The National Agricultural Library does not verify the accuracy of the accounts described herein by participants in an Oral History Project. These oral histories are expressions of the views, memories and opinions of the interviewee.
They do not represent the policy, views or official history of the United States Department of Agriculture or the National Agricultural Library. An official website of the United States government. Here's how you know. Introduction At the time of this interview, Dr. Video Menu 1. Introduction and early years and formation of the Northern Plains Sustainable Agriculture Society [13 minutes] 2.
The definition the USDA is still using is one established in When that report came out in , there was only one journalist that picked up on the real issue, and it was because she had talked to Mike Duffy. That was Lisa Hamilton. Thirty percent of our farmers were over age 65, and only 6 percent were under age Where are the farmers going to come from, particularly as we face these new challenges with climate change, and so on?
These young people are amazing. The challenge is that they need access to land, they need access to affordable capital to invest in the resources they need to be farmers, and they need the kind of markets where they can get returns from farming so they can pay off their investment and have a decent life. And those are all things we can address.
We can address some of them in public policy. But this is something that we must address, because, as [author] Richard Heinberg has projected, by the year , [the United States is] going to need 40 to 50 million people to produce our food in one way or another.
So we get 75 percent of our total agriculture sales from less than a quarter of a million farmers, and we need to get to 40 to 50 million. So we have to do everything we can to enable this new generation of young people to actually become farmers and begin to fill that void. There have been four reports that have come out of the U. What we have to do is work with people, especially small-holder farmers and women, in their own communities and give them the information that they need to develop self-sustaining agro-ecological systems.
Another article, an amazing article in YES! We have to figure out a way to give them the resources they need to feed themselves and empower them. How can modern farms incorporate more biodiversity? Fred : Matt Leibman, a weed ecologist at Iowa State University, has done research over nine years comparing a typical two-crop rotation in Iowa—usually corn and soybeans, or sometimes continuous corn—and that system supported with synthetic inputs.
He compared that two-crop rotation with a three-crop rotation—corn and beans with a small grain and red clover, with a lot of livestock manure—and then a four-crop rotation, which is corn and beans, a small grain, and alfalfa, followed by a second year of alfalfa.
He has demonstrated that in the three- and four-crop rotation, you can reduce pesticide use by almost 90 percent, your fertilizer use by almost 90 percent, and the return to land that farmers get for each unit of labor is actually slightly higher than in the two-crop rotation.
I think the market infrastructure is going to start changing when the current market system no longer works. Norton and Company. In this volume, they make a strong case for the beneficial connections between the microbes in soil and the microbes in our guts. And ignoring this living community and its benefits, as input-intensive agriculture often does, has simply put us on the wrong path. As David and Anne put it in a concluding paragraph of The Hidden Half of Nature: "So where does this evolutionary new perspective leave us?
Put bluntly, many practices at the heart of modern agriculture and medicinetwo arenas of applied science critical to human health and well-beingare simply on the wrong path. We need to learn how to work with, rather than against, the microbial communities that underpin the health of plants and people.
Such potential human health and soil health connections may lead us to an additional reason to consider soil health-based scenarios as the core of the future of organic agriculture. Two additional examples from health care professionals worth exploring are Dr. Fall Energy transformation: A key component of systainability's future Summer The most dangerous world view Spring Farmer-led pathways to our climate future. Winter Rethinking soil, economics and health Fall Sustainability-as-flourishing Summer Our 'collision course' Spring From instant gratification to need for connection.
Winter What's an education for, 2. Summer Practical strategies for a hotter, scarcer, more open world Spring Redefining wealth. Winter Rethinking evolution: From competition to cooperation Fall What really drives science?
Summer Leopold's ongoing dilemma Spring What's an education for? Winter The challenge of ending hunger Fall Anticipating the future? Summer On 'being there' Spring From commodities to communities.
0コメント