As the human population grows and the human middle class grows in developing countries, we are going to need more. More food, more meat, more energy. And producing more is going to require more resources. Since we are just about tapped out of the resources required for food production—namely water and land—we are going to have to figure out how to use these limited resources as efficiently as possible.

A number of suggestions have been made to try to achieve this, from the lower tech—like curbing animal consumption and minimizing food waste—to the higher tech, like planting GMOS that might improve yields, developing better fertilizers, and maximizing irrigation efficiency. A new analysis in Nature Geoscience offers up one more: switching what we grow where.

The authors write: “We find that the current distribution of crops around the world neither attains maximum production nor minimum water use.” This is hardly surprising, since agriculture developed in a haphazard, piecemeal way, pushed by different political entities with different agendas over centuries. No one ever sat down with the whole globe before to determine what would grow best in each region.

But these scientists claim that shuffling around crops based on how much rain and irrigation water they need could feed 825 million more people than the planet can currently sustain, while cutting water use by about 13 percent. Their primary goal was to optimize food production (in terms of calories grown) while saving water. But they also attempted to render rain-fed crops more resilient to droughts, to leverage local knowledge and technologies, and to maintain crop diversity.

The scientists writing in Nature Geoscience met their goals, but... there’s always a but. Their results were achieved by growing more soybeans, sorghum, roots, tubers, and peanuts overall. This came at the expense of crops like millet, sugar (cane and beet), rice, and wheat. Sorghum in lieu of sugar beets in western Russia. Millet in lieu of rice in northern India. Soybeans in lieu of wheat in Australia. Peanuts in lieu of wheat in the Nile Delta. So they are essentially suggesting that we can feed more people by growing crops that people don’t really tend to eat in the regions they’d be grown.

Some of the world’s most valuable growing regions have suffered recent droughts; by shunting around our crops, these regions will save water. Countries that rely on food imports to feed their populations will be able to increase their production of calories and/or protein. But even under this new crop distribution, some important growing regions—notably the breadbasket of the American Midwest—continue to deal with water scarcity, indicating that they are maxed out. No matter what we try to grow there, we cannot use less water than we are currently using.

There are obviously immense economic, political, technological, environmental, and cultural barriers to implementing a global agricultural (and dietary) overhaul like this. But a growing population is going to need more space as well as more food. Adequately growing enough food to support our increasing population on a dwindling area of arable land is going to take innovative and bold measures. Perhaps some aspects of this could help.

Nature Geoscience, 2017. DOI: 10.1038/s41561-017-0004-5 (About DOIs).