Growing up I was often found sitting in front of the television listening to my parents remark how the television was turning my brain to mush. One of my favorite shows was “Heroes,” whose premise was based around the line “Save the cheerleader, save the world.” In light of one of our themes being based around feeding the world, I have devised a new motto: Feed the cheerleader, feed the world. This phrase has been repeated so frequently to the point where a game should have been put in place for every time it was uttered. While I do wish for every person to have food to eat, will the world become unfixable because of the farming practices done today?

At the Iowa Soybean Association we were able to meet with Carol Balvanz and her to team to discuss the predicament that our world could face. Carol Balvanz was a very intelligent woman who voiced her views on high-input farming in an optimistic light. However I believed she glanced over the dangers that this concept could entail for the future.

While high-input farming does yield a higher amount of crops, it also yields a larger carbon footprint. A farm model based on agroecology would reduce the size of fiber footprints and increase the number of different crops planted at a farm. While this style of farming would help the soil gain much-needed nutrients, agroecology does not produce as high of yields as the “feed the world” conventional monoculture farm. In our increasingly monocropped agriculture, soil erosion has become a bigger threat than ever before. Our society has become solely focused on feeding the world that we are possibly destroying the land we farm on in the process. Fields could become infertile over time. While this short term fix to feed the world today may work, long term there will be no land on which to farm. I am glad I do not have to make the decision on whether we adopt a policy that is more sustainable and admit we are unable to feed the world or we feed and destroy the world simultaneously. Now go back and count the number of times I said “feed the world” in this post. This phrase carries the power to determine the direction of future Farm Bills. Will this phrase help us achieve a goal that many feel is out of reach or leave us and our world in ruins?