Perhaps the most crucial idea for understanding our species’ future on this planet boils down to two boring words: land use.

To mitigate climate change, humans will need to extract critical minerals to build vast numbers of photovoltaic cells and wind turbines. We’ll need millions of tons of copper to wire continent-spanning power grids. But the most immutable resource constraint we face — the one we can’t mine more of — is land.

Although many of us don’t see it, because most humans now live in urban areas, the story of land constraints is really a story about agriculture, which devours nearly half of our planet’s habitable land; urban and suburban areas take up only a tiny fraction.

We’re not using all that farmland very wisely. Beef farming, for example, occupies “nearly half the world’s agricultural land to produce just 3 percent of its calories,” the journalist Michael Grunwald writes in his new book, We Are Eating the Earth. In part because it consumes so much land, agriculture contributes between a quarter and a third of all greenhouse gas emissions, and as humanity’s numbers climb, its footprint will swell. “If current trends hold, the world’s farmers will clear at least a dozen more Californias’ worth of land to fill nearly 10 billion human bellies by 2050,” Grunwald writes.

Grunwald’s book — a lively, reportorial world tour through the misunderstood science and politics of agriculture, often explained via Gen X movie references — is among a slate of new titles that I like to think of as the abundance agenda of food.

Abundance, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s bestselling it-girl of wonk manifestos, shares intellectual DNA with a growing set of ideas bringing supply-side economic principles to the future of farming. Just as we can’t solve the housing crisis or the green energy gap with a politics of scarcity, we can’t fix agriculture’s planetary impact by simply producing less food. We have to grow enough food to affordably and sustainably feed a world of 8 billion and counting. And because there’s a hard limit on land, that means figuring out how to squeeze more food out of our precious acreage.

The proposed solutions might surprise you. They are not crunchy farming philosophies like local agriculture or so-called regenerative ranching — woefully inefficient, low-productivity systems that, if deployed at scale, would mean mowing down the world’s remaining forests, accelerating climate change and mass extinction. That’s because wild, carbon-sequestering ecosystems are our best natural defenses against climate change, which is something that no agricultural pattern can replicate. “Every farm, even the scenic ones with red barns and rolling hills that artists paint and writers sentimentalize, is a kind of environmental crime scene,” Grunwald writes. And today, “global agriculture is shifting south, toward tropical forests and wetlands that are the world’s most valuable carbon sinks,” like the Amazon.

That means the most important determinant of agriculture’s planetary impact is how much land it sucks up — what Grunwald calls “the eating-the-earth problem.” By this measure, conventional, intensive, industrial crop farming like that practiced across the US, and heavily........

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