Prof. David Lobell says a lot of his students are puzzled when they get to his Stanford University classroom and hear him advocate for the food industrial complex.
“The basic challenge of the next 30 years is how do you make the most of current land and labor, and maximize yield with those resources,” says Lobell, a 2013 MacArthur “Genius Grant” recipient who uses data to investigate the impact of climate change on crop production. “Buying organic and local aren’t the key because they won’t be at enough scale to be at the center of the problem.”
Lobell, 36, says his students get upset upon learning their teacher supports the current food production system. Lobell explains that things like farmers markets, organic foods and buying local have little-to-no impact on whether someone in sub-Saharan Africa will be able to eat 20 years from now.
“The students are very interested in the topic and they’ve got very critical thinking, but when I give talks to general audiences the questions are sometimes from people with agendas, such as, ‘Aren’t you perpetuating the current system?’ and ‘Shouldn’t we all be farmers?’”
His answer is no.
Lobell, who grew up just outside of New York City in Port Washington, joked that he was the least likely person to study agriculture. He says the largest fields he ever saw as a child were those at baseball games he attended with his family. But during a 2001 visit to a grad school advisor in Mexico he saw how data could impact food production.
“In retrospect my timing was good,” says Lobell, who has benefitted from growing data availability and rising interest in agriculture thanks to higher food prices. “In a way, when I first started, I thought I was being lazy using data that was already there. Now they call it data science.”
Lobell has helped turn agriculture upside down. Before the incorporation of data, scientists looking at food production would focus solely on field experiments and on-the-ground surveys. Lobell helped usher in an era of cooperation, where experienced researchers and farmers now work together with data scientists to increase the efficiency of growing staple crops like wheat, rice and corn.
That model led him to study climate change and its effects on growing such staple crops in parts of the world that depend more on nature than on technology. This explains Lobell’s appreciation for the American agricultural system – much to his students’ chagrin – because, as it stands, it produces surpluses of food in a very efficient manner.
“I don’t think we can meet our food goals if we don’t have high productivity agriculture,” he says. “My work is very much focused on increasing efficiency and productivity, especially for the main crops we already grow.”
Lobell was awarded the prestigious MacArthur “Genius Grant” in 2013 for his pioneering work. While he was thrilled to get the money and the award he says he stayed focused on the nitty gritty of his work rather than get caught up in his success. One way he did that was to continue partnering with others in his field to advance his research.
“I continually realize that I would have been nothing without the people I work with,” he says.
Lobell added that getting so much success for one area of research is dangerous: he does not want to only be known as the wheat and corn guy.
“Just because you get recognized working on one topic doesn’t mean that one topic should be forever,” he says. “It’s like investing in stocks: once everyone is buying a stock it’s probably a sign to move on.”
Lobell, currently an associate professor in Environmental Earth System Science and deputy director of the Center on Food Security and the Environment at Stanford University, lives with his wife and two children in Palo Alto. He says his family has the most basic understanding of what he does for a living.
“My kids say, ‘He helps produce food,’ ” he says.
Lobell says climate change will continue to impact what and how we eat. Droughts and record heat waves will continue to affect growing cycles for staple crops, and Lobell sees it as his job to help farmers produce enough food to feed themselves and those around them.
In addition to his future work on climate change Lobell will be looking at synergies available to farmers and others in agriculture, such as installing solar panels alongside farms so that any energy collected could be used in the growing process. He is also working with
So what will we be eating in 20 years? Lobell says the most change will occur around protein, specifically animal protein. In the aggregate more animal protein will be consumed, Lobell says, but the developed world share of meat eating will decrease. Instead, people in developed nations will have a diet heavier in vegetable protein, due partly to health and partly to cost.
