Keynote Recap: Driving Through Turbuent Times

Dr Frederick Kirschenmann’s Naturally Boulder Days keynote was a fascinating talk focusing on the type of forward thinking it will take for us to avoid a total collapse of our current food system.

Below are the notes I took during the talk:

What are turbulent times?

• The is the end of the industrial era. We need to prepare
• We’ve been too exploitive & hard on the planet
• We’ve been operating industrial agriculture as though it’s in a bubble with unlimited resources that isn’t affecting other systems

What do we mean by driving through?

• Don’t just do what is necessary (traditionally - humankind gets things done through force and violance)
• Use the civilized/rational heart - really thing things through (without a plan, we end up with things like urban sprawl)

He recommended two books:

• In the Bubble: Designing in a Complex World
• The Barbaric Heart: Faith, Money, and the Crisis of Nature (about the way in which we address problems)

What’s happening now and liable to get worse?

• More unstable climate - our agriculture has become so specialized that it’s susceptible to widespread failures if/when the climate changes
• Higher energy costs (which our current system is predicated upon)
• Loss of biodiversity

Random Facts

• Organic soil retains roughly 5 times as much water as exhausted non-organic soil
• The 1974 definition of a farm (which is still used today) is: has or “could have had” $1000 in gross sales (my thoughts: outdated laws can drive undesirable behavior - say for example spending more growing corn than you would be able to sell it for, then making up the difference through government subsidies)
• Only 5.8% of farmers are under 35 years old and most are on the verge of retiring. Where are the young farmers going to come from?

Strategies?

• Be Bolder - “greening” our current system is a step in the right direction, but it assumes the system is good and just needs to be made more efficient. Actually, the whole system is wrong and unsustainable.
• Shift from control management to adoptive management (my notes aren’t good enough for me to explain what he meant - can anyone elaborate?)

Even More Interesting Stuff

• There is a really fascinating example from the coal industry called Jenkins Paradox. He proved that when our systems burned coal more efficiently, coal became cheaper, and then we ended up using it at a much higher rate. So basically, making energy more efficient isn’t the answer since we’ll just adjust our habits to use even more of it than before.
• A guy in Milwaukee is feeding 10,000 people and generating $500,000 in revenue from a 3 acre urban farm. Dr Kirschenmann related that a typical 3500 acre Iowa farm generates less in revenue (I’ll be writing more about this guy from Milwaukee - my hometown! - in a future post)
• Will Ellend has prime Iowa real estate, but 3 out of every 5 years - he grows grass and grazes cattle on what is climate-wise the greatest place in the world to grow corn and soybeans

Closing Ideas

Organic and local isn’t good enough. Why? A place like New York City cannot sustain itself from a 150 mile radius. Plus, there would be tens of thousands of ideal farmland going unused in places like the Dakotas and Iowa.

We need to promote the idea of food citizens and blur the line between what is currently a separation between farmers and consumers.

Finally he said: “People often ask me if I am an optimist. The answer is ‘No’ because neither optimism nor pessimism will help us. Hope is the answer.”

My thoughts

This was really a fascinating and motivating speech, amazingly spoken without notes! The biggest takeaway for me was this: making a bad system more efficient only exacerbates the problem.

You’ve probably adopted lots of “green” measures in your life, but are they really fixing the system, or delaying the inevitable collapse?