Lynas clearly has been swayed by Stewart Brand, whose new book ‘Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto’ argues that it is time greens got real and embraced both nuclear power and GM. He appears to be arguing that we need now, given the immensity of climate change, to accept things we might otherwise have questioned; however, for me, in the case of GM, this would represent a jettisoning of ethics, values and principles. I believe absolutely that GM has no place whatsoever in a world responding responsibly to climate change and peak oil, and in saying so, I am not rejecting a “science-led assessment of the likely risks and benefits”, rather am basing it very much on the science. So, lets take a look at the claims Lynas makes for GM.

It’s Safe to Eat.

Lynas states that there is “zero evidence that any genetically modified foods in existence today pose a health risk to anyone. Millions of people in the US and Canada have eaten GM corn and soya for years now”. This is a highly contentious statement. Has anyone actually done such a study, a longitudinal study that looks at the health impacts of GM foods? GM is in foods in various ways, through animal feeds, through all the various foodstuffs extracted from GM foods, especially corn, which as Michael Pollan’s ‘The Omnivore’s Dilemma’ so brilliantly reveals, are now prevalent in processed foods, as well as through our eating them directly.

The central issue here for me is the Precautionary Principle, a fundamental principle in any decision making process. This suggests that we understand and test new technologies before we implement them on any meaningful scale. There are now hundreds of thousands of man-made chemical compounds in the world that weren’t there 50 years ago, few of which have been adequately tested, and even fewer tested in the diverse cocktails in which we are exposed to them. I would argue that the current state of the world has arisen, in part, from a failure to apply the Precautionary Principle, climate change being a case in point. Why now, when faced with the climate challenge, would we once again abandon precautionary thinking? It is one thing to state that there is no evidence of any health impacts arising from GM, but this a “no news is good news” approach has failed us spectacularly with other industrial food products, such as trans fats, which have been in our food for years before the harmful impacts they were having were identified.

Corporate Control

Lynas is dismissive of the argument that GM leads to the increasing corporate control of agriculture. He writes of greens that “their concern was that new, genetically engineered seeds would allow big corporations such as Monsanto to monopolise the world’s food supply, to the detriment of poor countries. However, this should not be an argument to oppose the technology. It would more rationally suggest the need for an open-source approach, where the benefits of GM technology could be developed within, and for the benefit of, poorer countries (drought-tolerant, more nutritious and nitrogen-fixing subsistence crops are some examples under development)”.

Handing food and farming over to vast agribusiness corporations in order to save the planet is a completely self-defeating ‘compromise’. Let’s be clear, Monsanto and other bio-tech corporations did not start genetically modifying seeds in order to feed the world, they did it in order to privatise genetic information, to hold patents for the very stuff of life. They also didn’t invent GM in order to save the world from climate change, that has been a much more recent piece of sales spin. A low carbon food and farming system will need to be based on a re-empowering of small farmers, a re-valuing of farming as a profession, a democratising of agriculture, not a bowing down of food and farming to corporate wishes. As we shall see below, this is potentially highly dangerous.

Lynas’s idea that making GM open source would somehow make it OK also needs questioning. Personally speaking, I feel that GM is simply unnecessary, there is no need to interfere with plants and animals in that way, that we are tinkering in a way that we barely understand, and have no sense of the long term consequences of, and we are abandoning the Precautionary Principle. I don’t have scientific papers to back that up, it is an instinctive revulsion at the very concept. The idea that making GM open source makes it fine was also discussed in Charles Leadbeater’s book ‘WeThink’, which argued that we could develop Wiki approaches to the modification of plants. Some obvious questions arise though, beyond whether the technology itself is ethically dubious or not.

Is Lynas really suggesting that remote agrarian communities, linked only by the web, would have the knowledge of genetics to be able to contribute to an international wiki GM design project, bringing genetically modified organisms to the point of being commercially viable? That they would be able to do this without the research funding, laboratory and testing facilities of large biotech companies, without those companies wanting a financial stake in the outputs? Huge money has already gone in to the GM products already on the market, I find it very hard to imagine that they are going to be philanthropically handed over as Creative Commons to the farmers of the developing world.

His proposal also ignores issues of power and money, failing to ask whether, in a corporate-dominated food economy shaped by power, greed, the maximising of profits and centralising of control and intellectual property, Lynas and Leadbeater’s concept of the intellectual property of seeds being handed back to farmers at the lowest level is fundamentally misconceived. What sort of knowledge and practice do we want to underpin our activities during this ‘make-or-break’ period in human evolution? I would argue that solutions which promote centralisation and dependency, such as geoengineering, GM and nuclear power, lock us into the same technofix thinking that got us here in the first place. As Einstein put it, “the significant problems we have cannot be solved at the same level of thinking with which we created them”.

Who’s Supported by the Science Here?

The recent IAASTD report, the product of what was, in effect, an IPCC on agriculture, with over 400 contributing scientists, the findings of which was endorsed by 60 world governments including the UK, was a scientifically rigorous look at the question of how to feed the world while reducing carbon emissions from agriculture. One of its chairmen was Bob Watson of DEFRA, a man whose openness to GM has been explored before here at Transition Culture, yet even so, the report is fairly dismissive of GM, arguing instead that the future of agriculture lies in “agro-ecological methods” and small scale farming. It argues for changing patterns of consumption so that farming doesn’t rely on oil and mined water.

At this year’s Soil Association conference, Dr. Mike Bushell from Syngenta was asked by Andy Goldring of the Permaculture Association why it was that Syngenta, one of the world’s leading biotech companies, had walked out of the IAASTD process. He replied that they had been unhappy with the process, and felt that it hadn’t represented their views fully. This was a rigorous process, which applied the scientific analysis Lynas advocates for climate change to agriculture, and concluded that GM has little if no role to play, and that what will produce more significant cuts in carbon will be agro-ecological measures and small farmers. So, is rejecting GM still looking like a rejection of science? Let’s continue. After all, Mark’s case is principally based on the argument not that GM is good for climate change, not whether or not it is morally repugnant.

Low Carbon Farming

Lynas’s bold conversion to GM is, in his article, based solely on those two arguments, that it has never made anyone sick and that there are ways round the corporate control thing and is it really such a problem anyway? There are however many other arguments that he sidesteps, which cannot be ignored in this discussion. One of the key ones is what a low carbon farming system actually looks like. In the 2009 UK Low Carbon Transition Plan, agriculture is set a measly target of 6% reductions in emissions by 2020, but can it do better, given that it needs to? A recent major report from the Soil Association brought together the research on soil carbon, and found that soils under organic management have 28% higher levels of carbon than conventionally farmed soils in Northern Europe, and 20% higher in the rest of the world.

It showed that under organic management, soils can produce carbon sequestration of 2 tons per hectare per year, and that for the UK that would lead to the sequestration of 64 million tons of carbon over the next 20 years, equivalent to taking 1 million cars off the road. This would lead to agriculture producing a 23% cut in emissions, not the 6% currently proposed. Beyond soil management, a low carbon farming system would be more diverse, incorporate more perennial plants, be more localised. If you want to reduce the carbon footprint of food, I would suggest that you start by tackling the fact that 50% of what global agriculture produces is thrown away, and the importing and exporting of produce that could just as easily have been grown close to the consumer.

Creating a Culture of Dependency

Drug dealers often work by creating a dependency that they can then serve, initially appearing generous, their true intentions and motivation becoming clear only over time. Similarly, supermarkets are often accused of opening new stores with cheap offers and loss-leaders, undercutting local competition until it withers away, and then raising prices. Farmers using GM seeds have found themselves in a similar position. The idea that GM was invented for the benefit of anyone other than Monsanto shareholders withers quickly on further examination.

US farmers buying Monsanto’s Roundup Ready 2 Soybean seeds in 2010 will be paying 42% more for those seeds than last year. Between 1975 and 1996, the cost of non-GM cotton seeds doubled, the cost of GM seeds rose from $73 to $589. For farmers in both the developed and the developing worlds, GM often leads farmers into a spiral of debt, as the recent film ‘Food Inc.’ identified. Vandana Shiva also links this spiral of debt with farmers suicides in India, which are still rising. US soya farmers usually spend between 4 and 8% of their income on seed.

In 2009, farms growing GM soya were spending 16.4%, and these costs have been driving cotton farmers into the red since 2008.

GM also increases, rather than diminishes, dependency on pesticide use. The idea behind paying more for GM seeds is that you then save money on the need to spray so often. However, a recent study found that overall, GM crops needed 26% more pesticides per acre than non-GM crops. We need agricultural systems that need less chemical fertilisers, herbicides and pesticides, not more. We need farming systems that rely less on artificial nitrogen, given the major contribution to climate change caused by nitrous oxide. GM would appear to fail on both counts.

Transition Food and Farming

So what does a low carbon farming system actually look like? Perhaps the best description I have yet come across is Colin Tudge’s, who in ‘So Shall We Reap’ describes it like this;

“The general answer (by and large) is to give the best, most suitable land to pulses, cereals and tubers (that is, to arable farming); to fit horticulture in every spare pocket – and be prepared to spend a lot of time and effort on it, and to invest capital for example in greenhouses; to allow the livestock to slot in as best it can …. in short, farms in general should be mixed: even the most committedly arable areas would in general benefit from at least some livestock, as all traditional farmers knew … the areas that are truly marginal – too high, too steep, too rocky, too dry, too wet – can be ideal for ruminants, notably sheep and cattle … some cereal and pulse can be grown expressly for livestock – but in general, only enough to keep them going through the winter, so they can make better use of the grazing in the summer.”

The model of agriculture that offers food security is not one that places control over how food is produced in the distant boardroom or with the share holder. This is too important. However, Lynas appears to have completely given up on the idea that any change in consumption patterns might be possible, our aim is to service business-as-usual in the most efficient way possible.

One of the problems with Lynas’s argument is that he purely sees this from a climate change perspective. When you add in peak oil and a Crash Course analysis of where the world’s economy is headed, the idea that we rely on experimental, potentially harmful, untested, distantly owned technologies becomes absurd. Food security is about creating an agriculture which is more diverse, more intimately linked to local economies, and based on a more seasonal diet. GM seeds are designed, at present, not to even grow stuff we eat directly, like potatoes or lettuces, but to produce the base from which processed foods can be created.

Most GM in agriculture is just four crops, soya, maize, cotton and rapeseed, and these are mostly grown to be processed into the bewildering array of additives that make up today’s processed food. Maize that humans actually eat as corn on the cob is not GM. The glucose syrup, fructose, and extensive list of corn-derived additions to processed food, are derived from GM corn. Although there may not be any direct evidence linking GM with ill health in humans (although some does exist from trials with rats), there is plenty to suggest that cheap processed food is killing us, and that a simpler, less processed diet would be to everyone’s benefit.

“Admitting mistakes is difficult, especially when one’s claimed position if the moral high ground”

I have long held that GM has no place in a low carbon farming system. This is not based on taking a moral high ground, or on intentionally rejecting science, rather it is based on taking a broader picture than merely whether it is harmful to eat or not. Does GM technology promote better soil health and carbon sequestration? Does it support farmers in creating sustainable livelihoods which they are in control of? Does it nurture healthier eating practices and a move away from processed foods? Does it improve and sustain biodiversity? Does it make us more or less dependent on cheap fossil fuels? Until the answer is yes to those questions, GM, for me, is out.

In a nutshell, the key question for me is does GM make us and the natural world healthier and more food secure? Surely, if climate science teaches us one thing, it is the need for the application of the precautionary principle. If there is a significant chance that a particular course of action will have harmful effects, then it makes sense to avoid it, even if it isn’t 100% certain. Likewise, so much is as yet unknown about GM, and so much could go wrong that we are far better off, I would argue, giving it a very wide berth. I don’t feel the greens have got it wrong, and it would take a far more compelling case than that set out by Lynas to convince me that they have.

So why has Lynas had this turnaround? Of course, we can’t know, but I get a sense that in the desperate search for a solution to the crisis we are in, there is a sense that this is still a soluble problem if only that one big solution can be found to sort it out. I think that if there is a way through, it will be composed of lots of smaller solutions, driven by those that feel ownership of it. There is a huge danger in embracing large scale, untested, remotely-owned solutions, that we end up turning a problem into a predicament, not sensible when so many, time-proven, smaller scale solutions exist.

Ethanol plant, Yuma CO

Before I get into the presentation, a few words about where I’m coming from. As it happens, I grew up in a little farming community in northeastern Colorado—Yuma—where my family owned the local drug store (complete with soda fountain).

I’m a journalist and communicator at heart, and I started working for the local newspaper in Yuma when I was in the sixth grade. I watched the landscape and the town change with deep changes in agriculture.

For nearly the last five years I’ve been working on relocalization in Boulder County and more recently across the state, working towards our communities being able to meet their essential needs locally, and in the process to become more resilient and self-reliant.

To begin this presentation, I’m going to give the briefest possible summary I can of the situation, our potential response, and what’s possible—maybe five minutes—then back it up with some details. Then I’ll talk about the involvement of the Transition movement in food and agriculture, along with some of the things we’re working on in Boulder County. Afterwards, I hope we can discuss all this together for a little while.

I’m probably going to step on a few landmines here, maybe break some taboos. But I ask for your patience.

Here’s my quick, thumbnail sketch of the situation, the highly condensed version:

Because the way we eat and the way we grow our food is a major contributor to climate change and global warming…

Because industrial food production is so energy-intensive and so dependent on oil for fertilizer, pesticides, planting and harvesting, processing, packaging, and transportation…

Because global oil production likely peaked in July 2008, which means that energy will be increasingly expensive in the future…

Because the age of cheap fossil fuels has come to an end…

Because the economy has been based on an abundant supply of cheap fossil fuels…

Because therefore food prices will soon increase dramatically, and food shortages will begin to happen—even here—perhaps in the next couple of years…

Because the U.S. is becoming a net food importer…

Because humanity is now consuming more food than we are producing…

Because industrial agriculture—like the globalized economy—is at a crossroads and is about to go into an unexpected decline…

Because much of the food that industrial agriculture produces is destroying our national’s health …

Because the way we grow much of our food is destroying and washing away our precious topsoil…

Because we can no longer conscionably support a food system that causes hunger, starvation, and disease in other parts of the world…

Because the way we eat is destroying our connection with the earth, with the natural processes and cycles of earth and sky, with those who grow our food, with the essence of life…

Because the way we eat has seriously weakened our communities…

Because maybe less than one percent of our current diet is local…

Because in Colorado we spend more than ten billion dollars on food each year, almost all of which is fleeing outside the state, lost to our local economies…

And because we know all this…

We must learn everything we can about our food predicament. We must all learn to grow at least some of our own food. We must all support the revitalization of local agriculture. We must end our dependence on fossil fuels, chemical fertilizers, and mechanization in our food production. We must commit to healing and rebuilding the soil everywhere we can. We must dramatically increase local food production for local consumption.

We must rebuild the local food infrastructure for processing and distribution. We must stop supporting and consuming non-local food. We must support local farmers, local producers, local grocers, and local restaurants.

We must learn how to eat seasonally. We must learn how to preserve and store food. We must plan how we’re going to build food security in our communities, and plan how we’re going to feed our people when things get tough. We must be prepared to share what we have to eat.

We must develop new skills and knowledge—composting, vermiculture, permaculture, soil-building, seed-saving, cultivating, canning and preserving, cooking, nutrition planning, herbal medicine.

We must make our foodshed as local as possible.

And we must do all this rather quickly.

If all this sounds like hard work, well, it is! But what would happen if we did this?

Our health would improve greatly, especially the health of our children. We’d feel more connected, more alive, more engaged, living more meaningful and more satisfying lives. We’d be devoted to rebuilding the soil in our farmlands. Our local farmers would be able to buy the land on which they farm. We’d transform the landscape. Our agricultural land would mostly be used for food production for local consumption. We’d produce thousands of new jobs; our local economies would be robust! We’d dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions and environmental degradation. We’d be sequestering carbon in the soil, in plant growth. We’d have plans and food stores in place to feed all our people in times of crisis or emergency. We’d all have a far greater degree of food security and food sovereignty; major corporations would no longer be in control of what and how we eat. Our foodshed would be resilient and self-reliant.

This would be a revolution!

The Food and Farming Predicament

Okay, now let me back up and go into a little more depth.

We face a daunting predicament with the way we’re producing and consuming our food. We could frame the heart of our predicament around a key concept that we’re all learning about these days: sustainability. Now, mostly we’ve been forced into learning about sustainability because modern industrial agriculture has some real problems here, and these have kind of crept up on us. We didn’t see all this coming, but here’s some of what we’ve been discovering (of course, most of you already know these things; I’m just trying to put it into some kind of context):

First, industrial agriculture is having serious and unexpected environmental impacts: fertilizer runoff has created dead zones in our oceans; the search for more arable land has devastated our forests; irrigation methods have depleted surface and ground water; the way we farm is eroding our topsoil and reducing soil fertility; pesticides and herbicides have polluted our air and water; monocropping has resulted in loss of habitat for many species.

And agriculture has become a major contributor to climate change. If we consider the manufacture and use of pesticides and fertilizers; fuel and oil for tractors, equipment, trucking and shipping; electricity for lighting, cooling, and heating; and emissions of carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide and other green house gases—the total impact of farming and food production may be between 25 and 30 percent of the U.S.’s collective carbon footprint.

If we add to this the carbon sequestration that is lost every year through deforestation to increase land for agricultural use, the total contribution of industrial agriculture to climate change is simply enormous.

At the same time, it seems that much of the food we have been producing has actually been decreasing in quality. Food is too cheap! We spend only 10% of our income to feed ourselves; we don’t value food enough. We’ve seen an epidemic of obesity and malnutrition (in Boulder County, 49% of our residents are overweight or obese), along with a dramatic increase in chronic food-related diseases and food-borne illnesses.

These impacts are serious enough, but may not even be the most significant impacts of industrial agriculture. We’ve also witnessed the loss of the web of connections at the heart of our society. Our towns and cities do not function as communities any more. People are disconnected from food, from the people who grow it, and from the land. There is a profound lack of public awareness of environmental costs and health consequences of processed foods. Rural economies have been left in shambles, as agricultural outputs are shipped to distant markets. Our communities can no longer feed themselves.

At the same time, on top of all this, there is a growing global food crisis that is symptomatic of our predicament. In the last couple of years, we’ve seen runaway inflation of food prices, growing inequities in the availability of food staples, food riots in at least 30 nations, and scientists calling for a moratorium on biofuel production.

The food crisis is also local. In 2008, we witnessed 40,000 people show up at the Miller Farm by Platteville when they opened their fields for gleaning. Hunger is on the increase even in America, and it’s extending well into the middle class. Poorer families often have to choose between food, medical care, or heat. They just can’t afford them all.

The Coming “Perfect Global Storm”

Gleaning at Miller Farm

Most of us know in our bones that a sea change is coming in agriculture. But the biggest driver of that change is not going to come from the issues that I’ve mentioned so far.

The biggest driver is going to be the increasing cost and decreasing availability of fossil fuels, especially oil. Because agriculture is so dependent on oil, the entire system is extremely vulnerable to oil depletion—and to oil price spikes.

The situation brewing on the horizon regarding oil compels us to begin rethinking how we grow our food, and even how we eat.

The application of fossil fuels to the food system has supported a human population growing from fewer than two billion in 1990 to nearly seven billion today. In the process, the way we feed ourselves has changed profoundly.

The population is expected to grow to about nine billion by the middle of this century, and there is great concern about how we’re going to feed all those people. The system is already straining to keep up.

What’s not on the radar of most people—including governments and industry—is that our supply of cheap oil on which we all depend (most especially in agriculture) is shrinking.

We’ve likely already reached the peak of global oil production, and are facing an irreversible decline rate that will be somewhere between three and nine percent per year. We’re at the tipping point right now.

So, the bottom line is not good news: Oil is going to become increasingly scarce and increasingly expensive over time—beginning very soon. This will fundamentally change how we farm and how we eat, and the local food and farming revolution is in many ways an attempt to anticipate and prepare for what’s inevitably coming.

Of course, it’s not just farming that’s going to be impacted, because our entire globalized economy is based on an abundant supply of fossil fuels, especially oil. The economic downturn we’ve recently experienced is directly related to this dynamic. In 2008, oil rose to $147/barrel, precipitating a global recession, and we’re still reeling from it.

There are now 98 oil producing nations in the world—and at least 64 of them have already reached their peak in oil production and are in decline. That is fundamentally why oil prices have been rising so dramatically.

Yes, it’s true that there is a bit more oil to be discovered and developed and produced in various parts of the world. But oil discoveries peaked globally around 1960, and have fallen off dramatically despite plenty of investment in exploration. We’ve already picked all the low-hanging fruit, the easy inexpensive oil. From here on in, oil is going to be increasingly expensive and harder to get out of the ground. All the cheap oil has already been burned.

And in a way, this is a very good thing. Because if we had unlimited quantities of cheap oil to burn, and continued doing so, we would quickly overwhelm the atmosphere with carbon to the point that it would be very difficult to grow anything anywhere. Climate change at that level would be devastating to all life on this planet.

Peak oil is an enormous predicament. Our ability to grow food to feed our population has been based on cheap fossil fuels. In fact, our entire global economy is based on cheap fossil fuels. And now we’re bumping into a very fundamental resource limitation that will force us to change how we do almost everything. Worse, though most economists don’t want to consider this yet, peak oil signals the end of economic growth. We are learning that economic growth as we have known it is profoundly unsustainable.

The implications for food and agriculture are staggering, and they are urgent. Last year, the Soil Association in the UK published a key paper, “Food Futures: Strategies for resilient food and farming.” In that document, they say:

“Over the next 20 years we must make fundamental changes to the way we farm, process, distribute, prepare and eat our food. Global food shortages will be inevitable unless we act now to change our food and farming systems.”

One of the key researchers in this area is Richard Heinberg, Senior Fellow at Post Carbon Institute, author of a number of important books that have helped us understand our predicament. Last year, he co-authored a very important paper, which I highly recommend to you, “The Food & Farming Transition: Toward a Post Carbon Food System.” Here he maps the pathways to a much-needed revolution in agriculture.

Richard is one of the most grounded and most incisive researchers and communicators in the world regarding these issues. I’ve come to deeply trust his perspective and his insights. In a paper titled, “What Will We Eat When the Oil Runs Out?,” Richard says,

“To get to the heart of the crisis, we need a more fundamental reform of agriculture than anything we have seen in many decades. In essence, we need an agriculture that does not require fossil fuels…”

A non-fossil-fuel agricultural system! Well, the situation we’re facing does mandate radical changes. Heinberg continues:

“The transition to a fossil-fuel-free food system does not constitute a distant utopian proposal. It is an unavoidable, immediate, and immense challenge that will call for unprecedented levels of creativity at all levels of society.”

This is all part of a convergence of global crises—fossil fuel depletion, climate change, and economic turmoil—which James Howard Kunstler has called “The Long Emergency.” We need to understand that The Long Emergency is not a problem that can be solved. It is a predicament, a long-term consequence of our own actions to which we must now adapt.

Now, at first this might all sound like a disaster. But it doesn’t have to be. It might turn out to be the best thing that’s ever happened to food and agriculture.

Albert Bates, author of The Post Petroleum Survival Guide and Cookbook, says

“The Long Emergency is an opportunity to pause, to think through our present course, and to adjust to a saner path for the future. We had best face facts: we really have no choice. The Long Emergency is a horrible predicament. It is also a wonderful opportunity to do a lot better. Let’s not squander this moment.”

As Rob Hopkins, the founder of the Transition movement, says:

“Inherent within the challenges of peak oil and climate change is an extraordinary opportunity to reinvent, rethink and rebuild the world around us.”

In the face of all this, one of the most important things we can do—and must do—is to completely rebuild our local foodsheds—from multiplying backyard and frontyard gardens, to converting our local agricultural lands to growing food for local consumption, to rebuilding local food storage and distribution systems, to training people to learn farming as a wise and essential—and sustainable—career choice.

Not only will all this help reduce the amount of fossil fuels embedded in today’s food from fertilizer, pesticides and transport, but adopting a more local organic diet will greatly contribute to our health, and our children’s health. It will also reconnect us with those who grow our food, with the land that supports and nurtures us, with the seasons, and with the natural processes and cycles that are fundamental to all life. In the process, we’ll rediscover what community really means. And for most of us, that will be an unexpected and inspiring revelation.

Of course, what I’m pointing to here are qualities of sustainability that can’t be measured, but which we know in our hearts are essential to humanness—qualities and experiences that have been lost to our communities for a long time.

This means that we have no choice but to quickly transition to a world no longer dependent on fossil fuels, a world made up of communities and economies that function within ecological limits. The age of economic growth driven by cheap fossil fuels is over.

And the age of agriculture driven by cheap fossil fuels is over, too.

The Worldwatch Institute recently published its report, 2010 State of the World: Transforming Cultures from Consumerism to Sustainability. In this book, in an article titled “From Agriculture to Permaculture,” Albert Bates and Toby Hemenway (both farmers and teachers of Permaculture) say:

“Humanity now confronts a critical challenge: to develop methods of agriculture that sequester carbon, enhance soil fertility, preserve ecosystem services, use less water, and hold more water in the landscape—all while productively using a steadily compounding supply of human labor. In short, a sustainable agriculture.”

Another perspective is from Sharon Astyk, a farmer and mother and writer. In her latest book, A Nation of Farmers: Defeating the Food Crisis on American Soil, she writes:

“Oil has replaced people in industrial agriculture, and now people have to come back and replace the oil.”

Sharon calls for a food and farming revolution that is based on simply choosing to change the nature of what we grow and what we eat.

“It is a call for more participation in the food system—100 million new farmers and 200 million new cooks in the U.S., and many more worldwide.”

Agriculture is entering into a profound transition, and fundamentally it’s an energy transition that will be unfolding over the next 10 to 15 years—and there probably will be some pretty big bumps along the way. We will have less available energy in the future. And renewables will not be able to come on stream quickly enough or at sufficient scale to avoid fairly drastic changes.

The opportunity we have is to design our descent down this energy curve. Now, the transition to a non-fossil-fuel food system will take some time. Nearly every aspect of the process by which we feed ourselves must be redesigned.

But if we do this right, we have an opportunity to build a food and farming system that is economically viable, environmentally sustainable, resilient and self-reliant, that ensures food security and sovereignty for all, that contributes to the health and happiness of our citizenry, and that revitalizes our communities across the nation.

If we do this right, as Sharon Astyk says:

“Not only can we cease to do the harm that industrial agriculture does, but we can replace it with something better—a better way of growing and preparing food—and also a democracy of the sort that Thomas Jefferson imagined for his nation, a democracy that is not vulnerable to being stolen or sold, as our present one is.”

The Transition Movement

While you’re digesting that, I now want to shift gears for a moment and tell you a little about the Transition movement.

In the fall of 2004, in Kinsale, Ireland—the oldest town in that country—Rob Hopkins was teaching the world’s first two-year Permaculture course at a community college there. On the first day of class, he did two things that rocked his world, and his students’, and which led to the birth of an international movement that is focused on designing our way down the energy descent curve.

The first thing Rob did was to show a brand new documentary film to his class, “The End of Suburbia: Oil Depletion and the Collapse of the American Dream.” Has anyone here seen it? The film lays out the coming oil crisis in very compelling terms, and for many it comes as quite a shock at first—as it did for Rob and his students.

The other thing he did was to invite a guest speaker into the class, Colin Campbell, a highly-respected petroleum geologist who happened to live just up the road from the college. Campbell spent decades working for some of the biggest oil companies in the world, and he founded the Association for the Study of Peak Oil (ASPO). Well, Campbell pushed Rob over the edge with his analysis. Here’s a brief sample:

“The second half of the Age of Oil now dawns and will be marked by the decline of oil and all that depends on it, including financial capital. It heralds the collapse of the present financial system, and the related political structures… I am speaking of a second Great Depression.”

As Rob and his students explored the implications of what they had seen and heard, they began considering how vulnerable the town of Kinsale was to the coming energy shocks, and economic shocks, and even food shocks. Rob had the insight that it might be possible to apply the principles and ethics of Permaculture to design a plan for the community to transition off of fossil fuel dependence, learn how to meet its essential needs locally, and in the process become more resilient and self-reliant. Designing such a plan became a very ambitious class project.

As they took it on, they envisioned what a truly sustainable Kinsale would look like, set a target of the year 2021, and through a process of backcasting began figuring out what would need to happen each year to get to that goal.

They did an impressive job, and put it into an historical document, the Kinsale Energy Descent Action Plan. In fact, they did such a good job with this that the town council adopted their plan as the plan for the town of Kinsale, and that plan is being implemented there today.

This experience got Rob Hopkins thinking. In fact, it got a lot of us thinking, who were looking at the coming challenges, as we were here in Colorado, watching what was going on in Kinsale. Rob saw that it might just be possible to use the principles and ethics of Permaculture to empower whole communities—even entire cities—to enter into an inspirational community-wide process together to design their own energy descent plans and become resilient and self-reliant.

In 2006, he began prototyping that process in Totnes, England in 2006. And now the Transition process he developed there is being replicated—more or less officially—in more than 280 communities in 16 nations. And informally, there are at least another 2,000 communities who are experimenting with the process. Transition is a bottom-up, grassroots-to-grasstops movement that is rapidly expanding, and generating enormous interest and enthusiasm around the world.

Hopkins’ book, The Transition Handbook: From Oil Dependence to Local Resilience, published in March 2008, has been a powerful force in galvanizing this movement.

Hopkins says we must quickly make our communities more resilient, less vulnerable to the profound changes that are coming, because we’re learning that resilient communities—“self-reliant for the greatest possible number of their needs—will be infinitely better prepared than those who are dependent on globalized systems for food, energy, transportation, health, and housing.”

The essence of resilience is relocalization, which means moving steadily in the direction of local production of food, energy and goods; local development of currency, government and culture; reducing consumption while improving environmental and social conditions; and developing exemplary communities that can be working models for other communities when the effects of energy decline become more intense.

In May 2008, our organization became the first officially recognized Transition Initiative in the U.S.—and the first in North America, for that matter. By that time, we had already for three years been working towards relocalization in Boulder County.

The movement in the U.S. has grown significantly, and as of today there are 58 officially recognized Transition Initiatives in the U.S., five of them here in Colorado.

Meanwhile, we have become a statewide hub to catalyze, inspire, train and support the adoption of the Transition process in communities across the state (some 20 initiatives are already under way in Colorado).

Nearly everywhere that Transition is getting traction, we’re all working on the relocalization of food and farming, the rebuilding of our local food systems, our local foodsheds.

After the Transition Handbook, the first book published by the Transition Network was Local Food: How to Make it Happen in Your Community. It‘s an inspirational and very practical guide for rebuilding a diverse, resilient local food network, drawing on the experience of dozens of Transition initiatives and other community projects around the world.

Rob Hopkins and his co-author set the tone for Local Food early on in the book. They say:

“…By collectively demystifying the contents of the global pantry and by sourcing, growing and producing food independently of centralized, fragile and detrimental food trades, we are rediscovering our own worth as community members—people capable of interacting with and shaping the food landscapes around us… We are bringing our food culture home because we have to. And while we know we can’t move mountains, we are remembering that we can plant seeds.”

Bringing It Home

Let’s bring it back home to the state of Colorado.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 2006 we Coloradans spent nearly $10 billion on food per year—$9.5 billion, $5.4 of which was food to eat at home (we eat out a lot).

97% of food consumed in Colorado is imported from outside the state. Very little of what we consume is organic.

Nearly $2 billion of our 2006 food budget for home consumption was on meat and dairy products, more than a third of the total. (Since that time, our meat consumption has of course increased.)

In Boulder County alone, we spent more than $660 million on food in 2006, almost all of which went outside the local economy.

If we could increase our local food purchases, particularly organic food, this would not only have profound benefits on our health and greatly reduce our contribution to global warming, but would also greatly boost our local economies.

I think we’re severely underestimating the economic power of local organic farming. This is part of what we’re thinking about in relocalizing food and farming.

To be sustaining and sustainable, agriculture must make the transition from an oil-based industrial model to a more labor-intensive, knowledge-intensive, localized, organic model. This means a radical reduction of fossil fuel inputs, accompanied by an increase in labor inputs and a reduction of transport, with production being devoted primarily to local consumption.

A key strategy for building a resilient food and farming system is relocalization. It’s not the only answer, but it’s a powerful step forward. Other strategies include: converting farms to powering with renewable energy; increasing soil fertility through crop rotation, recycling nutrients, natural fertilizers; shifting consumers to local, seasonal diet; switching to diverse multi-enterprise farming systems; adopting organic and biointensive methods of farming; shifting to labor-intensive methods; increasing the number of farmers; seed-saving; rebuilding local processing and distribution systems.

Permaculture and the Transition

As it happens, the entire Transition process of relocalization is based on a deep understanding of a particular form of agriculture—called Permaculture, which you’ve now heard me mention several times.

So what’s Permaculture? It’s a contraction of two words, permanent and agriculture. It’s really about permanent or sustainable agriculture.

As Wendell Berry says, “A sustainable agriculture is one which depletes neither the people nor the land.”

You could say that Permaculture is the art of making it possible for humans to live in harmony with the Earth, with the biosphere, and with each other.

Essentially, Permaculture is a design approach based on a deep understanding of the principles of how living systems naturally work; it shows us how to design and build (and rebuild) human systems based on those same living systems, and to do that in such a way that sustains human life and the life of the biosphere.

Permaculture shows us how to restore the balance between human life and the biosphere, which as we now know has gotten wildly out of balance.

Permaculture was first developed in the early ‘70s, by Bill Mollison and David Holmgren in Australia, largely in response to the oil crisis of that era, drawing upon indigenous wisdom from all over the world. Now it’s being practiced by farmers small and large, tens of thousands of them, around the globe. And all of those practitioners together have been evolving an enormous body of knowledge and experience that I believe is going to be extremely important to all of us in the coming years.

As many of you may know, when in 1990 Cuba’s supply of oil was cut off almost overnight with the collapse of the Soviet Union, it was the Permaculturists who stepped forward to completely transform that country’s agricultural system to feed its people. They demonstrated how farming could be done on a large scale without fossil fuels and synthetic fertilizers. They converted the nation to an 80% organic, mostly vegetarian diet in 18 months. Urban gardens there now produce 50% of the nation’s produce.

There’s a powerful documentary film about this, “The Power of Community: How Cuba Survived Peak Oil.” Significantly, to make the rapid transition from fossil-fueled agriculture, Cuba involved 15 – 25% of its population in food production.

When we started our relocalization work in Boulder in 2005, we could only find two people who were teaching Permaculture. Now there are at least 32 Permaculture teachers in the county, who are training scores of new practitioners every year. How many people in this room have taken a Permaculture course? Get to know a Permaculturist!

Designing the Transition (Boulder County Case Study)

In Boulder County, we’ve been asking, “What will it take to build a resilient, sustainable, localized food system? What will replace industrial agriculture?”

Here’s some of what we think it’s going to take: more Open Space acreage devoted to crops for food (not fuel or silage); more farms producing food; more biointensive, organic food production; more farmers (a lot more); more CSAs; more/bigger farmers’ markets; more local infrastructure for storage, distribution, and preservation; more local financial resources; more education and training; more backyard and frontyard gardening; more community greenhouses; more commitment by our communities to bring new awareness, energy, and vitality to the local food system, promoting closer connections between members of the community and those who grow our food

In short, we know we need to relocalize our local foodshed, and begin acting as if that local foodshed is just as important as our local watershed.

But how could a grassroots, community-based movement possibly help to accomplish all this?

Well, one of the principles of relocalization—and Permaculture—is that you begin in your own back yard. And a lot of people are doing just that. I love the story of Boulder’s Kipp Nash, a city-bound school bus driver who so desperately wanted to be a farmer that he finally began persuading his suburban neighbors to let him plow up their yards to grow vegetables.

I think it’s fair to say that he had no idea what he was getting into. He now has a thriving neighborhood CSA—he calls it an “NSA,” neighborhood supported agriculture—and has been selling produce at the Boulder Farmers Market. He’s a real farmer now, all right—an urban farmer, with all the challenges that rural farmers face. And what he’s doing is contagious. Transition Louisville, for instance, is implementing the same model in their community with a series of “urban farms.”

And hundreds of other people in the area are learning to grow some of their own food, from renting small plots in a community garden, to plowing up their yards and sheet-mulching on an ambitious scale, to raising chickens. Now, we might be slightly amused by all of this, as we witness a whole lot of people suddenly taking up gardening. But there’s something far deeper going on here.

Municipalities such as Longmont and Greeley have had to change local laws recently to accommodate growing public demand to be able to raise chickens. And arcane water laws are being challenged as more and more people are learning that they could greatly reduce their water consumption for backyard and frontyard food production by catching and storing water. “Illegal!?” they say. “It’s what makes the most sense!”

Also, we’ve got the likes of Michael Pollan, Barbara Kingsolver, Joel Salatin, Wes Jackson, Richard Heinberg, Sharon Astyk, and a host of other authors and documentary filmmakers working hard to change the way we all think about food and agriculture, and the way we eat and the way we grow our food.

And we’ve got local people like Ann Cooper who is determined to bring healthy, organic, local food into school cafeterias throughout the Boulder Valley School District, and others who are working to infiltrate other institutions like our hospitals and corporate cafeterias.

And we’ve seen a huge increase in the number of restaurants who are serving truly local food—more than 70 that we’ve identified in Boulder County so far, probably a ten-times increase from 2006. More and more chefs and restaurateurs are building gardens, and some of them are actually investing in farms.

We’ve also seen an enormous increase in the number of CSA subscriptions in Boulder County. Nobody knows the number today, but when we started in 2006 we could identify only about 150 available CSA subscriptions. Now we have individual farms in the county that have more than 300 CSA subscribers, and Grant Family Farms is going for thousands of subscribers. This is a big change! I think we could call that exponential growth.

Meanwhile, farmers markets are growing and multiplying…

A local food system gets built from the ground up, starting at the grassroots level. All of us have something to contribute to this process, and our skills and knowledge and passion are very much needed now—for the current realities are sobering:

Approximately 34,000 people in Boulder County are food insecure (don’t know where next meal will come from). That’s almost 12% of the county population. As energy prices increase and the economy slides, more will join their ranks.

In 2006, our food working group calculated that with the current food and agriculture system, we could feed only about 20,000 people in Boulder County.

Then they looked at the upside. They estimated that with greatly expanded individual and community plots, greatly increased farming for food, bio-intensive methods, reduced calorie intake and simplified diet—basically, doing everything we could think of to increase local food production—this maybe could be increased to ~185,000 people.

But the Boulder County population is 300,000 people. So we know that we’re vulnerable, like most communities. (We heard from a farmer recently that an entire season’s sales at the Boulder Farmers’ Market would only feed Boulder County for half a day!)

EAT LOCAL! Campaign

So, at Transition Colorado, right now we’re focusing both on expanding the market for local consumption and rebuilding our local food production capacity in Boulder County. It’s a kind of classic chicken-and-egg challenge, for we certainly can’t have one without the other. So we’re trying to build both at the same time.

On the market side, we’ve launched a public education and awareness campaign under the theme of EAT LOCAL!

A key strategy in this is our EAT LOCAL! Resource Guide and Directory, now in its second edition, published just a couple of weeks ago with 10,000 copies being distributed throughout the county. Copies are available here in the back of the room (please take several and share with others).

This is all supported by a rapidly-growing and continually-updated website (www.EatLocalGuide.com).

Through the Guide, and throughout the EAT LOCAL! Campaign, we’re explaining why eating local is so important, and connecting people with all the available sources in the county in a comprehensive directory so they can find what they’re looking for—whether it’s local food producers, or local food supporters. This directory is online, too.

But giving people the reasons and the sources isn’t enough. So we’re helping to provide some incentive, through a 10% Local Food Shift Challenge and Pledge.

And we’re showing people some of the many things they can do to increase their local food consumption and help support local agriculture.

We’re also helping people learn new skills, because shifting to lower-carbon, mixed-farming organic systems that are less dependent on oil and chemicals will require a lot more people with the right skills working on the land again. So we’ve launched an ambitious Reskilling program—providing instruction in the basic practical life skills we have largely lost, from growing, cooking and canning food, to permaculture design courses. We’ve delivered about 10,000 people hours of Great Reskilling instruction in the last two years.

At the same time, besides driving the market for local food, we’re working to help increase local food production capacity by:

• Getting people to see local organic agriculture as economic development.
• Encouraging people, especially youth, to consider farming as a viable and sustainable career choice.
• Training people in food production, especially Permaculture.
• Helping to organize and support a Boulder County Farmer Cultivation Center.
• Working with the Boulder County Food and Agriculture Policy Council and the Parks and Open Space Department to find ways to convert much of the county’s 17,000 acres of open space ag land to food production for local consumption, and to develop or change policies to support and encourage local agriculture.
• Working with county and municipal governments as they reconsider their comprehensive plans and land use policies, to ensure that local food and agriculture are supported by those plans and policies.
• Working with Slow Money, the massive capital pool being organized by Woody Tasch, an effort to direct local capital into financing local food and farming enterprises.
• Working with local entrepreneurs to exploit new opportunities that are emerging as we seek to rebuild local infrastructure of distribution, storage, processing, and marketing.
• Working with companies like Farmland LP and organizations like Post Carbon Institute, who are developing a far-reaching program of buying conventional farmland and converting it to organic food production as a significant investment opportunity.
• Collaborating with Everybody Eats! and other stakeholders to cultivate a county-wide coalition of governmental and non-governmental agencies, farmers, businesses and individuals to plan and implement a local food and farming system. Call it a local foodshed alliance, if you will.

All this is a massive process that’s going to take some time. Transition suggests a systematic approach that we’re doing our best to follow. But we’re not in control of the process. The community itself is. We’re acting primarily as a catalyst for collaboration, and as a provider of information, insight, and inspiration. It’s an experiment, and as Rob Hopkins says in his “cheerful disclaimer”: We really don’t know if it’s going to work. But we do know that if we wait for the governments or big industry, it’ll be too little too late. And if we just act as individuals, changing our lifestyles, it’ll surely be too little. But if we act together, as communities, it might be just enough just in time!

Conclusion

Clearly, the food and agricultural revolution is already getting underway. Fundamentally, it’s not about simply about lifestyle choices or mere differences in values. It’s arising in response to a growing predicament that is at the heart of our industrial agriculture system and the heart of our globalized economy.

This transition is coming whether we like it or not, whether we’re ready or not.

I know there’s a lot of controversy around all this, and a lot of emotions. I suspect a lot of dust is going to get kicked up along the way.

Much of the debate seems to hinge around the goals of sustainability seemingly interfering with farmers’ and industry’s goals of profitability. But sustainable agriculture must of course include economic viability. And that doesn’t necessarily mean “big.”

We sometimes hear “small farming” used as a pejorative term. Small organic farmers often get pigeonholed and tossed aside as a probable relic of the past.

But at the 19^th annual Farming for the Future conference in Pennsylvania earlier this month, Bryan Snyder, the Executive Director of the Pennsylvania Association for Sustainable Agriculture said something very significant, and I want to close with his words. He said:

“People like to hear about lots of acres or large numbers of animals and bushels of corn per acre measured in the hundreds. But models of farming that can gross $50,000 to $100,000 on a single acre—or CSA programs that, in some cases and on relatively small acreage, are able to count their customers in the thousands and bank $1 million or more in the spring before even planting a seed—are anything but small!”

Snyder’s conclusion is exactly what we have come to at Transition Colorado:

“We must encourage everyone, wherever they are and as a priority, to eat food produced as near to their own homes as possible. Secondly, feed thy neighbor as thyself. From this perspective, local food not only can feed the world, it may be the only way to ever feed the world in a healthy and just manner.”

‘Food Inc’  is like suspecting that you might have a tiny patch of dry rot in the loft, and going up to find the whole roof about to collapse. ‘Out of sight and out of mind’  has clearly not been a good way to interact with our food system.   The years of rather enjoying £1.99 chickens and cheap burgers have allowed a food system to become entrenched that is corrupt, violent, about as short-term in its thinking as it is possible to get, and which has left us in a shockingly unresilient state at a time when a resilient food system is really what we need.

The film’s two main protagonists are Eric Schlosser (author of ‘Fast Food Nation’) and Michael Pollan (author of ‘Omnivore’s Dilemma’).  Both are powerful and compelling presences on screen, and they hold the different stories told by the film together beautifully.  Among the tales told are how McDonalds became the giant it is today, how corn is now in virtually all convenience foods, how beef is now raised, never seeing even a blade of grass, the miserable life that is the lot of a chicken today and how GM is taking over US agriculture at a pace.  Many of these things will not be new to Transition Culture readers, but the thing that stayed in my mind the longest was the story of the man who is the last guy in his area with a seed cleaning machine.  Basically, if you want to save your seed and reuse them the following year, you need to have them ‘cleaned’ with this guy’s machine.  Monsanto don’t like people saving seeds, and if you reuse their seeds, it is illegal.

And here’s where it gets really grim.  If you grow non-GM soya, and your neighbours grow GM soya, and their GM soya cross pollinate with yours, they become the intellectual property of Monsanto.  Rather thanyou being able to sue them for polluting your soya which is what would happen in a right-thinking world, you are expected to treat your seeds as their intellectual property.  The film follows the seed cleaning guy through his court case brought by Monsanto, who claim he is aiding people to break their patent.  It is heart breaking, watching the treatment he gets as he is bullied out of his livelihood.

‘Food Inc.’ is very much a film about the US food system.  Watching it sat in the UK is somewhat similar to watching the ‘The End of Suburbia’; first you think “what a mad place!”, then you start transferring it to the UK, and find that much of it still applies.  For many UK viewers though, I think their response by the end of the film will be to think “well its not like that here”.  Of course some things aren’t like the US; the huge cattle lots, the broadscale GM, the Monsanto private detective harassing farmers on their own property, but many things are like that already.  Think of the huge poultry farms, the squalid practices that led to BSE, the less savoury practices of the meat processing industry, the fact that GM corn from the US now appears in many convenience foods we eat here, as well as in non-organic animal feed.  It would be too easy to say “it’s not like that here”.  In some ways it already is, and in others, the film acts as a stark warning of what’s to come if we allow the intensification and industrialisation of agriculture to continue.

What elevates ‘Food Inc.’ above just being a rant about industrial farming is when it tells the other side of the story.  You hear from the farmers as to why they farm in such a way, you meet a Hispanic family struggling to feed themselves on a very small budget and who, in spite of the resultant ill-health, still see a nightly trip for burgers and fries at 99c a head as the only way they can afford to fill their bellies.  It becomes clear that this is only a short term investment, as in the long term, the father’s healthcare bills look set to far exceed what they have saved on food.  The point is well made; this is a food system in which we all lose, farmers, consumers, the soils we should be building for future generations, those working in the food processing industry.  It is not a happy system.  Those who win are usually shareholders and captains of industry, situated as they are at some considerable distance from the reality on the ground of what industrial agriculture is doing to people.

From a Transition perspective, it is interesting to muse on the insights the film offers about resilience.  What we see in ‘Food Inc.’ is a food system designed to extract the maximum profit and the maximum efficiency on the uphill side of the energy mountain.  It is a food system designed for just-in-time, yet only made possible by the huge amount of things that are not paid for, most notably the cheap oil that makes it all possible.  So it works now, while liquid fuels are still cheap, but will fail spectacularly in a world of volatile fuel prices and shortages, and the growth of this system has been accompanied by the dismantling of the more localised agriculture system that existed before.  What has been offered in the name of efficiency is highly vulnerable, greatly lacking in resilience and adaptability.

Ultimately though, this is a hopeful film.  Yes the food system is extremely powerful, but as the film says, so was the tobacco industry.  The movement of local, organic, unprocessed food continues to grow.  As one farmer interviewed in the film says “people have got to start demanding good wholesome food from us and we’ll deliver, I promise you”.  ‘Food Inc.’ lays bare the fact that our food system, the most basic thing for a society to get right, has been hijacked, and is making us and the planet very, very sick.  Hopefully this passionate, inspiring and powerful film will play a key role in the scaling back and replacing of industrial agriculture.  Highly recommended.

Reporting from Detroit

Cottonwood trees grow through the collapsed roofs of homes stripped clean for scrap metal. Wild grasses carpet the rusty shells of empty factories, now home to pheasants and wild turkeys.

This green veil is proof of how far this city has fallen from its industrial heyday and, to a small group of investors, a clear sign. Detroit, they say, needs to get back to what it was before Henry Ford moved to town: farmland.

“There’s so much land available and it’s begging to be used,” said Michael Score, president of the Hantz Farms, which is buying up abandoned sections of the city’s 139-square-mile landscape and plans to transform them into a large-scale commercial farm enterprise.

“Farming is how Detroit started,” Score said, “and farming is how Detroit can be saved…”

Read full LA Times story here.

Note: This is the beginning of a multi-part series on agricultural education, the farming demographic crisis and the question of who will grow our food – what the problems are, how we will find new farmers, how they will be trained. To me, this is one of the most urgent questions of our time.

A quick, Jay Leno style quiz for the man and woman on the street.

Who will grow your food in the coming decades?

A. My friendly neighborhood agribusinessman will grow my food on a plantation the size of Wyoming using nearly enslaved non-white folks who are deported minutes after harvest. Or maybe there will be robots involved somewhere. Yeah, robots are good.

B. Farmers, of course. You know, those dumb people in the flyover states that we tolerate because they give us dinner. Where will they come from? Well, don’t they grow in the ground upside down like raspberries? Or do I mean zucchini? Well, either way, I think they reproduce by spores.

C. Food grows? You mean in the ground? With DIRT on it? And bugs? Ewwww.

The above answers may be parody, but only slightly. It is safe to say that very few people in the US have given any serious consideration to the question of how their food will be grown in the future. And yet, as Aaron Newton and I observed in _A Nation of Farmers_, even if we weren’t facing energy depletion and climate change and enormous social inequity, we’d be facing an agricultural crisis – one that is purely demographic.

As of 2002, the average American farmer was nearly 56 years old. The average American small farmer is over 60. More than one out of every four farmers is over 65 years old and rapidly facing retirement, and less than 6% of all American farmers are younger than 35 years old. Moreover, in at least one study (which I can’t find again at the moment) the majority of farmers expressed that they were reluctant to see their children follow in their footsteps and face the boom and bust cycles, poverty and hardship of farming in the current atmosphere. That is, in most cases, there’s no one to follow them.

I know a dozen farmers in this situation. John and his wife Allie live near us and run a lovely farm. They sell pork and meat rabbits, as well as beef cattle, hay and apples from their orchard. John is 55ish and so is his wife. They live on the farm John grew up in with his two children and John’s parents, in their 80s. The parents are increasingly unable to help on the farm, and the children are now in college, with no real intention of returning to the land – and John is torn – he’d love to have his daughter or his son follow in his footsteps in some ways, but he can’t honestly telll them it is the life he wants for them. The kids have watched dozens of the neighboring farmers go under, and while they have the skill set, they fear that the farm is ultimately doomed. Allie had to go to work during the last time prices collapsed to afford college for their kids, so now John does it all himself, and it gets harder as he gets older. We buy hay and apples from him, or from Dora, his 83 year old Mom. She sorts apples on a stool and tends her husband who had a stroke last year. We hope each year that the next one won’t be the year they sell out.

My closest neighbor up the hill sold out. He was nearing 80 after dairy farming along these hills for more than 50 years. He had three children and not one dreamed of taking up the morning milkings, and he was fortunate enough to retire at the height of the (comparatively small) local real estate boom. So at the end of my road, down below the hill are a row of McMansions designed to attract people who want a country place. The problem is that the kind of people who like McMansions don’t want to live in our rural space – the houses turn over often, so in the 8 years they’ve been here, some have been sold as often as four times, others are for rent now. Frank doesn’t like seeing the houses on the fields he hayed and grazed his cows, from his new house at the top of the hill, but farmers don’t have retirement plans, and what could he do?

You can hear a thousand stories like these if you talk to the older farmers. You can see partial solutions, like match up programs that connect people who want to farm with farmers , but the reality is this – the average American farmer is getting old. And again, even if we didn’t have to face climate change’s expected depredations on food, even if we didn’t have to face the end of heavily industrial agriculture due to energy depletion and climate emissions, even if we weren’t facing a world where structured inequity with a billion starving people and one out of nine supposedly-affluent Americans requiring food stamps – and we are – we’d be facing an agricultural crisis. All those things together mean we are facing a demographic disaster.

Why disaster? Well, for just about all of human history, the main way of getting farmers was to apprentice them to an older farmer, generally in their family. Over the last 200 years, industrialization has gradually reduced the number of farmers from about 1 in 2.5 people to 1 in 100. During the long period where agricultural populations were in decline, there were always more children of farmers than were needed – so some of them could be “drained off” from rural area to go to urban ones. Family farmers generally had a fairly large number of children and as fewer and fewer people were needed to do the work of agriculture, it was perfectly possible to continue the old way – raising an-ever smaller number of farmers on the apprentice system. There were enormous costs to this system – the destruction of rural communities, the “rural brain drain,” the loss of a population that understands where food comes from, tremendous waste of energy and resources, and of course all the worst excesses of industrial agriculture, which derive mostly not from malice, but from the need to replace human farm labor. But it could, broadly, be sustained.

But all that has changed, and changed radically and painfully. Broadly speaking, about a third of all emissions worldwide are tied to agriculture. In the Global South, the worst of these costs are tied to burning forests for agriculture, but in the North, the highest costs come from industrialization of agriculture. They come from the heavy equipment and long shipping created by centralization, from the nitrous oxide produced by overfertilization with NPK fertilizers, from the methane produced by CAFO livestock operations. If we are to address our emissions crisis, we are going to have to face the fact that we can’t go on replacing human beings with fossil fuels – it isn’t an option.

Moreover, there’s a great deal of reason to be concerned, as my readers know, about the long term availability of those fossil fuels. It doesn’t take a vast decline in access to energy to cause an energy crisis – the 1970s oil shocks arose from a shortfall of just 5%, while Cubans lost an average of 20lbs and found themselves eating fried grapefruit peels with a decline in oil imports of less than 20%. When oil prices rose to $148 barrel and potash prices skyrocketed, farmers found themselves heading out of business, or reducing their fertilizer inputs and selling off equipment. In the poor world, those rising energy costs left land fallow because farmers, who desperately needed the food, couldn’ afford to plant. One doesn’t have to believe all the oil will disappear overnight to imagine that an oil shock could have profound effects on the ability of industrial production to continue.

The combination of climate change and energy depletion means that we will have to replace fossil fuels in agriculture with renewable resources. But that’s easier said than done – there is a functioning solar powered tractor out there, but it isn’t exactly mainstream, and it is extremely costly. In the Global South home scale methane digestion and biogas as well as homescale biofuels have an important role in agriculture – but they don’t replace human labor. Animal manures, used wisely, could replace some synthesized fertilizer while treated humanure might replace others, but that requires more localized agriculture, where animal manures are spaced out according to populations.

In much of the Global South and through most of human history, populations have required 1/4 to 1/2 of their population (or more) to be engaged in the food system at some level to keep everyone eating. A large portion of those were farmers of some sort, and even those who aren’t farmers often produce vegetables and small livestock to supplement their diets.

The easiest (and do not take this to mean that I am claiming this is easy) renewable resource to replace fossil fuels is human beings. They are extremely abundant (6.8 billion and counting), and have something that fossil fuels don’t – those nice big brains. Thoughtful, intelligent agriculture can replace many times the fossil fuel equivalent in human labor – that is, it isn’t a matter of replacing machine horsepowers with an equivalent number of human beings, because we’re smarter than machines. And not only are human beings widely available, but those smarter practices are often much less destructive.

How many more people do we need? Well, for rough calculation purpose Aaron and I have argued that since most low-industrialization societies (not pre-industrial, but with access to dramatically fewer energy resources) both in the present and the past have about 1/3 of their population involved in agriculture either as full time farmers or as part time farmers. This was a rough calculation and not intended to be precise, but for the purposes of rhetoric, Aaron and I have called for 100 million new farmers. Most of those, we suspect, will not be full time farmers, but small gardeners and market farmers. We will also, however, need millions of full time farmers as well.

Even if the 100 million number is wildly overstated (and what figure is necessary will depend on the shape of climate change and energy depletion, rather than on preference, realistically speaking), we will need many, many more farmers than the ones we have, and many younger farmers.

Necessity, then, is leading us to a vast cultural shift, and one we’re ill prepared for. On Science Blogs there’s a lot of discussion (good and valuable) about the importance of science education and preparing young people for careers in science. In the culture at large, there’s a lot talk (good and valuable) about the coming demographic shift in which we will need a lot more nurses, doctors and specialists in elder care. There is almost no discussion whatsoever of the even more pressing crisis in agriculture – the profound need to train young people to grow food. The assumption has been that technology and resources are infinite and the path to ever-fewer farmers and offshoring of agriculture will continue indefinitely.

Even more than the “technology and cheap energy will save us” assumption that is so prevalent and wrong in our society is another underlying assumption, even more destructive. It is that because agriculture is unskilled labor, work suitable to people who aren’t qualified for better and higher things, we will simply be able to handle this through market forces – as low wage jobs disappear in one area, those people will just become farmers. But that’s ridiculous on several levels. The first is that low wage workers can’t buy land, and often can’t even rent it. But the more important one is this – agriculture is highly skilled, highly thoughtful, important work that requires an enormously varied skill set. I know this because I’ve been trying to acquire it for most of the last decade, and I now finally feel like I know enough to describe what I don’t know. Learning to farm was considerably harder than academia, than learning multiple languages, reading Kant or writing publishable papers. It was also a hell of a lot more fun, but that doesn’t diminish the difficulty of understanding an ecological system that you depend upon.

Let us say that we will need only 5% of the US population to become farmers. But since the vast majority of farmers are facing retirement within the next two decades, and under 35 farmers are such a tiny percentage, that means we will need to train 30-50 times as many young farmers in the next two decades as we have been doing. The numbers could be substantially higher. But where would even those small numbers of farmers come from? Even if the younger farmers were to have a lot of kids and encourage them to stay on the farm, that doesn’t resolve the problem.

So where do they come from? This is a new problem for human society – while we’ve always had some people take up agriculture as a new profession (and when that happened, say, during the settlement of the US west, there were always extremely high failure rates and ecological costs), the vast majority of those who did the work and stayed at it grew up on farms. We have never before in human history (except perhaps when we developed agriculture, and that didn’t happen all at once) had to teach an entire generation of non-farmers to farm. But that’s the problem we face.

In _A Nation of Farmers_ one of the things that Aaron and I argue is that the next generation of American farmers will have to come out of the garden, and from other nations rather than off the American farm. That is, the children who grow up with some knowledge of growing things will largely fall into two categories. They will grow up with parents who garden, and teach their children to garden, and who take that set of skills and build upon it, or they will be the migrants themselves or the children of immigrants who come from cultures where agriculture is more common than it is today.

Both of these approaches (and I’m going to write more about each of them in a coming post) have their issues, however. Immigrant populations often struggle to find land and establish themselves as farmers – often what happens is that they end up as impoverished laborers on someone else’s farm, never able to get their own land or establish their own farms. Social programs push recent immigrants into cities, where there are a lot of other immigrants like them, rather than on to the land – Hmong refugees, for example, are one fo the great success stories in agriculture in a number of states, but have established themselves as farmers with great difficulty, often after an extended cycle of poverty in urban apartments, where their agricultural traditions are valueless. Moreover, many immigrants to the US want “better” for their children than an agrarian future – they want their kids to become professionals, not farmers like they were. They recognize that agriculture is not a high-status profession, or highly paid, and they want their kids to have more than they have – agriculture is not a way to achieve that, and that would have to change to make a substantial cultural shift.

The children of gardeners have other difficulties. For the affluent ones (and we should remember that gardeners are often not affluent) the problem of status is central. The contempt we have for farmers is evident in the fact that we do not ever direct children towards agriculture as a profession if they are bright or thoughtful. In the 1980s, as I was transitioning from middle to high school, I told my guidance counselor that I wanted to attend the local “Aggie” the farming vocational school. I couldn’t imagine a better school situation than to get to work in a garden and with animals. My guidance counselor was very kind, but simply observed “Sharon, that’s for kids who aren’t smart enough to go to college. You aren’t like that.” That was an object lesson in the value we place on agriculture. I wish now, of course, that I’d had the ovaries to insist, but I was 13, and I believed the grownups.

What kind of radical cultural transformation would we have to have to allow middle class parents to say “I hope you grow up to be a farmer.” Or “Honey, why don’t you take some agriculture classes along with calc and physics?” Or “Honey, have you considered a cow college? Cows are great!” What would it take to make agriculture a profession of status? Eric and I are going to explore this question in one of the next posts in this series, talking about how we might begin integrating agricuture and systems science together for kids and college students.

When one out of three or two of every American kids was farmer, you could count on a large number of bright young people to grow up and become farmers. Even after the population began to decline, we benefitted from the fact that, as the expression goes, “The American public is lucky that farming is a disease not a job.” That is, despite every pressure to send out anyone bright and thoughtful, some of the best and brightest still stayed at it. It is a testament to the power of agriculture.

But the truth is that rural areas can’t bear the brain drain forever, and that we need thoughtful, well educated, creative people in agriculture *DESPERATELY* because as Greenpa put it in the comments to a previous post, we’re inventing a viable agriculture. That is, we’ve never before had to deal with the fact that there are no new frontiers, there’s no land we can afford to abandon, there’s no new place to go to avoid the consequences of fouling our land and wasting our resources. We need people who can create a sustainable – not in the superficial sense of the word, but really, truly sustainable – that is, can go on forever – agriculture. And that will take the best minds we have, and every kind of human intelligence, wisdom and thoughtfulness. And we need it soon.

For low income urban kids, even in the garden, the problem will be access to land, and also, access to a world of nature that expands beyond the highly structured nature of very small garden plots. That is, farming isn’t just learning to grow food, or learning to raise animals – it is learning to manage a space that is both wild and tame, and to have them exist simultaneously. A good farm pasture should support nearly as much wildlife as a comparable forest. A farm woodlot should support even more. A community garden plot or a public park offer little chance to teach kids to know and trust and understand the wild. We need a generation of people who have ties to such spaces – as I’ve written about before, establishing urban-rural ties may be our most central project.

We are facing a problem that literally has never been faced in human history – we don’t have enough people who know how to feed us to keep going foward. And for the most part, we’re not even fully aware of the problem. We have no plan going forward. And our children are being taught that farming is unworthy of them. This, folks, is a crisis.

Sharon

All three varieties of GM corn, Mon 810, Mon 863 and NK 603, were approved for consumption by US, European and several other national food safety authorities. Made public by European authorities in 2005, Monsanto’s confidential raw data of its 2002 feeding trials on rats that these researchers analyzed is the same data, ironically, that was used to approve them in different parts of the world.

The Committee of Research and Information on Genetic Engineering (CRIIGEN) and Universities of Caen and Rouen studied Monsanto’s 90-day feeding trials data of insecticide producing Mon 810, Mon 863 and Roundup® herbicide absorbing NK 603 varieties of GM maize.

The data “clearly underlines adverse impacts on kidneys and liver, the dietary detoxifying organs, as well as different levels of damages to heart, adrenal glands, spleen and haematopoietic system,” reported Gilles-Eric Séralini, a molecular biologist at the University of Caen.

Although different levels of adverse impact on vital organs were noticed between the three GMOs, the 2009 research shows specific effects associated with consumption of each GMO, differentiated by sex and dose.

Their December 2009 study appears in the International Journal of Biological Sciences(IJBS). This latest study conforms with a 2007 analysis by CRIIGEN on Mon 863, published inEnvironmental Contamination and Toxicology, using the same data.

Monsanto rejected the 2007 conclusions, stating:

“The analyses conducted by these authors are not consistent with what has been traditionally accepted for use by regulatory toxicologists for analysis of rat toxicology data.”

[Also see Doull J, Gaylor D, Greim HA, et al. “Report of an expert panel on the reanalysis by Séralini et al. (2007) of a 90-day study conducted by Monsanto in support of the safety of a genetically modified corn variety (MON 863).” Food Chem Toxicol. 2007; 45:2073-2085.]

Séralini explained that their study goes beyond Monsanto’s analysis by exploring the sex-differentiated health effects on mammals, which Doull, et al. ignored:

“Our study contradicts Monsanto conclusions because Monsanto systematically neglects significant health effects in mammals that are different in males and females eating GMOs, or not proportional to the dose. This is a very serious mistake, dramatic for public health. This is the major conclusion revealed by our work, the only careful reanalysis of Monsanto crude statistical data.” [communication to author]

Other problems with Monsanto’s conclusions

When testing for drug or pesticide safety, the standard protocol is to use three mammalian species. The subject studies only used rats, yet won GMO approval in more than a dozen nations.

Chronic problems are rarely discovered in 90 days; most often such tests run for up to two years. Tests “lasting longer than three months give more chances to reveal metabolic, nervous, immune, hormonal or cancer diseases,” wrote Seralini, et al. in their Doull rebuttal. [See “How Subchronic and Chronic Health Effects can be Neglected for GMOs, Pesticides or Chemicals.” IJBS; 2009; 5(5):438-443.]

Further, Monsanto’s analysis compared unrelated feeding groups, muddying the results. The June 2009 rebuttal explains, “In order to isolate the effect of the GM transformation process from other variables, it is only valid to compare the GMO … with its isogenic non-GM equivalent.”

The researchers conclude that the raw data from all three GMO studies reveal novel pesticide residues will be present in food and feed and may pose grave health risks to those consuming them.

They have called for “an immediate ban on the import and cultivation of these GMOs and strongly recommend additional long-term (up to two years) and multi-generational animal feeding studies on at least three species to provide true scientifically valid data on the acute and chronic toxic effects of GM crops, feed and foods.”

Human health, of course, is of primary import to us, but ecological effects are also in play. Ninety-nine percent of GMO crops either tolerate or produce insecticide. This may be the reason we seebee colony collapse disorder and massive butterfly deaths.  If GMOs are wiping out Earth’s pollinators, they are far more disastrous than the threat they pose to humans and other mammals.

In a victory for small food, 2009 will perhaps be remembered as the year gardening returned to mainstream consciousness. Much credit goes to First Lady Michelle Obama, thanks to the organic veggie patch she planted on the White House lawn. The symbolic gesture created an instant buzz, and many other politicos around the world have followed suit. There are now gardens on the grounds of city halls, governors’ mansions, and other houses of leadership around the world, providing countless opportunities to educate and discuss why gardens are good.

According to the National Gardening Association the number of households with gardens rose from 36 million in 2008 to 43 million in 2009. Michelle Obama’s garden certainly deserves some credit, but so does the recession, which inspired many people to stick their hands in the dirt, not only to save on grocery bills, but to find economical ways to enjoy their leisure time.

Ironically, this proliferation of home gardeners bears some of the responsibility for the rapid spread of a late tomato blight fungus which nearly wiped out the commercial tomato crop on the East Coast. Many gardeners bought tomato starts from stores like Home Depot, Kmart, Lowes and Wal-Mart, nearly all of which were raised by the Alabama nursery Bonnie Plants. Plant pathologists believe the nursery sent out infected plants, which slipped under the radar of agricultural inspectors and brought the spores to all corners. Unusually heavy rainfall encouraged the blight to take hold, prosper and spread. The take-home message: buy your plant starts from local nurseries, or grow them yourself from seeds.

In addition to kitchen gardens, another beneficiary of the recession is a 93-year-old great-grandmother named Clara Cannucciari, whose YouTube videos combine salty commentary about life in the Great Depression with hands-on demonstrations on how to crank out simple delicacies that average 50 cents a serving. The videos helped win Clara a contract with St. Martin’s Press, which published Clara’s Kitchen: Wisdom, Memories, and Recipes from the Great Depression this past October.

It’s impossible to discuss the year in food without an update on the activities of biotech giant Monsanto, whose year can be summed up in a single word: “chutzpah.” In April, the company sued the sovereign nation of Germany when its agriculture minister banned the planting of a type of Monsanto corn engineered to thwart the advances of the corn-borer moth. Monsanto was unsuccessful in forcing Germany to allow its farmers to plant the corn, and recent research suggests Germany’s concern (shared by several other European countries) may have been warranted: French scientists published a paper suggesting adverse affects of this corn — and two other types of GM corn — on the kidneys and livers of rats.

While health and environmental concerns over GM crops are commonplace, in September federal judge Jeffrey White in California’s Northern District ruled that Monsanto’s sugar beets provided an economic threat to farmers who wished to grow organic or non-GM crops. Beet pollen is carried on the wind, and will pollinate chard as well as beets. In Oregon’s Willamette Valley, where much of the nation’s beet and chard seed is grown, the presence of Monsanto’s “Roundup Ready” sugar beets threatens the livelihoods of farmers growing the non-GM varieties of these plants. It’s also likely that after a few years of Roundup Ready sugar beet cultivation in the Willamette Valley it would be difficult to get non-GM beets or chard anywhere in the nation. According to judge White, Monsanto’s sugar beets posed “…the potential elimination of a farmer’s choice to grow non-genetically engineered crops, and the consumer’s right to eat non-genetically engineered food.” The ruling, against the USDA, forced the agency to complete an EIS examining the potential impacts of the GM beets on organic seed growers and consumers before the Roundup Ready beets can again be planted.

Meanwhile, Monsanto’s marketing practices have placed it on a collision course with the U.S. Department of Justice, which this month indicated it’s considering anti-trust litigation. Monsanto’s string of acquisitions have squelched almost any possibility of competition, while its seed prices have risen by an average of 42 percent. When the DOJ dispatched some of its lawyers to meet with Monsanto to discuss these developments, the company engaged the services of Jerry Crawford, an Iowa lawyer who is a friend and financial supporter of USDA chief Tom Vilsack. It’s further indication that keeping Monsanto in line is about as easy as wrestling an anaconda.

Monsanto owns the rights to genetic sequences found in more than 85 percent of corn planted in the United States, and 92 percent of soy. Given the prevalence of corn and soy in the American diet, it’s hard to take a bite of any packaged food without eating Monsanto’s handiwork. What’s scary is how little research has actually been done in the area of food safety, and that nearly all such research has been conducted by the company itself.

While touting its products as safe for humans and the environment, Monsanto’s main sales pitch is based on the claim that genetically engineered seeds will increase crop yields and facilitate pest control. But last summer, a report by the Union of Concerned Scientists concluded that genetically engineered seeds actually don’t increase productivity. Another study, by the Organic Center, found that since the introduction of “Round-Up tolerant” corn, soy and cotton, farmers have sprayed 382.6 million more pounds of herbicides than they otherwise would have. This is partly due to the proliferation of Round-Up resistant weeds: between 2007 and 2008, farmers increased the use of different herbicides by 31 percent in an effort to combat these superweeds. Nonetheless, the company’s Web site promotes the seeds as a key component in “sustainable agriculture.”

While Monsanto has co-opted the term “sustainable agriculture,” retail giant Wal-Mart, already the world’s largest vendor of organic food, is poised to capitalize on the popularity of locally grown food. Wal-Mart is looking at ways individual stores can carry foods grown by local farmers. Another large grocer, Safeway, has this year begun aggressively pushing a “locally grown” marketing campaign, while blatantly taking advantage of the ambiguity in the term “local.” A writer by the name of Food Dude, on the Portland, Oregon blog Portland Food and Drink, busted Safeway with photographs of produce bearing out-of-state stickers next to signs announcing “I’m Local!” and “Locally Grown.”

That large corporations are jumping on the sustainable, local and organic bandwagons is arguably a good sign. It shows that these words, and what they represent, have infiltrated the mainstream consciousness. One of the most powerful vehicles to deliver this message was Food Inc, the movie whose depressing yet important message about the American diet was seen by enough people to make it the highest grossing documentary of 2009.

The year closed with the anti-climactic climate summit in Copenhagen, where U.S. Agriculture Secretary Vilsack acknowledged the huge role that livestock plays in global warming — more than transportation activities by most estimates. Vilsack announced plans to build methane capture facilities at large dairy farms in order to turn that potent greenhouse gas into an energy source. He deserves credit for helping to keep agriculture at the forefront of climate change discussions.

On the other hand, searching for ways to enable the cattle industry, while politically expedient in the short-term, are shortsighted in the long-term. Which brings us to my prediction for next year’s (or next decade’s) hot topic: serious soul-searching on the pros and cons of all things bovine. From the atrocities of feedlots and slaughterhouses to the environmental destruction wrought by cattle, given the skyrocketing worldwide demand for meat, the human addiction to cow products is reaching a breaking point.

“This critical literature review indicates that organic agriculture, as developed until now, has the potential to produce high-quality products with some relevant improvements in terms of anti-oxidant phytomicronutrients, nitrate accumulation in vegetables and toxic residue levels,” the researchers wrote.

To be recognized as “organic,” a food product must be produced without the use of genetic modification or chemical fertilizers or pesticides, and must promote sustainable cropping methods. In the United States, organically produced meat and dairy must be raised without the use of synthetic growth hormones or antibiotics. Hormones and antibiotics are banned in animal production across the board in the European Union.

Recently the United Kingdom’s Food Standards Agency (FSA) reviewed existing research on the nutritional content of organic produce concluded that there was no difference, nutritionally, between organic and non-organic produce. The FSA study did not examine the reasons most often given by consumers of organic produce, namely benefits to the environment, farm workers, and consumer health due to lower chemical use.

Yet the AFSSA review calls the FSA’s conclusions into question. After conducting an “up-to-date exhaustive and critical evaluation of the nutritional and sanitary quality of organic food,” French researchers concluded that organic produce is clearly nutritionally superior.

Organic produce contains more minerals, such as iron and magnesium, than non-organic produce, and higher levels of antioxidants such as phenols and salicylic acid.

“Organic plant food overall contain double the amount of phenolic compounds,” the researchers wrote.

Animal foods produced organically contained significantly more polyunsaturated fat than non-organic animal products. In addition, organic vegetables contained 50 percent less nitrates than non-organic produce. No more than 6 percent of organic produce tested contained pesticide residue.

Sources for this story include: www.foodnavigator-usa.com; www.healthsentinel.com.