 My name is Vincent Smith. I'm an associate professor here at Southern Oregon University and I've been here for six years. The question was, what drove me? What inspired me? It's a question I've reflected on a lot. I think part of the answer was an upbringing in farming, so I grew up on a farm in southern Missouri, on the border of Missouri and Arkansas, in the Ozark Mountains, a piece of land that I've actually farmed myself as an adult with my wife and children. And at the time, growing up there, I actually intended very much to leave agriculture as far behind as possible. I didn't like it. I didn't like my father always asking me to engage in things and I didn't like the country life. I wanted to be the urban, the suburban kid who escaped rural life and then over time as I was in school and as I thought more about what I wanted to do, the more I realized I just wanted to be of some service to those communities that I came from. And so I just blended my interest in biological sciences with an interest in agriculture and was born an interest in food systems and sustainability and how those systems can work both economically and environmentally. And really my interest has been on the economics side despite being an environmental scientist. I'm really interested in how can farmers really make a living? Having watched many of my own relatives fail at that and watched land lost. And now in particular, as my father gets older and starting to have conversations about what do we do with that piece of land, having a very personal conversation about how can I help him preserve that land as agricultural land or as conservation easement. Finding my professional life and my personal life become more and more similar. One of the things that started me feeling like I need to be of service is actually a really simple scholarship. So growing up as a rural farm kid you don't get a lot of opportunities for big scholarships. So one of the scholarships I applied for was actually a scholarship from the, I think it was called the Walmart Community Foundation. And I actually had to go into my local Walmart which was the only store around and tell them why they should give me money. And one of the things that they asked during that interview was in what ways will you take what you learn in college and bring it back to support this local community. And I don't know how seriously they took that question or what extent they were ever intending to follow up and they certainly didn't. I took the answer I gave seriously and I remember telling them that I would use what I learned in college to help end some of the poverty that I saw growing up. And while I didn't do that immediately I went on to school and went to work in the West Coast and went to grad school. It's always sort of concerned me in what ways can I actually give back and in some ways I've been able to give back to that community specifically but more often than not it's asking myself how do I end the classic Marxist critique of the urban versus the rural. So what he called the urban metabolic rift and I always ask myself is there anything I can do to make urban people understand what rural people think and how they live and is there a way that we can work together on issues rather than see ourselves as completely separate. Right now particularly in our political climate that becomes more and more a concern because we have a situation in our society at the moment where rural people see themselves as forgotten and I just came back from several weeks in my hometown in Missouri and that was a very real part of my experience there for two weeks just hearing from people over and over again including my family just talk about how much they've been forgotten and their way of life forgotten by urban people. Urban e-weeds. It's typically how they rephrase that. I've actually worked with Walmart on a couple of occasions once as well in graduate school. Walmart was working with University of Wisconsin and University of Arkansas on sustainable buying techniques and so I think that while you know Walmart's corporate techniques aren't always consistent with sustainability I think that the idea that we need to be sustainable is omnipresent and it's present in the philosophies of Walmart as well which is why they spend so much money hiring sustainability coordinators in their businesses. Whether that's because they feel like their consumer desires it and it's expected of them or whether it's a sincere I can answer but they certainly are they're hiring our students and will continue to. You know the question is was I involved in FFA and 4-H and the answers really know I really I wanted to be anything but that kid that was a part of my growing up and many of my neighbors were part of FFA programs and my father always talked about his jacket and how I needed to get my jacket but it wasn't who I wanted to be I wanted to be the person who got out that's what I desperately wanted and I think it was actually that that drive that's actually been most useful at this point. If I had gone down that route which is the route that I think my parents might have preferred me to take in reality I probably wouldn't have the the perspective on agriculture that I have so it was that desire to not be a part of that at that time and then my longing for it later as an adult that I think was the combined to be most useful to me. I feel longing for home frequently and as I mentioned a minute ago I did actually make this happen so I I quit a job in Santa Barbara, California and went home to farm the family farm for a period of time and it was wonderful and at the time I described it as as having come home from the war and I feel that way often times when I'm working in my office or I'm working for nonprofit organizations or working with nonprofit organizations or sitting in a board meeting and feeling like this is not really what I want but this is what I need to do what I'd really rather be doing is be at a place where I can just be at peace and there aren't people asking me questions and I can think clearly about what I'm doing and watch the systems that are taking place on my farm that's what I'd really rather do so I oftentimes feel like my longing for home is about longing for a moment in my past when I wasn't stressed out and I wasn't worried about what other people thought and I could just do what I wanted to do and the beautiful thing about farming is it's it's some part science and some part art which are two of my favorite things in the world and so I when I see myself farming I get to combine everything I know about agri-cology and food system science with the ability to be creative and just create what I want well there's certainly a lot of hardship which is why I'm doing what I'm doing and the hardship is ever present and it was for us as well and you know to be fair the farm I grew up on was you know very much non-traditional as my father had another job on the side my mother worked outside of the area and so you know we were doing much better than most people in our area most of the poverty I witnessed where I was among friends my friends in school who suffered much more than we ever did I don't know that there's a rosy lens but there are there are beautiful things about our pasts that are worth not forgetting and most of those things are super simple things I you know one of the things I I actually remember with great fondness and they've had the opportunity to do year after years go home and split wood for my father and while it hurts and it wasn't something I enjoyed as a kid I didn't enjoy time with them and they didn't get a lot of that so when you're splitting wood besides someone you care for that that makes a big difference so it's not that I forgot that those things exist it's that there's still things worth remembering I don't want to just forget about I think that there was a sense of community this you know and combined shaft kind of community the sense that people cared for but it was already on its way out one of the time I was there so I was growing up in the late 80s and 90s in southern Missouri and that sense had already started to fade there were the old-timers who would still gather in the restaurants in the morning and talk about how much precipitation they got on their farm and people would shout out well I got one and a half inches how much did you get there was a bit of that but among the younger generation among the individuals in their middle life middle of their lives most of that was lost there they were already moving into St. Louis to work in working office jobs or factory jobs and they would come back home at the end of the day and then the young people people my age were not intending to go into agriculture at all and many of them didn't do much of anything and the meth industry had already started at that point and so there was a lot of that going on so while you know at that time you might have argued that people were still longing for that rosy past community it was already on its way out that stage I remember moments of seeing this I can remember many years after I had originally left I had gone home with my wife and we stopped by the bank to close down my childhood bank account which had just a little bit of money in it we went to go close it down and and she addressed me by name and asked me how my mother was doing and my wife was from a much larger city which just dumbfounded she's like how does she know your name and so there was some sense of that that was still there and that woman knew me and she knew my mother and knew what we did but I can't say that I knew all of my neighbors that was definitely not the case growing up and there was vast mileage between us and our neighbors at times so you don't always know everybody I would say I consider myself a food scientist I enjoy working with people who are activists but I've really enjoyed and continue to try to position myself as the objective person in the room and I see myself as an applied researcher so I see the questions I'm asking is having very immediate utility so I don't wait to see who's going to use this information I make sure that I'm communicating with people who could use this information to make statements about policy but my role has has been here really to provide that information to those who are going to use it for these purposes and and my role in the Rogue Valley Food System Council has really been that person to to create the table the chart the graph to map something that others need I certainly have opinions but for the most part my opinions tend to be very moderate I don't know always what I would want to advocate for based on the evidence that I just found some cases I do but often it's complicated and there are very controversial issues on which people have made you know considerable statements in our region which I'm less certain and I tend to be less certain because I've I've been looking at it from a research perspective for years and recognize that there's value on both sides and I've worked with people on both sides conventional agriculture is an example of that where there are a lot of small organic farmers who who speak very poorly of the large-scale conventional farmers having grown up around many of those people and had them as friends and still working with people who I see as friends in that industry I don't necessarily see that as the enemy either their different approaches and they have values that are different and perhaps there's something we can learn from both at times so I've worked on agriculture at many levels and different scopes and scale I teach a class that's on you know international trade and politics around food and I've worked on civic agriculture and the agriculture that people take into their lives without any sort of monetary transfer here I'm working on how to at the moment working on how to scale up small-scale farmers to mid-scale farm size so they can enter the wholesale markets I don't know that I see myself working in one particular place I see myself as fragment pragmatic I don't like the idea of the academic on the hill trying to solve the community's problems I like working with communities and my work in this community came out of being asked to join in a conversation and listening very carefully to what people were asking for help with and then asking whether I could help and addressing those questions in this case it just so happens that the questions that were being asked really revolve around regional scale up infrastructure and agriculture whereas in my past research some of the questions I was being asked were what contribution does civic agriculture community gardening play in our region I don't really like I don't think I know enough to know what the problems are unless someone tells me what problems they have and can I help them solve them so one of the findings in that piece of research was that even at the very smallest scale there was a return on investment so of the small-scale gardeners home gardeners community gardeners and school gardeners measuring income and expenses only one garden that I looked at actually lost money every other actually made money and we also calculated dollars per hour associated with gardening itself and the dollars per hour calculations come out to more than most farmers make so in that sense I would argue that small-scale agriculture is absolutely it absolutely makes sense but it's so divided and it's so diffused that it's really difficult to say what contribution a role is playing what I concluded in here at least at that time in that community was if you combined all of it together every bit of it all every home garden a community garden it still wasn't making a difference in the large-scale production but I also wouldn't say that that doesn't mean it can't it means it wasn't and so one of the questions I would have is what is the potential for small-scale production and growth and I would say it's large but it also requires individuals who want to be a part of it and not everybody wants to or even can I think one of the biggest problems associated with viewing community gardening as a form of food security for example is the assumption that the individuals at the other end of that have the time to know how the desire to engage in food production and frequently they don't have any of those they don't have the time they're working multiple jobs they are there's a great statement that's been made over and over again that those who are poor are poor in all things and time is one of those so if you have found yourself in a situation where you lack privilege asking people to grow their own food is a form of privilege to suggest that somebody else has that kind of time I don't think we can make a statement about so I don't know to what extent community gardening home gardening is going to be a part of our future agricultural scenario I think it will be a part of it but I don't think it will ever be all of it so here's what I think so I have current research that looks at how food insecure populations think about their health and their eating which we're currently publishing at the moment and one of the findings in that research is that regardless of who you ask whether that person is food secure or they're food insecure and in the line at an emergency food relief location in town they'll tell you they want to eat healthy and some of the descriptors of healthy will include words like local and organic regardless of their class so I think that there's a desire across sociocultural circumstances to desire food that people perceive is good for them I don't think everyone has access to that food and that is certainly the case there's you know no argument about the fact that the kinds of foods that most people deem healthy are also more expensive and trying to find ways to accommodate that go well beyond the regional scale of agricultural sector those are the kinds of solutions that are going to require nation states to engage in not just regional regional researchers I've done a little bit of research in trying to capture how much we have in terms of production in a couple of locations and most recently has been here in southern Oregon so I've been looking at how much food are we actually producing and then a follow-up question which I'm still starting trying striving to answer is how much could we produce so the answer to how much are we producing is that we produce each year a little less than a hundred million dollars in food which is a significant amount it's not as much as many other counties in Oregon and it certainly not as much as some other counties in the country produce but given the geographic nature of our valley that is a lot of food it is however nowhere near enough to accommodate our food needs so there's a lot of food that is imported into our region and we're fortunate to have most of that food come from fairly close it comes much much of that food comes from the central valley of California for us that happens to be fairly close however when you're looking at the same question in New York most of their food is still coming from the central valley of California it's coming a much further distance and it becomes less less sustainable more costly to make that happen the question I think for our valley isn't how much land can we devote to agriculture it's how much water can we devote to agriculture and I have not modeled that number in part because it depends heavily on whether we decide to upgrade our current irrigation infrastructure so if we decided to upgrade our irrigation infrastructure that would change the game entirely and we would be capable of growing much more at present we have a very old irrigation system that that loses a lot of water and every time we build a farm we need to be asking ourselves whether we can really support that amount of water usage and at present I would argue that we should be asking ourselves the question do we really have enough water to continue down the path we're headed and where agriculture is going in our region and I think the answer to that is absolutely not so what role does Southern Oregon University play in food politics so when I arrived here on this at SU there wasn't a lot going on in terms of agricultural research so I have a couple of colleagues who are working and have been working in food that range from food science to food humanities and I think that there has been really good work going on there what has not happened well at SU at least to my knowledge is collaboration with other universities that can work to solve regional and statewide problems so one of the things I'm very excited is happening at SU right now is that we have several relationships with faculty members here at SU and with OSU and OSU extension that are leading to solutions based research throughout the state I've been fortunate this last year to work on a number of projects related to food hubs that have been in concert with individuals at the state capital in Portland and across OSU extension so that's been a very exciting thing happening here and I think one of the other things that's really exciting is the development of our campus farm on campus and that's been a project that we developed as an institution with insight from other organizations including OSU extension so members of OSU extension most notably Mod Powell were involved in the planning of that farm and one of our hopes has been and still is that we can conduct research here in collaboration with OSU with OSU's research farms on the other end of the valley there's some interest and I certainly have a lot of interest in looking at how regional differences impact growing conditions so we are in a very different place in the valley so we're a little bit higher in elevation than much of OSU's farmland so taking a look at see for example how does grape growing differ as you move up the slope how does organic growing of grapes differ can we accomplish that task and if so does it depend on where you're at in the valley floor so those are some of the things I'm really excited about. The idea of a farm at SAU started five years ago and it came out of a series of conversations with students most of whom were in our business department and those students were asked to engage in a project in which they started a social business they wanted to create a business model in which a social good was also being developed and so one of those students who was a friend of mine was Sean Franks and Sean approached me and approached the university about the possibility of starting a farm at SAU that would produce food for our relatively food insecure student body so his idea was to use student labor at free reduced labor cost to grow food for the students on campus who couldn't provide food for themselves and so we stayed true to that model and we do do that today so over the time of working with those students they were able to gain the support of the administration we four years ago secured a location on Walker Avenue adjacent to Science Works where we were given permission to start a campus farm and we spent most of our first year and a half raising the money necessary for basic infrastructure so the installation of irrigation the development of utilities like electrical down that spot development of refrigeration services on the site places for office office work and we even installed the capacity for high speed internet on locations throughout the farm which have yet to be realized in hopes that someday that farm could serve as a teaching location in various capacities we are currently in our third year of production we've been producing for three summers and we're prepping for our fourth summer we've installed about two acres of annual vegetable production a little over an acre of a half of perennial fruit trees we have almost an acre in vineyards and we're still growing our so our food is marketed from the farm at SU in three ways we have a CSA that's open to students and faculty members members of the SU community who want to buy into the CSA we sell directly to SU dining services the food is served in the hawk and then we provide a low-cost growers market on campus where students in particular can buy food at lower than cost again hoping to provide for our food insecure community it is it's a very real thing and our community in particular Ashland and SU's campus is undoubtedly a food insecure community not only because they don't possess the resources but they also don't possess the knowledge necessary to cook food and they don't possess the infrastructure so many of our students are living in situations where they don't have a kitchen and while that's not legal in our region it happens frequently and so students are living in circumstances where their access to a way to cook is exclusively a hot plate or a microwave and in those situations those students become very food insecure so we've tried to come up with ways to meet that need and there's very little we can do at solving the larger infrastructure question outside of advocating for fair housing costs for students and helping students recognize where available housing might be located at the very least however we can teach students how to eat properly and we can show them ways to cook fruits and vegetables in very simple three simple recipes and we do that a lot at all of our growing market stands are farm and SU market stands each week we provide recipes that can be accomplished with very little often times with a little less than a microwave and the food available at the market I would say that the vast majority of the students who take courses from me here at SU or engage the farm and SU do not intend to go into farming but what they do intend to do is to go into the food system some place and so I think what they're really learning is how the food system functions and the role of production as a part of that system so while they may end up as researchers or they may end up working for an emergency food relief system ultimately they need to understand the circumstances under which production occurs a clear example of that is that for years I have watched as food system or food security advocates and researchers have argued that there needs to be low cost or reduced cost CSA is available and what often happens there is that the assumption is made is that the farmer somehow has enough money to offer a free or reduced cost CSA however there's been plenty of research to suggest that frequently the lowest income member of the CSA is the producer of that food so they're in no position he or she's in no position to offer that food at free reduced cost I think that's important for students to understand I think it's important for students to pick strawberries and to watch how hard that is and to have a better appreciation for why I might advocate for strawberries that are actually more expensive not less expensive that it's back breaking work and doing it without the use of a lot of chemicals is very hard and you begin to sympathize I think with strawberry growers who have used pesticides rather than see as evil thing this is really hard to do and we have a decision to make do we want to make it affordable or do we want to make it sustainable environmentally and if we can do both then wonderful and certainly a lot of people are trying and I am too but we can't always do that so I think that's the value I direct students who express an interest in farming to several other sources to regular referrals or rogue farm core and OSU extension so I've had students go and work with both of them to my knowledge I haven't had a student yet decide to be a farmer as a result of the courses they've taken here but they better appreciate farmers and they certainly and we have an issue potentially an issue around market saturation and direct market production so we have a lot of farmers who move into the region who for whatever reason are able to move in a region able to afford land here and decide that they want to grow food in this region but they only want to do it if they can sell it a farmer's market and that market is potentially saturated another challenge we face is that many of the farmers who move in here in our region are wonderful people who because of the circumstance of their life have had this unique opportunity to farm in a region that very few people could but also aren't as incentivized to make sure it turns a profit immediately and many of those people are personal friends of mine and as a result of family circumstances a previous work experience they can come in this region and do something they've always really wanted to do they can farm the risk in that is that they will sell food at costs that are lower than they can be produced and when that happens farmers who need to make a living farming can't make a living any longer. I actually think that a large component of the of the credit for the rogue fight food system has actually belongs to the Gordon Elwood Foundation. They did a wonderful job of making sure that people in this region who are involved in that issue all started talking to one another and so as individuals including myself went to foundations family foundations particularly and asked for funds to help on number of projects they had the foresight to say look before we proceed any further why don't you all start talking to one another and let's talk about this as a group rather than each of you coming to us independently and when I arrived in 2011 that's what was happening for the first time there had been a growing conversation among individuals in different parts of the food system about what our food system in this region needed so there were growers meeting with members of access and access was talking to OSU extension and individual restaurant owners were part of the process and Harry and David was at the table and these individuals were beginning to ask questions about what is our what is our rogue valley food system need to look like what do we want it to look like and that stage in the game is where I got involved and my first real contribution was to the methodology used in developing community conversations and I came into that conversation it was already partly developed and we were asking what do what do the members of our community want our rogue valley food system to look like because again I don't feel like I'm qualified to determine what the food system should look like question really is what what does our community want it to look like do we want regional scale farmers do we want exclusively farmers markets and as a result of those food system conversations that happened in 2013 we were able to get a better sense of what our community really wanted and the objectives that we work towards now are based on their desires and there were many conversations and hundreds of people took part in those conversations from all different parts of the food system just consumers who are concerned about what they eat to business owners restaurant ears all the partners you desire comes to the table we we continue to try to bring people to the table who really need to be there and that's easy in some cases and hard in others we've also really struggled to make sure that we were we represent the entirety of the geographic region which we're going to represent which is the entirety of the rogue valley and we also struggle to make sure that we can get farmers to the table who often have so much going on that it's really difficult to find the time for them to come to a meeting recently however I've watched the number of farmers at the meetings outgrow the number of non-farmers which has been very exciting and I think that what has happened in part is that farmers have shared how the food system council and the food system network has helped them succeed and there's been a couple of really good examples of how that food system network is is served farmers recently one example of that would be several of us assisting farmers in grant writing so we have that capacity I have that capacity as a professor to to sit down and write grants and a farmer might not have that capacity alone but together we're able to do something together which is a lot of fun so I think the most impressive example recently has been the development of the fry family food hub that food hub that is located now at fry farm fry family farms main growing land is an example of a project that came out of a wide range of people working together to solve problems we knew what we needed in the area we knew we needed infrastructure for wholesale development we needed washing we needed packing abilities and fry was looking for ways to develop that on their farm and so through the process of working with the larger group of people interested in this we will identify what larger concerns might be and then raise money they would address what one individual entrepreneur needed but also what the regions the whole needed and so ultimately that project is a collaboration between a proprietorship fry family farm and a number of individuals who felt like this region needed more more capacity develop wholesale infrastructure I think we're at the very beginning of growing a wholesale market here we have started asking questions about the infrastructure needed we don't have a lot of growers who are are at a place yet where they are either growing enough or have an interest in growing at that capacity so I think it's yet to be determined whether we have will make significant differences we know from looking at growers who have been in wholesale success programming with us that we've impacted individual growers but the question I think it still lies before us is how much have we made a difference and can we impact the entirety of our region in large ways I I know that the desire of the Rogue Valley Food System Council is to reach all farmers and to serve all farmers you know we don't do anything that wasn't suggested to us by individuals in the community so we're not an advocacy group we don't go around advocate for small farms or large farms we're advocating for what this community desires and what this community desires is a range of infrastructure types including wholesale success so I think the question that you posed is whether the conventional farmer has a place at the Rogue Valley Food System Council is absolutely and we have struggled to get some of those growers to the table although some have been a part of the table as I mentioned Harry and David was a part of the initial development of that council and had a seat at that table through that entire process I think it has been difficult for large-scale growers to see how collaboration benefits them when they have already gone through the the process of developing that infrastructure themselves and to that I would say we need your help that if a farmer has developed a structure that works well and is developing an economically viable and sustainable farm enterprise we need to know how that happened and it needs to be shared with other people and not all of those people will be competitors many of them will move on from this region to go other locations but they're being trained here as we need to hear from those people I also think that it's important to recognize that some nonprofits and particularly nonprofits have a particular desire to see certain types of farm succeed and there's a reason why the table we have representatives from all sectors we don't want to just hear from one group of people we want to hear from everyone and that's not what everybody at the table wants and then of course there's people like me on the table who aren't interested in advocating anything but interesting in solving the problems of farmers in the region and that includes large-scale farmers one of my interests at the moment is to look at ways to better grow grapes in a region and I think that's a that's a place where we're going to be looking at ways to improve small scale and also mid-scale the large-scale farm enterprise well there certainly needs to be more outreach in terms of what's being done the original conversations that we had with the community were held in both English and Spanish and the intent there was to bring out individuals who may represent a component of the labor force that we're not being given a voice and we had individual participants in that but we have as of yet had individuals willing to fill seats on the real value food system council what we try to do is to reach out to communities who might not other would be to have a voice and make sure they know what's going on and invite them and we've had individuals attend various meetings sometimes on and off but they've been present and which is as great space to start ultimately and the bylaws of the rogue value food system network suggest that's reaching a wider range in demographic is the intent but we need individuals who are willing to serve in that capacity to have the time to make it happen and that's that is sometimes difficult for anyone it's difficult for me to find the time to serve on the food system council the question in broad broadly is how do individuals engaged in picking need to be involved and that is a lot more so there has been a very little conversation with individuals who are doing the picking and that is that is a unique demographic in our area that's a complex demographic it can be a Latino demographic but it's not always it is sometimes an abused student population and it can be and it has been in the past and abused internship population all of those people need a voice and I don't know how to give everyone a voice except to bring them to the table it's been a series of conversations not just at the campus level but in the as a community level about how we can make this happen we did have a community food hub our community food conference a couple of years ago which went well the challenge of course behind any of those is that every member of the food system council is independently busy and so how do we collaborate to develop something one of the things we need are individuals farmers foundations who are willing to see the value in collaboration who are willing to help us make things like that happen obviously one of the the ways to make something like that happen is to have a paid staff member who works not for me or not for any individual farm but works for the benefit of our region's farmers and growers or the benefits of our region's food system and that's been a really hard hard thing to accomplish and we have one individual right now with that task which took us a lot of effort to raise the money necessary for that and so with a person who's paid position is primarily to serve the best interests of our road value food system council I hope that we can actually accomplish that task in the future I personally have an interest in hosting a campus-wide forum coming up looking specifically at the role of cannabis in impacting our food system in the region so I'm looking forward to developing that form in the coming months sort of narrow though yes that conference would be specific the specific to the way that cannabis production is playing out in Oregon the broader question can we hold a you know rogue valley or southern Oregon food conference is one that the rugby food system council has talked about on multiple occasions I've been involved in those conversations and until we have a person paid to take a lead on it is simply is too hard to make it happen the most we've been able to accomplish is that we have been holding an annual presentation at the Jackson County Fair to make sure individuals know what we're doing and to educate the public generally about the components of the food system one of the perhaps accidental components of that has been that a lot of people have approached us during that that exhibit at Jackson County Fair inviting us to be a part of their group or to come and present to their local community organization and so we've been able to bring a lot more people into the conversation by virtue of being there terroir is a is an interesting component of of agriculture and in my work I think it plays out in a way that's a little different than it does in the wine industry colleagues of mine work specifically on how a region's a unique climate and its unique elevation or aspect play a role and how wine tastes my interests are really about how in in individual regions unique culture and new people make food different and that is a conversation that's it's really more about branding and for me that's a conversation that needed to happen in this region we have not done a very good job of branding the food that comes from our region I can't speak to whether broccoli grown in our region tastes uniquely different than it does in the Willamette Valley but it does come from a group of people who cared deeply about growing it and it came from a group of people that you might know personally perhaps you sit at church with that person or perhaps you see them on a weekly basis at your kids school and that kind of branding is not taking place as much as it needs to it happens at the direct market we see it at the farmers market and we see it at high-end restaurants but for the rest of us who shop at other locations at grocery facilities that conversation can still happen and it really it relates to branding the terroir the cultural terroir of southern Oregon that component of terroir the chemical science of what oftentimes considered to be the food science is beyond my personal wheelhouse I think that that's a component of it there's also you really complicated things going on there for example in some cases particularly with culinary herbs the very best herbs are going to be those grown out of their you know their best growing conditions so they develop their flavor and their uniqueness when they're stressed so it would be interesting to see how something like corn growing out of its primary location changes its flavor I don't I don't have an answer in this case of corn of course we'd have to ask the question of whether we should be growing it at all an area where grain doesn't fall from the sky you know I one way to address the question about the changing face of agriculture can be summed up and an assignment I give I offer an assignment to a group of freshman each year to ask them to create a farmer profile so I take them to a farm and to a couple of farms and I say create a profile of what this these farmers are like you know with their history on how they became farmers and I do that because it almost never looks like the view of a farmer that they perceive they would see so my my students often think that they're gonna find a 60-something-year-old white man with a John Deere cap wearing car hearts and some people fit that description but many don't and certainly in our region we see an increase in women in farming we see an increase in young people farming in our region and one of my hopes is that we can make those farmers successful and that we can scale them up to a place where they can be they can feel successful whatever that place is for them the other thing that you asked is about what's changing what's changing in a major way is the production of cannabis in our region and I don't think anyone knows exactly how that's gonna play itself out but it's having a huge impact on farming in a region and I'm desperately interested in figuring out what that impact might be and then determining what the best course of action might be to to make sure that we can continue to grow food here because land prices are continuing to climb as a result of that industry individuals are moving industries for more lucrative industries land is being sold to more lucrative industry and while I don't want to speak either positively or negatively for cannabis as a researcher I want to find out what that impact looks like so that we can know what to do next I've lived in a lot of places and I've lived in a lot of locations where there were some people thinking about a sustainable food system by sustainable in this case I mean a food system that can survive into the future economically and environmentally this is the first place where I've engaged in that conversation where I wasn't engaging in it alone there are a lot of people thinking about this from a lot of different perspective and a lot of really bright people here working on that issue and they're working on it on large farms on small farms they're working on grapes and cannabis and in fruits and vegetables so for me one of the most exciting things about working here is that there are so many voices and so much perspective and that's not something I've seen in other locations where I've worked