A Case for Converting America's Lawns to Syntropic Food Systems
The Dependence Rationalization is Irrational
The dominant argument for maintaining industrial agriculture is not scientific. It is inertial. The system exists; everything depends on it; therefore, it must continue. Farmers have capital tied up in it. Corporations profit from it. Policy is structured around it. And the people who operate within it cannot easily see a way out. This is understandable. But understandable is not the same as rational.
The rationalization goes like this: we cannot feed the world without synthetic herbicides, without monocultures, without glyphosate. To remove these inputs would be to risk starvation. This claim is treated as so self-evident that it rarely needs defending. But when placed alongside the actual data (on yields, on land use, on long-term soil health, on economic returns), it does not hold. What emerges instead is a picture of a system that achieves modest short-term yield gains in selected crops while degrading the very foundations, soil, water, and human health, on which all future food production depends.
What follows makes the affirmative case, in numbers and in logic, that the transition away from chemical dependency is not only ecologically necessary but demonstrably more productive. It begins where most discussions do not: with 40 to 50 million acres of American lawn that currently grow nothing edible at all.1
One important caveat before proceeding. The farmers who operate inside industrial systems are not the villains of this story. The capital structures, debt obligations, contract farming arrangements, and market access barriers that lock them in are real constraints. The burden of transition should not fall on them alone, and in the near term, it largely will not. The shift described here will be driven by ordinary citizens: in what they plant in their yards, what they demand from their food systems, and what they refuse to subsidize with their purchasing choices.
The Squandered Baseline: Forty Million Acres of Nothing
The United States maintains approximately 40 to 50 million acres of turf grass lawn, a figure larger than the acreage devoted to any single food crop in the country, including wheat.2 These lawns are the most heavily irrigated crop in America. They consume up to 9 billion gallons of water per day.3 They require petroleum-derived fertilizers, synthetic herbicides, and gasoline-powered maintenance equipment to sustain their deliberately sterile monoculture. And they produce not a single calorie of food.
This is not a minor inefficiency at the margins of the food system. This is the food system’s most glaring blind spot. Before any argument about the necessity of industrial agriculture can be taken seriously, it must reckon with the fact that an area the size of all U.S. wheat fields combined is currently dedicated to producing aesthetic conformity. The dependency rationalization never starts here. It should.
Converting this land (or even a meaningful fraction of it) to syntropic food forests and biodiverse, poison-free polyculture gardens would represent one of the most significant voluntary expansions of food production capacity in American history, achieved without purchasing a single new acre of farmland, without federal subsidy, and without industrial infrastructure.
What Syntropic Systems Actually Produce
Syntropic agriculture, developed through the decades of fieldwork of Swiss-Brazilian agronomist Ernst Gotsch, is a system that does not fight ecological succession but accelerates it.4 Rather than holding land in a perpetual cleared state (as monoculture farming does, requiring constant chemical intervention to maintain), syntropic systems stack crops vertically across canopy, sub-canopy, shrub, herb, vine, ground cover, and root layers, mimicking the structure of a natural forest while producing food at each level simultaneously.
The efficiency gains from this approach are substantial. Mature syntropic plots achieve 200 to 230 percent land-use efficiency relative to conventional monocultures, meaning that when total biomass and food value are measured across all crops and layers, a single syntropic acre produces the equivalent output of two or more conventional acres.5 These are not theoretical projections. They are measured outcomes from working farms in Brazil and increasingly in Europe and North America, where the model is being adapted to temperate climates.
Food forest pioneer Robert Hart estimated that a half-hectare temperate food forest (roughly 1.25 acres) can sustain approximately ten people with fruits, nuts, vegetables, and perennial staples once the system reaches maturity.6 The average American residential lot is approximately 0.2 acres; even partial conversion of that space, combined with community food forest projects in public parks and greenways, begins to constitute a meaningful distributed food supply that does not appear in any conventional agricultural yield comparison.
A 2020 study on permaculture food forests confirmed that these systems enhance multiple ecosystem services simultaneously: water retention, carbon sequestration, biodiversity, pollinator habitat, and soil fertility all improve as the system matures.7 The New York Times, documenting the growing food forest movement in 2023, reported on communities across the United States establishing productive edible landscapes in urban and suburban settings at negligible cost relative to their long-term output.8
The Yield Myth: What the Long-Term Data Shows
The claim that chemical agriculture is necessary for high yields rests almost entirely on short-term, single-crop comparisons measured under favorable conditions. When the timeline extends and the measurement broadens, the picture changes fundamentally.
Cornell University’s analysis of the Rodale Institute’s 22-year Farming Systems Trial, the longest-running comparison of organic and conventional farming in the United States, found that organic systems produced equivalent yields of corn and soybeans while using 30 percent less energy, less water, and no synthetic pesticides.9 The Rodale Institute’s subsequent 40-year report reinforced this finding with a critical addendum: in drought years, organic maize yields were 31 percent higher than those of conventional industrial systems.10 The mechanism is straightforward. Organic systems build soil organic matter, improve water retention, and support the microbial communities that sustain fertility over time. Conventional systems degrade all three, requiring ever-increasing inputs to maintain yields that nonetheless trend downward with each passing decade.
Dr. Andre Leu of Regeneration International, reviewing the full body of agroecological research available through 2025, concluded that the claim we need to poison our food to feed the world is a mythology sustained by industry-funded misinformation campaigns, not scientific consensus.11 A 2025 report documented regenerative farms outperforming conventional approaches in both yield stability and net profitability, particularly during years of adverse weather events, a category that is not so easily predictable, and potentially disastrous for national security if centralized production is adversely impacted by major losses.12
Organic and regenerative systems are also demonstrably more profitable per acre when full costs are honestly measured. A 2020 study found organic farms consistently outperformed conventional farms on net income, even without accounting for the long-term asset value of improving soil health.13 The conventional system’s yield “advantage,” to the extent it exists in any individual crop and year, disappears when input costs, resistance management, litigation liability, and ecosystem service losses are entered into the ledger. And that’s not even considering the costs most are failing to factor into the overall equation.
The Hidden Costs the Rationalization Ignores
The dependency rationalization works by focusing narrowly on one variable, yield per acre of a single commodity crop in a favorable year, while externalizing every cost that makes that yield possible. Those externalized costs are not trivial.
Glyphosate resistance has now been documented in over 50 weed (unwanted) plant species globally.14 Each new resistant species requires either higher application rates, newer and typically more expensive herbicide combinations, or a fundamental shift in management strategy. The system is on an accelerating treadmill: it generates the resistance that demands the next chemical solution, which generates the next round of resistance. The herbicide-dependent yield increases of 10 to 30 percent in key commodity crops, frequently cited in defense of glyphosate, do not account for the compounding costs of this resistance cycle.
Beyond resistance, the system imposes costs on human health at a scale that the February 18, 2026, Executive Order invoking the Defense Production Act to prioritize glyphosate production15 treats as entirely outside its frame of concern. Independent science has linked glyphosate to non-Hodgkin lymphoma16, gut microbiome disruption17, endocrine interference, neurodegeneration18, infertility19, and intergenerational metabolic harm.20 These findings represent an accumulating body of peer-reviewed evidence that the conventional agriculture industry has spent billions in litigation attempting to manage rather than address. A food system that systematically degrades the health of the population it feeds is not, in any coherent sense, a food security system.
The Global Wellness Forum put the contradiction plainly upon the Executive Order’s release: a healthy population is the true foundation of military readiness and workforce resilience, and expanding production of chemicals linked to cancer and chronic disease is not a sound national defense strategy.
The same logic holds for food security at every scale. A food system that trades long-term human health for short-term commodity output has not solved the problem of feeding people. It has deferred it while creating new problems.
Where the Transition Actually Begins: Citizens, Nonprofits, and the Ground Beneath Our Feet
The industrial food system will not reform itself. The corporations that profit from chemical dependency, the policy structures that subsidize commodity monocultures, and the market mechanisms that reward scale over diversity all create powerful and largely self-reinforcing inertia. Farmers operating inside that system face real barriers to exit, capital requirements, contractual obligations, and market access constraints that cannot be wished away.
But the transition does not have to begin with farmers. It can begin with the 40 to 50 million acres of American lawn that are currently serving no productive purpose whatsoever. It can begin with a single family that converts a quarter-acre yard to a layered food garden producing fruits, vegetables, herbs, and perennial staples with zero chemical inputs. It can begin with a neighborhood that replaces a maintained municipal lawn with a community food forest. It can begin with purchasing decisions that redirect economic demand toward regenerative producers and away from chemical-dependent commodity systems.
Advocacy for American Resiliency
There are many international movements advocating for a cultural shift that supports biodiverse landscapes over lawns, and regenerative agriculture over monocropping. One that started in the US in the 1990’s is all about growing foods instead of lawns.21 Kiss the Ground advocates for regenerative farming and provides a guide on purchasing products from regenerative producers and a map of the farms in America that are participating in the regenerative ethos22. Several nonprofits that have also emerged this year from within the MAHA movement are leading the charge to advocate for more resilient food security in the nation. Two newly formed non-profits include The Victory Garden Alliance23, founded by Jacqueline Capriotti, which is reviving one of America’s most effective grassroots food movements, building a national network of home and community gardens modeled on the WWII-era effort that produced 40 percent of the nation’s vegetables by 1945. Another, Origins Reclaimed,24 is working to implement community land trusts and conservation land trusts with supporting subsidiaries to convert land to syntropic food forestry, while teaching the next generation how to operate them. Its broader vision is a decentralized network of cooperatives built on holarchical, self-sustaining frameworks that integrate housing, health, food, education, and commerce for community benefit, making the extractive and exploitative frameworks of the current system structurally obsolete rather than merely opposed. Both organizations operate from the same foundational conviction: that health begins in soil, and that the power to reclaim it rests with individuals and communities, not with policymakers or corporations.
The Symbiocene25, Glenn Albrecht’s term for a coming era defined by human systems that integrate with rather than extract from living ecosystems, is not a utopian abstraction. It is an available design choice, scalable from the individual yard to the regional food landscape, and supported by a growing body of evidence showing it outperforms the system it would replace. The dependency rationalization asks us to accept permanent harm in exchange for a yield advantage that the long-term data does not consistently demonstrate. That is not a rational bargain. It is an industrial assumption that has been mistaken for a law of nature.
The numbers are clear. The logic is available. The land is already there, sitting in front of our houses, producing nothing. The question is not whether we can afford to make this transition. The question is whether we can continue to afford not to.
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Footnotes
Avellino Farms. “The American lawn is the most irrigated crop in the country and we can’t eat a single blade of grass.” Facebook, 2025. facebook.com/Avellinofarms
Milesi, C., et al. “Mapping and Modeling the Biogeochemical Cycling of Turf Grasses in the United States.” Environmental Management (2005). U.S. lawn turf grass covers approximately 40-50 million acres, exceeding the acreage of any single irrigated food crop.
Ibid. Lawn irrigation accounts for up to 9 billion gallons of water per day nationwide, accompanied by significant runoff of synthetic fertilizers and herbicides into waterways.
Weiss, Sandra. “In syntropic agriculture, farmers stop fighting nature and learn to embrace it.” Mongabay, July 30, 2020. news.mongabay.com
Permaculture Apprentice. “What Everybody Should Know About Profitable Permaculture Farms.” permacultureapprentice.com
Hart, Robert. Forest Gardening. Cited in: Good, David. “Robert Hart’s Estimate of Food Forest Size Required to Feed a Family.” The Survival Gardener, August 14, 2023. Hart estimates that a half-hectare (approximately 1.25 acres) temperate food forest can sustain roughly ten people. thesurvivalgardener.com
Hilkensberg Institute. “Permaculture Food Forests Enhance Ecosystem Services While Achieving Education for Sustainable Development Goals.” 2020. hilkensberg.org
Lehmann, Jane. “How to Grow a Food Forest.” The New York Times, January 27, 2023. nytimes.com
Pimentel, David, et al. “Environmental, Energetic, and Economic Comparisons of Organic and Conventional Farming Systems.” BioScience, Vol. 55:7, July 2005. Reported by Cornell Chronicle, July 13, 2005. news.cornell.edu
Rodale Institute. The Farming Systems Trial: 40-Year Report (2022). Organic maize yields were 31 percent higher than those of industrial systems during drought years across the full trial duration.
Leu, Andre. “There Is No Need to Poison Our Food: Higher Yields in Regenerative and Organic Agriculture Based on the Science of Agroecology.” Regeneration International, August 18, 2025. regenerationinternational.org
No-Till Farmer. “Report: Regenerative Farms Outperforming Conventional Approaches.” October 2025. no-tillfarmer.com
Non-GMO Report. “Study finds organic farming more profitable than conventional.” 2020. non-gmoreport.com
Benbrook, Charles M. “Trends in glyphosate herbicide use in the United States and globally.” Environmental Sciences Europe (2016). Weed resistance now documented in over 50 species globally, driving escalating input requirements and diminishing returns.
White House, "Promoting the National Defense by Ensuring an Adequate Supply of Elemental Phosphorus and Glyphosate-Based Herbicides," Executive Order, February 18, 2026.
Glyphosate reduces Lactobacillus abundance and contributes to anxiogenic effects via serotonin pathway disruption. Frontiers in Toxicology (2025)
An International network of gardeners and activists, sharing food, seeds, tools, land, skills, and other resources with each other in neighborhood-based, friendship-driven communities, Food Not Lawns™ was founded and trademarked by Heather Jo Flores. https://www.foodnotlawns.com/
Kiss the Ground: American Regenerative Farmers Map & Regenerative Purchasing Guide
Victory Garden Alliance. Founded by Jacqueline Capriotti, the Alliance is a national campaign to revive home and community food growing as a public health strategy, with partnerships across veteran, faith, and school communities. https://victorygardenalliance.com/
Origins Reclaimed. A nonprofit organization working to implement community land trusts and conservation land trusts, with supporting subsidiaries focused on converting land to syntropic food forestry and educating the next generation in operating these systems. Its broader vision encompasses decentralized, cooperative distribution networks built on holarchical, self-sustaining frameworks integrating housing, health, food, education, and commerce for community benefit. originsreclaimed.org
Albrecht, Glenn. Earth Emotions: New Words for a New World. Cornell University Press (2019). Albrecht coined “Symbiocene” to describe an era in which human civilization is organized around symbiosis with, rather than extraction from, living ecosystems.