Sustainable Livestock Production Conference Day 1

The Sustainable Livestock Conference was a process of participation for all attendees as evidenced by the notes taken here.

We're here in Anchorage in the midst of the first workshop session of the first Sustainable Livestock Production Conference. We'll be making regular posts to this blog as the conference progresses, so please check back regularly. This morning, after an introduction by organizing committee chair Jan Rowell, SNRAS Dean Carol E. Lewis gave the opening remarks.

Dean Lewis made a powerful statement at the beginning of her comments: "I'm frightened," she said. "Our food system is threatened."And not simply, she explained, because of the problems associated with being at the end of a long food chain or the costs to our environment of the energy-intensive means to produce, market, and distribute food in our modern global food system. These are formidible in themselves, but

this threat is not because producers and supporters of agriculture are not trying, but through either lack of understanding or neglect, those who could be involved, from government officials through the private sector, have chosen not to pay attention to what is happening...

Dr. Lewis went on to explain that the conference was meant to tackle the following questions:

• What is the knowledge bank on livestock production in Alaska?
• What are the challenges to creating a sustainable food system in Alaska? What are the constraints that affect what we can do?
• What are our needs?

"This conference," she said, "is designed to be participatory." Solutions will come from it, and from the people actively involved in producing meat in Alaska. The conference is important because change is coming to us, and she warned the audience, "if we do not manage change, change will manage us. We are here to effect that change."

Dr. John Ikerd (pictured above at right), professor emeritus of agricultural and applied economics of the University of Missouri at Columbia, gave the keynote address.

I'm convinced that we're at a point in time where we're at a fundamental change, a change at least as great as the Industrial Revolution. Different thinking is what it's going to take to get us through the change that's coming.

Dr. Ikerd is the author of several books on agriculture and sustainability, but he was, as he described it, for most of his professional career a firm believer in the industrial model of agriculture.

I think the Industrial Age is coming to an end in agriculture. The benefits of this industrial paradigm have been fewer and the costs greater than probably any other sector of our economy. Because of my age I've seen most of the changes of the industrial era in agriculture. In the late 1950s agriculture in the US was still mostly the diversified family farm, but was beginning to change. The factories that made tanks for World War II started turning out tractors. Gas was cheap and plentiful.... Agriculture was about to change from a way of life to a bottom-line business.

Industrialization is a reflection of a way of thinking that is seen most clearly in specialization, standardization, mechanization, and simplification, leading to consolidation. Food security is the main purpose of government involvement in agriculture. We continued to use the language of the family farm, but the assistance from experts supports consoldiation and increased efficiency so that farmers can sell more at less cost of production, so that the consumer can buy more. But this does not support the family farm.

Ikerd described how the supports provided during the latter half of the 20th century and now were aimed at increasing efficiency and reducing risk. However, he cautioned, the reduction of risk also increased the vulnerability of the agricultural system. Increase the efficiency of production, and the price of goods fall, the margin to the farmer is reduced, so farms become larger and more efficient so they can produce more--and the small farms are gradually forced out. Farm bankruptcies became common. Farmers began leaving rural areas and changing careers, moving to urban centers. This, he said, is a natural effect of the increase in efficiency.

He explained to the audience how over the years he realized that the farmers he was trying to help succeed did not do well:

The [farmers] we were trying to help who had focused most narrowly on the bottom line were the ones that were failing. The ones who'd been following the so-called experts' advice were the ones that were doing the worst, while the "laggards" as we called them, were doing a little better.

The industrial model, focusing as it did on economic efficiency, was bad for the farmers, bad for their communities, and bad for the land and its productivity. Life is about more than making a living, Ikert said. It's about the desireability of your life, and having purpose and meaning in your life.

Then came the sustainable agriculture movement in the late 1980s. Sustainable agriculture balanced the quality of life, stewardship of the land, and created ecological and social and economic integrity. Industrial agriculture had failed every test: ecological, social, even economic. And it wasn't even meeting the needs of the consumer, which it had been designed to serve.

Farms and feedlots had turned into biological assembly lines.

Despite the promise of the increases in efficiency and production, the consolidation of small farms into large ones, "industrial agriculture was an absolute failure," that has not created food security. "There is a larger percentage of the population hungry now than in the 1960s," he said, adding that our modern food system is making us sick, causing diabetes, cancer, heart disease, high blood pressure, and more ills, and that not only in our diet, but in the effects of how we grow, store, process, and transport it and its temporary success based on the easy availability of cheap energy. "Abundant, cheap energy made the surge possible, but it's not true now."Ikerd said:

The economic growth of the industrial era is unsustainable, and not ever likely to be repeated. It was an aberration.