 I'm really glad we had to put extra chairs out, that's exciting. We have a bunch of different crews here, which is really nice, we've got VYCC, we have St. Mike's, we've got UVM Practicum, and we've got the Farmer Training Program. So a shout out to all of you, and thank you for everyone else from the community that came. My name is Serata Santis, I'm the co-director of the Farmer Training Program at the University of Vermont, which is a six-month non-credit hands-on agricultural experience. So a shout out to all my students that are in the audience. So tonight we have an amazing panel for you, really lucky to have everyone who's sitting at the table. Each presenter will talk for about 15 minutes, and then we'll have a time for discussion. There's mics on either side, and we'll tell you when you can line up to ask questions. I want to thank our sponsors, UVM Farmer Training Program, UVM Catamount Farm, NOFA Vermont, and UVM's Agroecology and Livelihoods Collaborative. You can see our panelists up here, I'll introduce each when they come to speak. I also want to have a huge shout out and thank you to Eric Melton and Foster Nye, who are in the back allowing this to be live streamed and also archived at UVM YouTube Station and also Jeremiah over here who works with the Davis Center who's helped us with all the ITs. So thank you, everyone who made this possible. The reason we decided to have this panel is the staff at the Farmer Training Program, we often get questions of what's the difference between organic agriculture and regenerative ag, or what's the difference between agroecology and permaculture. We can answer those questions but this panel can answer much better than we can. So we wanted to bring everybody together because I also, as we can see here, there's a lot of other people in Vermont that wants to know what the nuances are between these different types of farming. And I think what we're going to learn is there's a lot of overlapping themes and then we're also going to learn how these different agricultural practices diverge and how they're different from each other. Sometimes people talk disparagingly about one form of agriculture over another and they don't actually understand the intricacies of these kinds of agricultural practices. And what we're hoping to do here is with further understanding about why farmers make certain decisions, we can hopefully have a broader understanding and awareness of agricultural practices and why farmers make decisions for what they do. So that's why we have this panel here. I hope you are going to enjoy it. First we're going to have Maddie Kempner. She's been working at NOFA Vermont as policy advisor since 2014. Maddie worked on a commercial organic vegetable farm in Educational Garden in Utah in Colorado, which inspired her to engage in the way to change our food system, how it's produced in farm policy. She also worked on the right to know GMO's coalition to help pass the first in the nation GMO labeling law. She has a BS in environmental studies from the UVM and a master's in environmental law and policy from Vermont law school. Can everybody hear me? Awesome. So as Sarah said, my name is Maddie Kempner and I work as policy advisor for NOFA Vermont, which for those of you who aren't familiar, it's the Northeast Organic Farming Association. And we are one of seven chapters throughout the Northeast doing similar kinds of work in the food system. We also have a certification program called Vermont Organic Farmers. Maybe you've seen the logo on the lower right hand of that screen. That's the logo of our certification program, which you'll see on products all over the state and beyond. And I see someone with a hat with that logo on it tonight, so props to you. And also, as Sarah mentioned, I'm going to talk obviously about organic. I will preface this with the fact that I guess what I'll give you is sort of a fairly basic overview of kind of organic philosophy and practices in terms of what certification requires and the process involved in certification. There are at least a couple of other people in this room who know more about this than I do. So please know that there are other resources and I'm by no means the end-all expert, but I will do my best to give you a good idea of really what organic means. So the organic philosophy, I think it's really important to understand beyond just understanding organic certification and the specific practices that are required. The philosophy really started out as one of the foundational tenets of organic is feed the soil, not the plant. Organic is really intended to be a holistic systems approach to farming where biologically active soil serves as a foundation to create, as you can see in this little flow chart, healthy plants, healthy animals, and healthy people. So the whole idea behind organic is that it's, again, a whole systems approach. And it really, I would say, stands out from a more conventional approach to agriculture in that it's, again, based on this biologically active system rather than kind of inputs in, inputs out. And along with this, I think it's really important to note that there is both what we at NOFA and VOF refer to as the negative definition of organic and the positive definition. The negative definition of organic is what people often think of from a basic consumer perspective where they think there's no GMOs, no sewage sludge irradiation, no synthetic fertilizers or toxic pesticides. All those things are true. But we also like to emphasize the positive definition of organic, which means that it requires that farmers go beyond those things and actively promote biodiversity on their farms, for example, and develop biologically active soil that feeds their plants and their animals on the farm. So I think it's important to remember that organic doesn't just mean that certain things are absent, but there are really practices that farmers are required and encouraged to do that are kind of proactively improving their farming system and hopefully the environment. So what are the organic standards in a very basic way? A set of definitions and practices that encompass organic farming and processing. Process products, as you probably know, are also allowed to be certified as organic. It includes the National List of Allowed and Prohibited Substances, which is a dynamic list of materials that are allowed in organic farming. And the idea also behind the organic standards at the national level is that they're continuously improved with input from farmers, consumers, nonprofits, and private businesses. So there's, just to give you a really brief overview, I'm sorry if this is too beginner level for you guys, but the National Organic Program is a part of the USDA, the United States Department of Agriculture. And along with the National Organic Program, which is really the kind of federal regulatory arm of the organic program, there's also a board called the National Organic Standards Board that is an advisory board to the NOP. So the National Organic Standards Board is made up of folks from all of these different groups listed here that gives recommendations to the NOP on what should and should not be allowed with an organic production. So who can be organic? Only farmers and processors certified by a USDA accredited certification body can use the term organic. When the National Organic Program was established in 2002, it basically meant that only people who are certified organic should be using that term, with this one exception that if an operation has gross agricultural income of $5,000 or less, they can use the term as long as they are still complying with the organic regulations and using organic practices. And I think this is an important point in that it really shows that USDA recognizes, and it's a certain way of recognizing more broadly that, and I will say also that NOP and VOF recognize more broadly, that there are lots of people who practice organically on their farms, who may or may not be certified for a variety of reasons. And I think, you know, in talking about organic, it's really important to kind of understand that outside of organic certification. The organic movement started long before the National Organic Program was established, and there are still farmers who are really foundational people within the organic community who choose not to be certified for a whole variety of reasons. So in terms of kind of some more specifics of what organic production entails, organic producers are required to feed the soil, and some examples of that are through cover crops, green manures, compost, and animal manures. Farmers are required to rotate their crops, which is a way of avoiding pest and disease problems that can build up in your soil over time. And organic producers are not allowed to use toxic pesticides or synthetic fertilizers. And basically this goes back to the idea of the holistic system, where the practices that organic farmers use are intended so that they don't need to use certain inputs in order to keep their plants and their animals healthy. And then in terms of livestock, there's, you know, similar different practices based on the same principles. They have to be fed organic feed without the use of hormones or antibiotics, raising the stress for the environment, allowed to exhibit natural behaviors. Healthcare treatments have to be natural or improve synthetic on the national list. They must have year-round outdoor access, and they must be raised on pasture. So there are some fairly specific requirements in terms of livestock production as well. In terms of the process of certification, farmers submit an organic system plan on an annual basis. There is an annual inspection, and they pay a fee to the certification body, and they have to renew that application every year. It's also important to note that we do unannounced inspections on 10% of our operations annually, and we do residue testing on 5% of our operations. So this is, I guess, more to the point, maybe, of the conversation that we're having tonight. One of the prompts that Sarah gave us all in preparing for this discussion is what does organic mean for agriculture at this moment in time? This could be a very lengthy discussion, and I hope we'll get a chance to get more into it. From my perspective, and I think from NOFA and VOF's perspective, organic is really a meaningful and clearly verified set of practices that benefits the environment and human health. If practiced correctly, that's what they should be doing. I think it's really interesting, there was a study that came out, I think at least I saw it through the National Young Farmers Coalition recently, where young and beginning farmers are saying that they are using organic practices, but at least anecdotally, and I think probably empirically, they're not getting certified as often as their predecessors. And I think that's a really important trend to notice, and when I think about that, and you all, young farmers in the audience, I'm sure would have a lot to say about this, but I wonder how much it is analogous to the feminist movement, for example, where for people of my generation, the feminist movement had already happened when I came up, when I grew up, and so there's a part of me that wonders whether young and beginning farmers aren't taking up the mantle of organic agriculture in the way that the founding members of the organic movement did, because it's already a really well-established set of practices, and it's often referred to as an almost $50 billion industry. So when you think of it in those terms, it may not feel like a cause that young and beginning farmers really need to get behind, but there's also lots of other reasons why young and beginning farmers may not be certified. Oftentimes if you're selling to direct markets and you really know your customer and they know you and your practices, that may not be something that you feel is right for your farm. And I think that's really important to emphasize too. Sarah mentioned earlier, you know, the discussion around why farmers choose to practice in certain ways. And while we at NOFA and VOF believe really strongly in organic, and I personally believe really strongly in organic, as a set of farming practices in an approach, it's not been our role to tell farmers how they should practice or tell farmers that they should or need to get certified. That's really an individual decision for every farmer. And you know, whether or not it works for them and makes sense for them. And so more kind of in terms of what organic agriculture means at this moment in time, I think that many of you may be aware that there have been some challenges with how organic is enforced and implemented at the national level through the National Organic Program. It is intended to be a process of continuous improvement, but especially in recent years organic has run up against some walls in terms of the National Organic Program enforcing the regulations consistently or different certifiers across the country of which there I believe 95, implementing the organic regulations in the same way across the board. So that's definitely one of the challenges associated with this being now under the banner of USDA, which I would say is different from the challenges that existed when there were a bunch of different kind of state-by-state programs, but I'm sure there were challenges with that as well. I think it's also really interesting that organic has come to serve as the foundation for a couple of add-on labels that are in development currently. There is a group called the Real Organic Project that is developing a set of standards currently that will be used to create an add-on label, not by that name, that will use organic as its kind of baseline and then build on top of it. And the reason for that is some of the stagnation that I mentioned with continuous improvement under the National Organic Program. The goal of the Real Organic Project is to address shortcomings in terms of USDA organic like the allowance of hydroponics, which have been allowed to be certified now as organic, and some concerns about enforcement of things like the pasture rule and the lack of implementation of higher animal welfare standards for organic, called the Organic Livestock and Poultry Practices Rule, which was actually passed under the Obama Administration, but was withdrawn by the Trump Administration immediately thereafter. And then there is another set of standards being developed called Regenerative Organic Certification. This was started by the Rodale Institute and it is a really similar project with similar goals, I would say, with a very different approach. And the Real Organic Project really was kind of started here in Vermont and has grown to be a national effort and it has always been very farmer-driven. And the Regenerative Organic Certification was seemingly less farmer-driven, but it also is a set of standards that are thought to be somewhat unattainable, at least in their current form. So it will be really interesting to see what happens with those couple of efforts, but USDA Organic Certification will be a prerequisite requirement for both of those. I think that's pretty much all I have. I don't know if I can use my extra time to take questions now or if I should just hold that for later. Thanks, everybody. Thanks so much, Maddie. Terry Bradshaw will be our next speaker. He's a research assistant professor at UVM and has worked his entire life in various sectors of Vermont agriculture. The bulk of his research and outreach program focuses on sustainable pest and horticultural management, specifically in orchards, mostly apples and vineyards, and includes both organic and conventional practices. He received his PhD in plant soil science from UVM in 2015, shortly after founding Catamow Educational Farm, where the farmer training program was housed. He serves as a specialty crops research and teaching laboratory at the UVM Hort Farm, and he's some of your professor out here, so take good notes. It's going to be on the quiz. Guys, if there's extra seats, can you take backpacks off? Maybe, Ari, could you just bring these three seats over here? Please, thanks. Don't need to give me anything. Good. All right. Hi, everyone. Thanks for coming out tonight. I don't know how we chose the order. I don't know if it was alphabetical or not, but organic is a very clear box. I say that as someone who's been certified on parts of the farm for 12 or 13 years. Conventional is everything outside the box, and these guys are more fuzzy boxes. I'm done. No. So I want to just highlight a few things that I wanted to talk about. One being the concept of agriculture. I teach on multiple levels, but one of the things that I often kind of focus on is production scale agriculture, where the marketing and the economic livelihood is a key part of this piece, and that's a lot of what I teach to and what I kind of direct my various programs to. So I want to put a little asterisk there in terms of sort of part of my focus. One thing I wanted to highlight. I love this picture here. I took this in an orchard last year. Anybody have a guess as to what that represents? Not counting those were in my class last spring. Those are the three primary, three most valuable crops in Vermont. Milk, although it's a beef cow. Maple and apples, all in one shot. Anyway, side note. One thing that I also want to highlight, and this has been something that I sort of have to deal with to some degree or other in my life, of having one foot in the conventional, if you want to call it that, bucket, and one foot in the organic bucket, is this sense of tribalism. And over the years, I've noticed that at times, particularly with people who don't actually have their hands in the soil, we divide more distinctly into our tribes. There's actually been a lot of research, particularly done in the 70s, that find that actually once people find a tribe, whatever that tribe might be, could be your knitting group, could be your fly tying buddies, you tend to avoid information from outside of your tribe. And so I welcome forums like this, and I welcome continuing the discussion. So I want to highlight that little piece. So conventional agriculture. I looked up, I just Googled, conventional agriculture took the first two Google images. And then I also looked at one of the initial definitions that came out, and from apropedia, I don't know who apropedia is, but I mentioned conventional farming is known as industrial agriculture, refers to farming based on continual inputs, genetically modified organisms, concentrated animal feeding operations, irrigation intensive tillages, monoculture. And that was really kind of the focus, and that's not the first thing that I think about. And anybody who's familiar with some of my talks, the concept of Monsanto gas mask man is not what I think of when I think of conventional agriculture. But it is what's pretty popular in the first Google hits. So sometimes we have to work against this and sort of dispel this, and also recognize to embrace parts of this that we do deal with. This picture does drive me crazy because whatever that chemical is was banned back in 1992, so it's not even very appropriate for the common, for contemporary discussion. But we have parts of this that do fit into conventional agriculture. However, if you look into some dictionary definitions, the idea of conventional has more to do with what is generally done. What are most people doing? And are most people doing bad things to grow food? And I would say that the vast, vast majority of people aren't doing bad things to grow food. So Maddie had a good point of talking about negative versus positive connotations around organic. You can say the same thing about conventional. So conventional is what most the farmers are doing. And one thing I think about in terms of conventional is organic is in a box. The NLP list, and there's certain things you do, conventional is not in a box. And so we are free to try new things to innovate. And we can be a little more responsive, I think, to challenges, to potential solutions to challenges. And because we're on the front of that, sometimes we make mistakes without question. But we're not bound to an ideology first. We're bound to whatever our particular principles might be. One of the things that's important to note here is there's nothing mutually exclusive between organic and conventional. I can use organic practices and materials all day long in my conventional orchards. In fact, we do. So that's an important thing. It's not a black or white mutually exclusive kind of thing. And I think we'll see this across the board. So really, at the end of the day, what are we absolutely limited to? Whatever the laws are. So then we have to make sure that we have good policies and good checks and balances to make sure that as a society, we make policies that protect the environment, the food supply, farm workers and farmers so that people can afford to live and we can all eat. Any one of us can talk about these problems. Anybody who is looking at farming at the food supply knows we have an increasing population. We have a decreasing labor supply. We don't have any more land to grow on. And students who've heard me often hear me say that our most limiting resource in agriculture is land. Even when we figure out the nitrogen and phosphorus issues 100 years from now, we're not going to have any more land. In fact, we'll have less land. Certainly environmental degradation and climate change is going to impact all of these. So we've all got some really big issues to solve. Or at least continue working around. We're never going to solve them. One thing that we think about and this is a concept that's always been on my mind is the idea that came about 200 years ago that at some point we're going to run out of things to feed the mouse that we have. And so anybody who's familiar with mouse-less theory knows that there was a theory that says if we, population will increase at a logarithmic rate, food supply will increase at a geometric rate and eventually we aren't going to have enough food. And this was a real concern prior to the Industrial Revolution and would have been a concern if we weren't innovating and making for better agriculture. Thankfully, innovation moved beyond this particular situation and we've generally kept pace. That does not mean there hasn't been shortages of food. Doesn't mean that there aren't certain regional issues. But generally speaking the productivity of agriculture worldwide, and I don't mean conventional agriculture because this started well before chemical agriculture came in, people started to breed better plants, people started to realize better ways to tend to their soil, and we have kept kept pace sometimes just barely and not always evenly across the board, around the world, but we've been able to continue to feed people. If we were growing food at the production levels we were 200 years ago we would have run out of land a very, very long time ago. What happened? Around 1900 we discovered a way to make nitrogen synthetically. In organic systems this is not allowed. You can pretty much track agricultural production and population growth and pretty much plot it with the amount of synthetic nitrogen we've made. That's been good in that we've continued to feed the mouths of the people that get born in the world that's also very likely contributed to overpopulation in the world. So we are on a treadmill we are stuck with this system to where if we were to remove Haber-Bosch or synthetic nitrogen from the system there would not be enough food for about half the people on the earth. It's a very gross overstatement but we would be in for a major problem so we've got to find ways to use this stuff the most efficiently, which we're not doing generally. And also ways to try to find other systems that will be more resilient so that we're not tied to milking every bit of natural gas out of the earth to just continue to produce nitrogen. So this is the problem and this is something that people are going to need to solve for decades to come. So when I think about conventional agriculture I think about as an undergrad the term was sustainable agriculture that's not in vogue anymore but I still use the term. And I go to McGuire from Washington State who came up with four key elements to maintaining sustainable agricultural production make sure my time is on so protect the soil not it is key the soil is absolutely what we need to manage and when we ran into dust bowl conditions some years ago that was a logical extension of very poor soil management. So no matter how you're managing your farm you need to protect the soil. Maintain soil fertility if we're going to take a piece of land and we're going to pull it out of wild condition because every farm is not wild although Keith might talk a little bit differently but we are taking this piece of ground and we're saying we're going to alter this we're going to do something with this and we're going to remove it from the natural system we better make sure that we're using that land appropriately so that we are maintaining the fertility to get the crops that we need for the effort we put in and for the mouths we need to feed and that we're also replacing the fertility that we're removing and the only thing to remember is every time you pull a crop off the soil you're pulling nutrients out of the soil so we need to maintain that use water efficiently this is one of Andrew's points I don't think any of us in Vermont most of us don't have too many issues with water he's based out of eastern Washington where it's very dry but it's something we need to think about and we need to also remember that the world is not Vermont the world is not even North America although the climate change they're changing quite a bit we need to always be thinking about this and how to design systems that are more resilient so we can maintain reasonable production in the health of the environment and then protect the crop and this is a key part that I feel differentiates conventional if you want to call it conventional from other systems where we recognize that we need inputs human labor capital that has gone into this crop and we need to make sure that we respect that by protecting the crop so that could be something as simple as hand picking we've done this in the organic orchards for years hand picking and some of the people in this room get to hand thin various fruitlets out of our orchard sometimes that means firing up a sprayer this is in the organic orchards organic orchards are not spray free sometimes that might mean using other tactics and so this is the classic IPM integrated pest management pyramid which looks very similar to the pyramid that you see in various organic management texts minus the effective chemical use at the tip although there are some chemicals that are used in organics but the key to have a healthy resilient well designed pest management system is to work on all the stuff at the bottom so that you minimize the stuff at the tip and that's what good conventional growers do and I would even say the bulk at least the ones that I know then we have some issues this is a picture my old boss took on the back of her deck of her car we use as much as possible resistant varieties to try to maintain to prevent disease before we have it or prevent insects before we have it so this is a liberty next to a macintosh neither one got fungicides one got apple scab one didn't this is a conventionally bred resistant variety sometimes you can have transgenic resistant varieties so this is a field of BT bull worm resistant cotton on the left on the right you can see that there's a major issue there in certain parts of the world it may take over 20 applications some pretty hot pesticides to keep bull worms off of the right so this is a tactic that's used by conventional farmers and it can be a controversial one one that I see that is coming up that I think is going to bubble up to the surface what we call GMO 2.0 so there's a new group that are not transgenic something that might be where they call CRISPR edited where the genes do not leave the particular species so there's now late blight resistant potatoes developed in England there are some groups in England in their organic they're not organic because they can't plant these but some people are saying this is a system where we can really save on the management of a devastating disease I wrote the numbers down here somewhere annual worldwide cost to manage late blights is in the 3 to 5 billion dollar range between the sprays that are applied and the loss of crops this is an area that we're going to see more changes and I think we're going to see some real soul searching around this around the use of modern breeding to avoid having cancer pests and then finally a piece that I added and I don't know this is officially in any conventional agriculture world but as a guy who grew up on a dairy farm and as a guy who works in orchards with farmers and sees people day to day sometimes making a living sometimes not any sustainable agriculture system has to absolutely provide a sustainable living for the farmer and for their communities so few examples of some of the growers that I work with not necessarily work with all of them but these are all non-organic farmers that I would consider progressive really good conventional growers and I think my last slide one thing that's very interesting is we think about soil health and the talk particularly about regenerative agriculture when I first started hearing about regenerative agriculture and soil health about 2000 2002 and it was not coming from the organic world actually came from Heather Darby who was working with this organic apple project but she was bringing me papers from the upper midwest in the Great Plains saying look at the stuff that's going on out there these are farmers that were that took it upon themselves largely to really start a revolution in terms of paying attention to soil health number one in terms of managing and making for a sustainable farm even if you're a conventional farmer particularly multi-generational farmers you know that the soil is what is going to provide for you for decades and generations to come so this really is a focus of conventional agriculture as well this is a really bad Venn diagram that I'm stopping on for my ag policy class trying to show where we all fit all these bubbles could move around and I think that's part of the point is how much overlap there is some of these I don't even know where they should fit and I think that's kind of the point of this panel is we've got all these names and conventional it's just because there's more acreage I didn't show you the scale of the acreage and I maybe will come out of this with some sense for whether or not the bubbles all overlap they separate and I welcome any discussion around that so with that I'm done thank you so thank you Terry Corey Pierce is our next speaker going to address Regenerative Ag she's the owner and operator of Bread and Butter Farm located on the town line of Shelburne in South Burlington you still have some seats left for Burger Night this Friday no yes with you okay so if you want to go check that out Bread and Butter Farm is a diversified regenerative agricultural farm focused on diversity collaboration and engaging community in many ways through food art experiences music care and care for the land animals plants and one another so thanks for being here Corey yeah thanks it's always fun to engage in these panels discussions hopefully discussions okay put it up maybe so let's see I saw asked me to talk about regenerative agriculture and I'd say that that certainly is a term that we kick around as a way to describe what we're doing I I liked the reference that you made Terry about like these this kind of tribalism mentality and kind of latching onto something I think that's something we do as humans to kind of feel good about and support decisions that we make and things like that so I get that I'd say that I work personally pretty hard to try not to do that and try to you know just follow what I feel is working through observation through just experience through learning from others as much as I can and I'd say that owning and operating a farm it's simultaneously almost some ways harder to do that because you're so down focused in your world and in some ways easier because now you're fully emerged in that world and you're and it's so it benefits you to try to stay as really open-minded as you can about what is going to be the best practices for yourself for the future for the world for your children etc so when I thought about how to talk about this tonight really how I my journey in farming has really dictated kind of where I am now at age 44 and being an owner of a farm and trying to make a go of it as a business so I thought I'd talk about that so initially for me I did not grow up on a family farm I was a kid who spent a ton of time outdoors and just naturally loved that and then when it came time to get a job I was sort of panicked about needing to stay inside in the summertime and luckily found an opportunity to work on a farm as a 20-acre so conventional vegetable and fruit farm in my hometown in New Hampshire and I literally instantly got hooked I loved the things that just grabbed me were being outside, were working with the team were working hard it has been very physically driven engaging physically is something that's always excited me and then I very quickly saw the community that was built around that certainly learning how to grow food seeing foods that I had never known about before eating the freshest possible food was really fun and exciting seeing these farmers and how they interacted with us as their crew and be like let's make this great lunch and go right out to the field and gather a bunch of stuff and cook it up was certainly like whoa this is awesome, this is great so all of those things really hooked me I worked on that farm all through high school and then into college and really quickly I was like I want to have a farm when I grow up but I kind of have this idea that farming is not necessarily seen as a really good job it's not something that people go seek out so this is in the early 90s and we have certainly come a long way especially in Vermont, New England of thinking about farming in a new way but I it was hard for me to articulate is farming an option? is it something that you can go and say I want to be a farmer, I want to do this my parents certainly thought otherwise seriously how is she going to do this but that was in me and it was like stuck in me and I started mulling that over how do we do that how do I do that so then I started learning about agriculture my only experience was this one farm and I loved it, I loved the people I loved what it represented in our community but then I started in college I started learning about the bigger scope of agriculture agriculture has meant to the human race I started learning about environmental issues that we were facing that Terry talked about again but specific to so I was learning about all these big environmental issues but I started learning specifics around farming the loss of topsoil the reliance on fossil fuels chemicals and what we are finally figuring out chemicals we're doing to ourselves to the world all around us that other countries were banning things that we weren't just all these things and how short-term it felt like we were there is this race that again Terry talked about of populations growing food needs to grow we need to make it all happen but it's sort of like what comes first the chicken or the egg there are we making more and more and more food and more and more and I'm not going to answer those questions that's not for me to answer but I started just noticing those and questioning those and then reading books about how agriculture is potentially the downfall of the human race that being able to grow so much food in one spot one farmer can grow food for thousands of people with the help of all these man-made things you know maybe not the best thing for us as a species then I had a whole other journey around my own health and my own understanding nutrition and what makes my body feel the best and what specific health issues I was seeing people I knew and loved have and how all of a sudden there's like very clear connection to the food that people were eating and then how they were feeling and diseases they were suddenly getting and you know so there's that whole thing I'm not going to go into all of that but I had a very real personal journey on that front and then started to kind of make connections about this shift something that I asked I started asking as a little kid constantly was why are humans why are we this only species in my eyes that seem like we are just outside of the rest of the natural world like why do we need to kind of carve out our world why are we so reliant on things that are not just part of the natural world why have we created and then become reliant on so many man-made things when I see out in the natural world so you know every other species is like just living and doing their thing and some boom and bust some crash some go extinct some you know have been here from forever but why are humans and when were humans ever really naturally part of the world and part of the natural world in a way that was not just like cavemen you know whatever you know so I that was a really big question for me as a kid and then when I as I got older thinking about agriculture in a deeper way I started thinking about you know that question came up again and then it came into the into the form of agriculture like why do we have to grow food in a way that is so clearly in a box here is a farm this is how you do it you run these big huge machines that we had to make and then we had to extract all this fossil fuel from the earth to drive and then we have to spray all this stuff on it to make it work when I see then out in the forest a thriving beautiful highly diverse bountiful amazing ecosystem that is supporting life of all kinds and so that was really confusing to me and I see all this work whether it's like actual physical work by the humans or whether it's like work that were channeling through big huge machines to get done to make this thing this one thing and then again compare it to the forest and the diversity the beauty the health and it just does juxtaposition that was very challenging for me to understand then I started noticing that that all that stuff over here that we were killing ourselves to do or killing the earth to do is making one crop and it's usually annual crops so what's the deal with why are we putting why are we trying so hard to make these annual crops these crops that just come and go and die and then we just start over the whole next year come and go and die start over the next year and some years they totally crash because even with all the protection in the world that we as humans try to give them some kind of infestation happens some kind of disease wipes it out some kind of something and it's all done and then we're done right and and those questions are just like mind blowing to me right and I'm trying to figure all of this out so I start and meanwhile my like desire and love for all of those things that I was so excited about farming when I first started as a teenager before I was mired in all the depressings parts of like the human situation I still had in me and I still wanted that and I still wanted to like figure out how to do this in a way that wasn't then like gonna just contribute to all of these other parts of farming and agriculture and human craziness that that I was seeing and so I've lived in California I've lived in Michigan farming and I've grew up in the northeast and now farming in the northeast so I've been luckily been able to go onto so many types of farms in so many different parts of the world or this country particular and really you know gotten to know a lot of farmers who are doing so many hugely different things and seeing just every possible type of scenario and there's still so much more to see and learn but I feel like I have been lucky in order to get somewhat of a perspective there and it's been very eye-opening and I feel like my journey is just at the very tip of the iceberg still and I have the rest of my short life to try and learn as much as I can to try to get on so you know I basically basically began to ask myself okay is it possible to be an ecological player to be side by side to the soil to the plants to the animals to my fellow humans in my community in an equal balanced way like you would in a rich thriving forest ecosystem is it possible to do that as a farm as a farm and what is the definition of a farm as we've been already hearing it's hugely variable and so what that quickly meant to me was can I somehow get land can I somehow have a business that can support my family, myself some employees my neighbors can it blend in enough and again I like what Terry said and always both as an ecosystem but then also economically is it going to be viable and that's where I am now so nine years into having a farm the term regenerative agriculture is and I brought a book by Mark Shepard called Restoration Agriculture which I like that term too and I continue to learn about really challenges me challenges us to think about perennial systems that have longevity that rely on intensive diversity and certainly all the things that the other speakers have said caring for the soil first and foremost but trying to figure out how to to bring humans back on an equal playing field with our natural ecosystem with the animals we have beef cattle on our farm we have pigs we have a few chickens we have perennial plants and we do have annual plants and how can we have all of those things intermixed together so that we're not reliant on one only over the other and how can we work alongside all of those players down to the microbes as all super important players to make healthy farm system and that's our journey I think I'm done let's see yeah I think a few other notes but I think that's what I'm going to say thank you Cory Keith Morris is our next speaker he's going to talk about permaculture he has been applying his lifelong love of nature and culture and experience as an activist of permaculture he's been a very old design since 1996 he's spent over 20 years developing permaculture with farms in schools, towns, indigenous people activists in solidarity with exploited populations Will Crossing Farm which is his farm I put it up there wrong sorry it used to be called Prospect Rock Will Crossing is Vermont's longest running permaculture and agroforestry research farm he is also the co-founder of the Permaculture Association of the Northeast thanks Sarah thanks to my co-panelists it's an honor to be here so Terrence mentioned kind of neat boxes and some of us having maybe fuzzier boxes permaculture is probably one of the fuzziest boxes and or frankly just straight outside of the box and probably I probably have the most work to do to dispel myths or at least misconceptions with the field that I'm representing especially as it's interpreted in the agricultural community first and foremost maybe I'd just like to kind of help define permaculture and maybe clarify that in essence really permaculture is primarily a design system and it's a design system that uses the study of ecology to inform the ways that we create relationships between people and the things that we depend on food centrally but also of course water, shelter, energy waste management etc so permaculture is very holistic from the outset and I can say for some of my own journey as a farmer and it's really nice to follow Cori and kind of her story and kind of personal struggle for self-identity or species role that we all question right what is the role of human beings in the world and at this time and place we certainly have every reason to question and wonder who we are what we're meant to be doing and certainly what is our relationship to ecology right so thanks for that and I can say that personally I really came to farming from the place of an environmental activist and really looking at our intersection with food as that most immediate intersection with the life around us and recognizing that I wanted personally to take more responsibility to that and wanted to build a deeper relationship to that both in terms of species and places and the other people who also contribute to feeding me and us so one of the kind of misconceptions which isn't it's easy to understand why permaculture is often associated almost entirely with things like forest gardening and herb spirals and chicken tractors and all these things are pretty cool things but much more importantly is the thinking behind how we create relationships between the parts of a system and looking in fact to ecology as the model for how these relationships are as mutually beneficial as possible so for instance again Terrence mentioned like picking apples by hand out of an orchard and so you have a really great jump on getting any pupating pests out of the orchard system before they reproduce and I've had that job and it's you know better than other jobs but it isn't my ecological niche it isn't I don't thrive picking up wormy apple drops in the floor of the orchard and chickens and pigs really do enjoy picking apple drops out of the floor of orchards and so of course there's regulatory issues about grazing and fruit production so I'm not going to get into that terrain but that is one example of the types of relationships that we're looking to foster where trees are not only having pest control and fertilization and management but also you know being met some of their needs in terms of food so at its heart permaculture is a vision and that's a vision of ecological regeneration and you know regenerative agriculture I would firmly place within the umbrella of permaculture and there's definitely people outside of it I think that bubble diagram while there's a lot of room to shift and grow these bubbles I think it's really interesting to look at where we see these types of overlap and especially in the fashion as employed by Mark Shepard and this new term restoration agriculture I mean that book is a permaculture text and written by a permaculture teacher and it is very little other than permaculture in the specific application to like agroforestry based grazing systems carbon sequestration via agriculture and really that in the particular case of Mark Shepard kind of encouraging permaculture minded folks to move out of their yards and homesteads into co-op scale production with tree crops and grazing systems and more diversified agriculture and especially in the case of Mark Shepard we learn from the earth work and water management strategies that we learn from permaculture and that's one of the pieces that I also want to kind of add to this conversation is I think we're so popularly associated with permaculture being really the application of ecology so permaculture as a as an academic pursuit really comes from the school of ecology in part and saying instead of a descriptive science where we imagine ourselves outside the natural world and talk about what we see we recognize as Corey mentioned like we are in the natural world and have a place in the natural world and have a very interesting cultural dissociation at the moment imagining ourselves as something other than or different from and as we move into that recognition that we are in obligation relation to ecology we take the text of ecology from being descriptive text to being applied right and we look at how ecology informs how do we go to the bathroom how do we take a shower what do we eat how do we build our homes and of course that always takes very place specific shape and that is one of the most beautiful things about permaculture that I try to add to this conversation is that in addition to applied ecology really more so permaculture is frankly applied anthropology or applied ethnobiology where we really study the best practices that have emerged in all of the communities all over the world historically pre-historically archeologically and with a specific nod to the incredible sustainability of many indigenous cultures that certainly explicitly inspired permaculture design I mean in fact permaculture really at its outset as a coined phrase is an effort to heal the trauma between colonists and indigenous peoples in Australia and in fact to recognize that that power imbalance is incredible and we have a lot to learn not only from indigenous philosophy but indigenous practice and indigenous crops in particular especially in the case of Australia where literally European Australians arrived and they said there is nothing to eat here we cannot survive without importing the combined cultivated diversity of the world and bringing in animals and plants and every other food stuff from other ecosystems meanwhile Aboriginal Australians of course were fermenting poisonous plants into their nourishment and building weirs and elaborate traps of tidal fish catch and really ingeniously meeting their needs from nothing other than that ecosystem but it is very interesting that you know in the world of permaculture and this now global recombinant ecology that we have you know Australia offers almost nothing to our palliative plants you know we don't find much kangaroo meat on the shelves right and so that's a big part of where permaculture comes is saying okay you know we have a lot to learn from indigenous culture indigenous perspective but also and explicitly from its outset permaculture is looking to this you know reality which I bristle at the phrase personally but so I need to qualify and what I mean is explicitly recognizing soil erosion explicitly recognizing toxicity explicitly recognizing peak oil and climate change and so for 40 years permaculture has been explicitly oriented in these directions and essentially categorizing the human endeavor and saying well we need to meet our needs and we need to meet our needs in ways that actually increase ecological health and actually take responsibility for our toxic legacy and the problems of totalitarian agriculture and clear cut and recognizing that if we go beyond you know certain perspectives of history we can look deeply and recognize that when it comes to major civilizations based on annual agriculture they have never done anything but destroy ecosystems create deserts and eventually collapse and only very recently with the aid of essentially fossil fuels can we pretend that that path of agriculture is going to continue to feed us and while I think we need to recognize you know this incredible imbalance of power in agriculture in the United States in particular I don't think we need to judge or attack our IPM or conventional agriculture neighbors and to be honest as a permaculturist who is at production scale with various components of our farm I frankly have a lot more to learn from folks who might identify in the conventional ag label often and then I think there's also something to be said about organic coming essentially from this act of resistance also as permaculture did in this solidarity that we find and when we have for instance NOFA conferences you have like full access open source I mean basically everyone goes out every year innovates finds ways to have better more efficient production and then completely shares their best developed secrets like every winter here you know recently here at UVM every February so you know all of this I think is a part of the dialogue that permaculture wants to have with the agricultural community and we're organizing that as a design system we work with systems that utilize tillage that you know utilize conventional agriculture that utilize spraying and other things and in part of that you know ecosystem relationship between the parts our work my work is often just figuring out like how in a whole farm system you know is the greenhouse best located or where would a vineyard system or trellis system go in relation best relation to all the parts around it and I think there is a lot to be learned from like our techniques that we are popularly associated in terms of like edible forest gardening and really most recently kind of especially diving into the some of the nitty-gritty of carbon farming and tree crops and agroforestry more generally but also you know these probably universal techniques at this point like bioremediation right addressing toxicity like carbon sequestration like increasing the diversity in our food system with an intergenerational perspective and making sure we not only have you know access to incredible cultivated diversity of normal vegetables and animals but like rarer fruits and nuts some of which have been cultivated cultivated in this area for 10 plus thousand years potentially in a participatory ecology fashion right especially when we look at nuts and then we look at the distribution of nuts and we recognize this isn't a natural phenomenon the distribution of nuts is the phenomenon of human beings who were in large part nut eaters carrying boatloads of nuts through all the river systems and lakeways and you know creating an ecosystem via via which frankly we all do every day especially as eaters that is what we do is we create ecosystems so the request of permaculture is to bring the science of ecology and evolution as well as ethnobiology and ethnobotany and ethnozoology and say how do we do this best and how do we do this best now in this modern world where our food plants and animals have come from all over the world and we are by default creating recombinant ecologies and how do we create these recombinant ecologies as wisely as possible with our only hope to know what's wise potentially being looking intergenerationally and saying how do we leave deeper soil more suited to produce food in the future rather than less right how do we leave cleaner water and in this very specific moment in time how do we leave this peak of our access to energy in the best legacy possible which I think we all agree isn't more pavement more parking lots more places where we can't grow food but also we have this very unique moment in history where we can use machines to install appropriate water catchment systems or terrace hill sides or create really good food producing ponds that keep nutrients out of our wild waterways and also invest our energy at moment in infrastructure like greenhouses and root sellers and food processing facilities that quite frankly only a generation or two in the future most likely won't have access to the same resources and materials to do so how do we do this with a very deep intergenerational perspective which is which is you know not to overly simplify all of the varied wisdom that we learn from indigenous cultures the world over but certainly one thing that seems to be in common from the most successful cultures on the planet is their intergenerational responsibility and their intergenerational perspective so in closing the last thing I want to say is really also where permaculture most excitedly to me joins this conversation is to look beyond our fields and certainly our farm systems you know permaculture offers a lot to them but really permaculture enters this dialogue about like how do we feed growing populations and all the arable land in the world can only feed you know so many people to say well forget all the arable land in the world let's look to our yards let's look to our cities let's look to our rooftops let's look to create ecosystems very intentionally in the places we live that are as productive and resilient as possible thank you thanks Keith our last speaker but definitely not least is Ernesto Mendes he's professor of agroecology here at University of Vermont he shares his time in the environmental studies program and in the department of plant and soil science where he provides the agroecology and livelihoods collaborative he also didn't put this in his bio but I'm going to announce that he's going to be the chair of the plant and soil science department starting in four days same day marijuana is legalized go down goes down in Vermont okay great okay his research and teaching focus on agroecology agrofood systems participate action research and transdisciplinary transdisciplinary research approaches that UVM is an active member of the food systems initiative and a fellow at the Gund Institute for the environment most recently he is the lead editor of a book agroecology transdisciplinary and participatory in action oriented approach which is the latest agroecology textbook out there that's great Ernesto was born and raised in El Salvador and he has worked extensively in Latin America US and Spain and I'll also say it was my privilege to study under him to do my graduate research so thank you Ernesto so good afternoon everyone Sarah thank you for organizing and for everybody who came my fellow panelists it's been great to hear some of your stories so I'm going to add a little bit of my own stories but at UVM I lead this group called the agroecology and livelihoods collaborative I'd like to say that we're a community of practice it's very diverse there are faculty, students, staff collaborators including farmers and other members of the community and we use participatory action research like SRASA to to work in agroecology PAR as the acronym really tries to do research with and for communities so when we work with farmers we'd like to establish the research agenda with them moving forward in fact I work with Corey we're starting to work with them more and we do quite a bit of teaching and training at different levels our group is very collaborative so I've put some of the logos here of the people we collaborate with it's a value we hold that some of the issues that have been coming up related to agriculture are not going to be solved if we don't work together in one way or another so this was one of the questions that SRASA gave the panelists to answer what is whatever you do to you and I want to say that my training my undergraduate degree was in conventional agronomy and that the reason following with the life stories that people have been sharing about agriculture was somewhat different being from El Salvador a country where there's a lot of inequality and a lot of inequality in land when I was growing up so 2% of the population own 80% of the land at one time and so this is something that I really wanted to work with or do something about and I was fortunate enough to be able to come and study in the US so I did my agronomy degree and it was a very conventional approach very production oriented and industrial ag grapes and vegetables in California and when I was thinking about going back to work in El Salvador to try to solve some of the issues that I was concerned about industrialized agriculture didn't seem to be what was going to help resolve those things because it was very present already and being used by very large landholders that had a lot of capital and a lot of resources but a lot of the smallholder farmers that were working there just didn't have access to that so agroecology I found that in the 90s more than 20 years ago and it was an inspiration and I saw it as as an approach as a way to really take into account agriculture and farming that would be environmentally sound socially just and economically viable so I like to say that agroecology is an approach I'm a researcher I'm a scientist and I really like doing research but I like to do research that has an impact and that's why I like to do research with farmers so that whatever we do together actually has some meaning to their farms or rural communities and I found that that was going to be useful it couldn't just be one discipline so ecologies here as a tenant of agroecology just does this in permaculture but that's just not enough when you think about the El Salvador issue ecology is not going to resolve some very deep rooted social and issues of inequality the other thing that resonates with what some of the people here have said is that agroecology really values so even though I do believe we have our roots in science and in the academy we really reach out and have horizontal dialogue with practical knowledge, indigenous knowledge that can span all these different you know cosmovision, culture we really think that is important in our work and finally and this might be more personal than other agroecologists for me is that I really want to do something that's action oriented and transformative very recently or not too recently but has been very recently accepted is that agroecology can be seen in expressions of science, social movement and practice this resonates a lot with me because I think that some of the issues that prompted the development of alternative agriculture I agree that there is tribalism but I would also say that a lot of organic permaculture and agriculture are response to industrialized farming so they came up because people were concerned about some of the impacts of industrialized farming there is overlap, absolutely but there is also a division somewhere so for me we really need to engage these three dimensions of research and science social movements and practice hopefully that will be a little more clear at the end what I see, I see a lot of overlaps between or among all of the alternative agriculture models but again I see them as very separate from the industrial ag model and we have heard Keith use ecology I think Corey might have said it too which is at the core of agriculture organic started as a social movement and there is definitely the practical side and with conventional agriculture so there are a lot of similarities I think the main difference with industrialized ag is that a lot of these other perspectives really have social and ecological stewardship as a guiding frame whereas I think I remember from being a conventional agronomist that we were really being trained to produce and make money and most farmers be it that they're organic, agricultural want to produce and make money the question is do you do it at the expense of the environment and social issues so again I'm an academic and I think it's really important to say where we come from and where we're positioned so I'll give you a bit of an academic history of agroecology as a concept so in what I call wave 1 which is is that working over there in the 70s and 90s it was basically the field sort of like very strongly wanted to apply ecology to agriculture this was not happening so again I went to California Polytechnic State University then crop science somebody want to guess how many ecology classes I took to get my BS anybody Eric wins so that wasn't really a part of conventional agronomy so a lot of the people in the 70s and 90s that came up with agroecology were saying we need to be ecology into agriculture but then wave 2 in the early 2000s they realized that ecology was just not enough and part of it was if we really want to help farmers it's not just about farming practices there's political issues, there are land distribution issues, there's social issues there's inequality very complex issues and honestly as an agronomist I was a little bit afraid of moving into that those dimensions but I started working with smallholder farmers and I've been lucky to work almost in most parts of the world except Asia maybe and it's true in a lot of these places technology and just farming better to produce more is not enough there are some really deep rooted issues but if you really want to solve the problems in the long term you'll have to address at some point in 2009 what I call wave 3 was this proposition that agroecology was a science and movement in a practice and it had some debates at that point but right now I can safely say that most people accept it that this is how it is and wave 4 where I've participated the most is really taking it more explicitly into this inclusive and transformative approach so we want to change food systems I'm doing it from my research position in different ways and we want to be inclusive we want to hear other voices we don't want to say that just science is the voice that has to be predominantly there we have to take into account the issues that Keith brought up colonization a lot of people that reach out to agroecology are groups that have been oppressed in one way or another and that's because they see a justice perspective I had a conversation with some Cuban permaculturists and we had a whole discussion about similarities and differences and they kind of said well permaculture seems to have more ethics and agroecology more justice we should talk about that Keith so one really interesting thing about the social movement piece is that La Via Campesina which is a international peasant organization 182 organization members 81 countries and estimated 200 million small holder farmers so here's where a friendly challenge to tarry yes so I would say that maybe more land being cultivated under conventional agriculture but there's probably more non-conventional farmers yeah thank you so what you see which is really interesting is that these social movements have really embraced agroecology as the way that they want the farmers that they work with to farm and part of the reason is because they see this opening but it's not a science that rejects the political economic issues a lot of my scientist colleagues really cringe at this you know don't talk politics we don't talk politics in agroecology we kinda have to engage it because we believe that some of the issues we face are political economic so that doesn't mean that I have to be the activist and the advocate all the time maybe my role is more doing this research with farmers and with community members but I acknowledge the fact that the issue is there it is important so there's a lot of these movements all over the world less so in the US although growing I think another thing that I wanted to say is agroecology has emerged and taken a seat in international policy when I started working in agroecology it was really at the fringe and it was considered or taken seriously by a lot of scientists or policy makers we have now are in the radar of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations which is not that important in the US but pretty much very important everywhere else because it's the UN arm of agriculture in Central America the Ministry of Agriculture listens to the FAO and in a lot of different countries so it's been huge that the FAO has kinda like embraced agroecology they have an agroecology knowledge hub and they just had the second global symposium IPES food is the equivalent of the IPCC the climate change panel so I invite you to look it up if you want it they just published a report on from uniformity to diversity it's a lot of really great people Olivier the shooter is the leading director and he was the UN for the right to food so in the US there are some organizations that are affiliated with agroecology advocating the US food sovereignty alliance, Food First Union of Concerned Scientists it's been interesting for me I've been at UVM for 11 years looking at who is engaging in agroecology in the US a lot of them are Native American groups, African Americans people of color that are doing agriculture so this sort of like again groups that have some kind of marginalization or oppression are reaching out to this approach to do that we are starting to work more with why hunger they have reached out to us recently and you know this dialogue that came up among the tribes is also very difficult between scientists, advocates and practical farmers right sometimes we don't speak to each other that well so that's part of what I really like to do is how do we break those barriers in terms of practices since this was a farming practices in agroecology as in permaculture we use principles and a lot of what I like to do is how do these principles hold all over the world so soil health is a principle that's been coming up for me everywhere I work we did work with on climate change resilience in Haiti, Nicaragua and Honduras and people concluded that those farmers were like we need to take care of the soil when you look at some of the work I've done here in Vermont we're talking about soil health so it's a principle that seems to hold regardless of where you are and then your practices would adapt to your context so maybe to maintain soil health in the tropics agroforestry is really good although I'm hearing Keith saying that here too great but here in the US I'm more used to hearing cover cropping is a really good practice for maintaining soil health which is not that great in a tropical environment but maybe could be a little tweaked so there are also other agroecology associations around the world again getting really strong in other places and less so in the US but we're really working hard to change that and I wanted to end just by bringing to your attention this opinion piece in the New York Times that came out today that discusses agroecology gives you a good summary of the things that are happening globally so I have this very global vision I can't help it given who I am and where I come from and even though I love to work in Vermont I'm always keeping this sense of what it's important to contribute I think Vermont has a lot to contribute to the world all of the things that are happening here and sometimes we don't bring it out enough I guess I'll leave it there thank you to all the panelists it was great to hear all of your stories and it's time for you guys to participate so we have two mics so you can come up to the mic if you have a question we ask it's time for questions and comments if you have a specific question for a panelist please address it to them so not all five panelists have to answer every single question obviously you're allowed to chime in but we just want to have the most time for you guys to give comments yeah so anybody have any questions can you go up to the mic yeah thanks hi everybody thanks for being here tonight and engaging with all of us I heard some of you talk about like a global food shortage and rising populations and some of you not address this topic and I just wanted I was wondering if you could all speak about how your respective disciplines think of is there a global food shortage is there not and yeah just a little bit about the discussion within your respective disciplines so agriculture has a very strong position on this and it's mostly that we are producing enough food already that the issue that we're facing is is distribution right and the other issue is what are we producing so we have for example millions of acres of soy in South America in Argentina so that's quite a lot of production but it's all going to animal feed or some to biofuels so we contest the notion that we need to produce more to feed people again it seems to be this more political economic issue of who's producing for what are they producing and who's getting who has access to the food thanks yeah that's a great question and I would say personally and then there's by no means consensus within the permaculture community but generally we work against this scarcity mentality where the problem is there's not enough to go around and the reality is even historically when we look to the Irish potato famine there were record breaking wheat exports happening at the time of the Irish potato famine and the people who lived on potatoes were the only people who were in famine and I think it's a really interesting problem in our economic system and I think that's certainly where we have much better leverage because the reality is there is food held under lock and key for purposes of stabilizing prices the reality in the United States especially is that a vast and embarrassing portion I won't quite say majority but an embarrassing portion of the food that we produced never reaches plates much less even after reaching plates is fully nourishing people and we are in fact overproducing tremendously relative to the eater's needs on the planet at present and only driving ourselves deeper when we're overproducing in like soil eroding systems so the answers are harder to come up with but I think it's a very important question because as we enter the dialogue for instance with genetic engineers and things like golden rice and they say hey we're going to end world hunger well the reality is of course genetic engineers at present are primarily herbicide manufacturers and primarily genetically engineered plants so that they can increase herbicide sales and I think we have a very important conversation to have about for instance scarcity versus abundance and also really addressing a kind of import-export commodity oriented agriculture which might make sense from an investment perspective and perhaps in some cases from a GDP perspective but that is something where permaculture has the reason permaculture became a global movement essentially was to go to these places which were engaged in export monocultures and if there was ever price fluctuation with those crops these communities would be in tragedy if there was pest or disease issues with these crops these communities would be in tragedy and to encourage a incredibly diverse agriculture system that meets first immediate needs which isn't to say it doesn't engage in any export or production for sale I'll just add that I just wonder, I think so yeah how long we can keep up what we're doing and you know point of discussion for me as someone who raises animals in a way that is not the way that when we talk about animal like food growing crops being raised to feed animals that's a totally different way to work with animals on a landscape and so that's like the end result of raising meat for human consumption there's two very different ways to do that that is part of this whole discussion as well but I just wonder how long we can do it in a way that is you know currently happening but I agree with everything that you just said the overproduction right now for a very short term human scale short term gain well I had those graphs so what I would say is we don't have a shortage and I don't see there's a couple of things that I see as promising one is that we are expecting the human population to level off at about 10 or 11 million and to finally reach replacement populations so as long as we can find a system by then to feed that many people in theory we can go on as long as our resources don't run out those graphs chicken or egg do we have more people because we had more food or did we make more food for more people I think we probably have more people because we produced more food and allowed people to breed more was that a good thing or a bad thing well we can argue that all day long but we're all here and we all have to eat I think two parts that I want to mention one that I like that Corey mentioned we animals animals are fabulous creatures for converting non digestible plant proteins into proteins digestible by humans that's what we when we bred animals domestic animals you know over millennia we created these creatures that could convert food that we can't efficiently eat mostly grasses we can eat soybeans into food that we can eat in store you don't have to refrigerate a living cow until you cut it up but and what I see is the biggest problem is our western diets is far too dependent upon fossil fuel nitrogen dependent crops to feed all the animals we eat too much meat and more concerning is that the rest of the world we don't want to just have it all but the rest of the world is catching up to us and then we see a lot of the issues with particularly say the soy tariffs that are happening right now that are probably going to decimate a lot of leaving more ghost towns in the Midwest those soybeans are being grown to ship to China to feed to pigs to feed a western diet so we eat too much meat without question we need to address that the other last thing I'd like to point out there was a piece of New York Times November of last year I think it was looking at the food waste issue and one really important thing to think about with this is that of the food that's wasted yes we produce enough calories worldwide and then significantly more to feed everyone between 60 and 96% of that waste is pre-consumer before it hits the plate so we need to again protect the crops and design a system where we can move those crops to people during that chain that don't get wasted and there's a whole lot of societal implications we need to come up with to do that we're not perfect human necessity to make sure we're all fed has been a great driver of innovation but as resources start to shrink we're going to need to have different drivers which is how do we do this in a more sustainable way that's what I got I want to add too much but I will say that generally speaking I would definitely agree with what Ernesto said that the problem is not production or food scarcity but access much more so which is a much more complex problem to solve and in terms of I guess addressing specifically organic and how I think organic views this issue there's a lot of discussion kind of outside the organic community about feeding the world and whether organic can really ever accomplish that I would say that the 200 million small-holder farmers that Ernesto mentioned are probably practicing a lot closer to organic than conventional industrial farming practices and they are feeding a huge portion of the world as it is right now and used to feed a larger percentage of the world and then kind of within the organic community and I think this is fairly minimal but I have had conversations with people who are part of I would say the organic industry not necessarily the organic farming movement who are concerned or share this mentality of food scarcity and feel that we need to kind of loosen up the regulations around organic in order to allow organic to feed more people and I push back really strongly against that because if we loosen up the meaning of organic too much it's not going to mean organic anymore and I don't necessarily think that that's what needs to happen in order to feed our population we need to address the issues of distribution and access Thank you and there's lots of research out there that does show small-scale organic agriculture can field the world if we focus on that. Badgley article was an article that came out in 2014 or 2012 I can't remember for four, seven, right it was when I was in graduate. Anyways look that up and there's lots more research out there but we don't want to focus on agriculture giving my opinion here I'll never stop. Okay so Dave Miskell please step to the mic I'm Dave Miskell I have been farming organically since 1973 and it's really really exciting to see the you and young people you know you are it what we've started you need to really go with I'm along with Dave Chapman and East Thetford Vermont we started an organization called Keep the Soil and Organic about six years ago to fight the USDA illegal certification of hydroponic farms as we were doing that we found more and more that the industrial organic industry was not following the rules of the organic regulations whether it was the hydroponic or whether it was the CAFO chicken operations the CAFO dairy operations which are very quickly putting out of business the real organic dairies in Vermont and elsewhere the family farms we're in a crisis situation with the dairy organic dairy industry throughout the United States we're becoming a crisis situation with the hydroponic greenhouses taking over the markets whether it's here in Burlington its city market whether it's in the supermarkets whether it's in the whole foods and so we fought that we lost because USDA National Organic Program illegally is allowing the hydroponics as we were doing that we found that there were a lot of other instances where the rules weren't being followed the Senator Leahy was the originator and to push the national organic program and the standards and they're not being followed we have groups like NOFA and Vermont and around New England who are following the rules I'm certified by Vermont Organic Farmers I did along with a number of other small group of organic farmers in Vermont we started Vermont Organic Farmers and the difficulty now is that the NOFA and the true certification organizations in the United States have to follow the rules of the national organic program and yet those rules are shaky because other certification organizations like CCOF California Organic Farmers and a number of other ones aren't following the rules so you go into the city market you go into the supermarkets and you see the USDA label that USDA label does not mean the same throughout the United States about 80 to 90% of the certification farms in the United States are following the rules and the bigger and the bigger and the bigger ones aren't yet you go into these stores you don't know the difference so when we lost we started an organization which Maddie mentioned the real organic project and what that is meant to do is it's meant to really look at where what the rules are and how to make them better and to give something higher than what the USDA standards say but even more important on how the USDA standards are being certified throughout this country so our focus is two things one thing is to have the standards which we met together in the end of March with a group of farmers and organic advocates from all around the country and sort of improved on what the USDA standards say and we're doing a pilot project with 50 farms in the United States to see how these standards work within some of the top farms in the United States the other thing is is we're doing a just ask campaign where you go into the stores and you go to city market and you see Driscoll's berries Driscoll's is the biggest producer of organic berries in the world almost all of them are hydroponic in the label so to ask people in the stores is that hydroponic is that organic most of them don't know so the the push is to have something that really means organic as you people here are wanting to become organic and become organic farmers I'm just about done my organic farming but if I don't leave the legacy that we and other ones don't leave a legacy that organic means something you won't have a market and what you're trying to do with the good things with your organic farms the industrial organic agriculture will have the markets so go to our website do you have a question does anyone else have a question Graham from rural Vermont thank you thank you all I really appreciated everything you all have to say in this discussion here tonight so I do work from rural Vermont but I'm also a small farmer in central Vermont and work as an educator as well my business partners over here it's really like I said great to have you all speak but also to see everybody here it's really inspiring and one of the questions that comes up both in my personal relationship to this work but also my professional relationship I think Dave really gets to part of the point here is what do you all see as the role of policy in shaping the future of farming of agroecology of our food systems of our agroecosystems and maybe it's a second layer to that question but it's a little more home and something that I think a lot of at least a few of these people at the table here are dealing with directly is which is partially a consequence of policy is how do you see a just transition from some of these systems of management but also as Keith mentioned larger economic and political systems and social systems that are meshed within it accounting for sure ecological impacts but also the history and current situation of industry and policy pressure that made these farms the way they are and specific I would say the dairy industry whether it's called conventional or it's called sustainable and organic is now still part of this commodity system and we're seeing organic dairy producers also at the fate of that system just transition looks like to you accounting both for ecological impacts but also socioeconomic well being in history that's a part of all of this and where these farmers find themselves in the role of policy in your work or movement building or other methods of change thanks Graham does anybody want to take that up I'll have to answer whoever wants to answer so we can get more questions in yeah it's a really hard question to answer I'm not really in a succinct way but that's what my job I hope is all about and in response to your specific point about kind of a just transition we recently at NOFA did a survey of our members and we asked them you know what they want us to work on in our strategic plan over the next five years what they think our goals should be for that plan and a lot of them mentioned exactly what you're talking about a transition for Vermont agriculture away from a commodity based dairy model be it conventional or organic to a more diversified type of maybe smaller family scale or mid-scale agriculture and I think that that's really been our vision and of course we do want to support organic dairies and also other types of family scale farms that are succeeding economically and ecologically our mission is to build an ecologically sound and economically viable food system in Vermont and so I think in terms of policy there's so many ways it's really hard to again succinctly answer that question but just today I actually was looking at an amendment that's being proposed by Senator Sanders on changes to the way that dairies regulated in the farm bill under the farm bill and there's a lot of kind of small tweaks that you could make that may help farmers in this time of crisis and that's sort of a stop-get measure but I think the larger question of how do we transition away from these systems that may not be sustainable in the long run is a much larger one and I think it's going to take a really concerted and collaborative long-term effort across lots of different types of agriculture and lots of different organizations to work on policy that will accomplish that it's sort of a non-answer but it's a really complicated question I got something I'll mention so yeah without question since the farm bill came about even a little bit before that there has been a false advantage given to field crops corn and soy corn is a incredible plant in terms of productivity if you feed it it'll just keep producing especially how we bread it but the policies and the subsidies have given it a false advantage and therefore we've been able to build up systems whether they be however you convert that protein into milk or meat that take advantage of corn and soy this is a little lear and dear to my heart I grew up on a dairy farm and what would be considered sort of the idealized small dairy farm we moved back to the farm I was three years old my grandfather had I think 26 head of cows in the classic red barn when I was a kid four or five years old we had two milk men we had the guy who picked up the milk and we had the wick guy who brought our food systems allotment because you could not make money at that scale and there was a real transition at that time so there's a fundamental problem with dairy there's a price disconnect between there's a disconnect between the price signal when the price goes up you make more milk when the price goes down you make more milk until enough people go out of business the price keeps going down people go out of business it crashes and that's how we affect our milk prices what we need what I feel we need and I go back to papers I wrote in this class I now teach nag policy that my father thought this was crazy that I was proposing this and I wasn't proposing it's not a new idea the problem with dairy in particular in some other commodities is that it is a supply driven system not a demand driven system so where dairy has worked particularly when we look to the north is when there's a supply management system organic dairy I have cousins that are in the organic dairy business farming on a farm that looks exactly like my farm when we sold the cows in 2004 they were doing well feeding three generations of a family they're struggling right now and at that time in central Vermont where we had 35 to 60 head dairy farms organic was the only way to make it work and that was a bubble for a short period until we figure out it's not that there's too much conventional milk there's just too much milk and until we find out a way to balance the supply with the demand we're going to keep running into that so I don't have any great answers aside from trying to figure out the policy issue we need to get to stop subsidizing field crops as much and go up with some way to balance the supply with the demand you don't have to I don't know and I'd say that the strategy that we're working on is just trying to come up with structural for our own business like a legal structure that can protect us as best as possible and that takes a lot of time and resources and energy to figure out and I don't know if that's the answer but I think we have to be super creative and I want nothing to do with the commodity world on that front because how with already all the unknowns about farming then to add that unknown to seems really scary to me so that's just our approach is like really digging into the legal structures and try to find all the different type of protection mechanisms we can Thanks Thanks for an important question I think we are in a very unique position in Vermont when it comes to these questions because I'd like to think that we have more are folks able to hear me? I'd like to think that we have more than elsewhere a more participatory democracy or at least greater access to our representatives here in the state I think we have the tradition of town meeting and we have generally people who you see at the store or school or have town hall type meetings where hopefully policy can be a little bit more responsive and respond quicker to our demands and I think we have a really interesting dilemma here generally any farmers want more regulations and at the same time we everybody maybe benefits from more transparency except for those with something to hide so I think it's really interesting when we look to other states where laws are passed for instance if you wear a camera into an animal production facility you are charged with criminal trespass even if you were hired and that's the law that they pass and say right now we've protected farms and it's really interesting I guess I want to weigh in on this with a little bit of personal background and in the case of my farm with frankly what I think we will face most significantly in the immediate future here in Vermont which is cannabis so we are a cannabis farm we produce organic CBD hemp which is medical hemp it's directly from the branches we don't grow fiber hemp or seed hemp we grow seedless female flowers for medicinal purposes and right now that entire game is in direct dance with every little tenth of a percentage point shift with our breeding, with our extraction with our cultivar selection and we're in the responsive position where we basically adjust as the law change and I think what we as a farm and group of people are trying to do is be much more proactive rather than responsive and if we take our cues from corporate agribus they don't show up in a community and say well here's what we can and cannot do and what is and isn't legal they show up and they whine in time the legislators and hand over like pre-written bills and say this is the one that we need signed thank you very much and that's not necessary I don't think we should adopt that model entirely I definitely think we need to be much more proactive and vocal with a positive vision and use that vision to drive what we see the need what policy limits and what policy supports and in the case of cannabis I don't want to weigh in on where policy should be but it's really interesting and we particularly find ourselves at this very moment we're hosting a residential intensive cannabis culture course where people are learning to grow cannabis ideally in as ecologically regenerative ways as possible and specifically I think this is an opportunity for us to be proactive and pre-emptive in a business with incredible financial interest with which the tides will turn very quickly I mean right now we see the greatest opposition to legal cannabis coming from essentially the biggest breweries and pharmaceutical companies in the country and they are also at the same time ready to invest and become the primary means of distribution of this crop or this product and I think we in Vermont have this very unique position just like we did when we decriminalized raw milk, thank you, we're all Vermont and created more immediate liberalization of the ability to process animals on farm and serve them publicly in a restaurant without the Clark brothers, the chicken which couldn't cross the street if you're familiar with the story one was a caterer, the other was a farmer and they were on the same farm and they couldn't sell the chicken from the farm to the caterer without going all around the state and that was a part of how we created policy with that kind of as an example of what we wanted as a community, we wanted to go to a farm that had the chickens grown and if they were serving meals in a restaurant fashion know that that chicken was actually the same chicken and not necessarily mistagged from a major facility so I'm sorry to take as much time with this as I have but I think especially in the case of cannabis we see this incredible dissonance between federal policy and state policy and need to lie and rely on our directly participatory democracy broken as it may be and and vocally have a voice for what we want which in the case of cannabis I would hope is a part of a diversified family farm, a part of ideally organic agriculture a part of our tradition of direct marketing and direct added value and right now we have the opportunity to shape that law because I guarantee you that law will be rushed through the next legislative session as we simultaneously see legalization in Canada and Massachusetts and literally millions, dozens of millions of dollars just leaving the state to engage in a legal market on both sides of our borders so I don't want to make this about that but I think it's a very interesting part of where we have to shape policy proactively rather than respond to policy in determining our farming practices I'll be very brief, I think this is really important and I want to agree with everything that's been said policy, engaging in policy and advocacy is hard, we all have jobs families and adding one more layer is hard but I think that it's very important that we do it and because if we look at the policies if we believe in a broad umbrella of sustainable agriculture and food systems that's not where the current policies are taking us so if we want to make a change we have to engage however we can I know that for me I'm opening up more to engaging with social movement organizations that are interested in agriculture, they're asking for data they're asking for talks educating some of their their staff so that's one way that I've been able to engage and I think it's really important as someone who hasn't done it that much but I'm convinced that we have to do it we have to change it at that level Thank you so much to the panelists and to the audience and I just want to remind you that this is going to be archived at the UVM YouTube website so if you think other people would want to hear this please pass it along Thank you so much for coming out tonight