renting farms from white farmers. And then they were displaced by this process. And, migrated to cities and this created a lot of tension as well. And this was a huge concern at the time. Today, you think of the, if you look at a children's book and it's got a farmer, it's usually a white guy on a tractor and that's kind of the image that kids internalize of what is farming. But we have to think about the deep processes and consequences that arose from this process. And deep injustices that occurred that to kind of get invisibilized by the common image. So anyway, we need to think about it that social aspect as well as you know, the ecological aspect I think they're deeply entwined with one another and and we have to we really have to consider it. 

Matthew

So that’s part 1. It's clear that the rise of fossil fuels came in tandem with the rise of farm machinery and input-heavy agriculture - and that's had massive impacts on our food system and on society.

And it might make you wonder what the counterfactual would look like. If there wasn’t this widespread mechanization and technological innovation in agriculture that led to larger and larger farms, fewer farmers and mass migration to cities.

For starters, we’d have to set aside a whole lot of land to feed the horses that plow our land. Instead of exhaust emissions from cars, we might need street maintenance to regularly clean up horse manure. Summers would be filled with community harvests rather than holidays. Maybe fewer people would live in cities, which would probably be a good thing—after all, it would be difficult to feed today’s densely packed urban centers. 

In Jennifer Clapp’s new book out now, she traces this history across the chemical pesticide companies, the fertilizer companies, and the farm machinery sector. We’ll link to some diagrams from the book on our webpage, showing how dozens of companies across each sector have merged or were acquired. And today, only a handful dominate. 

Now we’ll switch over to the future of digital farming and why all these companies are investing heavily in data as the new agricultural input.

Matthew

It's really interesting to think about the development of these firms over time and you can see their evolution to build market power and concentration and they were trying to deliver and meet the need of a growing global population with limited resources. I think you can trouble that narrative in different ways, but that was a very real threat that was being faced in post -World War II.

Fast forward to the present, 70 years later, I think there's a much wider understanding or recognition that we're confronted with planetary boundaries. There's an unequal distribution of food and access to food in the world. These companies have shifted a lot of their work towards precision technologies or digital farming or digital agriculture.

I want to hear your take on this. What is a best case scenario and also what do you think is happening in practice?

Jennifer Clapp

Right. Yeah, well, first I'll just say what's really interesting to me about the rise of precision technologies and digital agriculture is that all the firms across machinery, pesticides, and fertilizers, though these are separate industries today, they're all investing and developing products for precision in digital agriculture. So it opens up a potential pathway for these firms to merge with each other in the future if we consider data as a new input into agriculture.

So that's interesting. They're all vying for this. And the reason they're all vying for the market in digital agriculture is because of something that big tech scholars call platform power. Once you have the dominant platform like Amazon or Facebook, Google, once you have that dominant platform, everyone else has to kind of like work with you and you become a gatekeeper.

And that's something that these firms are all trying to be. They're all trying to get the most dominant platform so that everyone has to deal with them. But anyway, the idea behind this sort of digital and precision agriculture is really to collect data on farms like soil data, weather data, pest data, all kinds of data. Pull that data with data from other farms, analyze it, and then use AI to generate prescriptions to give back to farmers to help them be more precise and more productive in their fields.

Matthew

So how’s that work? Using lots of data about farm management, different landscapes, climates, soils. Understanding what are the regional pests in your area?  What varieties grow best? AI can then prescribe a set of seeds and inputs in coordination with tractors to give precise treatments to the local conditions both across and within different farm fields.

Jennifer

This part of your field needs a bit more fertilizer than other parts of your field because it's lower in certain nutrients. Maybe it's on a slope, maybe it's whatever. And then also, you're only going to need to use herbicides when absolutely necessary. So for example, these sophisticated machines that have cameras and sensors can actually spot weeds and spray them only where the actual weed is, rather than a blanket spraying across the field. So it's quite a sophisticated combination of hardware and software that comes together, the use of AI, to basically generate a more precise way to farm.

And this raises all kinds of issues and I'm sure these become obvious once you start to think about it, about data ownership has been a big concern that people have been talking about because farmers basically have to give up data on their farm and give it to this general pool of data that then gets analyzed and then it raises questions about their own sovereignty of their data on their farms. But we also have to think about the energy and water required and those don't always pop to mind right away. But obviously these machines are requiring energy to do these things like sensors and cameras and whatnot, but also the data. We have to think about the ecological implications of the data itself. The data sits on servers, and the water use is also required to cool these servers. And also when we consider the use of AI, that actually generates more energy use that requires more fossil, typically fossil energy. It doesn't have to be, I suppose it could be electrical, from other renewable resources, but it's using water as well to cool these servers.

And so, it’s pretty cool, like, wow, we can become more precise, we can be more efficient in the way we use these natural resources, chemicals and increase our production by stylizing seeds for certain fields, et cetera. But at the same time, it has these other hidden aspects to it or these hidden costs we have to consider.

But what the farm companies, these companies providing this digital farming platforms are arguing is that this is the way to more sustainable agriculture. They argue that this is a way to actually decouple from limited natural resources, including energy, which is, I think, a little bit ironic given the high energy use needed for AI and data storage. But the argument is basically that with more precision, we can be more careful about how much chemical we use and save natural resources. They're also now increasingly integrating these software platforms with carbon credit initiatives. So basically part of the prescription farmers if they sign on if you do no -till farming and use herbicides to kill weeds instead of plowing this is going to store carbon and we'll link it all up with this digital platform and then you can both you know get our services and get paid for the carbon that you're storing and it's sort of they're positioning it as a climate smart resource efficient way of farming.

But you know, while it might bring some benefits on the margin, the bigger picture that we have to think about is that hidden story of how much energy and water is on the backside of that particular technology. But also that whole digital farming platform has been designed by these farm companies to continue to sell their existing products. So it's not moving us away from chemical use entirely. It's not moving us away from reliance on farm mechanization. It's not moving us away from reliance on fertilizer. Instead, it's making the existing system more efficient.

Matthew

I think that’s really interesting. It's a fascinating challenge to think about. They need a market to sell these products but they're also asking for a reduction of use in them. So there is a question around kind of what is the sustainable business plan -

Jennifer Clapp

Oh yes. I read an interesting interview with one of the Bayer executives. H e basically said that, and this was in the Financial Times. It's not like it's a secret. They said that our vision is to basically offer a service to farmers that will guarantee that you'll have decent production and decent margin so long as you give us a cut. So their vision is actually to sell, in a way, a risk management package of technology to farmers, but it turns farmers into basically workers. Sort of like the way we think about chicken growers, right, or livestock farmers. They basically become contract workers. Well, and the fact that they sell these digital services not by a person, it's not based on you have one subscription to our thing and we'll charge you. You know, that's sort of like Netflix does that, right? Instead, they charge you by your acreage. So the bigger your farm, the more you're going to pay. And that's another way that they're making more money off of this. Even if they might be selling less chemicals, they're selling more data and data is a huge now proportion of their profits.

Matthew

There's also a big question around what agency the farmer has to accept or not accept these contracts. There's so many interesting things we could explore in the back of this. I want to bring this towards wrapping up.

I guess the one question that I'm having or thinking throughout all this is what's different or unique about food system versus the rest of our modern society and civilization?  Is there something special about the way that fossil fuels have imprinted themselves all over the food system or is it just a feature of our 21st century globalized society?

Jennifer

Yeah, that's a really good question. Well, I'm just looking around my room and I'm seeing embodied energy, fossil energy and fossil fuels in everything from the frame around my computer screen to the fact that my computer is running on electricity. I think it's everywhere and we don't always think about it through that lens.

But I think that I guess what makes the food system special or unique or what gets me thinking about it is that we have that free solar energy every day. Until the sun burns out we're gonna have that energy every day but it's a limited flow. We only get so much per day versus the fossil energy where you have the ability to pull the lever and take as much as you want until it's gone.

And so we've turned the lever too far on fossil energy. We're taking too much all at once and not thinking about the fact that it's going to end. That's one consequence. But the other that is going to reach us even before we exhaust that is that climate change is fundamentally, yeah, it's fundamentally ruining the planet. And so we need to think about how we harness that solar energy better and not all societies across the world have utilized that fossil energy to the same extent. Some societies have utilized it much more than others, but once that transformation takes place it's hard to go back. We have to learn from farming systems and other parts of the world that are not yet completely embedded in fossil fuels. There are some, but I think there's to some extent it's everywhere.

But we have to learn from those systems that are trying to break free from it. And then, yeah, think about how we facilitate that major transformation. And I guess if one lesson came out of that for me and my big research project was that the state, which we haven't really talked about much, but governments played a huge role in facilitating the development and spread of industrial agriculture, they can play a huge role in facilitating the development and spread of non -fossil fuel dependent agriculture. And they need to step up and play that role. Neoliberalism has really been a big setback. The retreat of the state. We need state support for research and development in these areas, because the big companies aren't going to do it.

Matthew

I think that's a great place to leave it. I don't know if it's a note of doom or hope. It's kind of, it's somewhere, it's somewhere in between, I think. There is a, which is the state that we largely exist in within this topic.

All right, we'll leave it there. Jennifer Clap, thank you again so much for speaking with us.

Jennifer

You're welcome. It was a pleasure to have this conversation with you and I look forward to hearing the result.

Matthew

That’s a wrap on the Fuel to Fork podcast. In the next few weeks, we’re going back to new episodes from TABLE’s podcast Feed, that  humanizes debates over the future of food. 

A big, big thanks to you for listening the whole way through, and to the organizations and people behind this series. IPES food - the international panel of experts on sustainable food systems, Global Alliance for the future of food, and TABLE. Special thanks to Anna Paskal, Nicole Pita, Robbie Blake, Chantal Clement, Anna Lappe, Amanda Jekums, Dharini Parthasarathy, Melanie Moran, Tara Garnett, Tamsin Blaxter, and Jackie Turner. 

The series was edited and hosted by Matthew Kessler, sound engineering by Adam Timuss, logo and artwork by the Ethical Agency, Music by Blue Dot sessions.

Talk to you soon, in the Feed feed.