Bridging the Organic/Conventional divide…The Third Way

Jonathan Foley, Director of the new Institute on the Environment at the University of Minnesota will be one of the keynote speakers at the Agricultural Trade Show at the Augusta Civic Center on Wednesday, January 13^th, at 1pm.

Dr. Foley is a renown expert on global land use, agriculture and climate issues He will talk about major issues that must be addressed if we are going to double world food production in the next 40 years given continued population growth, increasing meat consumption and pressure from biofuels.

Dr. Foley says currently, there are two paradigms of agriculture being widely promoted: local and organic systems versus globalized and industrialized agriculture. Each has fervent followers and critics. Genuine discourse has broken down: You’re either with Michael Pollan or you’re with Monsanto. But neither of these paradigms, standing alone, can fully meet our needs.

Dr. Foley believes we will have to dramatically reduce the environmental impacts of our farming practices, But at the same time we will also have to improve food security for the world’s poor. Today, our high-efficiency, globalized world has many benefits, but it is vulnerable to disruption, whether from drought, disease or price spikes. We must start building more resilience into food systems to better insulate us from future shocks.

Organic agriculture teaches us important lessons about soils, nutrients and pest management. And local agriculture connects people back to their food system. Unfortunately, certified organic food provides less than 1 percent of the world’s calories, mostly to the wealthy. It is hard to imagine organic farming scaling up to feed 9 billion.

Globalized and industrialized agriculture have benefits of economic scalability, high output and low labor demands. Overall, the Green Revolution has been a huge success. Without it, billions of people would have starved. However, these successes have come with tremendous environmental and social costs, which cannot be sustained.

Rather than voting for just one solution, we need a third way to solve the crisis. Dr. Foley will expand on the third way, which will require ALL farmers, researchers and policy makers to come together with a new vision for agriculture into the 21^st century.