Eating healthier food would not only be good for our bodies; it would also improve the health of our farmland, our environment, and our rural communities.

This is the message of The Healthy Farmland Diet: How Growing Less Corn Would Improve Our Health and Help America’s Heartland, a 2013 report which uses economic modeling techniques to estimate the effects of changing food consumption on agricultural land use.

The findings? Increased consumption of healthy foods would lead U.S. farmers to grow more of these foods and less of the commodity crops that currently dominate U.S. agriculture. This in turn would produce healthier soil, air and water, as well as providing economic benefits in the form of job growth and increased access to healthy foods for farm communities.

Our Unhealthy Farm Landscape

Only about 2 percent of U.S. cropland is used to grow fruits and vegetables, while 59 percent is devoted to commodity crops, such as corn and soybeans, which are used primarily to produce three things: meat, processed foods such as high fructose corn syrup, and biofuels such as ethanol.

Current farm policy encourages this pattern by providing subsidies for commodity crop farmers; farmers who receive these subsidies are usually prohibited from growing fruits and vegetables. Furthermore, federal crop insurance programs are tailored for commodity crop farmers, making it hard for fruit and vegetable farmers to obtain insurance and credit.

Why is a landscape dominated by commodity crops unhealthy? These crops are grown using monoculture practices that rely on heavy application of fertilizers and pesticides to compensate for their soil-depleting and pest-attracting effects. Monoculture is also less beneficial for local economies than more diverse farm landscapes.