South of Alberta’s Badlands, where rainfall averages are lower than parts of Ethiopia, Nicholas Savidov’s self-contained ecosystem has grown literally tons of fish, vegetables and fruit, for years, all with hardly adding any water. Since 2001, explains Dr. Savidov, lead plant physiologist and biochemist at this provincial crop diversification lab, he’s recycled the same water, over and over, through jumbo vats, throbbing with hundreds of tilapia fish, out to an adjacent water table as big as a small backyard, where grids of aquaponic crops nourish on nutrients from the composted fish waste, and then back to the fish, where it returns clean and oxygenated. “Just one square metre,” of this operation, he says, “gives you more yield than in one acre of land.” The equipment pays for itself from food sales. All it requires is a little power, and fish food. The all-in-one food-making contraption could one day feed humans in poor regions where water and potent agricultural materials are not always easy to come by. “That’s an ideal system for a developing country,” Dr. Savidov says, pointing to a refrigerator-sized version he says might cost as little as $1,000. “[It] will produce up to 300 cucumbers a year.… A system like that can supply a family with fresh vegetables and with vitamins and also with protein” from the dozens of fish, he says. While Western environmentalists lionize unrefined, organic farms, one of the best ways to protect our environment is by spreading 21st century farming technology and corporate agricultural products. Food production that truly sustains the planet is the very stuff that the eco-priests decry: fish farms, genetically modified foods, and farms relying more, not less, on corporate-made chemicals. “Intensive agricultural production is the key,” says Patrick Moore, co-founder and former Canadian president of Greenpeace, now chairman of Vancouver-based communications firm Greenspirit Strategies. “It’s simple arithmetic: the more food you grow per acre, the less natural world you have to clear to do it.” The late Norman Borlaug, father of the Green Revolution that modernized farming, ending frequent famines, in India and Asia, illustrated it this way: in 1990, America produced 596 million tons of crops. Had it stuck with 1960 methods of farming, it would have needed 460 million more acres than in 1960, of fertile land. Only, there wasn’t 460 million more acres of good-quality land, so it would have been millions more yet, of poorer quality land. “We would have moved into marginal grazing areas and plowed up things that wouldn’t be productive in the long run. We would have had to move into rolling mountainous country and chop down our forests,” he once told Reason Magazine. With advances in agriculture, farmers instead doubled output in 30 years, using 25-million fewer acres. Mr. Borlaug, in addition to being credited for saving a billion lives by introducing fertilizers, pesticides, and seed genetics to Latin America and Asia (he won a Nobel peace prize for it,) spared millions of hectares of forests from being razed for farmland. At November’s UN World Summit on Food Security, economists estimated that the world must double current food output by 2050 to feed a population of 9-billion, many increasingly demanding Western-quality diets.

For developing countries, using farming methods circa 1860, never mind 1960, this means more than doubling farmland. Antiquated farming methods are the number one factor destroying forests. Sustenance agriculture -- Third World farmers typically farm an acre or less -- caused up to 45% of deforestation between 2000 and 2005. Africa was responsible for 50% of the world’s deforestation between 1990 and 2000, compared to Asia’s meager 4% contribution. “What Borlaug and the Green Revolution did was very positive for the environment, because a lot of land and forest were left untouched,” says Per Pinstrup-Andersen, professor of Food, Nutrition and Public Policy at Cornell University. But in Africa, he says, such destruction is worsening, as primitive farming methods, and fertilizer deficiencies, degrade soil of nutrients. “The erosion gets worse, and it’s a downward spiral,” as farmers abandon exhausted fields for new land, says Dennis Avery, director of the Center for Global Food Issues at the Hudson Institute. Both men believe that modern technology already offers the means to sate global appetites now and in 40 years, without devastating oceans or forests. But using it requires ignoring environmental NGOs, and letting the beneficial products of private industry play a bigger role. David Suzuki rhapsodizes about Cuba’s “sustainable” archaic ox-ploughed farms, but that country imports 85% of its food. An hour or so up the road from Dr. Savidov’s laboratories, John Tremblay, president of Alternative Agriculture Technology, breeds shrimp in two huge tanks in a barn in the middle of cattle country. He’s just getting started. When he’s fully scaled up, he estimates an enclosed shrimp farm on an acre of land will produce 60,000 lbs of food yearly -- a 30 times greater yield than a typical acre of soybeans. “We went from being labelled shrimp farmers to being sustainable food production specialists,” Mr. Tremblay says. “If a guy can grow shrimp in Alberta then we can do it almost anywhere.” Pound for pound, acre for acre, fish farms output more food, with fewer inputs and emissions, than land farms, without ravaging oceans or clearing land. “What most people don’t realize is that fish are so much more efficient at converting into food,” says Mr. Moore: their cold blood and not having to fight gravity makes seafood emit less than half the greenhouse gases of equivalent amounts of land-based meat. Just as man evolved from hunter-gatherer to domesticating livestock, it only makes sense to evolve our seafood cultivation, says Sebastian Belle, president of the Maine Aquaculture Association. Sea conservation groups say bottom-trawling is devastating millions of miles of aquatic ecosystems. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization estimates over 70% of fish species are either maximally exploited or depleted. While wild fishing declines, aquaculture is flourishing; accounting now for 42% of seafood production, it is expected to exceed 50% in the next decade, according to the Worldwatch Institute. But environmental groups are arguably the biggest political obstacles to its expansion, pressuring governments and consumers to resist it by claiming that fish farms are unhealthy or contaminate wild species. No such risks have ever been substantiated, Mr. Moore notes. What’s astonishing, he says, is that organizations claiming to care about ocean life are, essentially, pushing to keep us straining sea life, hunting fish, like buffalo, to near extinction, rather than sustainably growing our own.