 So, we looked at the various dimensions of the food crisis, we looked at the need for distribution, efficient distribution of food resources and avoidance of waste to make sure that we have adequate food in the present, but in the future we need more food. So, we tried to investigate whether industrial agriculture is the solution and it turns out that according to what facts I have brought to this discussion, it turns out that industrial agriculture may not be the appropriate solution because it may actually lead to an increase in food insecurity. So, then we turn to alternative forms of agriculture and let us try to see if they can help us in this matter. Now, in order to understand why these alternative forms of agriculture actually are important or why they came about or why people develop them, let us compare anthroposystems or human made systems with ecosystems. In anthroposystems generally they are these are also similar to ecosystems, but they are generally more simple, they have they can have about three trophic levels, but they are open systems. So, again recalling from the lecture on sustainable development, we saw how you have resources extracted at one end and then the waste dumped at the other end. So, that is a characteristic of an open system. So, in our usual agricultural systems, they also operate in a linear fashion similarly there is minimal recycling that happens, but the advantage is that there is a high efficiency of transfer of biomass from one trophic level to the other trophic level. In other words, if you are looking at a rice field or a wheat field, let us say 50 percent of the mass of the plant is the food grain, then nearly all of that food grain actually gets consumed, it goes to the next trophic level, which is which is quite remarkable because in if you compare it with ecosystems, you will find in a forest, there is a lot of grass growing, but not all that grass gets even consumed by deer, so by the herbivores. So, that transfer from one level to the other that is very efficient in our anthroposystems, but our anthroposystems are very often they are monocultures and they are highly dense you know growth of one or maximum two or three species. In an ecosystem on the other hand, there are there is high biodiversity and very high density of one species alone is not very common, although there are there are instances of that too. So, what we do is we have some crop plants which we call as crops and then anything else, anything other than that is branded as a weed and it is to be eliminated. So, this is quite different and quite contrary in philosophy to how ecosystems work because in ecosystems there is nothing such as a weed, there is nothing such as there is nothing that is to be eliminated, things keep each other in check, one species will keep another species in check, but there is no need for total elimination. So, our human systems are static and they are quite unstable, so if there are any changes in the weather if the rain falls, either there is too much rainfall or there is too little rainfall or it happens at the wrong time, then your productivity takes a hit. Whereas, ecosystems are generally far stabbler, they are more resilient, they are quite robust, they are adapting and they are continuously evolving, so that thing is not there. So, if we really want to have food security, then we have to pick up some elements from ecosystems to make our systems more stable and more productive. So, I have similar numbers as shared by one of the remote centers from Shastra, I think it was Shastra, where we see that we depend on very few crop plants and although we have many more edible varieties of plants, but we do not depend on them and which is not a great idea and if we depend on very few species of plants, then we are risking, we are putting large populations at risk and the best example of that is the Irish potato famine where in a span of 3 years nearly one people died due to a combination of starvation and disease and why did that happen, it happened because the staple of Ireland was potato and the potato crop caught a disease which led to a collapse in the productivity and which led to starvation and all that. So, at the same time in Peru which was the cradle of the potato plant, they had a lot of diversity in the varieties of potato. In Ireland there were only relatively few varieties of potato and Ireland suffered major losses, but in Peru there were relatively minor losses and this kind of mass starvation never happened during that same period. So, we have several problems in our anthroposystems and we can only turn to nature and natural ecosystems to learn how we can improve our anthroposystems. Now, some things that are very clearly understood are that we need to adopt low input sustainable organic farming methods. Why low input? Because there are organic agriculture methods which require high input such as you need to add lots of manure and maybe some bio pesticide and labour costs are very high. So, such systems even if they are organic are not going to be suitable. So, we need to develop systems that inherently do not require very high inputs. There is another important thing that we need to do is we need to go for indigenous or traditional crop varieties which are locally adapted. The benefit is that if the plant is adapted to the local climate, soil, moisture conditions and including the pests and diseases, then the your agricultural system becomes more self-supporting. You do not have to prop it up with various inputs from outside and then it tends to be more profitable. There is a need to improve farm diversity and if at all required some organic or biological pest management methods can be used. So, we will just take a brief overview of that. So, based on these general principles, many people have developed different varieties of agriculture and they name it differently. So, if a person is more preoccupied with the notion of sustainability, then he will call his farming a sustainable farming. If somebody is develops a farming technique and he is very interested in mimicking nature or something like that then you call it ecological agriculture or things like that. So, there are various types of or various brands of organic or alternative agriculture and all of them have some common features, but then they differ in many other features also. So, I have kind of made a summary of the various features or characteristics of these techniques, what all activities or processes that they have and how each of those activities or processes gives you some environmental benefit. I had a similar table for conventional agriculture where I showed how each of the agricultural processes have got some adverse environmental impact. We are developing alternatives only to remove those adverse environmental impacts. So, some of the characteristics of these farming techniques are listed over here. So, somebody is let us say tomorrow I become an organic farmer, I may choose no till or minimum tillage methods, ground mulching and inter planting. So, my brand of organic farming may include like these two or three features. Somebody else's brand of farming may include some different combination of these. This is what this table actually means. So, among them no till is something that is quite interesting and maybe you can look up on the internet about no till methods of farming, tilling or tillage meaning plowing. So, there are methods by which even without plowing you can get good yields. You would be surprised that in the US roughly 5 percent of agricultural land is under no till cultivation. Now, you may say that it is so good that US agriculture is doing good things, but it turns out that they use copious amounts of herbicide. So, that is not really that good. There are methods of no till agriculture even without herbicides and I am going to show you one such method. Ground mulch is one very important thing that can benefit Indian agriculture in my opinion. Mulching is covering the soil with either living or dead organic matter. So, either you have a green mulch which is living plants covering the soil or you have a brown mulch which is dead organic matter leaf, litter or agricultural residue from the previous crop that can be put on the soil. So, if the soil is covered then it does not get overheated due to sunlight, the UV sunlight does not kill off the beneficial soil biota and the drying out as well as the oxidation of humus is hindered. Moreover, the mulch also provides micro habitats for predators of agricultural pests. Now, there are fears of some diseases also finding that mulch as a fertile breeding ground. If there are adequate quantities of natural predators then it has been observed in many of these organic farms that the pest problem does not become such a severe problem. Moreover, if you mulch the ground adequately then incidence of weeds also reduces because the weeds if the soil is covered by a thick mulch the weed plants cannot sprout up. So, that is one important benefit. Inter planting I think the benefits of inter planting are quite well known in inter planting or inter cropping improves crop diversity and in that in the species that they normally plan it is common to have some leguminous plants to fix nitrogen and that benefits the system. One more feature which is often not given adequate attention is the role of beneficial organisms such as earthworms and bees there are many others there are wasps also. So, these are creatures that actually are our friends and they provide various services such as in the case of bees they pollinate plants even birds do that earthworms you know are very important for the soil the wasps for instance are they feed on the pests of plants. So, if we provide shelters where wasps can have the nests then you are you are building up resistance towards pests in your agricultural system. There are many more points and again as I said each of them is like a hyperlink there is much to learn and much to know about each of them. So, I think teachers should those who are interested should take the time to do that. Farm diversity is very important the indigenous crops with diversity is one of the most important features everything starts with the seed and it is important as Dr. Vandana Shiva explained to us that the seed is the birthright of the farmer and it must always remain in the hands of the farmer and it is the farmers have to develop and maintain their own seeds so that we get good produce. So, there are there are many slides with a lot of detail and I leave that to you I am going to take a few questions that that many people ask about organic or alternative farming methods the first one is that whether it can feed everybody. So, I have taken them one by one and I am I am kind of going to go fast on that the explanations are provided over there, but I will briefly just touch upon them because unless those queries are satisfied we do not we do not feel that it actually is a good solution. So, in the context of future food security I do not think either conventional or organic or any agriculture is by itself going to be enough and the reason I am saying that is if the population continues to rise unabated, if land degradation happens to increase as at the rate at which it is increasing, if climate change also happens and if the water crisis again grows to the proportions that we expected to grow and I do not think any farming method is going to be adequate, but there are there are modeling studies that show that organic agriculture if implemented on a large scale will not reduce the productivity in fact it may increase it in the long run because it will actually slow down each of these problems which I just mentioned except for population it will slow down the others. For instance it may it will slow down land degradation it may even enrich the soil, it organic systems if designed properly not all organic systems, but properly designed organic systems can be designed for low irrigation inputs, still yielding high amount of calories. So, in that sense there is there is lot of promise in organic methods as opposed to the conventional methods where you are assured of land degradation and over exploitation of water resources as well as pollution of the environment and the health effects. So, in order to actually ensure food security we have to work on all these aspects together that this is what I started my first session with sustainable development where I said that in order to solve one problem you must also be working at all the other problems also you cannot expect that only by making some slight modifications in your agricultural systems that you can ensure future food security you have to deal with the water problem also and many other things. So, if all these things are done together then organic farming will actually be more than satisfactory and it will be it will pave the way towards future food security. Now, the second question is whether they give you high enough yields. Now it turns out they do give high enough yields I have some references over here there are many more and I have spoken to and visited many farms of good organic farmers as I said you have to get it right that applies to anything even I mean it is like saying if you if you drive a car can you can you go fast yes obviously you can go fast, but you have to learn to drive a car if you do not know how to drive a car your car may not even start moving. So, there is an element of learning there is some time that may be required, but once you get it is definitely going to yield high. So, this large survey found that in the case of irrigated lands transitioning from conventional agriculture to organic agriculture gave only a marginal benefit only slight improvement in benefit because the irrigated lands were already operating at high productivity, but in the case of rain fed crops because of water stress and low soil fertility the yields which were very low upon conversion to organic farming the yields increased quite drastically from 50 to 100 percent increase. And that mainly comes from a addition of organic carbon in the soil better availability of nutrients the soil being able to hold more moisture and the diversity that in many projects were was included. So, you had some leguminous plants also in that all these factors contributed to increasing the productivity of rain fed crops. Now, this is very significant because 65 percent of India's arable land is rain fed. So, we need to find a solution for increasing the productivity of those rain fed crops without placing an additional demand on the water on water for irrigation and those crops which are those lands 35 percent which are irrigated they can make do with much less water. So, that water is freed up for other other uses. Now, there is a transitional phase if you are if you have over exploited the land and added lots of chemical fertilizers and the soil quality is very low then maybe it will take 1 to 4 years for the soil and the entire soil ecosystem to kind of rejuvenate during which period there may be slightly reduced yields about 30 percent you may take a hit in the yields in the transitional phase, but after that they will stabilize again to a high productivity level. Now, if those products are organic then in places if they are certified and if there are proper outlets for that they you can command a premium price. Now, that is not always always true because access to such stores and such markets has to be there and some of them require certification which is an extremely tedious process and in fact, it is in my opinion it is unfair because the people who are polluting they do not have to go through this extra exercise, but the people who are doing the right thing they have to go through this enormous pain. Now, there is another factor which I had mentioned in the context of food forests of over yields that take place in polycultures. A polyculture is a system in which you have multiple species that are planted together and the combined output of these multiple species exceeds the monoculture in many cases. So, that is called as an over yield. Now, in the traditional in Mexico they have what are called as the three sisters. So, they do not plant corn, corn is their staple, but they do not plant corn alone. Corn is it is almost like sacred to them they plant the three sisters together and the three sisters are they plant corn they have these mounds of compost and some mulch and in that they plant these three sisters one is corn the second is a variety of beans and the third is a variety of squash. So, the three together give some synergistic effects and the over yields as compared to a monoculture are about 50 percent. So, the reason they give the over yields is the corn plant requires some nitrogen which is fixed by the beans and the bean requires some support. So, it climbs on to the corn the squash prefers the shade and it spreads on the ground since it is covering the ground the ground retains better moisture it is a green mulch kind of. So, the soil remains more fertile and the overall productivity is higher. Now, some studies have even found over yields as high as 150 percent. Another study has found a consistent 15 5 to 15 percent increase in yields due to intercropping. Now, there is a move towards perennial polycultures. So, if you instead of having to do all those agricultural operations starting from ploughing the soil then seeding and then weeding then adding fertilizer and pesticides and all. So, many intensive activities that are conducted in agriculture if we have a perennial system which you do not have to replant it will seed itself or those plants are long lived and you simply go there and you harvest and you take what you need and the system is kind of self-standing. So, you do not have to do all those things. So, there is a land institute in the United States where they are working out various combinations of plants which will remain there perennially. I showed you about one food forest that existed for 300 odd years. I now want to show you a video of how starting from scratch you can start a food forest. So, this is a food forest that will give mainly it will give fruits, but it does not have to be that way you can change the species and you can have it give even vegetables and things like that. So, this is a 7 minute video which is going to show us the various stages in actually making a food forest. Remember that the food forest is a perennial system you do not have to do all those regular operations. In the initial setup phase you may have to do a few operations which are again very easy operations as something as simple as just chopping the plants a little. The reason they chop the you will hear a phrase over there called chop and drop and the principle is that a plant has the roots which are sucking in moisture and the leaves which are transpiring. So, there is a kind of a steady state that is set up. If you chop the plant then the roots are going to continue to suck in moisture. So, the sap will ooze out. So, in order to prevent that when the shoots are chopped the plant sheds some of the root biomass under the soil it gives up some of the root biomass it reduces the biomass. So, that biomass is added to the soil which starts to decompose and that decomposition process is enabled by soil organisms large numbers of fungi and bacteria actually proliferate over there which enriches the soil. So, when you repeatedly do that the soil gets enriched and kind of a regenerative process sets up. So, exploiting this process and then some other things they are going to actually engineer an artificial ecological succession. People who know about ecology a little bit there are some pioneer species that on a barren or an abandoned land will first strike root over there and grow. They will produce some biomass and improve the soil and these with improved conditions then different species of plants will then find it easy to grow over there. So, the species mix goes on changing as the as the region finally matures into a forest. So, this ecological succession that happens naturally they have tried to engineer it to make a food forest. So, in a short period of about 5 years you can have a nice tall standing food forest. Let us see how. The interesting thing about that it is pretty much self-standing after it is established it does not require any inputs from us as the as I said your input may only be required to increase or to manipulate the production of the various species. He said that there are some what I am talking about such a thing is resilient to climate change because you have woody trees which are which are much more resistant to small spells of drought even if even if the monsoon fails we have in India we have a monsoon climate. So, it is sometimes the monsoon does not provide enough rain and if the monsoon fails then your the regular monoculture crop will suffer very serious problems, but such a forest is more resilient and the species can be determined or can be selected based on the local conditions. So, what grows over there locally is absolutely the starting point for choice of species. Exotics are generally not a good idea, but there are in India I have seen that people who have tried to make this food forest they use some exotic species particularly as the pioneer species and then they gradually eliminate them. So, that is also another approach to take. So, what is the what is the secret profitability of organic systems? See there are see you have the profit is the difference between the two. So, there are two ways either you can increase your output or you can reduce your inputs either way you get profits. So, in organic systems the output actually is high or as we saw in according to some studies it is it improves it is even higher, higher than the regular or the conventional methods using monocultures. So, the outputs are high and the inputs are quite low. So, if you design systems specifically to be low input systems then your inputs will be very low. So, as a result your profit is quite high and then the additional advantage is that the inputs that are required are not external inputs meaning you may be adding some manures, but they may come from the livestock that is already there on your farm not some chemical fertilizers purchased from some multinational company. If you have adequate mulch in your farm then even the weeding labor cost related to weeding and all can come down significantly. So, this is how you can actually ensure that these organic systems are economically feasible. In there is a study which talks about the economic viability of organic cotton and they found that over a period of 6 years in the case of cotton there was a reduction in cost of cultivation and there was an increased gross as there were increased gross and net returns. So, it actually works out in many cases. Now, organic products retain better quality they even post storage they have they retain their quality and the spoilage during storage also is less. There are some people who have argued whether since you are putting manures which come from animal dung or something like that might lead to some diseases or things like that whether they are safe or not, but many studies have found that there is there are no health risks to exposure from microbiological contaminants. Of course, the compost have to be made properly you cannot mismanage things and expect favorable results. So, there are procedures there are there is a good way of doing it and there are bad ways of doing it, but if done properly then that this is not a major concern. In fact, they are quite superior and healthful in on a number of parameters the amounts of vitamins and minerals and things like that they have fewer mycotoxins which can be a major problem. Pest management is again one area where you do not wait for the problem to happen. You start by feeding the soil you make sure that the soil is fertile how do you make sure the soil is fertile? I showed you that video on soil conservation practices. Moreover, we have to cover the soil with mulch make sure there is adequate organic matter the soil should have balanced nutrients. The plants that grow the crop plants that grow in a in healthy soil if they come from good locally adapted indigenous seeds then they will be quite resilient to both climatic variations as well as pest attack. So, such healthy plants will require very little inputs from our side for pest management. Then whatever little inputs are required can be managed by the beneficial organisms that I told you encouraging natural predators. There is a variety of natural predators that that are found in a in a farm environment some of them are spiders, wasps, frogs, lizards, birds even. So, they are they all feed on the different organisms different insects which are pests we consider as pests they consider that as food. So, the enemy of an enemy is a friend. So, encouraging these organisms now these spiders and wasps they do not feed on your crop there is no need to eliminate them in fact they are beneficial. So, we should encourage them spiders do an important job even if the spider does not have to consume that insect right away many insects get caught in their in their webs. So, they are they are eliminated from your farm. So, giving them good habitat itself is a is a big contribution to the pest management and then in the eventuality that there is some uncontrolled pest attack there are there are alternative organic pesticides such as neem and there are many others many other concoctions that can be made because this kind of intervention should be done at the very last stage the main intervention begins from the soil and choosing the right right crops main protecting the the natural predators of the pests. If these main things are taken care of then with with minor inputs of some organic pesticides the job can be done very easily and at least this is this is how many people have many organic farmers have managed it. Just because you and me who have very little experience if we try to make some experiment and it fails it does not mean that it is it is a failure because there is a learning process and I am I am repeatedly saying that because during my college days I did a number of such farming experiments on my father's farm although very small farm, but I did very good experiments on that I learnt a lot, but I I I actually do not mind sharing this and most of my experiments failed, but it is through the failures that I learnt and success comes only after after many failures, but when it comes you know it really gives you a lot of satisfaction and I will just tell you what what those some of those experiments were in a bit. Organic farming is more environmentally friendly as this review of over 300 published reports says on various parameters organic farming was found to be more environmentally friendly than conventional farming. Now this is important to understand because it is not even organic methods can end up damaging the environment. There are environmental impacts even of organic agriculture methods, but it turns out that they are smaller than the conventional methods. Organic input is very important organic input to the soil there is a lot of surplus biomass and I told in the energy chapter that surplus biomass if there is anything that requires that surplus biomass then it is the soils that require it because the soils are the place from where we get our food. So, the first priority should be given to feeding the soil and if you add the surplus biomass to the soil as mulch you can or in the or after composting as compost. For every ton of carbon added per hectare to a degraded soil it can increase crop yields by 20 to 40 kg per hectare for wheat and 10 to 20 kg per hectare for maize. So, it can it achieves multiple ends you require less external fertilizer you can enrich the soil you can also sequester carbon. So, the soil holds more carbon otherwise that carbon would have oxidized and gone into the atmosphere. No tilling no till methods are probably the best for protecting the soil because every time you run a plow through the soil you damage the roots you compact the soil and all these destructive processes kind of start. This is a 12 minute video that I am going to show you, but I want to save it for the last. So, I want to save the dessert for the last. So, although it is relevant over here this is about a veteran Gandhian organic farmer Mr. Bhaskar Savai who has won several awards he recently passed away but not without contributing immensely to the field of organic agriculture and he is a very, very well respected figure in this area and I was very fortunate to have met him in person I stayed in his house I visited his farm along with a friend of mine. So, watching that video actually gave me very good memories of my college days. So, we will watch that towards the end. Also in this context people who are interested in organic agriculture may be organic gardening I mean you do not have to do it as a profession. I strongly very, very strongly recommend reading this book The One Straw Revolution by Masanubu Fukuoka. He is a Japanese person again he passed away a few years ago, but he is probably can best be described as the grandfather of natural farming. His method is agricultural method is so unique he does not till the soil he does not I mean he makes seed balls. So, he takes a mixture of clay compost and the seeds and he just makes it into a dough and make the mix these maybe a centimeter or size balls and dries them in the shade. And even in that the seeds that he add he adds a mixture of seeds and then he simply tosses it onto the field covers it with the straw of the of the last season and allows the rains to come and then the crop sprouts it grows above the mulch the brown mulch and he also grows among the seeds is also a nitrogen fixing cover crop called as white clover which is very similar to alpha alpha if some of you know about it. So, the cover crop kind of covers the ground and the rice grows up and then he when the rice is about to be harvested maybe a 15 days 2 weeks before that he similarly sprinkles balls of containing wheat or barley seed for the winter season and then he harvests the rice threshes the rice puts the straw back on the field the wheat sprouts through the through the mulch and so basically he has the wheat and rice in succession and the productivities that he has got are just phenomenal. I mean they can compare with the best farms in the world and he absolutely does not add any fertilizers or chemicals there is no weeding his fields have the cover crop in plenty and there are many weeds in his field but they are they are adequately suppressed by the cover crop. So, they do not really compete in a big way with the with the rice crop rice or the winter grain crop. So, it is an awesome book and he talks about many things apart from the actual practices the agricultural practices that he follows he talks about many things related to food agriculture and you know long term food security also. So, it is a must read this book is out of print it has been out of print for decades even when I got it I think 20 years ago it was with great difficulty, but now people have made pdfs of this and this is you just click this link and you will find it a pdf for download. There are many videos related to his farm this 24 minute one is quite a good video you can watch that there is a longer one hour video also available you can search for it on your own and watch that, but definitely it is worth learning for people who are interested. Other important thing which I touched upon and this is a kind of a sensitive area for many many people and they do not want to address this problem they just want to brush it aside or you know pretend as if they did not hear, but I am taking some risk over here and still going to talk about it. It is about vegetarianism and its relevance to the the environmental problem the food problem. It turns out that even the IPCC chairman also made a statement in Geneva that it is vegetarianism is one of the best ways to fight global warming and there is a reason for that. You see that world meat production has increased over the past half century it has increased nearly five fold and as I explained to you based on the trophic pyramids if you instead of being a primary consumer if you are a secondary consumer that is a meat eater then you require much greater land to support you much greater quantity of the autotrophs which are the plants and plants require land area. So, you require much more to feed you now this data is a little out of date when the world population was 6 billion, but at that point the 6 billion humans shared the earth with 1 billion pigs, 3 billion cows, 1.8 billion sheep and goats and 13.5 billion chickens. So, that is 3 heads of livestock per person even now I think the numbers are not going to be any less if at all they might have increased. So, this again shows how meat consumption has increased. So, has human population, but again some of the livestock types like chickens have increased very drastically. If you compare with other countries India is way down as expected the United States is somewhere at the top in meat consumption and India is somewhere at the bottom. So, in that sense that is thanks to a lot of large proportion of Indians who are vegetarian even the people in India who consume meat they do consume significant amounts of vegetarian food and then they have a few non vegetarian dishes which is quite different from the diets in other parts. This talks about the protein intake and you know what is where we source our protein intake. In India we large fraction of our protein intake comes from plant based sources. Meat eating is actually implicated in a number of health problems and even the Chinese government has noticed this problem and there is a call for moving away from particularly from red meats. So, there is nearly literally an explosion in the cardiovascular disease and cancers in the proportion of cardiovascular disease and cancers. There are researchers all over the world other than Indians also who claim that the low quality plant protein which actually allows steady synthesis of new proteins is actually healthier as compared to the high quality animal protein. We all understand that animal protein is considered to be high quality protein compared to plant protein. But it is actually the lower quality which is better because it is consistent with less diseases and longevity also. So, there are these vegetarian based diets which can keep your cholesterol level very low and where the risk of cardiovascular disease is very very small and quite insignificant at least until old age. At the turn of the century heart disease and cancer were very small contributors to death but now they have increased quite drastically which is something to be concerned about. So, according to this scientific American article the best diet for humans for infants it is mother's milk and for adults it is fruits, vegetables, whole grains, pulses and nuts. So, this kind of a diet is the best for humans according to this article and I know many Indians who are claimed vegetarians they are actually the majority of them are lacto vegetarians. So, in other words we consume milk. Milk is not strictly vegetarian but it does not involve killing an animal. So, we kind of associate it with vegetarianism but consuming the quantities of ghee and fried items you know the vegetable oils that we consume you cannot claim that to be a healthy diet. So, although Indian vegetarian diet kind of generally fits in this diet but sometimes the amounts of fried foods and the ghee that some people use is just too much I mean I do not think that can come anywhere close to a healthy diet. So, there are even people are even thinking that there are some studies which say that the meat industry is actually a drain on the American economy because they consume so much of meat it just turns out that the sales of meat in US are almost equivalent to the healthcare costs in the US. So, there appears to be a relation between the two that you eat more and more meat and you spend money in the hospital for treatment of cancer and cardiovascular diseases. It is quite likely that there is a possibility that it is a net drain on the American economy and why America because they consume more meat. So, the effects are obvious in that. When so many people are starving is it yesterday in the last session there were some discussions about ethical issues being part of the sustainability discussion or the sustainability discourse and these ethical issues come in the choice of food that we have in the consumption of various resources, in the consumption of energy, in the choice of energy sources that we choose. Ethical issues are come up everywhere and particularly when we are faced with so many starvation deaths to divert some of the food that is available to cattle feed definitely is an ethical problem and we need to address that. What is the problem? You may say that I am diverting some grain or to feed the animal and then we are getting the meat from the animal. So, that does not work out as easily as that because for getting 1 kg of meat you have to spend 7 kgs of grain, but those 7 kgs of grain could have directly fed many more people. With 1 kg of meat you can feed fewer people, but with 7 kilograms of grain if cooked you can feed many more people. So, if the food grain that is diverted towards livestock is actually taken up by humans it can either completely feed everybody or at least to a large extent. So, these are some kind of interesting numbers if an American reduced his meat consumption only by 5 percent then he would end up feeding all the hungry people in the US and if he reduces it by maybe 50 percent then maybe he can feed all the poor people in maybe few other countries also. So, this talks about 6 kgs of plant protein is being required to create 1 kilogram of high quality animal protein whereas that 6 kgs of plant protein if directly given to humans then it will actually satisfy the requirement. Now, meat eaters contribute to greater energy use as compared to vegetarians because meat consumption requires 20 times as much energy to produce 1 calorie of animal food. So, this tabulates the energy consumption of so, how much energy is put in and how much energy do you get. So, you have to put in 4 units of energy to get 1 unit of energy through meat, chicken. In the case of beef you have to put in 54 units to get 1 unit of energy and in the case of grains this is a little surprising and there is a reason to for that for grains it appears as if you have to put 3 units to get 1 unit that is not entirely correct because that may be so for industrial agriculture where there are lots of fossil fuels that are used to given energy. But the traditional food production systems and particularly the polyculture and the no-till natural farming methods of Okuoka they are they require an insignificant amount of energy to be put in and you actually get energy and farming or any growing plant should not require energy inputs to give you energy output because it is taking energy from the sun. The energy that we put in is really not even required for natural ecosystems. They take all their energy from the sun which is not factored in this calculation. So, really speaking no energy from human being should be required but nevertheless we do have our agricultural systems which require some human labor or some things. So, some small quantities of energy alone will be required. The factory farms of livestock they actually contribute to lot of methane emissions. They consume huge quantities of water to produce one pound of beef some 5 tons of water is used and for lettuce and tomatoes and all these vegetables very very small quantities of water is used to create one pound of food. So, water consumption again is energy consumption is high for meat water consumption is also very high for meat. If you pass up one hamburger then you would have saved water enough for taking 40 showers with a low flow shower head. So, even if you are consuming meat then shifting from pork to chicken will require half the grain and half as much of water. But in reality these livestock farms are so big and they are even increasing that the waste from these farms has become a problem. In fact, there is this pig farm somewhere in Utah which produces more sewage than the city of Los Angeles and Los Angeles is among the largest cities in the world. So, this one pig farm over 50,000 acres produces more sewage than the city of Los Angeles and livestock in the US produces 130 times as much waste as humans. Land requirements again you require much more land if you are dependent on beef and other forms of meat, but you require less land if you are vegetarian. So, the graph over here shows that the calorific needs of how many people can be satisfied on 2.5 acres of land. So, if you have beef then you would satisfy only one person, but if you are eating getting all your calorie inputs through cabbage then maybe 23 people can be supported on 2.5 acres. A similar calculation is made by Fukuoka in 1985. So, when the world population was 5 billion. So, he said that if everybody is consuming grains alone as their main diet then you could support 60 times the world population at that time meaning 60 times 5 billion. So, many humans could be supported on the earth's land area and if everybody ate potatoes then it would be 20 times if everybody ate beef then it would be only 5 billion that can be supported. Okay, topsoil loss again over grazing leads to topsoil loss this is a major problem. Again the most uncomfortable topic in this context of vegetarianism is animal slaughter. Some even in the United States alone some 9 billion animals are killed for food each year and all this is when plenty of vegetarian food is available for Americans. So, the same applies to urban Indians there is no shortage of vegetarian food in the urban places. So, when that is the case it is clearly a choice a preference it is not a matter of need there is no need for consuming non-vegetarian food it is only a it is a matter of your tongue and for that for the sake of that if so many animals are killed how can we run away from the ethical aspect of this issue. So, many people have on on spiritual or similar philosophical grounds have favored vegetarianism including Gandhi and many other followers of Gandhi and there are there is the Jain community in India which is very vehement about vegetarianism and so definitely some of their arguments are worth taking into consideration. Reducing meat is actually a win-win situation because you will if you reduce meat not only will your health improve the environment will also benefit and it is also more ethical. So, in all contexts actually reducing meat is good it is very much possible with a vegetarian diet to live a very happy healthy life free of disease meat is absolutely not compulsory. So, and again some animal protein that is required can be taken through by way of milk products. So, a lacto-vegetarian diet seems to be a good balance. I am not saying that there are no ethical issues with dairy farming there are ethical issues nobody is exempt from those issues. There are unethical practices that happen even in dairy farming, but it does not mean that since some unethical issues are unavoidable therefore, you do a massacre of 9 million animals it is that is not justified. The unethical issues that happen in the dairy industry should also be eliminated that is my stand on it. So, what can you personally do to alleviate this problem? I have a long list of things support local produce grow your own food urban gardens rooftop gardens. If you have some land somewhere in your native place you can try to move to organic farming support local farmers and consumers sometimes when they have excess production you can take it up that time you need not I know everybody is entitled to their choice of what they want to purchase for food, but if there are local farmers and if they have surplus production we can accommodate them if you accommodate them then spoilage of food is reduced and it helps the environment helps the farmer. MNC marketed GM crops can be a problem and they should be avoided if whenever possible home cooked food is best preserved food has got lots of embodied energy and it is not even as healthy. So, that can also be avoided those who are vegetarian great those who are not vegetarian can consider sparing some of the grain and some of the arable land for feeding poor people and reducing their meat consumption. Lokmanya Tilak in this context made a very interesting statement he was writing a letter to his nephew who was going to the west to UK for higher studies. So, he gave his very fatherly oncular advice to his nephew and he basically all the good things you know that hold on to your values all that glitters is not gold you have to work hard and things like that all good things and in that he even made a statement which can roughly be translated like this in the letter was in Marathi, but can be roughly translated like this don't turn your stomach into a graveyard for unfortunate dead animals. This was one of the advices that Tilak gave his nephew. So, we have so many things that we can actually do for this and we have come to the end of this session. I want to end with this beautiful video of Shri Bhaskar Save who is a Gandhian organic agricultureist in South Gujarat the Maharashtra border very close to a place called Dhanu the actual village is Umbergao. So, let us watch this video it's a very nice video there are some interviews with him in which he speaks in Hindi, but there are English subtitles. So, if there are people who are sitting at the back of seminar hall I request you to please come up front so that you can read the subtitles in case you do not understand Hindi. So, the video is actually a documentary in English, but there are some interviews that are in Hindi. I visited his farm when I was in college I really enjoyed it it was such a great experience the discussions that I had with him and they kind of molded my thinking in many ways. And one interesting thing he makes he has Chiku achhats Chiku sapota and some of the sweetest and the most delicious Chikus that I have ever eaten pure sugar they are so sweet and so tasty I cannot forget that I just thought I would share it with you. I hope everyone enjoyed this movie I wanted to keep this for the last like a dessert. I hope that in these all these sessions starting on Tuesday from the sustainability talk and the talk on water and energy and this one on food. I have tried to share many different perspectives with this huge audience of all teachers. This is I think what I have shown are these are some pointers to the best of my understanding now there is no guarantee that that is the best or that is the only perspective there are many more perspectives. But I feel that some of the things that that are shared over here are definitely worth further investigation. And all of us are very qualified very mature people. So we are capable of doing that inquiry of investigating further and taking this forward and to make it very meaningful personally to ourselves as well as our students. So if I would say that really we need to only open our eyes around there are natural places you can learn directly from nature you can learn from people who have learnt about nature such as this great gentleman we saw on the video. So that is all I have to share with you and this completes my set of sessions that I will be sharing with you. Okay so with this I take your leave thank you very much for hearing me out.