Frederick Kaufman’s idea for a food revolution restores faith in big agriculture. His OnEarth article “What’s New for Dinner” suggests that if megafarms take measures to calculate and reduce their costs (in efficiency, water waste, electricity, nitrogen-use), their cash concerns will simultaneously support sustainable gains for food production. The Stewardship Index for Specialty Crops—a 2008 consortium of corporations, academics and industrial agriculture players—supports Kaufman’s vision. In Kaufman’s words:

“The Stewardship Index calls its proposed yardsticks ‘sustainability metrics,’ and the hope is that once everyone in the industry can quantify environmental sustainability, they will be able to compare and contrast their levels with those of their industry peers and eliminate their own excesses. The logic is fairly straightforward: sustainability aligns with efficiency, and the elimination of any size, shape, or form of wasted resource will save the world’s largest companies untold dollars, euros, and yuan. Thus will stewardship of the earth come to align with the profit motive, and sustainability metrics will become the lingua franca of staunch capitalist, radical environmentalist, and everyone in between. At least that’s the idea.”