Surviving Climate Change: Producing Less and Enjoying it More

Panel 5: Sustainable Food Systems
Saturday, June 28, 7:00 — 9:30 pm

digger (aka Daniel Romano) is a writer and editor for Confluence, an independent news journal in St. Louis. He is a long time member of the Gateway Green Alliance and is also a performing artist, an anarchist and social justice activist.

Before the speakers talk about sustainable food systems, digger will describe how the USA’s unsus-tainable system of agriculture and food distribution requires an overhaul. He will cover

The need to leave the Green Revolution behind, stop running agriculture in the interest of agribusiness, actively favor small family farms in the USA, and support the kind of research that will benefit rather than undermine Global South peasant and subsistence farms.

The impending collapse of the USA’s petroleum based food system, which presents opportunities for new modes of agriculture that have been shunned in the fossil-fuel age.

The need to slash meat production, and raise the meat that is produced in an ecologically sound way.

The false promises of biotechnology and other high-tech agricultural systems. Biotech companies promise higher yields and happier farmers, but the real purpose is profit and control of the food system. Food security can be achieved without biotech.

Fredrick D. Carter, is co-founder of the Black Oaks Center for Sustainable Renewable Living. He is a certified teacher of permaculture, a Peak Oil Community Leader certified by The Community Solution, and has trained in biofuels as well as photovoltaics.

Stan Cox is a senior scientist at The Land Institute in Salina, Kansas, formerly a geneticist for USDA. He breeds perennial grain crops for sustainable systems. His book Sick Planet: Corporate Food and Medicine was published in March, 2008.

Reducing production on America’s 350 million-plus acres of farmland can be done in ways that will improve people’s nutrition and health and slow the degradation of our soils and water. In the short term, it will require an end to the feedlot and animal-confinement industries and a reduction in meat consumption; replacement of grain cropping with ecologically well-managed perennial pasture and range; removing more of the most erodable land from production and establishing tree and grass buffers; using biological nitrogen fixation rather than industrially produced nitrogen; and reversing rural-to-urban human migration to help return the fertility in human and animal wastes to the soil. The long term will require much more; if humanity is to continue living well beyond this century, more than 90% of the planet’s landscapes must be returned to diverse, perennial vegetation, which entails the replacement of annual grain cropping with polycultures of perennial grains and oilseeds. Those perennial crops are being developed through plant breeding.

The impact can also be reduced by reducing production in those nonessential but highly profitable industries that are dependent on agriculture. Farming differs qualitatively from industrial work in that it is inevitably bound by the calendar — by month-to-month variation in the capacity of soil and sunlight to support the growth of plants, and it depends fundamentally on the productivity and the habits of non-human biological organisms over which humans can exert control only up to a point. That clearly isn’t the ideal pattern for efficient wealth generation, so the past century has seen relentless efforts to mold agriculture into the factory model as closely as possible and, where that can’t be done, to graft more easily regimented industries — machinery, chemicals, food processing, the restaurant industry, shipping, packaging, advertising — onto an agricultural rootstock. In the US, the dollar outputs of those ancillary industries are growing at two to four times the rate of agriculture itself, putting ever-greater demands on the soil. We can make deep cuts in those activities and enjoy better nutrition as a result.

Wes Jackson is president and founder of The Land Institute and author of New Roots for Agriculture among other books. He was a 1992 MacArthur Fellow and received the Right Livelihood Award (aka “the alternative Nobel Prize”) in 2000.

Success toward solving “The Problem of Agriculture” solves essentially all of the “Problems in Agriculture:” soil erosion, fossil fuel dependency, chemical contamination of our water due to fertilizers and pesticides. Key components necessary for the solution are perennialism and species mixtures. Since a perennial monoculture will be superior to an annual polyculture, perennializing the major crops, plus domesticating promising wild herbaceous perennial species, assumes priority at this time. The perennial habit is essential if we are to have soil erosion reduced to replacement levels leading to greatly increased efficiency of nutrient management (twice that of annuals). As a consequence we will have fossil fuel savings (natural gas) for nitrogen fixation reduced by half (equal to energy cost for on-farm traction) and the energy cost for field operations will be greatly reduced — for once the perennial habit is planted, passes through field will be reduced to harvest and occasional fertility application. Polycultures will be essential in the long term because different species have different root architectures and therefore different interactions with nutrients and soil organisms working in ensemble. Together, they act like an orchestra displaying emergent and beneficial processes further reducing industrial input costs.