Deepish agriculture

Last night we went to hear Michael Pollan speak. The title of his talk, which is part of the Seminars About Long-term Thinking (SALT) series with the Long Now Foundation, was "Deep Agriculture."

I really like how Michael Pollan thinks and talks about agriculture and the entire US food system. He approaches this massive and gnarly mess in a positive and solution-focused way: in spite of the overwhelming nature of the problem, which he does not skirt, you somehow leave feeling like we can actually fix this rather than feeling beaten down.

Food, he pointed out, is the shadow problem which is driving some of the largest problems we are grappling with as a society right now: climate change, the skyrocketing cost of health care, and elusive energy independence. The industrialization of agriculture over the past 50 years was single-mindedly pursued in the service of ending hunger (and making certain parties extremely wealthy, but bear with me a moment): I think we can say that the system has over-performed on that count. It is time to rethink what we are optimizing for, and then line up appropraite technologies and subsidies, regulation and other policy incentives and disincentives to create a system that better serves the health and well-being of the American public.

What's exciting is that we finally have a president who "gets it" and sees the path to fixing this. What's troubling is that he has said privately that he doesn't yet see the movement. He's listening for it. Michelle's planted an organic garden at the White House. But he needs the American public to demand it in a way they are not yet doing today.

The demand is clearly building, however. Michael Pollan doesn't know about my rooftop garden and my fantasies of small-scale farming life, but he did say that not a day goes by that he doesn't have some young professional - programmer, analyst, etc - share with him that they are cashing out and buying a farm. This makes me feel so much less original in my instinct to do just that and makes me wonder if what we are talking about is a real movement here.

In fact, the biggest obstacle he cited in getting from where we are today to a healthier, more resilient, more sustainable food system is that we don't have enough farmers. Today, one million farmers feed over 300 million people. He estimates that we will see something closer to 20 million farmers in the US by 2050.

How do we get there? Michael Pollan says: "we need to make farming cool."