Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture

Kirschenmann: Backcasting to resilience

Back to Leopold Letter Winter 2011

By FRED KIRSCHENMANN, Leopold Center Distinguished Fellow

It comes down to this, friends: Can we keep ourselves fed? Can we save the stuff, the soil and water, of which we are made? All of us are just stopovers between soil and soil. - Wes Jackson, The Land Institute

Karl Stauber, president and CEO of the Danville Regional Foundation, has suggested that we have become an “instant-oriented” society. We tend to see all of our problems as challenges to be solved instantaneously, and all of our advantages as opportunities to be seized immediately. Such an instant-oriented culture, of course, assumes that we always know all we need to know, in an instant, to make wise decisions, and that we always can accurately predict that our instantaneous actions will serve our long-term interests. There is little evidence from history to substantiate those assumptions.

Unfortunately, such an instant-oriented scenario largely dominates our food and agriculture policy pursuits so now would seem to be a perfect time to rethink that strategy. We began that instantaneous practice in 1965 by instituting a “farm bill” every five years. It is a strategy that inevitably leads us to ascertain what will work productively and politically for the next five years.  By 2015 this will have been our policy strategy for 50 years!  ­

It would appear that this “instant-oriented” approach to shaping our food and farm policy was inaugurated to provide our nation with a “sustainable” food and agriculture plan. There is ample evidence to suggest that this approach has utterly failed to achieve that objective. This policy approach has contributed to an agriculture that has produced a thousand dead zones in our seas - one of the largest in the Gulf of Mexico - and seriously depleted the biological health of our soils. It also has contributed to the disintegration of our rural communities and seriously eroded one of the most important resources of a thriving agriculture - its human capital. Seventy-five percent of our total gross sales from agriculture (as of 2007) are now produced by just 192,442 farms, and 30 percent of our farmers are now over age 65 and only 6 percent are under age 35. (Duffy)

All of this is particularly disturbing when we anticipate the challenges confronting our food and agriculture enterprises in the decades ahead: the end of cheap energy, rapid depletion of mineral resources (particularly rock phosphate and potassium), decreasing supplies of fresh water, degradation of soils, and more unstable climates. These are just a few of the imminent challenges that our food and agriculture enterprises will need to address.  And they cannot be addressed using short-term, instant-oriented policy strategies.

In June 2009, The Land Institute based in Salina, Kansas, suggested an intriguing alternative to the current series of five-year plans. Based on information gathered from some of its own research scientists and from 10 meetings that the Institute sponsored coast-to-coast with farmers and other citizens, they proposed a “50-Year Farm Bill.” Instead of continuing with a process that develops a short-term policy every five years for 50 years, the 50-year farm bill would ask what changes need to be in place 50 years from now to achieve a resilient, “sustainable” food system, and then “backcast” from that point to determine what policies and research priorities need to be instituted every five years over that 50-year period to achieve its goal. 

The 50-year farm bill plan acknowledges some of the preliminary research that the Green Lands, Blue Waters project already has conducted, which can achieve some of the objectives for such a new future.  The work of the Green Lands, Blue Waters project (carried out by 17 universities and non-profit organizations and initiated by the Leopold Center almost a decade ago) and the research that The Land Institute has done during the past 35 years together provide a beginning template for practical directions that a “50-year” food and farm policy initiative could sponsor.

At the heart of this new design for our agriculture-of-the-future lies Aldo Leopold’s observation that “the true problem of agriculture, and all other land-use, is to achieve…permanence,” in other words, to achieve resilience. It is only a resilient, largely self-renewing agriculture that will provide us with a “sustainable” food system over the next 50 years.

References

Wes Jackson, 2011. “Between Soil and Soil,” The Progressive, December 2010/January 2011.

Karl Stauber.  Submitted by e-mail.

Mike Duffy.  Based on ERS 2007 farm census data, confirmed by e-mail.

Aldo Leopold, 1999. For the Health of the Land, Previously unpublished essays edited by J. Baird Callicott and Eric T. Freyfogle. Washington, DC, Island Press.

For a detailed description of the “50-year Farm Bill” plus a Wes Jackson and Wendell Berry’s opinion piece, “A 50-Year Farm Bill,” published in the New York Times on January 4, 2009, see www.landinstitute.org.

Back to Leopold Letter Winter 2011