Conferences and Other Serendipitous Mishaps

Somehow last month I ended up at a conference for the Health Department. I'm not sure how I even got invited but in April I received a conference flyer with a note that said there's still time to sign up! The conference was called S3 Food Symposium. S3 stood for food safety, security and sustainability. The topics covered antibiotic resistance (as discussed by the CDC. Be still my nerd heart!), insulin resistance (my thesis topic) and how to feed a population of 6 billion. This was of particular interest to me since most of the conferences I go to have talks about what to do to feed the population when it hits 10 billion and these talks are put on usually by Monsanto or Elanco. I was interested to hear what speakers outside of agriculture were saying. With a conference line up like that I had to sign up!

The conference kicked off with a farm tour of Full Belly Farm, which I consider to be the mother of CSAs in California. This could be just because they were the first one I heard of or because you often encounter them as people discuss their forays into sustainable agriculture and I now know why. Next week I'm off to visit his nephew's pasture dairy, so more on the tour and that adventure next week.

Apparently, I was so excited about the CDC that I failed to notice that the keynote speaker was National Geographic (side note: I LOVE National Geographic) discussing feeding a population of 6 billion. Rather than exposing an opinion of how we should farm and feed a growing population, National Geographic displayed images from farming across the world. It was a beautiful and enlightening presentation. National Geographic is looking at issues with feeding a population of 20 billion by 2050, both how we can accomplish it and the effects it may have on the planet. You can check out this "Future of Food" here: http://food.nationalgeographic.com/

Along with the conference packet, we got a National Geographic magazine. In "A Five Step Plan to Feed the World" but Jonathon Foley I think his observation is dead on.  Unfortunately the debate over how to address the global food challenge has become polarized, pitting conventional agriculture and global commerce against local food systems and organic farms. The arguments can be fierce, and like our politics, we seem to be getting more divided rather than finding common ground. Those who favor conventional agriculture talk about how modern mechanization, irrigation, fertilizers, and improved genetics can increase yields to help meet demand. And they're right. Meanwhile proponents of local and organic farms counter that the world's small farmers could increase yields plenty - and help themselves out of poverty- by adopting techniques that improve fertility without synthetic fertilizers and pesticides. They're right too. But it needn't be an either-or proposition. Both approaches offer badly needed solutions; neither one gets us their alone. We would be wise to explore all of the good ideas, whether from organic and local farms or high - tech and conventional farms, and blend the best of them."

I think this is key in my search for somewhere in the middle agriculture. What we are currently doing in "big Ag"doesn't have to be all wrong. There are some great things happening in production agriculture. The thing that scares me the most is the tendency for the industry to put its head and the sand and keeping marching down the path it has always taken. The reluctance to accept new methods or consider environmental or public health concerns has long been my greatest frustration.

I spent a good amount of time discussing antibiotic resistance with the deputy director of the CDC. IT is of big concern to me that organizations outside of agriculture are saying the big changes need to be made in the way animals are raised because of concerns over anti biotic resistance and producers are saying, financially we can't. We may have the safest food supply in the world but that doesn't mean we can't do better. This goes right along with marching down the path that animal production has already established. Instead of evaluating the management practices that have required us to use high levels of antibiotics to mitigate disease brought on by confinement and over crowding, the industry chooses to keep pouring more inputs into a solution.

On a lighter note, I struggled at the beginning of this conference because due to some miscommunication with the conference manager I ended up without a room in Sacramento. I think my willingness to struggle through it brought great rewards. At this conference it felt like every time I asked a question the answer appeared. During a talk on health department regulations, I retreated to the lobby to read my National Geographic magazine. While there I noticed a large group of roughneck looking men toting Coors Light boxes, not the sort who would typically stay at a Hyatt. Later in the conference while talking to the Quality Manager from Starbucks I mentioned my odd day: how I felt like I shouldn't have been invited to this conference, but I was there and many opportunities had opened as well as I learned a great deal. I mentioned as we were standing by the elevator that I couldn't figure out though why all these men were there and as soon as I asked the question why are they here? It appeared on the back of several mens t shirts - they were all union workers. There undoubtedly for a union meeting. I feel like somehow life is telling me I'm on the right path.
"It's not just about where you're headed, its about what happens along the way."

Why Sustainable Farming Matters: Dean Carlson at TEDxPhoenixville

"In the 1700s a group of French economists who called themselves physiocrats ("government by nature") argued that all wealth originates from the land, making farming the only truly productive enterprise. All other work was seen as extractive or transformational of the original value created by farmers. All agricultural products, they believed, circulated through an economy like blood through a body and were just as essential for well-being and long life....Physiocracy failed to take hold, mostly because the bounty of natural resources newly discovered in Asia, Africa and the Americas appeared to be unlimited, Careful stewardship of the land took a distant backseat to rapid and dramatic resource exploitation, leading eventually to scarcity anxiety as supposedly bottomless wells of resources began to run dry. It's only now, Dorn believes, as we bump up against significant and unbending environmental limits that the advantages of a physiocratic-style economy are becoming evident again."

-Courtney White from Grass, Soil, Hope: A Journey Through Carbon Country



There is a tendency in agriculture to say that those outside agriculture just don't understand how things work because what do you know of farming if you've never farmed. I think this is short sighted. How can we grow and become better if we refuse to accept criticism? And even more frightening what are the ramifications if we refuse to deal (or acknowledge) serious issues like climate change, anti biotic resistance and the inevitable depletion of fossil fuels. I, however, think it is interesting to hear the outside perspective. The CDC's views on antibiotic resistance, economists views on scarcity and how this all should effect the decisions the industry is making. And yet as an industry, we've adopted this attitude as if the outsiders are ganging up against us. It's PETA and those damned environmentalists, they're trying to ruin everything. People think food just comes from the store and my favorite: we're feeding the world (as if that absolves us of environmental and moral considerations). What I come back to is a lesson I learned in high school: all my friends and some random acquaintances said the juvenile delinquent I was dating was cheating on me. Of course he said he wasn't and of course he was. The lesson there is that when people who have no attachment to the situation are telling you something and someone who is emotionally (or financially) attached to the situation are telling you differently,it is usually the people who aren't intimately involved that have a clearer picture of what is really going on. I think it goes with the you can't see the forest for the trees analogy. Anyhow, if you have time check out the economist turned farmer. (I really like Ted Talks. If you've never heard of Ted Talks we're probably not friends and you should immediately run to ted.com and learn about all kinds of science and technology and psychology and  really cool people doing really amazing things.)

In the Beginning...

I had read about the other side of agriculture. While I was in graduate school I read Michael Pollan’s books and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. I thought they were great stories of the way things should be. But I had to put those books back on the shelf and get through school. School that corporate Ag was paying for.  And so I put it all out of my mind: egg mobiles and growing your own tomatoes and cows on grass. I ordered my CSA box and ate my locally grown veggies, but I got on board to hate the smelt and that feedlots and CAFOS were the way to feed a growing population. The only way. And then one day, years after grad school was done, three years into my stint as a dairy nutritionist’s assistant, I melted down. I lost the path the others put before me. Somewhere in cow’s knee deep in manure because the flush doesn't work and calves with pneumonia no one notices, in the middle of an asthma attack probably caused by the aforementioned flush system, I decided it was time to walk away. There had to be a better way. 

When I was in school we called the real animal lovers petters. I suppose as horse people who were we to judge? These were the people who refused to brand or castrate. They cried and said but his name is Ferdinand while we were branding bull calves in our beef lab. When I went out into the field, I didn't want to be a petter. I tried really hard. I looked at it with a scientist’s distance. While you’re taking animal science classes they tell you if any of this was really stressful these animals wouldn’t produce the way they do. Stress inhibits growth, reproduction, and milk production. I told myself all these things. Dairy is tough. It’s a tough business, I just don’t know that I think anyone should own 6,000 animals. Let alone 12,000. It’s easy to let things fall between the cracks and to try to save a buck here and there. With a 30% cull rate, you can’t get attached to every animal or apparently any animal. Fourth or fifth lactation animals are old. With a first lactation at 2 that means these animals are 6 or 7 years old. They lay down and don’t get up one day, or they blow their udder or they stop producing and go to beef. It’s the circle of life. I tried not to be a petter. I tried not to pat their heads and let them lick my jeans, but I did. And maybe I am a petter, but I think we can do this better. 

Somewhere in the middle refers to what my friend Meridith always tells me. That what I'm looking for is somewhere in the middle. Somewhere between rain dances and goddess prayer circles at Eco-Farm and mega dairies. Somewhere in the middle is the food system I want to be apart of. For Sara, somewhere in the middle falls between regimented super healthy diets where food loses it's magic and not paying attention at all where food makes you unhealthy . As a combined effort, this blog will explore the somewhere in the middle of agriculture as I try to figure out what I think is right and find the animal science I signed up for and somewhere in the middle of nutrition where Sara is finding that food is still fun. Together these things make a food system and somewhere in the middle there is magic.