 And it is my great pleasure and honor to introduce to you our next presenter on the topic of From Green to Resilient, Fred Kirshman, who is a distinguished fellow at the Leopold Center for Sustainable Development at Iowa State University and really one of America's leading thinkers and practitioners on greener approaches to agriculture. He's the president of the Stone Barn Center for Food and Agriculture, and he won in 2011 the James Beard Foundation Leadership Award. I give to you Fred Kirshman. Well, thank you very much. I hope that you can appreciate the challenge that I have because resilience, the case I'm going to make, is one of the most important things that we need to do now. But it's a topic that unfortunately is not very well incorporated into our culture, and so it really is going to take about an hour to do an adequate job of that, and I'm doing it in 15 minutes, so I hope you know this is not going to be the premier performance that it should be, but I'm going to try to raise at least the critical issues that I hope you can take advantage of. And then I also want to say that one of the other important things about this is that there are some resources available quite readily, and I'm not going to say this in terms of if you have time, but this topic is so important to this whole issue that we're talking about, that I hope that all of you would take advantage, and there is now a professional society, relatively young, but a great professional society called the Resilience Alliance that has produced a lot of really good material, and all you've got to do is Google the Resilience Alliance and most of their work will come up. And then also there is a volume that two of the members of the Resilience Alliance, that's interesting, has published Brian Walker and David Salt, and the title of the book is Resilience Thinking, and it's a very succinct, clear indication of all of the issues that are involved in the issue of resilience, particularly how it applies not only to food and agriculture, but to all of our human activities now as we move into this new future that we're all going to be a part of. So the simple definition for resilience is the capacity of a system to absorb disturbances and still retain the basic function and structure. That's the basic concept of resilience. In other words, it's building into systems its capacity to maintain its productive capacity, and we're going to talk primarily about food and agriculture. So building into our food and agriculture systems the capacity to absorb disturbances without crossing a threshold into a different kind of function so that it can continue to produce the kinds of goods and services that we need. And then there's a second part of that definition that is if in fact those disturbances do cross into a different kind of function that we have the resources within the system and frankly the redundancy within the system so that we can continue to produce the goods and services in this instance food that continues to produce the food that we need under those new circumstances in that new restructuring of the system. So that's basically what resilience is about. Now the problem with our current food system and I think frankly the problem with much of our discussions not only here but everywhere that I'm involved in discussions about food and agriculture is that that whole concept is absent even those of us who are part of sustainability movements and serious about sustainability have only started to incorporate even the language of resilience in about the last two or three years. Mostly what we have talked about is how to green up the system and when you talk about greening up a system you're assuming that the system is going to remain relatively stable and that's simply not our future. So we have to now convert from the notion of greening up a system making it a little less bad and a number of examples were used this morning you know No-Till which has a certain advantages integrated pest management which has certain disadvantages. Those are all greening up but they all assume that the basic structure and system of agriculture will remain relatively the same. And Joseph Ficksel who's a part of the resilience movement at Ohio State University I think stated it well what we've really been talking about in sustainability all this time is steady state sustainability that everything's going to remain pretty much the same and we just got to fix it a little bit and that's not the future that we're going to be involved in. Now the problem with our current food system is that we're also operating out of a single mandate and it doesn't make any difference whether you're a farmer or a food processor or an input supplier the one goal that you have to achieve is maximum efficient production for short-term economic return and it really doesn't make any difference whether you're manufacturing automobiles or computers or underpants you know in our industrial economy that's what you have to do maximum efficient production for short-term economic return and then the means by which you do that of course as Henry Ford learned you know a hundred years ago in manufacturing automobiles through an assembly line is through specialization you know he once famously said that people can buy any car they want as long as it's a black Ford Model T because that was the only one he was going to manufacture because he was interested in that maximum efficient production for short-term economic return so specialization management simplification you know he didn't teach everybody to do put a whole automobile together he taught a lot of people to do one small piece of it simplifying the system to gain those efficiencies and then of course economies of scale now agriculture was one of the last human enterprises to adopt that principle and you know we can all argue why that was the case there's something about the nature of farmers you know who are a little skeptical about some of the new kinds of things at least at least they used to be and so the notion but the notion that we use these principles in agriculture really got adopted on a large scale after the Second World War but now when you go into any agricultural community particularly true in Iowa what you're going to see is that specialization simplification economies of scale in Iowa now 95% of our cultivated land is in just two crops corn and soybeans it meets that principle and that's what we're doing okay so now the big problem here is the kind of disturbances that we're going to see in the future which is not going to enable this kind of specialization simplification economies of scale to be quote sustainable and climate change is certainly one of those that's not the only one I've identified at least eight let me just go through this very quickly and I can't go into detail on them because of time one is the end of cheap energy our current system this specialized system is enormously dependent on energy we now use about 10 kilocalories of energy for every single calorie of food that we produce the most least energy efficient that we've ever had so now as energy costs go up and there was a report from the United Nations just recently that indicated that every time the cost of oil goes up the cost of food goes up at exactly the same rate so imagine crude oil being $300 a barrel $400 a barrel because we're going to get there at some point then can we still do the kind of agriculture that we're doing today and the answer to me clearly is no we cannot the second is that we're depleting our mineral and metal resources that have been critical for this you know we talked earlier about fertilizer rock phosphate and potassium we're drawing down those resources all across the planet and they're beginning now people to talk about peak phosphorus that we may in fact reach peak phosphorus before we reach peak oil now when phosphorus is no longer available or when it becomes so expensive that farmers can't afford it how are we going to produce our food can't do it the way we're doing it now and then there's fresh water we're depleting our fresh water resources all across the planet 70% of our fresh water now is used just for agriculture irrigation and one of the reasons that we use so much fresh water is because we're not playing attention to another depletion and that's the biological health of our soil the reason we're not paying attention to the biological health of our soil because we've been using these external inputs to substitute and so when you don't have biologically healthy soil you're going to use a lot more water because the soil doesn't have the capacity to absorb and retain the amount of moisture that it needs to grow a crop so we have to use a lot more irrigation and then you've got of course the unstable climates and we've all talked about that today but again if you're going to have these huge monoculture systems you have to have stable climates if you're going to have 95% of your cultivated land in Iowa and corn and soybeans you consistently need climate weather that's favorable to corn and soybeans that's not our future and then you have the loss of biodiversity and genetic diversity again when you use specialization as the key issue then you don't retain and maintain all of the varieties of biodiversity and genetic diversity which give you the resources for local adaptation under these new disturbing consequences that we're going to see so we need to now not only restore the biological health of our soil but also restore the biological diversity and the genetic diversity as a resource to meet these new challenges in the future and then there's the loss of human capital, the loss of our farmers this is not very well understood because we're still using a 1974 definition of the farm but when you break this down as of 2007 census data 75% of our total agriculture sales were produced by just 192,442 farms in this country and 30% of our farmers are over age 65 and only 6% are under age 35 now that's not very well known in the public because it's not just statistics that were presented in that way but when you present them in that way I think that we've got a huge human capital problem that we're going to have to be facing okay so what are some of the elements in a resilience kind of thinking in a resilience future that we ought to be thinking about well first of all we need to restore the biological health of our soil and we need to restore our biological diversity and genetic diversity that's a key factor because those are the fundamental resources that enable us to put a resilient system together secondly we need to restore or to transform our annual crops into perennial crops and again there's always some good news here because there are some people that are attending to this West Jackson at the Land Institute for the last 30 years now has been through natural breeding developing perennial crops to replace annual crops and you know he was demonized for a long time because biologists have said well you know if you're going to put you know plants either going to put their energy into root systems or into seeds and if they go to a pinded root system you're never going to get the yield well West understood somehow that biology is more complex than that and he's now proven that in fact he's correct and he now has already developed some varieties of wheat and sorghum and other crops the yield aren't quite where they are yet but every growing cycle has increased and a number of us have projected now that if we were to put a modest amount of our current research dollars into developing these perennial plants then by 50 years from now 60% of our annual crop land could be in perennials and you think about resilience from that perspective perennial plants have root systems that go 15 to 18 feet down into the soil rather than 15 or 18 inches so you have all of that resilience into the system and my time is up here so let me just a couple of other things agroforestry which is developing in many parts of the third world is another more resilient kind of system and then permaculture which was mentioned here a little bit earlier in terms of these complex systems of plants and animals in which the waste from one part of the system becomes the energy for the food for another part of the system these kinds of biological synergies have to be part of a resilient future so I can't tell you how important this is because we can do without automobiles we can do without computers and if we have to we can do without underpants we can't do without food and so we have to deal with the issue of resilience now and building resilience into our food system and again the good news is that we have some information to go on and I would encourage all of us to do that and if you have some questions or want to discuss those I'll be around all day I'd be happy to have further conversations with you about it thank you