On a thousand-acre wheat farm, every gallon of diesel matters. It’s measured, budgeted, and accounted for with thin margins. Farmers don’t burn fuel casually. Every tank is a wager: that the crop will come up, the weather will cooperate, the markets will hold. Efficiency isn’t just good practice—it’s survival.
Yet in much of the public discourse about agriculture and climate, farmers are cast as prime culprits. The sight of large tractors and combines feeds an easy narrative: big machines, big emissions. Meanwhile, the larger realities of the food system—the energy expended in transporting, marketing, purchasing, and ultimately wasting food—remain largely invisible.
It’s a convenient misunderstanding. And one with consequences.
Farmers have been quietly improving efficiency for decades, driven not by regulation but by necessity. Diesel is expensive. Equipment downtime is expensive. Fertilizer, seed, land, labor—all expensive. Every gallon of diesel a farmer saves is money kept, emissions avoided, and margins preserved.
By contrast, the emissions and inefficiencies in the rest of the food chain remain diffuse and less visible. To take just one example, the average consumer never sees how much energy they personally burn to access food—let alone how much of it ends up wasted. Grocery runs, restaurant trips, deliveries: they add up to a larger carbon footprint than the farmer’s fieldwork ever will. Yet it is the farmer who faces new layers of compliance mandates, engineered to solve a problem they already have every reason to minimize.
One regulation stands out as a symbol of this backward approach: Diesel Exhaust Fluid (DEF) requirements. Intended to reduce certain pollutants, DEF systems have added mechanical complexity, increased costs, and sometimes left farmers stranded during harvest due to unexpected failures. It is a classic case of a top-down solution that overlooks the practical realities on the ground.
Meanwhile, the real opportunities for emissions reductions—more efficient food logistics, reductions in consumer waste, better urban transport—are rarely addressed with the same vigor. We target the visible end of the food system because it’s easier, even if it’s not the chief culprit.
If we are serious about sustainability, we need to rethink where and how we apply pressure. Farmers aren’t the problem. They’re part of the solution—if we let them be.
It’s easy to measure the diesel bill for a tractor; harder to measure the gasoline burned across millions of grocery store parking lots. On a typical acre of wheat, a farmer might use somewhere between three and six gallons of diesel across the season—from planting to harvest. That six gallons of diesel produces enough wheat to sustain roughly five people for an entire year, based on caloric needs.
Now consider the consumer side: The average American makes more than 80 trips to the grocery store annually. Each trip averages about six miles round-trip, burning close to 20 gallons of gasoline per person each year just to access food.
Multiply that by five people—the amount of food produced on one acre of wheat—and suddenly the consumer side of the fuel ledger comes into focus. Those five people burn about 100 gallons of gasoline to collect the food produced on one acre. The farmer, by contrast, used only about six gallons to grow it.
None of this is to assign blame to the average person buying groceries. Eating is necessary. Transportation has a cost. But it should recalibrate the narrative: the largest slice of emissions in the food chain doesn’t happen on the farm. It happens after the harvest.
And yet, it’s the farmer who faces the mandates, the inspections, the compliance paperwork—not the sprawling logistics networks, not the consumer supply chains, not the energy-intensive grocery habits of a nation.
If the story ended with consumer emissions simply being overlooked, that would be frustrating enough. But it’s worse than that. In reality, policymakers have imposed mandates on farmers that often cause more operational harm than environmental good—none more symbolic than the required use of Diesel Exhaust Fluid (DEF) systems on farm machinery.
DEF was introduced to reduce nitrogen oxides (NOx) from diesel engines. In principle, that’s a worthy goal. NOx contributes to smog formation and, indirectly, to climate forcing. Cleaner air matters. But in practice, on the farm, DEF systems represent a textbook case of poorly tailored regulation.
Farmers today are required to purchase tractors and combines with DEF systems installed—often adding thousands of dollars to equipment costs. They must buy DEF fluid at around $3.50 to $5.00 per gallon, maintain the system meticulously, and hope that delicate sensors and electronics can survive rugged field conditions.
When those sensors fail—and they do—tractors can “derate” (severely limit engine power) or shut down entirely until repairs are made. For farmers, who operate on tight weather windows where a few lost days can mean the loss of a crop, this is not a small inconvenience. It’s a direct economic threat.
In many cases, DEF-related downtime costs can run into the thousands annually. Some farm operators report $10,000 or more in annual revenue loss simply from DEF system failures. In a business where net margins might only reach $30–$50 per acre, such losses are devastating.
Even more frustrating is the realization that this burden falls heaviest on those least able to absorb it: the smaller and midsized farms that form the backbone of American food production. Large operations can spread the cost of downtime across more acres; small farmers often cannot.
It would be more palatable to farmers if faults with the DEF systems didn’t derate our tractors. However, even without the downtime many warranties only cover parts and labor, not travel. For many farmers in rural areas that cost can be sizable. Plus farmers tend to hold onto equipment well past the warranty date, leaving the repair costs to erode the bottom line. The American Farm Bureau Federation (AFBF) reported that Tier 4 Final compliance increased the cost of new farm equipment by 10%–20%. For large tractors and combines, this translates to $30,000 to $50,000 more per machine.
What’s missing from the conversation is a simple question: Is there a better way to achieve the same environmental goals without gutting the very people doing the work?
Instead of mandating rigid, failure-prone systems like DEF, we could focus policy support on technologies farmers already want—because they save both fuel and money.
- Autosteer GPS systems can reduce diesel use by 7–10%, simply by optimizing field passes and minimizing overlap.
- Reduced tillage practices not only lower emissions from tractors but also improve soil health and carbon sequestration.
- Equipment efficiency upgrades—turbochargers, better tires, optimized engine tuning—can yield meaningful environmental gains without adding operational fragility.
None of these require mandates. Farmers adopt them willingly because the economics make sense.
A 7.5% fuel savings, for example, would spare a 1,000-acre wheat operation over 750 gallons of diesel annually—preventing about 7.6 metric tons of CO₂ emissions—without a single new regulation.
These are real, scalable opportunities for emissions reduction. If climate policy in agriculture was truly about results, this is where it would start: at the intersection of practicality and sustainability.
The story of food and fuel is not one of careless farmers and responsible consumers. Rather, the story is of a working class already incentivized to conserve, bearing the weight of regulations that ignore the larger footprint elsewhere.
If we are serious about reducing emissions across the food system, we need to start where the real opportunity lies: with honest accounting, practical incentives, and a willingness to confront uncomfortable facts about consumer behavior.
It’s easy to regulate what’s visible. A tractor, a combine—they are tangible symbols of “industrial agriculture,” easy targets for mandates and compliance checks. But the bigger story—the thousands of small trips, the refrigeration chains, the retail displays, the mountains of food waste—happens out of sight, diffuse and harder to regulate. Harder, but not less important.
It’s easy to regulate what’s visible. A tractor, a combine—they are tangible symbols of “industrial agriculture,” easy targets for mandates and compliance checks. But the bigger story happens out of sight, diffuse and harder to regulate. Harder, but not less important.
Farmers already want to do what sustainability demands: they are maximizing output with minimal input, because the economics leave no other choice. Every dollar saved on diesel is a dollar that keeps the farm alive. Every hour saved by better technology is another hour of margin against unpredictable markets and weather.
Rather than punishing these operators with blanket regulations like DEF, we should be asking: How can we help you save more fuel? How can we make sustainability a profit center, not another line item on the expense sheet?
And if we continue to misplace blame—targeting the few who already do the most with the least—we risk undermining not just the people who farm, but the resilience of the food system itself. There is no Plan B when it comes to food. We ought to start treating the people who grow it as if we knew that were true.
Image via Flickr
