Certain critics of modern-day agriculture long for the days of small farms, limited pest and weed control application, inefficient methods, and old school equipment. They blame our environmental woes on the practices that enable farmers to feed the world's growing population and insist that production agriculture must be shifted to organic and local farming in order to save the planet—never mind that food production would drop dramatically, leaving untold numbers of people without proper nutrition.

But a new Stanford University Study is about to take the wind out of these critics' sails. The study—which was published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences—indicates that today's agricultural techniques have actually lessened the impact of global warming by limiting huge amounts of greenhouse gas emissions.

According to Jennifer Burney, PhD, the study's lead author and a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford's Program on Food Security and the Environment, "Our results dispel the notion that modern intensive agriculture is inherently worse for the environment than a more 'old-fashioned' way of doing things."

This is big news for American farmers, who have long had to fight back against agriculture opponents who insist that the Green Revolution—a movement founded by Nobel Peace Prize-winning scientist Norman Borlaug that dramatically increased food production and is credited with saving millions from starvation—is responsible for today's environmental problems.

The study posits that the Green Revolution's improved agricultural methods that result in higher yields have allowed growers to use less land—the researchers calculated that several billion additional acres of cropland would have been needed without these advances—thereby reducing the need to convert forest to farmland.

According to the study's researchers, without increased yields, "additional greenhouse gas emissions from clearing land for farming would have been equal to as much as a third of the world's total output of greenhouse gases since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution in 1850," an astonishing 590 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide.

So what does this mean for today's farmers? Well, hopefully they now have a little bit more ammunition for the critics who like to point fingers at the hardworking men and women who provide our country's food and fiber, making them the scapegoat for the environmental problems for which we must all share responsibility.

For additional information about the study's results and a link to the full paper, please click here.