2024 Conservation Forum Synopses

Jack Algiere

Our food system needs an aesthetic transformation – not just what we see but our emotional attachment and understanding. For a sustainable world, enjoyment, health, stability of communities and ecology are goals with food productivity a result. We need to integrate back into nature & reshape the way we eat and farm.

Access to natural environments broadens our imagination and forms our relationship to beauty & creativity.

Acts of stewardship are not reserved for the few but for all. We contribute through choices and actions, cannot assume farmers are the sole stewards. The more adventurous we are as consumers, the more potential for farmers to apply best practices, to access land & learn from each other.

Agroecology is a scientific discipline, agricultural methodology, and social movement. Its practices reinforce patterns and principles of nature and are soil centric, diverse, mixed, cyclic, nimble & adaptive. We cannot have an agriculture that does not consider its impact on the ecosystem or relationship to the people around it. Agroecology merges how land can be cared for and how people can develop culturally.

Local economies, health, resilient communities are essential to regional food system transformation. We need to strive for zero waste, use evolutionary services & multipurpose stewardship practices to promote shared land use, adopt regenerative farming practices to facilitate native habitat restoration, and value native grasslands.

We can do this locally: Show up regularly at farmers markets, take ideas home, play with food, watch a cooking show. Enjoying good food grown well is transforming our future. Enjoyment, beauty and health should be indicators of our path forward.

Judson Reid

Judson Reid, Senior Extension Associate for Urban Agriculture Cornell Cooperative, spent his childhood on a dairy farm in upstate New York. His early years have influenced his life’s work and passion. Today, he oversees programs focused on rural and urban agriculture.

The question he is most frequently asked about today’s agriculture is, “How Did We Get Here?”

Judson broke it down into three overriding factors;

1. Farming is a business – The scale or industrialization of agriculture means increased use of pesticides, GMO!s, and a necessary reliance on migrant labor.
2. Lowest cost production model – This challenges the small farm’s existence. The scale or industrialization of the process drives our dependence on migrant labor. Without the migrant labor, we do not have an agriculture market.
3. Major vulnerabilities – Both the labor and management are challenged. Fruit and vegetables are labor intensive, and the labor market is weak. This in turn drives the industrialization of farming. The global trade market increases the onset of invasive pests, forcing farmers to rely on pesticides. The spotted lantern fly attacked New York grape vineyards with a vengeance this year.

He urged us to embrace a healthy food system. In addition to the health benefits, food unites us across cultures, and yet, the three items mentioned above have built in challenges to this important positive.

He submitted that the future of agriculture is in authentic food: think farmers’ markets, think small farms, think urban farming. Authentic food, is food that has some story behind it. That story may be about the food producers, their families, their values, environmental values, is the product grown organically or naturally, and the important story of CSA, Community supported agriculture.

Consumers today, spend more money on the food they consume outside of the house than inside the home. This does not include delivered meals or meal kits. It is now the majority of our food dollar. While it is good for the dairy industry, milk and butter, it has negative diet implications. When we dine out, we eat more saturated fat and fried foods. Only 7.4 cents of every consumer dollar stay with the farmer. The commercialization of agriculture is further reflected by the explosion of cannabas. It is now our fifth most valuable crop between wheat and cotton.

While Judson acknowledged the challenges of embracing a healthy food system, he concluded with two key positives.

The advances in soil health through the use of cover crops improves the microbial status of our soil, and therefore our food. Soil health is a place where farmers can come together whether large scale or small scale and indeed they are. Secondly, he applauded urban agriculture. While small at the moment, it has the potential to grow and improve food sovereignty for our urban populations. It is an opportunity for us to diversify, to engage the new demographics of our urban communities, and to expand the knowledge of farming, thereby increasing the number of farmers.

Dacotah Rousseau

Dacotah Rousseau, the managing food director of Down to Earth Markets, manages nine farmers’ markets throughout New York and Westchester. Her work fosters a strong and growing regional food system of independent farms and businesses, thereby growing the local food economy and providing healthy alternatives to the big farm food industry.

Dacotah believes that the farmers’ markets provide:

1. Food security – Remember the empty shelves when the food industry transportation broke down due to the pandemic. Growing and buying local was the answer.
2. Future farmers – Access to local markets for small farms and entry points for younger people to consider a future in agriculture.
3. Food system visibility – As we strive to eat healthy, a key component is knowing where your food comes from. Farmers’ markets foster transparency and education about your food so that farming is no longer an invisible act.
4. Means to survive – Fresh and minimally processed food is healthier for consumers, and farmers’ markets promote a profitable sales point for small scale farmers and food makers.

She believes that our agriculture/food system is broken, but she feels confident that we have the means within the existing system to correct our issues. Some of the biggest problems Dacotah sited are related to succession.

1. The average age of the American farmer is 57 1/2. Young people are needed who have the benefit of time to acquire experience and build a career.
2. There is a lack of access to land and a lack of affordable land. We must preserve our farmland.
3. There is insufficient agricultural income from farming. Ninety-six per cent of farm households in the United States depend on off-farm income. Unless we enable farmers to earn a living from their farms, the means of production will go elsewhere.
4. Access to labor, management, and ownership opportunities for minority populations, who have farming experience, and reflect the growing demographic, are key to preserving and growing our agricultural community.

By creating ownership opportunities, supplying affordable land, supporting urban farms, committing to inclusion in our labor and management force, and providing education, Dacotah believes we can correct what is broken.

Dale Strickler

Wheat and corn are annual crops requiring tillage. With tillage, a massive explosion of food abundance was followed by soil degradation & erosion as soil carbon compounds were oxidized, effectively converted into fertilizer.

Climate change is blamed on CO2 from fossil fuels but most CO2 released comes from tillage of the soil releasing carbon compounds into the atmosphere.

Another destructive force of grain-based annual agriculture is fallow: nothing is grown on the richest soils in the planet about 8 months a year. When land is fallow, photosynthesis, critical for the absorption of CO2, cannot occur.

But we know how to reverse this: we can farm without using tillage and can replace fallow with cover crops. If everyone grew cover crops, we would be a lot cooler. The difference between the temperature of bare soil and soil under a cover crop residue can be 40oF in Summer.

We have choices:

• The most ecologically sound food is grass finished ruminant meat produced from intact native ecosystems, prairie & forests. It does not destroy ecosystems if managed properly.
  By restoring prairie with native grass and introducing rotational grazing Strickler turned lifeless clay into soil that now stores carbon from roots that go down 7 feet.
• US food and farm policy became “get big or get out”, with devastating effect on our rural economy and soil health.
• Taxpayer-subsidized crop insurance produces ecological destruction, e.g. farmers can rent out pasture grassland for $10 an acre or receive insurance of $300 an acre for
  planting unsuitable crops which die.

To avoid war, pestilence, famine anddeath and to survive as a species, landowners, consumers and voters must become facilitators of photosynthesis, the path to Peace, Prosperity, Happiness and Health.