A new report published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences finds industrial agriculture has helped keep greenhouse gas emissions at bay – kind of.

Study co-author Steven Davis of the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Ecology touts the study’s estimate that since 1961 higher yields per acre have avoided the release of nearly 600 billion tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.

“That’s about 20 years of fossil fuel burning at present rates. Our results dispel the notion that industrial agricultural with its petrochemicals are inherently worse for the climate than a more ‘old-fashioned’ way of doing things.

The researchers found that although the various inputs to modern farms require more energy and greenhouse gas emissions per unit of food output than did the lower-input methods of the past, crop yields have increased by 135%, reducing the amount of cropland needed to produce the same amount of food. Without these advances, the conversion of vast natural areas to agriculture would have caused much more greenhouse gas emissions—the equivalent of nearly 600 billion tons of CO2 since 1961.

As Davis explains, land conversion is the big culprit:

Converting a forest or some scrubland to an agricultural area causes a lot of natural carbon in that ecosystem to be oxidized and lost to the atmosphere. What our study shows is that these indirect impacts from converting land to agriculture outweigh the direct emissions that come from the modern, intensive style of agriculture.

We may have gotten ourselves into a predicament. Abundant fossil fuels have enabled both population growth and increased food production. Now fossil fuel production has begun to sputter at the same time soil fertility is beginning to succumb to years of assault by chemicals and synthetic fertilizers. And the population bubble has inflated to enormous proportions, and is still growing.

Industrial agriculture enabled the population bubble to inflate. Now all these billions of people go about their mission of pursuing economic growth, emitting greenhouse gases in the process – especially in the rich countries. The argument that industrial agriculture helped keep greenhouse emissions at bay only makes sense if we ignore the totality of industrial system within which industrial agriculture is embedded.