Our 2023 series “Schumacher Conversations: Envisioning the Next 50 Years” was drawn to a close in December with “Regenerating Local Food Economies: Feeding Eight Billion.” The full recording is now available online.
In our final 2023 panel, three sustainable agriculture elders met in an expansive discussion on the past and future of the movement. Wes Jackson of The Land Institute was joined by Vandana Shiva of Navdanya International and Liz Henderson of the Northeast Organic Farming Association. Severine Von Tscharner Fleming of Greenhorns and Agrarian Trust served as moderator.
Since Small is Beautiful, the stakes of food systems transformation have only been raised higher. As regeneration of smallholder agriculture is now recognized as critical to climate stabilization, our participants shared insights from their decades of combined experience, and considered what steps are most needed to secure “small is beautiful” food systems at this pivotal moment.
Highlights from our December Conversation
Wes Jackson on the entrenched power of industrial systems
Opening the conversation, biogeneticist Wes Jackson reflected on the trajectory of the sustainable agriculture movement since E.F. Schumacher’s time. As with his most recent book, An Inconvenient Apocalypse, Wes laid out the movement’s shortfalls to date: industrial agriculture, and its dependency on fossil fuels, has proven more difficult to transform than many of the Small is Beautiful generation originally imagined. He relayed a sobering drive through the American prairie recently taken with family:
We took a trip through Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota— what did we see in that more than 1,000 mile journey? A lot of corn and soy beans. A lot of abandoned small towns and farming communities. There had to be more chemicals added to that landscape than we’ve ever had. And trying to buy some of that acreage now… is essentially impossible unless you are a multimillionaire.
Why is this? I don’t think that we have appreciated the power of the highly-dense carbon that we cannot say no to.
Coming to grips with that power, for Wes, implies “giving up our own love stories… We need to be more ambitious, to step out of our comfort zone.”
Projecting not a fifty year timeline, but a 200 year timeline, Wes predicted that humanity’s planetary footprint will be smaller: “less people, less stuff.” Visionaries working now, he argued, can help imagine a future in which humanity accepts serious limitations, and where small can still be beautiful.
Vandana Shiva on meeting both of food and climate challenges
Indian-born scholar Vandana Shiva concurred that “looking at the world today, what we call the food system is not a food system, because it is not growing food to feed people.” Some 80-90% of agricultural commodities, she estimates, are grown for biofuel and animal feed. For Vandana, these realities add urgency to her mission: to “reclaim food as nourishment, not just for human beings but for the web of life.”
Until colonization and industrialization, the two-hectare farm had been the standard that had fed India for 10,000 years. “Reclaiming sovereignty over our food systems” she argued, calls for “transcending the measures [that] mislead us into thinking that systems that are starving the Earth and people are feeding the world.”
We’ve been falsely told that large farms and corporations feed the world. Experience and data shows that small farms feed the world— but this doesn’t get counted in the global trading system, which measures commodities…not food people eat…
Namely the category of “yield” should be revised to measure “nutrition and health per acre” rather than mass yield. Research conducted in her part of the world, she shared, finds “nourishment is more with native seeds…and biodiverse-intensive systems. That’s the way we need to go to feed the eight billion” and “meet that 1.5 degrees centigrade that’s causing so much panic in the world.”
Elizabeth Henderson on the role of community in systems change
An organic farmer, advocate and organizer for many decades, Liz Henderson discovered the organic farming movement as a young adult in the 1970s. A former academic, she was inspired by peasant farmers she met during her travels in France, and by reading books like La vie d’Une Simple and the work of the Black American agronomist Booker T Watley.
What Booker T. Watley was trying to solve is what launched Robyn Van En into Community Supported Agriculture: how to enable middle sized and smaller farms using ecological practices to survive in the ruthless global system… dominated by corporations.
For Liz, the regeneration of sustainable farming goes hand in hand with cultural regeneration. This begins with a recognition of indigenous peasant practices, identifying with small farmers around the world of “la via campensina.”
Grounding in place-based, human-scale relationships, Liz suggested, also propels the work of movement-building. She held up the Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) model as “an antidote to the industrial food system…an alternative mode of distribution” that fosters cooperation and mutual understanding between growers and consumers. And organizations like the Northeast Organic Farming Association (NOFA), she said, model self-governance while fostering genuine community around the production of food.
Liz reminded listeners that “change is not linear, it’s very hard to predict.” The process of seeking out others, creating collaboration, and engaging with the natural world is integral to sustaining a lifetime of activism. “We have to build a big enough movement… each of us committing to that, supporting each other, keeping our spirits, touching the earth…will give us the strength” to do so.
All 2023 Schumacher Conversations will remain available on our website. Our thanks go out to each of our exceptional participants and hosts over the past year.