Agriculture: Hiding in Plain Sight

Name: RA Capital
Price range: $

05/27/25

Agriculture: Hiding in Plain Sight

CULTURE | PLANETARY HEALTH

Photo by meriç tuna on Unsplash

Introducing AgMap

Pop quiz! What industry …

feeds you, clothes you, and helps shelter you?
generates more revenue and produces more goods than any other?
emits more greenhouse gases (GHGs) and requires far more land and freshwater than heavy industries like cement, steel, and oil & gas?

The answers are agriculture, agriculture, and agriculture again.

Agriculture has dramatically changed the way humans have lived over thousands of years, and even today remains the backbone of our global economy. At the same time, it is an unrivaled resource hog and driver of pollution, including biological, chemical, and particulate pollutants.

Its true scope is likely much larger than you think: it’s more than just food, but also fibers, fuel, and wood products, and its sheer scale often means it is hiding in plain sight.

Let’s dive in.

And if you’d like to jump right to exploring the map on your own you can view it here.

We know Ag is big but just how big is it?

In terms of just GHG emissions, agriculture is roughly comparable to the entire transportation sector.

But let’s see how it stacks up against other large industries that produce goods across a broader set of impact metrics.

Agricultural output (food, fiber, fuel, and wood) produces more by weight than each of the cement, steel, and oil and gas industries.

And for greenhouse gas emissions and market size, agriculture is larger than all three of those heavy industries combined!

On water and land requirements the differences are truly staggering; these other industries use at most a few percent of the water used for agriculture and their land requirements are 1% of what agriculture uses.

The only area where other industries surpass agriculture is in their energy content; in this case the oil and gas industry is much bigger than the rest combined (which makes sense given we use these fossil fuels as energy sources).

Let’s look at how optimizing yields or adopting new approaches can impact agriculture’s land requirements.

Imagine we could take the yields from the most productive parts of the world and apply them globally across all staple grains (e.g., maize, wheat, etc.) as well as fruits and vegetables.

The same amount of food could be grown with much less land, corresponding to an area the size of Mexico.

Moving fruits and vegetables to greenhouses could have even more dramatic relative reductions, using ~40% of the original footprint for these products.

While a complete shift to greenhouses is not feasible, the market is already shifting in this direction due to productivity gains.

Nutrients are mainly helpful in fields but harmful when they drain into oceans.

When fertilizer runs off into waterways it leads to algae blooms, which deplete oxygen levels and lead to ~500 aquatic “dead zones” globally (and also greatly affecting many inland waterways not shown here).

It’s not just the number of aquatic dead zones that causes problems but also their massive cumulative size: in total these dead zones cover a surface area roughly the size of the UK.

This isn’t just bad news for marine animals; these dead zones cause hundreds of billions of dollars worth of losses each year, mostly due to impacts on commercial fishing, tourism, and property values.

Let’s take a closer look at agriculture’s impact on water quality and what we can do about it.

There are many on-field interventions, including soil covers (e.g., cover crops), nutrient optimization (e.g., fertilizer), crop protection (e.g., weed control), and crop lines (e.g., genetically optimized plant traits).

The full AgMap also describes the market size and startup environment for these spaces along with other agricultural sectors; explore the full map here.

Other impactful interventions focus on off- or edge-of-field measures, including including riparian buffers (vegetated areas adjacent to fields to mitigate runoff into waterways), land restoration (turning lands used for human activity into more natural environments), and terracing (stepped shelves to reduce soil erosion and nutrient loss).

Agriculture’s environmental impact isn’t just about how we grow food, it’s about how much food we waste.

The full AgMap also describes the market size and startup environment for Food Waste along with other agricultural sectors; explore the full map here.

Sadly ¹⁄₃ of food produced is either lost or wasted; that volume of uneaten food would fill ~50 million shipping containers and could feed ~2 billion people.

We know that agriculture requires a lot of land; collectively the land required to grow all that uneaten food is almost twice the area of the contiguous United States.

Agriculture consumes a tremendous amount of water as well; the water needed to grow all that uneaten food would fill 100 million Olympic-sized swimming pools.

Agriculture produces more methane than any other human activity.

Methane has at least 20X greater warming potential than CO₂ and agriculture produces more methane emissions than the entire energy sector.

Agricultural methane includes some unexpected drivers: methane emissions from rice are almost as high as those from natural gas (which is itself methane!).

But when it comes to agricultural methane it mainly comes down to cows… cattle alone produce about as much methane as oil, coal, and bioenergy combined (though the impacts on climate change are different).

Let’s take a closer look, because cow burps are more than just rude, they are a major driver of climate change.

We saw earlier how methane emissions from cattle compare to those from the energy sector; incredibly, if looking at CO₂ equivalents, GHG emissions from cattle are roughly the same as those from all cars on the road.

There are several direct interventions that can reduce methane production in cattle, including dietary manipulation (e.g., feed composition), feed additives (e.g., supplements that suppress methane production), and vaccines (e.g., immunizing cattle against methane-producing microbes).

There are other interventions that can help too, including manure management (e.g., composting, flaring), genetic selection (e.g., breeding cattle that naturally produce less methane), and land management (e.g., managing how cattle graze in pastures).

AgMap is a systems-level view of the most important industry in the world… and a call to action.

Improving agriculture needs a broader and more dynamic set of systemic solutions that goes beyond a singular focus on yields. We must also consider farm profitability, impacts to human health and the broader environment, and the resilience of individual communities. By publishing this map, RA Capital and The Nature Conservancy aim to make agriculture’s scale and impact – both positive and negative – impossible to ignore.

Review an in-depth and annotated review of three AgMap case studies and our methods here.

These are some of our key take-aways, what are your conclusions and areas for impact? We would love to hear from you.

Agriculture: Hiding in Plain Sight

Introducing AgMap

Pop quiz! What industry …

The answers are agriculture, agriculture, and agriculture again.

Agriculture has dramatically changed the way humans have lived over thousands of years, and even today remains the backbone of our global economy. At the same time, it is an unrivaled resource hog and driver of pollution, including biological, chemical, and particulate pollutants.

Its true scope is likely much larger than you think: it’s more than just food, but also fibers, fuel, and wood products, and its sheer scale often means it is hiding in plain sight.

Let’s dive in.

We know Ag is big but just how big is it?

In terms of just GHG emissions, agriculture is roughly comparable to the entire transportation sector.

But let’s see how it stacks up against other large industries that produce goods across a broader set of impact metrics.

Agricultural output (food, fiber, fuel, and wood) produces more by weight than each of the cement, steel, and oil and gas industries.

And for greenhouse gas emissions and market size, agriculture is larger than all three of those heavy industries combined!

On water and land requirements the differences are truly staggering; these other industries use at most a few percent of the water used for agriculture and their land requirements are 1% of what agriculture uses.

The only area where other industries surpass agriculture is in their energy content; in this case the oil and gas industry is much bigger than the rest combined (which makes sense given we use these fossil fuels as energy sources).

Let’s look at how optimizing yields or adopting new approaches can impact agriculture’s land requirements.

Imagine we could take the yields from the most productive parts of the world and apply them globally across all staple grains (e.g., maize, wheat, etc.) as well as fruits and vegetables.

The same amount of food could be grown with much less land, corresponding to an area the size of Mexico.

Moving fruits and vegetables to greenhouses could have even more dramatic relative reductions, using ~40% of the original footprint for these products.

Nutrients are mainly helpful in fields but harmful when they drain into oceans.

When fertilizer runs off into waterways it leads to algae blooms, which deplete oxygen levels and lead to ~500 aquatic ​“dead zones” globally (and also greatly affecting many inland waterways not shown here).

It’s not just the number of aquatic dead zones that causes problems but also their massive cumulative size: in total these dead zones cover a surface area roughly the size of the UK.

This isn’t just bad news for marine animals; these dead zones cause hundreds of billions of dollars worth of losses each year, mostly due to impacts on commercial fishing, tourism, and property values.

Let’s take a closer look at agriculture’s impact on water quality and what we can do about it.

There are many on-field interventions, including soil covers (e.g., cover crops), nutrient optimization (e.g., fertilizer), crop protection (e.g., weed control), and crop lines (e.g., genetically optimized plant traits).

The full AgMap also describes the market size and startup environment for these spaces along with other agricultural sectors; explore the full map here.

Agriculture’s environmental impact isn’t just about how we grow food, it’s about how much food we waste.

The full AgMap also describes the market size and startup environment for Food Waste along with other agricultural sectors; explore the full map here.

Sadly 1⁄3 of food produced is either lost or wasted; that volume of uneaten food would fill ~50 million shipping containers and could feed ~2 billion people.

We know that agriculture requires a lot of land; collectively the land required to grow all that uneaten food is almost twice the area of the contiguous United States.

Agriculture consumes a tremendous amount of water as well; the water needed to grow all that uneaten food would fill 100 million Olympic-sized swimming pools.

Agriculture produces more methane than any other human activity.

Methane has at least 20X greater warming potential than CO2 and agriculture produces more methane emissions than the entire energy sector.

Agricultural methane includes some unexpected drivers: methane emissions from rice are almost as high as those from natural gas (which is itself methane!).

But when it comes to agricultural methane it mainly comes down to cows… cattle alone produce about as much methane as oil, coal, and bioenergy combined (though the impacts on climate change are different).

Let’s take a closer look, because cow burps are more than just rude, they are a major driver of climate change.

We saw earlier how methane emissions from cattle compare to those from the energy sector; incredibly, if looking at CO2 equivalents, GHG emissions from cattle are roughly the same as those from all cars on the road.

There are several direct interventions that can reduce methane production in cattle, including dietary manipulation (e.g., feed composition), feed additives (e.g., supplements that suppress methane production), and vaccines (e.g., immunizing cattle against methane-producing microbes).

There are other interventions that can help too, including manure management (e.g., composting, flaring), genetic selection (e.g., breeding cattle that naturally produce less methane), and land management (e.g., managing how cattle graze in pastures).

AgMap is a systems-level view of the most important industry in the world… and a call to action.

When fertilizer runs off into waterways it leads to algae blooms, which deplete oxygen levels and lead to ~500 aquatic “dead zones” globally (and also greatly affecting many inland waterways not shown here).

Sadly ¹⁄₃ of food produced is either lost or wasted; that volume of uneaten food would fill ~50 million shipping containers and could feed ~2 billion people.

Methane has at least 20X greater warming potential than CO₂ and agriculture produces more methane emissions than the entire energy sector.

We saw earlier how methane emissions from cattle compare to those from the energy sector; incredibly, if looking at CO₂ equivalents, GHG emissions from cattle are roughly the same as those from all cars on the road.