October 17 At the Bioneers Conference 2015

Keep your head in the soil, but not like the ostrich. 

Ouch! I asked a question at a workshop this afternoon and got slapped down as if I were an apologist for industrial farming. Ouch again. Maybe I just asked the wrong person in the wrong setting. But give me a break. Farming for carbon sequestration is a new concept in agriculture and it needs a quick development. Increasing soil carbon concentration 2% will pull enough enough carbon from the atmosphere to reduce the PPM to the magic sustainable number 350. For its promoters to suggest that industrial agriculture will not need to go through a massive restructuring in order to prevent starvation is just ridiculous. 

Somehow local promoters of farming with the objective of sequestering carbon in the soil as a primary goal seem to believe that only a tiny percentage of our food comes from modern corporate farming. If they had only stayed in their chairs until the next workshop, ‘Curbing Corporate Power to Develop a Just Food System’, convened they could have been disabused of such nonsense.  This second presentation provided information that 50% of grocery retail sales is controlled by 4 corporations. That over 11 million workers are involved in providing our food. The presenter from the National Family Farms Cooperatives talked about how corporate America controls agriculture from the production, selection, and distribution of seeds. NFFC also suggested that the storage of grain seed, an essential part of the banking of community wealth in agriculture areas, that the ownership of grain elevators is also being concentrated in the hands of a few of these giant corporations. 

Because of the aging of American farmers over half of agricultural land will be sold in the coming decade. Anyone who has read my screeds about food production on this blog will see that in my view this is a major issue that needs to be addressed with an openness to the realities of our system and with an urgency that will allow our system time to develop so that we don’t all starve from the changes necessary. We must sequester carbon through our agriculture process and feed the people.