There's no shortage of questions about the future of food. Just how will we feed a growing planet? Well, in the May issue of National Geographic magazine, author Johnathan Foley is proposing some answers. He's laid out a five-step plan for feeding the world, with concrete ways we could solve the world's food dilemma. Read one of the steps he's proposing below.

Step One: Freeze Agriculture’s Footprint

For most of history, whenever we’ve needed to produce more food, we’ve simply cut down forests or plowed grasslands to make more farms. We’ve already cleared an area roughly the size of South America to grow crops. To raise livestock, we’ve taken over even more land, an area roughly the size of Africa. Agriculture’s footprint has caused the loss of whole ecosystems around the globe, including the prairies of North America and the Atlantic forest of Brazil, and tropical forests continue to be cleared at alarming rates. But we can no longer afford to increase food production through agricultural expansion. Trading tropical forest for farmland is one of the most destructive things we do to the environment, and it is rarely done to benefit the 850 million people in the world who are still hungry. Most of the land cleared for agriculture in the tropics does not contribute much to the world’s food security but is instead used to produce cattle, soybeans for livestock, timber, and palm oil. Avoiding further deforestation must be a top priority.

Intriguing, right? Check out the full article for Foley's other four steps, plus more details about the challenges of feeding the 9 billion people who will live on our planet by 2050. Taken together, this five-step plan could more than double the world’s food supplies and dramatically cut the environmental impact of agriculture worldwide—that's change that makes a real difference. Find the full, interactive article here: http://www.nationalgeographic.com/foodfeatures/feeding-9-billion/.

Don't forget to share this article with your friends and family—they'll want to know about these steps too! And if the article has got you thinking, pose your own questions or share some other solutions with #futureoffood on your favorite social media site.