Hello, everyone. My name is Charles Godfrey, director of the Oxford Martin School.
And welcome to our talk this evening. I'm delighted to say it's been given by Dr. Mike Hamm.
Mike is a visiting professor at the Oxford Martin School and is doing a lot of work on our programme on the future of food.
Mike is based at Michigan State University, where he is the See US professor of Sustainable Agriculture.
He's also a senior fellow at the Centre for Regional Food Systems, and he was founding director of the Centre for Regional Food Systems.
Mike was actually an old friend of us. He was here for six months in 2015, and it's always nice to see Mike back.
So, Mike, please come up and give you a talk. City region food systems potential for impacting planetary boundaries and food security.
Thanks, Mike. Well, thank you very much, and first, I want to thank Charles and all the people at the Oxford Martin School for letting me come here,
giving me a space to sit and allowing me to work.
It's always a pleasure to come and I'm having a great time and I will for the remainder of my time here.
So let us get started. What I want to do today is talk about city region food systems and why.
I think that it's important to consider these in the context of increasing sustainability and health impacts of the food system in a changing world.
And I'm going to focus on Michigan since that's my home and it's what I know best.
I debated between focussing on England and Michigan and decided that I don't know enough about England.
It would be a little bit hubris of me to try to speak about England forcefully,
so I'm going to talk about Michigan, and you can see if it applies to you or not.
And I want to start a little bit by just talking about the differences because there are there are many differences.
And one thing to keep track of is is that the Michigan England is about fifty thousand square miles.
Michigan is about fifty eight thousand square miles. So Michigan is a bit bigger.
It has, but England has fifty three million people in Michigan only has about 9.9, just under 10.
So you all have about five and a half to six times the population and less land space than we do.
And so that gives us some advantages. And I just want to give you an eye kind of context for Michigan.
For those of you who aren't exactly aware of where it is, where in the upper reaches of the Midwest,
we border four of the Great Lakes, so about 18 percent of the world's freshwater surrounds Michigan.
And then if we drill in a little bit the first,
the part that I'm really going to speak about is a tri county area that includes Michigan State University, includes Lansing, the state capital.
It includes our house and where we live.
And I'm focussing on this this tri county area because the 83 counties of Michigan are divided up into 12 regional planning commissions.
So these are government bodies that don't there's no elected officials there,
but they do get federal and state money with regards to transportation with regards to some
public housing stuff with regard to some issues of food security and some other things.
And so when we start thinking about planning in some kind of a regional context,
it makes sense to me to think about what government entities are there you can start to plan around.
And so we can kind of break it down to that and to give you an idea that little arrow you're going to see.
If you look in the kind of the upper reaches of that, you see that the tri county area includes Lansing.
It includes Michigan State University. The arrow points to where we live.
So that's our house. My wife, Lisa and I, we bought that in 2003 to give you an idea that's twenty five acres of land with a nice house.
And there was a small dairy barn in a four star horse barn on it.
The cost of that was less than the than the average cost of a detached house in Oxford in 2003.
So land prices are a bit less. Um, you can get a bit more for your money there.
And what it also means is is that we do have a lot of land relative to population, and that's an important consideration to keep track of.
The other thing to keep track of here is this When we think about regional and local in our context,
I know when I go to the when we go to Tesco or when we go to the farmer's market and there's an organic farmer that brings in
something typically right now is organic apples and some garlic and some things that can be stored and then organic food,
mostly from Spain and of course, Spain for you.
Seems like a distant place, but it's about half the distance that California is for us.
And so distance has also become a different type of thing to think about.
And when I think about a resilient food system, what I think about as a food system that has a range of different diversities,
a lot of people that I work with in the NGO world in Michigan, and when I was in New Jersey,
they're I'm going across the United States thinks that if everything were small farms and we could produce everything involved,
small farms be more sustainable, more resilient. I'm going to talk later about why I think that's not true.
But my point here is that I think diversity of scale is absolutely important. We need small farms, we need big farms.
We need meat medium scale farms to produce the tonnage of food that's needed for five hundred thousand people,
ten million people, 60 million people, or seven billion. We need a diversity of systems.
Again, many people and I'll talk about organic versus conventional a little bit later.
But many people argue that if it was everything was organic, everything would be fine.
And my feeling on this is is that we still don't know what is what is really sustainable.
And of course, the main characteristic that many people apply to sustainability is that it's a process and not a not an endpoint, not a product.
And so it's about continuous improvement and the way that we're going to move to an ever
more sustainable agriculture and food systems is to look at different types of systems.
That doesn't mean there. Not things right now about our current food system, we can say we should really get rid of that.
But it does mean that we're probably going to have a mixture as we move down the road.
And then diversity of production strategy and production predicts diversity of production points.
So right now, for example, I'll show you some images of California projections for climate down the road.
But half the domestic produce that's produced in the United States is grown in California,
almost all in the Central Valley, and the rest is grown all over the United States.
Something like eighty six percent of the country's almonds are produced in California.
So there's there's these. We have these production centres for a whole bunch of historical reasons both economic,
both climatological and environmental and technological developments.
But we probably need to diversify those. And that's one of the hallmarks of city region food systems.
Diversity of backgrounds Early on in the 20th century, there were ten hundreds of thousands more African-American farmers than there are today.
The number of African American farmers the United States has dropped by about ninety six percent since the early part of the 20th century.
And so one of the things, especially when in a place like Detroit, Michigan,
which now has seven hundred fifty thousand people and is 92 percent African-American.
One of the hallmarks for them of food sovereignty is that the producers of their food look more like them.
And so thinking about how do we move back to increase the diversity in our food system, both in production and in the supply chain is is critical.
How do we minimise external inputs?
And again, I'll talk about that in the context of city region food systems when we think about phosphorus and nitrogen.
And so we move on from there. So a lot of diversity is required and there's reasons for a lot of it.
And so I would argue that's simultaneously one of the things we need to do is to think about how do we reduce GWP star?
How do we use primarily green water for production and not blue water,
i.e. water from surface waters and underground aquifers, but rain fed agriculture?
How do we recycle nitrogen and phosphorus in a way that doesn't make us have to use tremendous amounts of energy
to produce nitrogen and add tremendous amounts of energy to restrict it to extract a non-renewable resource,
namely phosphorus? How do we allow for increased biodiversity?
How do we do some land sparing in addition to allowing our agricultural system to allow for more different biodiversity inside it?
And how do we increase renewable energy use in the food system?
We'll talk about that a little bit with respect to scale. And then on the other side, how do we increase increased livelihood potential?
We can think about that in a place like Michigan, where we have a number of small farmers, farmers of an acre or two acres, five acres.
But fundamentally, they're not making money and there has to be, if it's a household,
somebody in that households working off the farm to balance the books and probably to generate the health care for the family.
How do we alter dietary patterns towards more healthy and sustainable?
We'll talk about that, and then we need a backstop to food insecurity with a reduced necessity for it.
So we talk about the emergency feeding system in the United States, but it's really not an emergency feeding system.
It's a chronic feeding system. And it's a way that food manufacturers and in some cases,
farmers can move what essentially doesn't sell on the shelves in the supermarkets or
can't get to market into a way to get it to people who don't have enough food otherwise.
So how do we make that more of an emergency system and not a chronic system?
And I argue this will be increasingly difficult to do without city region food systems.
So for me, the data indicate that the food system can become part of the solution for environmental challenges rather than part of the problem.
And I'll talk about why I think that the two have a little bit later.
And the food system can be an instrument of human health, well-being, dignity and livelihood rather than destroying those things.
And again, we'll talk about that a bit. So I'm going to use the tri county area as a case study.
Ingham and Eaton County, or the three counties out of the eighty three in Michigan there, right central in the state to we'll see.
I guess it would be your left is if you go over eighty five miles from there, you hit Detroit.
And if you go the other direction, you go through Grand Rapids and you hit Lake Michigan.
If you go south about 40 miles, you hit the border of Indiana, so pretty much right in the lower centre part of the state.
Now why in Michigan? Why in the tri county area? Should we care about this?
Well, California, I mentioned, is the prime producer of vegetables. If we look at that, the three maps, what we see is increasing number.
Of course, darker is always bad when it comes to climate models and pictures.
And what we see is is that that red section of the middle gets darker and darker and darker as we move up towards the end of the 21st century.
That's central kind of oval ellipse that goes down the middle of the state is the Central Valley,
where about 90 percent of the produce and nuts that are grown in California are grown.
The other part about that is the climate change predictions predict that about 75 percent of the snowpack in the Sierra Madres will disappear.
They'll still get the same amount of precipitation, but it's going to come down as rain.
What does that mean?
That means that water runs off more quickly through when it comes down instead of being stored in the mountains for runs out in June,
July and August, when they need that rain, that rain fed irrigation for all those crops.
And so what that means is without thousands of literally thousands of dams to hold that water back in the Sierra Madres,
they're going to lose all that water and they're going to lose irrigation potential.
We can look at Michigan, and again in all of these darker is is worse in many ways.
We see the projected change in average temperature goes up.
Protected change in the number of nights below thirty two degrees goes up.
What this means in the northeast northwestern part of our lower peninsula, where most of the tart cherries in the United States are grown,
about 80 percent of the US tart cherries are grown is that there's going to be less ice on the Lake Michigan,
less ice on Lake Michigan means less of a moderating effect on temperatures in land based right around there.
It also means the potential for a late frost, and in 2002 there was a late frost in Michigan that killed 95 percent of the cherry crop up there.
And it was after that actually that Michigan started losing its pre-eminence globally and
tart tart cherry production and a lot more crops started getting grown in Eastern Europe.
And then we see the number of change change in the number of days over 90
degrees Fahrenheit and the change in the number of days of heavy precipitation.
Now, with all of that said, it was a funny little kind of cartoon video that I found on From Popular Science,
a wonderful peer reviewed journal that looked at.
I was kidding about that. By the way, if you don't know it, that looked at kind of where's the place to be in the United States?
They kind of on this map they put in, OK, all the places where sea level is going to rise and is going to flood out areas,
all the places where tornadoes are slated to increase, all the places where hurricanes are slated to increase.
All the places where there could be an increase in mosquito borne infections because of increasing temperatures.
And when they got done putting all those things on the map,
what they found out was that Michigan and Wisconsin will probably be the two places to be by 2100 the United States.
So there you go. So I'm holding on to my land right now.
The other thing that I think is is that we need to think seriously. And of course, I'm not the only one to say this about biogeochemical cycles.
We've typically had a source to sink mentality for the last hundred years or so.
Right. We make nitrogen from propane and from nation gas in the air.
We extract phosphorus from mines in Florida.
We spread it and it goes the products that come off of that land go to cities and people eat it and then people defaecate and urinate.
And all that stuff goes to a treatment plant and it goes out into the waterways.
In some cases, now in cities, it gets treated and gets alkaline colonised and it gets treated.
It's put on the land is sewage sludge. But for the most part, we take it.
We put it on to land. We eat it, we consume it, we defaecate, we urinate and we get rid of it.
And so what we've done is created a very energetically expensive process for building our crops.
The other part of it is water stress.
So many parts of the United States right now are water stressed that area in the lower part of Lake Michigan is right around in and around Chicago.
But you look at the Southwest Arizona down there, where in the wintertime in January and February,
90 percent of the romaine lettuce produced in the United States comes from Arizona.
And it's all fed on. It's all irrigated crops, and most of that irrigation is either flood for or overhead irrigation,
the two most inefficient forms of irrigation there are and the population demographics because of all immigration,
everything there will probably be an explosion of population demographics there that's going to need water anyway.
So our ability to continue doing that in these water stressed areas is going to be sorely challenged.
And on the other hand, we've got this rise increasing rise of obesity rates.
The United States again. Darker is worse. So you can look across the South and across the Midwest and across the eastern seaboard in the lower part.
And what you see is that obesity rates that go anywhere from 30 percent to somewhere above 50 percent.
And so dealing with that and all and all of the non-communicable diseases that come along with that and their associated and not associated with it,
obesity is part of the food systems challenge. OK, so what will or at least what might be?
Well, I would argue that, for example,
one of the things we're going to see is increasing challenge of production centres, example chocolate and Cote d'Ivoire.
Well, the Mars I was talking to the research director at Mars Candy Company a few years ago at a conference,
and they were working with climate scientists to identify points around the globe.
That might be good chocolate producing areas because they're going to lose the current chocolate producing areas because of climate change.
Bananas in Central America. I'll show you another slide next slide that the U.S. gets the vast the majority of their bananas from Guatemala.
Now, climate change in indicates case that in fact, there might be an increase in the growing range of bananas in Guatemala.
However, they're going to be water stress. There's going to be an increasing population that needs water and many.
Many of those farmers bananas as a secondary crop to something that probably they won't be able to grow as climate changes,
so they may give up the bananas because they can't grow the other thing.
And then almonds in California, which I mentioned earlier, then we've got the challenge of shifting production centre.
So let's take chocolate.
For example, we may find that there's a great place to produce chocolate somewhere else, but there's no cultural capital there to be able to do it.
There's no knowledge system within the indigenous communities, within the people that live there to grow those particular crops.
We may be able to find the ecological environmental characteristics, but we may not find the cultural characteristics.
And I'll show in Michigan how, because of the diversity of agriculture that we have right now,
we're actually in a very good position to think about diversity, diversifying our agriculture even more.
And then there's a challenge for what's next in the current production centres. For example, right now,
I think everybody in here is probably heard about the Mexico U.S. border and the things that this person we call our president is trying to do.
And what we find is that most of those refugees that are at the border, Guatemalan and they mostly come from the cities in Guatemala.
But that's only their proximal location. A few years before that, before they came to the cities, they were farmers.
And several years of drought drove them off the land,
and it drove them into the cities and the crime rates in the cities and the lack of work drove them out of the cities.
So they arrive at the US-Mexico border. They're climate refugees.
And the estimation is there could be as many as as 20 million climate, five million climate refugees over the next 20 years in Central America.
So if we think about a place like Guatemala, where it's the Twenty Eighteen,
the leading U.S. banana supplier with one almost two billion metric tons, forty five percent of our total U.S. imports.
Now the thing about all those imports to keep track of there was a study a couple of
years ago that looked at the relationship of international trade to biodiversity,
and what they showed on a global level was that about 30 percent of the decrease in biodiversity could be attributed to international trade.
So one of the things I think we have to give thoughts about and what you'll see when I talk about city region food systems specifically,
this is I'm not arguing that every city region should produce 100 percent of its food supply.
Whatever you can grow, they're good for you and whatever you can't, you got to give up.
What I am saying is is that we need to massively rethink the extent to which we engage in global trade.
The extent to which we rely on production centres across the globe,
whether it's Spain or whether it's California or whether it's Guatemala for producing specific items.
And how do we diversify those and bring biodiversity back in line with international trade
playing the part that it can in restoring global biodiversity and not destroying it?
So when we think about that ways to reduce the environmental issues, how do we bring them back within the boundary limits?
Well, the first thing, of course, is that we need to think about dietary pattern change.
And of course, the thing we always hear about is we need to reduce meat consumption and we'll
talk about that more when I talk about the tri county area specifically.
But the other thing to keep keep track of is all those excess calories that we consume.
I did a calculation for a paper.
I wrote about six or eight about a year ago now and calculated that all the excess calories consumed in the United States,
if you convert that to corn syrup, sugar to corn sugar and corn oil,
it's about what did I come up with two and a half million acres of corn just to produce the excess calories,
just to eat the excess calories that we do on a on a yearly basis in the United States.
So it's both it's it's all those things and our production practises.
There's no question that the way that we produce food has a big impact on the environment.
We'll talk more about that in a few minutes. Our supply chain practises part of this is about waste.
So part of the supply chain price when we think about things like fruits and vegetables is quality standards when they go into the store.
And so those quality standards means that a lot of stuff either sits in the field or it gets rejected
at the point of delivery because it doesn't meet the quality standards for whatever reason.
That's just one example. Then there's consumer handling practises, where in the developed world here in the UK, EU, the United States,
something like 30 to 40 percent of our food is wasted, and most of that is at the level of the consumer.
We buy too much. We put in the refrigerator, we forget about it. It gets mouldy or it goes soft and we throw it out.
At least here it goes into a recycling bin and gets picked up once a week.
I don't know of any.
There's probably a couple of places in the United States that do that, but I don't know if there's none in Michigan that I know of.
I've talked about production centres in Duke and diversifying those,
and I can talk about that again here and then we think about the reward structures.
The example that you probably aren't familiar with is is that in the United States, we have county fairs and state fairs in every agriculture.
All county in the United States. So there's a county fair once a year, and there's 4-H programmes where the 4-H student high school students,
whether it's goats or sheep or cows or pigs or vegetables or whatever it might be,
they produce things and they take it to the fair and they get sorted and graded and everything like that.
Well, they do this with with the adult farmers as well.
And so, for example, Michigan Milk Producers Association gives out an award every year for the top dairy producer.
Well, the top dairy producers are determined by how many pounds of milk does the cow produce per year.
So in Michigan now, the average is about twenty six thousand pounds in a conventional dairy milk per year.
And that cow lasts about two point six patricians, and then they're made into hamburger from McDonalds.
And what if we in fact, gave the reward based on something else like, Oh, I don't know, something like pounds of pesticide use per pound of milk?
That might be an and want to look at. I'll show you a bit about that in a minute.
So the point of that is is that the reward structures that we have in agriculture forest are guaranteed
the force of production stick strategy and not a strategy that takes everything else into account.
And finally, there's future protein sources, which we can talk about a little bit. And then there's Polly as policy incentives for all of this.
Much of this, there are policy disincentives.
There's disincentives for transitioning to organic, for example, because you've got a three year waiting period.
And during that period, first of all, you can't market is organic. And secondly, your yields are probably down a fair bit.
And so you get a double whammy on an income. So there's a number of things we can do.
And so what does this mean practically for production practises?
Well, it means we minimise external inputs. Again, I'm not saying organic is the be all end all, but what I am saying.
There is a global study that came out a while back that looked at could we feed the world globally with organic?
And the answer was yes. But and the but part is, is that the the U.S. is we can if three other things happen simultaneously, reduce meat consumption,
reduce weight by at least 50 percent, reduce waste by at least 50 percent and nitrogen would be a problem.
So how do we do that? So the point is is that we could massively increase organic production and other types of production that minimise inputs.
We can think about creating circularity instead of that nitrogen and phosphorus being a source to say, how do we make that a cyclical process?
We can increase soil carbon, I'll talk and I'll show you a couple of slides in a minute of some data around intensive pastoring as a strategy
for increasing soil carbon and organic practises for road crop production as a way to increase soil carbon.
We can spare land and work with nature and allow for enhanced biodiversity.
I've got a colleague at MSU, Doug Landis in Entomology, who's done a lot of work with the blueberry growers here on the western side of the state.
For the most part, we grow a lot of blueberries. And what he's found is is that if you have native habitat around the blueberries, in fact,
you keep the native a higher degree of native pollinators around,
and they're more accessible to pollinate the blueberry crop when it comes into flower.
And we minimise the use of blue water, which I talked about a little bit.
We increase renewable energy use, and we'll talk about that a bit because I think that one of the things that's probably true,
although this is where I kind of jumped down a rabbit hole, that's not my expertise,
is that it's probably possible to think about using renewable energy at a smaller scale than it is at a scale of five or ten thousand acres.
There are there's one company in the United States of working with a hydrogen tractor,
working at developing a hydrogen tractor that could be used on larger scale commercial farms for real crop production.
The problem with that is is my understanding from talking to people is hydrogen is only about eight percent
efficient in terms of transferring the energy of the Sun into the energy of traction for with hydrogen.
And we can eliminate topsoil erosion. There's interesting research from Iowa State University looking at on farms,
taking about eight sites on farms and saying what we have to do to eliminate the flow of sediment and phosphorus into the lakes and streams that go
to the Mississippi bays that go into the Mississippi River down to the Gulf of Mexico and along with nature and create the dead zone every summer,
the massive dead zone. And what they found on these farms is that if you took the right 10 percent of land out of production,
it reduced the flow by 85 percent of sediment and phosphorus in action.
So in fact, it's and that's just basically the most charitable soils, and you put that into permanent cover crops.
So this stuff, it's also serves as a trapping resource. But anyway, the point is is that there is ways to eliminate topsoil erosion.
But we again have to get away from the productiveness mentality that says, as Earl Butts said at one point back when he was secretary of agriculture,
plant hedgerow to hedgerow and then take out the hedgerows and keep planting.
So we need to think about these biogeochemical cycles.
And of course, in the US, we have a massive problem with phosphorus and we have a problem with nature and in terms of excess usage,
excess losses and excess levels of pollution because of it.
There was a recent I'll digress for a second. I can go down a rabbit hole and I try not to do it too much.
But there was a case, a court case in Des Moines, Iowa, about a year ago that was decided.
And in that case,
the city of Des Moines in the Water Authority of Des Moines sued the farmers of Iowa for pollution of the fresh water that they were using.
So they had to put in huge, extensive purification plant to take the chemicals, the Petro,
the agrochemicals and nitrate and first-in-the-nation phosphorus out of the water supply.
The reason for that is because when the when the Clean Water Act was passed,
the United States agriculture was exempted because it's not considered a point source pollution.
However, most of those farms in Iowa are tiled, which means that the water,
the water that comes down from rain is collected in these tiles, and it eventually gets into one big pipe and comes out into a waterway.
And so the city of Des Moines was claiming that that was in fact a point source.
Well, they lost. So we'll see where that goes. But with phosphorus, one of the things to think about is that phosphorus is a non-renewable resource.
It is a mined resource and it is limited right now.
For example, the United States is relatively self-sufficient.
We produce about 97 percent of the phosphorus that we use on a yearly basis across the board,
most of which is used in agriculture that's supplied mostly from Florida probably has about 20 or 30 years left.
You all all the farms here probably are getting their phosphorus from Morocco,
Morocco, and that area has the vast majority of other phosphorus resources.
But some estimates estimate that by about 20 70 will hit peak phosphorus.
Now that's very different. Difficult to decide because a lot of this information is proprietary and what they release is not necessarily accurate.
But suffice it to say that if we keep using phosphorus like we are at some point down the road, some generation beyond us is going to find out.
Oops. And remember, phosphorus is absolutely essential for life.
Most of you have probably had at least one biochemical course and you know about 8p a.
You know that the key is phosphorus, and there's no life without phosphorus,
so this is work from Dana Cordell in Australia, who's probably one of the best people regarding phosphorus.
And she talks about kind of how much phosphorus would we be using in a business as usual case, which you can see there is the top line.
And then as we start doing some things with efficiency in agriculture,
in the food chain, et cetera, and then how do we start to think about recycling it,
whether it's animal manure, human manure and what we get to is a usage rate for phosphate rock that's actually very low.
If we get to that usage rate for phosphate rock, we extend the lifetime that we have for phosphorus by a large part,
by a large number of decades and probably centuries.
So phosphorus and phosphorus is one of those things where we can precipitate it.
Some treatment plants are now precipitating it into a compound called Trouvait,
and that can be packaged and reused, but it's not being done broadly yet.
And so there's a lot of phosphorus that, in fact, is being wasted and in and the way that we currently raise animals, the United States predominantly,
which is finishing in large animal confinement facilities, there's nowhere for that, for that to go except as a pollutant.
So we start to think about nitrogen phosphorus from city regions. The question becomes, Well, how much can we actually get?
We know phosphorus is non-renewable and essential for life, and we know that nitrogen is energetically costly.
So let's think about human waste phosphorus.
On average, there's about six tenths of a kilogram per person per year that comes out in the urine in the faeces.
About two thirds in both for phosphorus, a nation about two thirds in the urine, about one third in the faeces.
So there's about in a place like the Lansing area, there's about with four hundred and seventy thousand people there.
There's about two hundred and seventy two metric tons of phosphorus per year, or about six point three kilograms per acre,
which on an average level means about eight percent of the of the amount that's conventionally used.
And their estimates are we can probably reduce the amount that's conventionally used.
We think about nitrogen,
there's about four and a half kilograms per person per year of kilogram of nitrogen that's excreted again two thirds urine, one third faeces.
That's about 20 100 metric tons of nitrogen per year, and that's about twenty five point three kilograms per acre,
which would be about 16 percent of the conventional usage. And again, that's the current conventional uses.
That's not necessarily the uses that we have to have if we have better crop rotations with legumes and other kinds of things.
And so why expand organic and why expand pasture?
So let's talk about that a little bit.
Well, as I said, as I mentioned before, if we look at pesticide usage, I this data actually is not available online anymore.
The federal government quit posting this data at some point in the past. So this is somewhat old data.
But on average, in Michigan, you have about two pounds per acre of pesticides applied for soybeans and almost three pounds per acre for corn wheat.
Not so much pastors about point zero seven eight.
So again, if we start thinking about raising ruminant animals on pasture and the relative production say per pound for
the for the amount of pesticides you have to apply versus feeding them corn and soybeans to raise them,
it's vastly different.
So one of the things to think about is is that if we if we dramatically want to reduce pesticide use without everything going organic,
one way to do that is think about so let's reduce the amount of acres of corn and soybeans that we produce.
And by the way, pesticides take about five point four kilograms of CO2.
They produce about five point four kilograms of CO2 equivalent per every kilogram that's produced.
So they're fairly energetic. Nitrogen fertiliser produces something like six point five.
Now we've also become very locked in, so I'd like to preface this slide by saying that one of the truisms in research today,
and I'm sure that all of you can identify with this, is unless you're in the social sciences and your research doesn't cost much.
You only get you only can you only get answers to the questions you ask.
And you can only ask the questions you can get funded to ask. And so what questions you can get funded is a real is a real issue.
And so, for example, the United States, if you're doing research on optimising corn and soybean production,
are you you're doing research on optimising by optimising milk production in a cow that's fed corn and soybean in this very highly specialised diet.
Funding is still tight. There's there's hundreds of millions of dollars there.
If you take a combination of government and industry, if you want to look at it,
how do I how do I optimise the environmental attributes in the production of cows on pasture?
Well, that's another story.
It's very hard to get funding, so some people say, Well, you know, if you can't, you can't get enough production in this system to make it work.
And my answer to that is, is that if we were doing.
If we had done the same amount of parallel research and pasture based systems versus confinement feeding systems,
and we had spent about the same amount of money optimising both systems, I'd really be interested to see what that data looked like even without that.
And this is Jason Roundtree, who's a colleague of mine in animal sciences and his grad student,
Paige Stanley did a study where they looked at soil carbon over a four year period and intensively managed beef pasture system.
They've got a 40 acre site at one of our outlying research stations and many of the the carbon fluxes in ruminant systems.
They tend to look at what's released, they don't look at what's captured. And so it's really gross release.
It's not net release now. So if we do a gross release and we look at soil carbon flux, what we see is is that without soil carbon flux,
what we see is is that the production of methane CO2 or CO2 equivalents in a feedlot system is less than it is in a pasture based system.
If we add in soil carbon flux accounting for the what's soil carbon flux in the corn production and soybean production,
et cetera, it's basically the same. If we do the same experiment in these in these intensively managed rotational grazing systems,
what we find that is in fact, like I said, the CO2 equivalent fluxes higher in the pasture system.
But if we now take into account soil carbon flux, in fact, there's a there's a fairly large net carbon sequestration in that system.
And so now that other people have said, well, but this doesn't last for long.
The reality is we don't know the answer to that,
how long it would last in these intensively managed systems because we don't have that long term of the data.
But let's say that it could potentially last for 20 years. That's what some people have argued that it could be.
Well, the other piece of that is is that there's a sampling error there as you go down the road for decades because for soil carbon sampling,
you're typically doing a 30 centimetre depth. But as you build soil carbon, you build the depth of topsoil.
As you build the depth of topsoil you've forgotten part of the first part of the the end of the first 30 centimetres you were you were measuring,
you're measuring a new 30 centimetres.
So in fact, we don't know, and there's no reason to believe based on kind of a millennium of topsoil development in the Great Plains area,
where some of those soils in Iowa were 18 feet thick when when they started ploughing them, now they're barely there.
There's no reason to believe that you can't get Long-Term soil carbon sequestration these systems.
That doesn't mean we shouldn't eat less meat.
It does mean there's a way possibly to have some ruminant meat in the diet and have it be beneficial for the environment in the long term.
And there's the possibility of virtual fencing with RFID tags on the animals,
so you don't have to go out there and change gates all the time and move cows from different parts of the pasture all the time.
You can do it electronically. Those are still kind of in development, mostly out of Australia.
And then we've got soil carbon build-up in an organic system.
This is a cropping system at the Rodeo of Farming Systems trial and Kutztown, Pennsylvania.
From eighty five to ninety five, the system still goes, but over that 15 years, they monitor soil carbon change.
And what they found right here is is that in both the manure based nutrient addition system and the legume based rotational system,
there was a net gain of a significant increase in soil carbon, whereas in the conventional there was not.
So even with some corn and soybean production, there's ways to think about how can we make that more beneficial rather than less.
So now let's take a little bit of Michigan agricultural bit of context. So there's about forty seven thousand farms in Michigan.
This data came out about a month ago, so I've been madly trying to calculate it.
Since then, the latest census of AG just came out. There was about nine point seven million acres of farms.
I apologise for this, not in hectares. It's in acres, the tri county area that I'm talking about.
We've got about twenty nine hundred farms and about six hundred eighteen thousand acres of farms.
If you look at the farm size there, there's a great diversity of size.
We've got a number of farms that are above 1000 acres around us.
There's a the Australians are about five or six thousand acres of land on two sides of us as part of their land.
On one side of us, we've got Monsanto and on one side we've got my shoes.
So we're surrounded by farms, and only about 76000 of those are certified organic right now.
We think about field crops, we've got about two million acres of corn, two and a half million acres of corn,
a half million acres of wheat, two and a half million acres of soybeans.
There's a pretty good most farms to a pretty good job of a corn soybeans rotation and or a corn wheat soybean rotation,
except when corn went up to $7 a bushel. Then suddenly there was two years of corn before they went to the next crop.
And in some cases, three. But now corn prices are down, so they're back to a rotation.
Now, if we think about fruits and vegetables, we've got a we've got a huge diversity in Michigan of production.
Our Orchard Acres and our berry acres across the state is about one hundred twenty five thousand acres.
Only about 300 in the tri county area. And what you see is that the big three are apples, tart cherries and blueberries.
Interestingly enough, the apples until about 2002 2003, the apples almost all went to juice and sauce and then Chinese concentrate.
Chinese concentrate started coming into the U.S. market. And the market for their apples collapsed almost overnight.
So they had to figure out how to go to a fresh market. Apple the problem with apples There's two things you got to deal with for fresh market apples.
In that situation, you've got to have different varieties. It's not the same varieties that you use for sauce and juice,
and you've got to have control atmosphere storage so that you can extend their shelf life into about March or so, March or April.
And they've done that now. About now, about 30 percent of the crop is fresh market in the state.
Tart cherries I mentioned before blueberries would grow a lot in the sandy soils on the west side of the state.
And then we've got vegetables again. We've got a lot of vegetable acreage is we've got a lot of asparagus.
An interesting story there because again, around 2000 until about 2003,
almost every acre of asparagus went to canned asparagus coins, canned asparagus.
And if consumption was about a half a pound a year and going down and they were getting a nickel a pound from the processor,
they were losing money on every pound because they had the processors had a captive market.
Well, they realised that they could start selling it fresh because now that was kind
of when the by Michigan was starting to take hold by local kind of thing.
And they used the same varieties and the harvest was almost the same, with very little changeover for them to go to fresh.
I just just look in the other day and they got last year they got about 90 cents a pound for fresh market asparagus, cucumbers.
We got thirty four thousand acres of cucumbers. Ninety five percent of those go to dill for pickles.
And then we've got 50 thousand acres of potatoes, almost all of which go to Frito-Lay for potato chips.
So what does this mean, the good and the not so good?
Well, the first part of it is we grow wide and raise a wide variety of things, so there's a lot of skills amongst farmers and at our land.
Grant University Michigan State,
we've had to maintain a large research base around a wide variety of things to satisfy the needs of all those different farmers.
We've got good climatic conditions for a wide range of crops and for some crops,
we're probably going to go into better climatic conditions than we do now, especially for some nuts.
We've got a greater diversity in marketing strategies than we did 20 years ago.
There's much more direct marketing there. There was then there's much more fresh market farming for like apples and asparagus.
And there's also much less antagonism by the traditional AG commodity groups towards
organic and alternative marketing alternative production than there was in,
say, 2000 small acreage. Farmers are numerous, but they're not necessarily productive, profitable and they're not producing tonnage.
And there's a challenge to that tonnage that's needed.
So I always I always like to say to people when they say we can do everything like this or like this,
I'm going to say, OK, how do you get to the tonnage in Lansing with four hundred seventy thousand people?
Right now, we need about 200 million pounds of vegetables in one hundred and thirty one million pounds of fruit a year.
That's based on current consumption. If people eat the way the dietary guidelines suggest they do,
we need 300 million and two hundred million a half a million half a billion pounds of produce.
I've never come up with a way on how to get that from one acre farms. That doesn't mean they're not important.
So consuming more. All right. There's a challenge to doing.
It's falls to just give you an idea if everything were eight to eight tenths of a hectare, an acre of production of fruits and vegetables.
We currently have one hundred ninety four thousand farms across the country that produce fruits and vegetables.
If we if everything was from one acre, we need five point six million. And by 2050, we need seven million.
Everything was 10 times that on 10 acres. We still need more than a half a million,
so we need to increase by three hundred thousand three hundred fifty thousand farms if and if people were consuming the way they should.
We'd have to increase by that many. So my point in this is is that we can't do everything small.
We've got to have small, medium and large,
and we've got to have a strategy where farmers can move from small to medium scale and into large scale if they want to.
And in the United States, USDA defines scale by by sales and and a large scale farm for fruits and vegetables.
Fruits or vegetables would be selling over five hundred thousand dollars a year, which sounds like a lot.
But in the scheme of things, it's actually not OK. What's next?
OK, so what does this means for farmers? It means we need to. We need a variety of needs for training, land and financing.
There are actually a lot of young people in Michigan and across the United States that would like to go into farming now.
Many of them have no idea what that means.
And so luckily, a lot of a lot of universities and a lot of the land grants have student farms now where students can work for a summer out,
there are two summers. And many of them get the idea. You know, this is hot, hard work and maybe not what I want to do.
Others get the idea that this is what I want to do. Many of them come from, they come at it from an environmental background.
They're interested in saving the environment and sustainability and all that, and they learn that that's in fact hard.
But they're interested. But they don't come from a farming background.
They're suburban or urban backgrounds.
They need a lot of time to develop skills, and they need land because they often don't have land in their hip pocket.
They can't get it from mom and dad, and they need financing, which is often hard.
They need to weigh of scale up without significant increases in labour.
I think we need a much greater impact input on mechanisation, including robots for small and medium scale farms.
That is scale appropriate and cost appropriate for that scale.
The biggest problem that organic farmers face when they're doing produce is weeds and waiting by hand is not fun.
And waiting mechanically is not necessarily easy. Not necessarily all the equipment's there, but nice robots could do that.
And we need electric based implements. And I did some some calculations to think about home economics on the farm.
What would it mean for a farm in our tri county area to be able to support the
household without having to have off farm jobs and have decent health care?
Well, the median income for a Michigan family is about sixty nine thousand US dollars.
I calculated how much and how much would have to be set aside on an annual basis so that 40 years from now,
when they're sixty five, they can retire and their retirement plan pulling out four percent a year,
which is what everybody says to do to make it sustainable into the future that they would they would then have 70 percent of their income,
which is what's estimated you need in retirement. To do that, they have to put about twenty one thousand dollars a year into that plan.
Remember, we don't have federal pension plans for everybody, for people, and we don't have federal national health care to speak of right now.
And so at MSU, they put they pay about sixteen thousand dollars a year from my me and my family to have health care.
So if I had those all up, you got to look at it at an op ed income for that,
for that farm of about one hundred seven thousand dollars, that's after expenses.
So that's what we need to work towards for families to actually be viable farming.
So if we think about the land balance, then in the tri county area, oops,
we've got about four hundred ninety five thousand acres of production currently.
Well, if we if I look at and we've got if I look at the conventional column and I say given the population of four hundred and seventy
thousand people and given what is recommended for us to consume in grains and fruits and vegetables and protein and dairy,
how many acres does it take to produce those for that 470000 people?
And those are the numbers I came up with the totals about three hundred twenty four
thousand acres out of that four hundred and ninety five if it were all done organically.
And I used a notion of 80 percent yield relative to conventional.
There's some data that indicates that's pretty good, but there's some other data that indicates that after about 10 years,
the yields may actually not be different between the two. And over time, the yield difference tends to collapse.
We'll go with 80 percent, then it needs about four hundred five thousand.
If we took all of that protein and I calculated all his meat for this at this point.
And dairy and put it into pasture production, it would be about four hundred forty thousand acres.
So you can say we use basically the bulk of that for the production of the local food supply.
And again, this is accounting for if all the food, if all the food system was localised and I'm not arguing that should be the case.
But this gives an idea of what are the boundary conditions of acreage. And then I say, Well, what if we reduce the meat?
And so what if we reduced the meat to 20 percent meat, an 80 percent dry beans?
If we do that, we've reduced the percentage of total acreage use from 65 percent to 30 percent.
If we do it with 20 percent meat and 80 percent seeds, I did sunflowers.
It's about 30 percent. If we mix beans and sunflowers, it's about 30 percent.
Thirty one percent. So in any case, the point of that is if we reduce meat from our current consumption patterns to 20 percent of that,
which still allows us to have meat basically as a garnish,
every every dinner if you want to or have it go crazy one or two two nights a week, we can use half.
We go from 60 percent of the farmland to 30 percent. This often assumes no food waste beyond typical processing in fruits and vegetables.
For example, I've accounted for the processing waste, like when you pour an apple and the core gets tossed away, et cetera.
OK. So what could be done with those three hundred thousand acres that we could save, that we would have left over?
Well, we could use it for biodiversity enhancement. We could use it for non-food products like plastics and fuels and fibre.
We could use it for erosion elimination. We could use our forest products,
but we could use it for emergency preparedness in cooperation with other city regions and have some some things on hand for when things go wrong.
And we could export to other reasons internationally and globally. Obviously, there could be a combination of these things.
The point of that is is that in that city region, first of all, now we've got recycling of nitrogen and phosphorus.
We've got a reduced amount of meat consumption.
We've got anchorages that can be used for many different things beyond what they're being used for now.
And we still got and we've got a healthy food supply now in Michigan.
Of course, we're seasonally challenged. There's when we can harvest tomatoes.
The grain is when we can do it outside. The simple is when we can do it and not heated high tunnel.
So you get about an extra month and a half on each end. If you take something like spinach, we can basically get it all year.
If you take something like apples, we can get them for a good part of the year,
fresh out of off the tree and then stored in controlled atmosphere storage.
And the season when we're not getting apples, other things come in like cane fruits.
And so so the point of this is, is that we of course, have a fairly short growing season and it does get cold.
We had four days in January when luckily we were here, when it was minus forty five centigrade in Michigan.
And they closed our public school for four days and then closed the university for three days,
which is the first time they've ever closed it for more than one day at a time since 1855.
It was cold, but unheated hoop houses provide a great opportunity.
These are structures that some of you may be familiar with. They look like a greenhouse, but there's no fossil fuel energy going into those.
All the heat captures from the sun and there's no auxiliary light. Next up, we can move to his greenhouses.
After that, we can move to no sun systems. Please don't get me started on those.
We did a LCA on hoop house production of lettuce in January versus getting it from California.
Rachel Plawecki, who was an undergraduate presidential fellow working with me, did this research,
and what we found was the the the the CO2 equivalents equivalent CO2 equivalent per hoop house production was about 0.2.
Relatively speaking, getting it from California was about one notice, all because of transportation.
The production was about the same, but refrigerated truck transportation is costly.
If we add heat into it, it skyrockets. If we move to an indoor system, it really skyrockets.
Tomatoes are similar if we do it and if we do it. In California, it's about point six.
We do it in a hoop house. For those extra two months, we get two and a half to three months we get.
It's about half that. We add in heat. It jumps.
We add in electricity. It really jumps because you've got to put all that electricity to grow all the vegetative matter before you get to the roof.
As with your well, you're still using a look. No, no, no.
Not if we tell you what. Ask me that question afterwards. OK? OK, now when we talk about opportunities and livelihoods,
we did a study in 2008 when Michigan was really in the doldrums economically and was was the government was just haemorrhaging money and was in debt.
And we looked at how could Michigan, the Michigan food system, be part of the solution?
So we just modelled what if people eight went from current fruit and vegetable consumption to public health recommendations?
And what if when those things were available fresh in Michigan, people got them from Michigan?
So not all year and all that kind of stuff.
What we found then, was that across the state, for 10 million people, we need about thirty seven thousand more acres of production.
And it would it would put two hundred and eleven million dollars of net income into farmer's hands,
as after taking into account the corn and soybeans that are taken out of production for those thirty seven acres, thirty seven thousand acres.
And there's eight hundred more off farm jobs because of the spill-over effects.
OK, so I'm going to finish here because I've gotten the high sign, but what's not been considered today, probably more than has been considered.
I started out with 100 PowerPoint slides and kept knocking it down and knocking it down so we can talk for seven hours, if you wish.
Supply chains, although there's potential for electric vehicles, are greater for short haul, I think.
And there are coming online now, some short haul electric vehicles, and so that's going to be an interesting one to follow.
Processing we have I haven't talked about at all.
Preservation one driver of household energy use has increased number and size of refrigerators and freezers, and there's many others.
So with that, I'm going to close and we can have a lot of questions. I just want to finish with this slide.
This is my grandma Lucy and the slide with her, with the hat,
with the the top one on the corner is her and I when she was ninety four and that was in the first microbrewery in St. Louis,
which is where I was raised and where she lived, and she loved it.
After she had the first one, Lisa and I took her there. She said, Can I have another one?
And we said, Grandma, we're not letting you drive anyway. So sure.
The bottom line is when she was one hundred and four and then the other one with the little hat on is when she was a hundred and ten.
That was her 110th birthday. She died last August. She died.
When did she die?
Yeah, last August at one hundred and ten, and she lived a full life, and I think she probably lived a sustainable life as anyone could when she died.
She was living in one room and we cleared it out in 20 minutes.
So she lived a good life, Lucy. OK, so we'll end with that and we can talk questions if you want.
Thanks, Mike, for a really fascinating tour. Questions now just to remind you that we are being broadcast.
So remember that when you ask a question and let me tell you, the gentleman who asked the questions are Let me go first.
Please tell me questions. I can line up a couple.
Oh yes, thank you for a very interesting presentation.
So I have two questions one question you had two slides with usage of pesticides.
Mm-Hmm. Was that mainly roundup or was that a mixture?
It's a mixture, and that's the total of all pesticides. Just so you know, OK?
Because in terms of soy, for instance, as far as I know, Roundup, this is the main pesticide.
But anyway, the second question is concerning indoor farming using this fund, skyscrapers and things like that.
Mm-Hmm. Which has a huge advantage of cutting out transportation and transaction losses.
So I'd love you to tell us a bit more about that and your thoughts about that.
OK, do you want to take a few questions? Yeah, yeah.
Yeah. So I'll be quite honest with you. With respect to the pesticide.
I did that on that Excel spreadsheet so long ago, I can't remember the exact list,
but I know it was not just one thing for any of them, but I can't tell you kind of how much of each was it?
So I just know that's the kind of total number. Now, with respect to indoor and vertical farming.
Very interesting question because I know that you know this here at Columbia University,
published the book on vertical farming and started talking about kind of building skyscrapers to produce wheat and produce corn and everything else.
And so I'll just go on record as saying, I think that's the silliest idea I've ever heard.
And I'll tell you why we can use rain.
And when you when I talk with with people who are building vertical farm businesses in
the United States and I've been on a panel with a couple of them and chatted with them,
their argument is is that when you bring up the issue of energy, they say, Well,
you know, at some point we'll have enough renewable energy to do that, OK?
But I look at, you know, this computer we're using and our phones and these lights that are on.
And the thing I say to myself is that should really be our first priority for renewable energy.
Now if you talk, if you if you talk to maybe your are you in the renewable energy field?
So am I going to say somebody is going to get me in big trouble? Probably. So, OK, so I'll get myself in trouble.
I think it's going to be a long time before we get to sufficient renewable energy to do all the things we have
to do with electricity and then to do the things that we need to do with electricity like transportation.
And my my basic argument is why take something free away and add something that's not free?
So indoor vertical farming, we eliminate the sun and then we substitute renewable energy, let's say for it.
OK, now I'm not as convinced about the transportation issue as as you're making it out.
That's another argument, I think for city region food systems is we do have land in outlying areas and they're not that far from the cities.
New York's a whole different issue. I don't know how we think New York.
I've got friends here from New York, but in a place like Lansing, when I take that three county area,
Lansing is kind of the population centre of that, that tri county area.
There is no place it's about it's more than about 20 miles, maybe twenty five miles from Lansing.
And now I realise that's going to takes energy to transport, but you've got the Sun.
There's no reason to eliminate it. We can do.
Now, the thing that we can do, I think, is we can do much more with greenhouses out on the landscape and produce more year-round.
And there's going to be some energy input. But most of the input over the course of the year is going to come from the Sun.
Certainly in the winter months, if you want to grow up and grow tomatoes in the winter months, you're going to do what the Dutch do.
You're gonna have a greenhouse system,
you're going to use supplementing heat and you're going to supplemental electricity with LED lights and you're going to do that.
And we can think of ways probably on farm to produce energy, to do that kind of thing in a reasonable way.
And an interesting thing to think about is how would we how would we couple pasture
based ruminant production with energy production for greenhouses on farms?
There's interesting research at Oregon State where they found that the grasses under the
solar panels that had been put out in some fields had a better grass mixture for the
ruminants than than what was in the in the sunny areas because of the shade and the
coolness and the water holding capacity of the soil under the lack of evapotranspiration.
So there's actually some research going on in the states now about co-mingling solar energy production and beef production, for example.
I'll let it go at that. We can talk more with wine. I'm going to get two questions here and there.
So thank you. Ray Taylor from Milford. You mentioned about emergency scenarios.
Professor Molly John, who you may know who has been a mountain school fellow and now works at under-par, has done this assessment report for the UN.
Looking at potential multiple breadbasket failure, multiple breadbasket.
Oh OK. OK. Is that the kind of thing you were thinking about?
And I'm afraid I do want to get you onto the other thing you mentioned because there's there are
even worse scenarios like a five year volcanic winter where you indeed might want a no sun system.
So are any of them despite what you said about renewable energy or any of them in any way viable?
OK. Could you pass the microphone? Go ahead.
Thank you. You seem to have described the industrialisation of farming, and it's now based on sort of a business like approach of inputs and outputs,
you know, efficiency gains, commoditization of food and the consequential substitute turbidity of the farmers output.
And you know, there's a lack of variety as well as in my mind, I live in America for value.
For money always meant more of something or cheaper. So to what extent do you think value for money could be better quality, more nutritious food?
So in my head, I would imagine Italians would have, you know, if you go to, you want to spend some money.
It would be on a better product, not more so since you've taken the system approach to think about obesity as well.
To what extent could we actually have a better approach where we need to eat less but better quality, more nutritious?
And then you can say home grown is better than imported?
OK, all right. Good deal with us, if you could do with those.
OK. OK, so first about emergency food and multiple dysfunctions, multiple collapses in the in the breadbasket.
And so so one of the things I've been thinking about lately, and it's just kind of struck me.
So and I know it's here too, because I had one approach me. I want to talk one to talk about Jesus.
But the Mormon church in the United States has a system of soup of food pantries for their members.
Right? And they have a label called Desiree, and they have a number of processing centres around the country.
They used to have 50 to. I think they've closed some of them. And in those processing centres, anybody in the Mormon church can come in.
And so people come in with like bushel, baskets full of tomatoes and things, and they spend the night canning tomatoes.
But each of those, those calories is responsible for canning two or three,
maybe products that get distributed across their food pantries around the country.
And so across that they get the spread of products that they need for the pantries, you know,
various fruits and vegetables and grains, and they they can wait and do all kinds of things to preserve it.
And so one of the things to think about is is that in a system like this,
let's just take the United States as an example where you've got all these city regions,
ones that have excess land could think about producing stuff that would be stored
and would be available to various parts of the country in times of emergency. Now the other piece of it is what about multiple basket failures?
I would argue that that one of the things about diversifying production centres is that you
reduce the opera the chance that there's going to be massive failure across the whole landscape.
And so that's another reason, I think,
for having some excess production because you're never going to have the exact right, but you have some excess production.
Probably some of that 300000 acres, in my case, goes into this excess for in case that happens.
And then if it doesn't happen, you store it for future use when you can.
OK, that was the first thing. The second thing was was about vertical farms, right?
And those on systems, right? Yeah, I have to tell you, I mean.
So I think part of my antithesis to him is is that in the US,
what I'm seeing is the vast bulk of the of the venture capital money that's going into agriculture that's coming out of,
say, the tech world in Silicon Valley and everything is going into these.
No, no sun systems. Just a rough addition in my head.
There's probably something like 200 to $250 million around the country that's going into various companies,
either that are directly no sun system producers or they're the software companies
for that or they're the the robotic companies for that or whatever it is.
OK, so there's a lot of money going into that.
And there's there's only one place that I know of where there's one university that has a billionaire funder that's
funding some work that's doing intensive work around robotics for small farmers and different kinds of things like that.
So part of it is is just this this just this imbalance in where venture capital money is going.
But the other piece of it is,
I really do think that it also distorts our perception of what we could be doing with agricultural farm with farmland into a way that we could.
You can increase the amount of production per acre in hoop houses and greenhouses because you produce over a longer period of time to get more,
more yields per year, let's say. And you can still use much less water than you would in, say, overhead sprinkler systems,
because most of that is trickle irrigated or in a greenhouse system.
You can still do it hydroponically. And so I just have I.
I have a fear of that being our first choice instead of it being our last choice.
OK, now when it comes to changing the kind of the way that I think what you're asking me is changing the
way that basically consumers perceive food and then that leading to kind of downstream effects.
Is that correct? Or upstream effects really seem to denatured food itself as the basis of based on TV particularly healthy.
Right?
We have more nutrition from fewer ingredients and that if you gave a better quantity, you could actually put more value into smallholder farmers.
More buying into American. Right, right. In a shorter supply chains.
And I think people would appreciate that and be healthier. Well, I mean, I think to some extent that there's an element of that that's happening.
So I'll give you an example in Michigan. So and I'm going to preface this by saying this has no this has nothing to do with me going there.
It just is where I date time from. In 2003, when I got to Michigan State, I was at Rutgers for 20 years when I got there.
There were about 90 farmers markets in Michigan. Now there's about three hundred and fifty in two thousand three.
There were three farmer's markets that could take our food stamp coupons.
You know, the Supplemental Nutrition Programme for for low income people because they had the technology and there were three big ones in the state,
one in Detroit, one in Grand Rapids and one other one that I'm forgetting which one it is today.
There's about one hundred and fifty that can because of a partnership between the
state and some nonprofits to get that technology into the hands of market managers.
And the emergence of a Michigan Farmer's Market Association. So and the amount of sales at those farmer's markets has continued to climb.
And of course, it's mostly fruits and vegetables. There's very little meat sold.
There's some soul, but relatively little, and there's relatively little dairy products.
Although we're starting to see more artisanal cheese in Michigan. So I think that to that extent, that's happening.
I think the other piece of it is, is that in our in our in our schools, our K through 12 schools, for example,
our centre, one of our staff, Colleen Matz, runs a large programme across the state for institutional purchasing.
And when we started that back in about 2004, we did a statewide survey of our school districts.
There's 283 school districts in the state. 10 percent of them reported buying something from a local farmer in the last year.
Now, about 50 percent of the school districts in the state by Michigan produce over the course of the year.
The hospitals is the same thing is happening with some of the hospitals.
The universities now, like our university, buys about $70000 a year produce from our student organic farm,
and they're buying stuff from others as well. University of Michigan is doing a similar thing with farms in their area.
So I think there's an element of that that is happening. The other side of the coin, though,
is is that I think as long as we're used to when I go into the store here and in Tesco's or Sainsbury and buy milk, I'm appalled at how cheap it is.
It's just I know that the dairy farmers here are struggling mightily because the milk prices are so low.
And so there's an element of it where you're similar to us in some ways in that people in general want low cost food.
We want to pay a low percentage of our income for food.
And so, you know, my argument is, is that that said, there's a large swath of society that has the ability to pay more.
And so they should look for opportunities to support people that are doing that.
And then the trick is is in the United States with with snap benefits with our food stamp programme.
Food stamps are only designed to support 60 percent of the food budget, not 100 percent 60 percent.
And so how in the United States do we develop?
Do we develop the programme where those food stamps are more broadly available and there's greater encouragement for using those for healthy food?
And so that people don't have to go to McDonald's because it's the cheapest source of protein is the cheapest source of calories.
I think we probably just have time for the last question. And do you think the agricultural reforms in the US,
such as the alteration of the reward structures that you mentioned, are feasible in the current political climate?
And if not, how do you believe as a country the necessary changes to the food system can be made so easy?
Yeah. So this is what will conclude on, OK. Well, I'll start with with a small story, and I think Charles knows this story.
In two thousand fifteen,
the US Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee submitted a 600 page report to the secretaries of Agriculture and Health and Human Services,
and they had to they had to send it to Congress. In that 600 page report was 20 pages on how to encourage sustainability in the food system.
I was a consultant to that committee and helped write that 20 pages.
Congress immediately went to the secretaries and said, You shall not talk about that again and shut it down.
And so the bottom line is, at this moment in time, I don't think there's a lot of chance of doing that.
And the bottom line reason is I know this is being recorded.
The bottom line reason of this is because the large agricultural commodity groups in our country are very,
very powerful and they have the pockets, they have the hands, they have the eyes and ears of a lot of legislators.
OK, now the reality is, is that I think that is going to change.
So here's my optimistic side. Now there's many parts of the Green New Deal that have been released that I think,
well, first of all, I think it was released without nearly enough information in it.
But that said, I think there's a lot of things that could be done inside a Green New Deal
that encourages support for a lot of the things that I've talked about today.
I think I'm working on a paper with a colleague back in the states because I just haven't heard from her lately.
And at the end of that paper I've written, I've suggested about 14 policy ideas that would be useful for encouraging this kind of a thing.
And so I think there is a chance to do it. And I think, quite frankly,
the way that it has to be framed is a both and not as an either or it's going to be a it's
going to be an evolutionary process to get to the point where this is the food system.
And the trick is if you just if you immediately go for, let's get rid of big egg because first of all,
my there's a version of Big Egg that I think needs to be there to some extent to feed seven billion,
300 meal, 350 million people in the United States. But that said, there's also a way to pull back their power.
And so I think that some of that is a way to do that.
There are some programmes at USDA that are helping a lot in that direction, but they're very small.
You know, remember, the USDA budget is 70 percent, the food stamp programme.
It's about 20 percent. All the supports for four commodity farmers and everything else that's in there is that last 10, 10 to 12 percent.
And so there's like about a $30 million beginning farmer and rancher programme that provides
grants around the country for people working to help develop next generation farmers.
It's very useful, but it's very small. And so I'll leave it at that.
Excellent. Let me invite everyone to come and join us for a drink afterwards, I should say that Mike is part of the Oxford Martin visiting programme,
and that exists due to the generosity of Lillian Martin, and we're hugely grateful for her and also to Mike for being such a superb visitor here.
The next talk at the Oxford Martin School is on Thursday. Penny, maybe as part of our evolving economic economics talk.
And Mike, I don't have is a good genes or a taste for bad beer that's responsible for the longevity of the of the ham family family.
I'll leave you to answer that over coffee. Please join me. Have an answer for this?
Please join me in thanking Mike for a really fascinating thing.