My book Deep Agroecology: Farms, Food, and Our Future is now available in both print and eBook editions.

A quarter of a century ago, I had the privilege of serving as National Coordinator for Earth Day USA. I partnered with the Seventh Generation Fund to help bring the Council Circles project and curriculum to hundreds of North American communities.

Now I’m happy to bring forward a book that again brings a council circle of wise voices together to offer native and agrarian wisdom ways forward for human beings and for our earth.

The way we tend the land that produces our food, and the way we eat, are the key factors in our physical, moral, and spiritual survival and development in this tumultuous era.

Elizabeth Wolf, my wife and partner, has played an indispensable role in bringing this book to life in a powerful and elegant way. I’ve dedicated the work to her, with love and appreciation. ~ S.M. 

Both the print and the eBook editions of  Deep Agroecology are now available through Amazon, and soon also through other sales outlets

DEEP AGROECOLOGY
The Ways We Farm and the Ways We Eat
Will Determine the Destiny of Life on Earth

While deep agroecology is new territory, it’s natural territory, not just for farmers, but for all people. Farms are the foundation of our civilizations, and that foundation is undergoing massive upheaval. We must be about building a new agrarian foundation that can support in a healthy, spiritually intelligent way the high-tech, digital waves of culture sweeping so profoundly around the world.

Farms and farmers can build that foundation, but only with the intelligent involvement and active support of people and communities who depend upon them for survival.

Table of Contents for Deep Agroecology

Introduction
Chapter 1        Right Names
Chapter 2        Industrial Farms and Food
Chapter 3        Elements of Agroecology
Chapter 4        Webs of Light and Life
Chapter 5        Elements of Deep Agroecology
Chapter 6        This is the Holy Land
Chapter 7        Tierra Viva
Chapter 8        What Are Farms For?
Sources
Index
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Selected Reviews

Endorsements
“Thank you, Steven McFadden, for rich and moving clarity, as you weave for us the many threads of ‘deep agroecology.’ The vision you capture is not a choice, for in this dire moment for our Earth, it is life’s only possibility forward.” ~ Frances Moore Lappé, author, Diet for a Small Planet and cofounder of Food First and the Small Planet Institute

“Deep Agroecology is an engaging encyclopedia of why ecological farming is the roadmap to human and planetary health. McFadden challenges us to work within the interconnectedness of all life. Concepts as far ranging as modern physics, microbiology, spirituality, and social networks are woven together, leaving the reader with a new world view. A must-read for students of the good food movement…It did change the way I perceive the world — in a way that didn’t leave me running for the hills (as the scientist in me often does when scientific and spiritual worlds merge).”  – Linley Dixon, Ph.D., Associate Director, The Real Organic Project

“Steven McFadden uses the words of farmers, scientists, philosophers, and indigenous elders to convey a deeper concept of agroecology that cannot be coopted by corporate agribusiness…The future of humanity depends on our heeding the wisdom of deep agroecology.” – John Ikerd, agricultural economist and author of Crisis and Opportunity: Sustainability in American Agriculture.

“First of all, let me just say that it is such a pleasure to read your writing, and I cannot say that about many people. You actually know how to write, which in truth means to pour spirit and meaning into earthly language. Everything I read was beautiful and felt true…This book is a little gem and very much needed right now.” – Robert Karp, former Director Practical Farmers of Iowa, and the Biodynamic Association

“Your many ideas are like lovely jewels, strung together.” – Alice Bennet-Groh, Temple-Wilton Community Farm

“A transformation of agriculture practices is essential for a sustainable future. In this well researched book Steven McFadden provides compelling information that is required reading for those invested in a better future for the planet and humanity.” –  John Thompson: Eco-psychologist and founder of The Nature Code

“Steven McFadden, in his Deep Agroecology: Farms, Food and Our Future, beckons the reader to wake up to the cries of our wounded planet and our suffering farms. If we cannot heal our farms, our civilization has no future. Steven offers a way forward, by blending indigenous agrarian wisdom with contemporary tools of sustainability. Deep Agroecoology implores us to put into action our love for the planet.” – John Peterson, The Real Dirt on Farmer John

Reviews of my other agrarian books

 Farms of Tomorrow: Community Supported Farms, Farm Supported Communities
by Trauger Groh and Steven McFadden

The Call of the Land: An Agrarian Primer for the 21st Century
“This book is just terrific…McFadden is dealing with sacred science, the sort of wisdom we require for our survival.”  —LARRY DOSSEY, M.D., author of Healing Words and The Extraordinary Healing Power of Ordinary Things

“The Call of the Land provides an incredibly thorough guide for all who are interested in discovering or further understanding the changes taking shape across the country. In this surprisingly compact book, the author manages to assemble a meticulous overview of the people, places, and concepts in what he coins the ‘Agrarian Renewal.’ You will be amazed by the diversity and vision embodied in the movement so thoroughly and vividly described by Steven McFadden.” —ANA SOFIA JOANES, director of the film FRESH

“The Call of the Land is an important and timely primer on a resurgent agrarianism taking place around the nation. As the challenges of the 21st Century begin to bear down, we can take solace, and find pragmatic solutions, in the back-to-the-land work of progressive farmers, ranchers, conservationists, and many others. Hope dwells in the grassroots. This book is a great guide on where to look.”  — COURTNEY WHITE, Executive Director, the Quivira Coalition, author of Revolution on the Range: The Rise of a New Ranch in the American West

“The great value that The Call of the Land offers is the encouragement that comes from seeing what so many others are doing to revitalize America’s agrarian roots and branches…Steven McFadden has pointed the reader to hundreds of grassroots efforts to join, emulate or use as inspiration to plant our own gardens in whatever form makes the best sense for each of us. A hopeful work!”  – DEBORAH MADISON, author of Local Flavors, Cooking and Eating from America’s Farmers Markets, and Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone.

“In the face of widespread turmoil and resignation, The Call of the Land shows us that our hands, minds, and hearts, when used as one, are already healing ourselves and the planet earth. Author Steven McFadden reminds us that the seeds to a new future are being planted right now, that farms are meccas of cultural and ecological renewal, and that healthy agri-CULTURE is the sattvic incarnation of the Green Revolution. – FARMER JOHN PETERSON, Angelic Organics

“In this updated edition, Steven McFadden continues his significant work of identifying various agrarian projects where the vital link to nature is being restored. The Call of the Land serves as a valuable resource at a crucial, make-or-break juncture because there is just no ignoring Earth’s distress signals. “ – JULES DERVAES, Founder of the Urban Homesteading® Movement, Director of the film Homegrown Revolution

“We humans have lately entered into a collective techno-trance in which our primordial ties with land have been all but forgotten. Urban consumer lifestyles lead children to believe that food comes ultimately from the supermarket; that nature is merely something to be seen on dedicated cable channels. In reality, we are as dependent as ever on soil, water, weather, and biodiversity, even as we overuse, upset, and destroy these foundational elements of life. Steven McFadden helps us remember the essential, and points to the only sane path ahead–a profound emotional reconnection with the physical ground of being.” – RICHARD HEINBERG, Senior Fellow-in-Residence of the Post Carbon Institute, author of the Last Energy Crisis.

“It’s inspiring to read about all of the wonderful efforts Steven McFadden details in this book. With the dedication of Steven and all of us, we will achieve a future of healthful food, diverse farms and vibrant communities.” – TERESA OPHEIM, Executive Director, Practical Farmers of Iowa

“The Call of the Land will inspire you with page after page of innovative projects across the country that are having a positive impact on how we eat. Explore this comprehensive list of positive ideas and then implement them in your own community.” – INGRID KIRST, Community CROPS Executive Director, Lincoln, Nebraska

“McFadden’s call to action is clearly written and well referenced with a robust list of current websites and a bibliography for general reading on positive methods for resolving our food security challenge. Anyone interested in a good contemporary overview of challenges and solutions will find the book valuable.” —CHARLES FRANCIS, Director, Center for Sustainable Agricultural Systems, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

“The author has been a keen observer-participant of the agricultural scene for more than 30 years and has witnessed firsthand this revolution: those who grow and consume food are speedily awakening to the perils of industrialization of food production and finding new ways … to make ‘food with the farmer’s face on it’ the norm. With his research and interviews McFadden presents hundreds of new ideas and resources … all sound and all hopeful.” —WOODY WODRASKA, author of Deep Gardening

“McFadden has assembled a collection of information that promotes the growth of locally grown, sustainable food. The Call of the Land offers… a pathway toward a 21st-century paradigm shift that many feel will be necessary for sustainable, reliable, environmentally friendly food production in the future.” — CAROL EVANS LYNCH, Master Gardener, Nature’s Companion

“…Readers new to this movement sometimes struggle to identify a primer that is accessible and grounded in real-world examples. The Call of the Land lends itself as a tool for such readers, as it not only illustrates a foundational agrarian ethos historically argued by Wendell Berry and Wes Jackson, but it also outlines a variety of practical models and approaches to inform the practice of local food system development. — KIM L. NIEWOLNY and NANCY K. FRANZ, Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development

 Farms of Tomorrow: Community Supported Farms, Farm Supported Communities

by Trauger Groh and Steven McFadden

A future where we all become part of the farm organism: “The concepts of community supported agriculture (CSA) grab at the imagination: reconnect with the land and farmer, know exactly where your food is coming from, work toward self-sufficiency. Such a utopian vision clashes gloriously with the disconnected, “cocooning” lifestyle of many people.

“This textbook for the CSA movement, first published in 1990 and “revisited” in this volume published in 1997, lays out the philosophies and actions that brought CSAs into our awareness today. You might know a CSA farmer, and perhaps even are a CSA member. But unless you’re the farmer herself, or on an advisory board for a CSA, you probably have not considered many of the philosophical questions.
In half-a-dozen essays comprising a third of the book, questions are explored such as: Should farmers or the CSA own the land? How should farmers’ retirement be arranged? Should animals be part of the farm, and should meat be part of the CSA shares?

“Three basic rules of such holistic farming are offered: 1. Do not work too many hours (leave time for observation, reflection and meditation). 2. Buy for the farm as little as possible from the outside world. 3. Take all the initiative for your actions on the farm out of the realm of the spirit, not out of the realm of money.

“The book talks of creating an “associative economy” and a “parallel polis” that look at society differently. One premise is that the farm should be supported by the entire community, and the risk shared equally by all consumers. Another is that farmland should not be a market commodity.

“Part of the book consists of essays by CSA farmers on their own operations; many were written for the first volume and updated, so the trials of time can be seen. The final section contains blueprints for operating a CSA: how to get started, and how to buy and hold land. Samples from farms show budgets, marketing materials and typical share content. From philosophy to examples, Farms of Tomorrow Revisited shows us where the CSA concept could take society, and the movement’s limitations, especially in solving current agriculture issues.” – Bill T.

At first the word agroecology hits the human ear with the dull thud of a complex, intellectual abstraction. But in truth it’s a term describing an approach to farms, food, and life that is real, urgent, positive, earth-based, science-informed, and altogether of the heart. We need agroecology now, and we need it on neighborhood, heartland, and planetary scales.

In the universe of ideals for farms and food, agroecology has in recent decades captured international attention. Now it’s becoming better appreciated in North America. Now it stands out as a range of essential, broad, and wise pathways forward for humanity…

The rest of my blog post is available at Mother Earth News.

Imagine the vast GMO-glyphosate soybean fields of America’s Heartland transformed into a perennial forest with swarms of hazelnut trees, deeply-rooted and thick as lilac bushes, fourteen feet tall, and laden heavy with oil-rich nuts that have a 101 uses.

Imagine the annual harvest of hazelnuts fulfilling a cornucopia of needs: for animal feed, for cooking oil, for fuel, for human food – and for many of the purposes and functions now fulfilled by soy.

How different the landscape. How changed the land itself, and all the creatures which share life upon the land. How profoundly different the environmental impact.

As of this month I have again started blogging for Mother Earth News, the original guide to living wisely upon the earth. It’s good to be back after having turned my attention to book writing for the last couple of years. There’s lots to blog about.

My first blog for Mother is titled Do Not Hit the Snooze Button. It’s about the thousands of wake-up calls that scientists, environmentalists, and nature itself have been ringing out for the last several decades. That ringing is deafening right now, as detailed in the blog. “As scientists from NASA, NOAA, and the UN worded it in January 2019, “We’re no longer talking about a situation where global warming is something in the future. It’s here. It’s now.”

In the context of our turbulent reality, the blog post points out that the sustainable and local food movements are keenly shrewd and resourceful responses that need to be scaled up massively now. The threat that links all these positive, proactive responses are agroecology and deep agroecology.  You can read my blog for Mother Earth News here.

Much more to come…

My new book – Deep Agroecology: Farms, Food, and Our Future  – will be published August 1, 2019

Our classic book Farms of Tomorrow Revisited continues to support the development of healthy farm & food community linkages.

With all that’s happening in the world in general, and to our farms and food in particular, I was happy to read this positive, edifying review of one of my books on the subject of Community Supported Agriculture (CSA). The book is titled Awakening Community Intelligence: CSA Farms as 21st Century Cornerstones.

I wrote this slender volume – a vision and a call to action – in 2015, immediately after my twin brother Michael died. I felt his spirit urging me to direct in a constructive way the maelstrom of feelings that swarmed me within and without. Awakening Community Intelligence is the result.

The substantive review appears in the current edition of the Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development.

Here’s the review’s first paragraph: “In the slender volume Awakening Community Intelligence, journalist and long-time community supported agriculture (CSA) advocate Steven McFadden argues for the exponential expansion of CSAs. In the face of profound, disruptive challenges in the 21st century—climate change, resource depletion, geopolitical instability—McFadden believes CSAs have the potential to become “community cornerstones” that provide “key points of stability and orientation.” In ten very short chapters, McFadden unfolds his vision of this potential and issues a call to action…”

Don Bustos of Santa Cruz Farm (author photo)

It was a blessed relief to hear the quietly passionate oration of organic farmer Don Bustos as he stood upon the land for 20 minutes to speak amid shifting rays of softening sunlight on an early August evening in Santa Fe, New Mexico. With dignity, he stood for clean food, for community food, and for food sovereignty.

Earlier on this crossquarter day the outpouring of farm news had been grim. We learned that the Dead Zone in the Gulf of Mexico caused by fertilizer and chemical runoff from industrial farming has swollen to an area larger than the state of New Jersey. We learned that despite scientific warnings the EPA declined to ban chlorpyrifos, a highly toxic farm pesticide known to interfere with human hormones, and to diminish IQ in children. We learned of serious labor shortages in the farm fields as immigration officials drive farm workers away from US lands. We learned that dramatic changes for industrial agriculture are essential now to reckon with the intensifying impact of climate change. We learned also that the suicide rate among US farmers is higher than that of the overall US workforce.

Without referencing any of these specific news items, Bustos acknowledged the larger system of which these developments are part. He mentioned the corporate industrial “militarization” of agriculture. Then with clarity and conviction he said that’s not the way to go. “We must grow food with respect. We must grow it in a way that acknowledges Creator and the spirit in the land.”

Bustos talk was part of the Farms Films Food program hosted by the Santa Fe Farmers Market Institute in collaboration with the Center for Contemporary Arts and the Street Food Institute.

The acequia-watered Santa Cruz Farm in Española, New Mexico that Bustos now tends has been in his family since the 1600s. Speaking broadly to encompass all of agriculture, he said that his big goal is “to make it possible that our children can farm on the land for the next 400 years.”

Nowadays Bustos cultivates about 70 crops on 3 ½ acres. At that scale, he’s developed an economic approach that enables him to give attention to the wider world. He trains young people to work the land, and to keep alive the centuries-old traditions of family farming in New Mexico. He’s a champion for community food sovereignty and for food justice at local, state and national levels. In 2015 he received the James Beard Foundation Leadership Award, specifically honored for his work “in support of farmers’ rights and education, and his efforts to include farmers of color in the national food movement.”

When he spoke in Santa Fe this week Bustos said that in his farming he’s guided by three keys: the traditional rituals and practices of northern New Mexico farmers, modern organic cultivation practices, and the Biodynamic Calendar.

“The strongest connection with Creator comes,” he said, “when you have your hands, feet and knees on the soil, and you are working with plants.” “Nature will tell you. You will understand signs so that you know you are on the right path.”

“I still grow and save seeds from our crops to plant the next year,” he said. “Saving open-pollinated, heirloom seeds is really important, but it’s not a silver bullet to solve the problems of agriculture.”

“Food should be grown in healthy soil with healthy water by people who are healthy. Then you have right relationship to the earth. The silver bullet is for everyone to take responsibility for their food by growing it, or supporting the people in their community who grow it for them. That connection to the Earth,” Bustos emphasized, “is important for everyone. It’s one of the Pillars of Food Sovereignty.”

EVERYTHING AT HAND – Massive, impressive cast-iron sculptures by Tom Joyce are on display until Dec. 31 at the Center for Contemporary Arts, site of the Farms Films Food program. (author photo)

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The USDA’s Agricultural Marketing Service has this month published a report titled Community Supported Agriculture: New Models for Changing Markets. The report highlights changes – from the 1980s to the present – in what the USDA refers to as the “business model” of Community Supported Agriculture (CSA).

For anyone interested in local food or food security, the report is worthwhile reading: well researched and written, instructive, and enriched with informative case histories.

But the report moves me to articulate once again what I consider to be an essential point: CSA was not developed as a marketing strategy. Obviously, some companies and farms choose to approach CSA that way, as is their right. Equally obvious, there is of necessity somewhat of a marketing element involved in most CSAs.

But to assert the idea that CSA is a marketing strategy – as the USDA and many land grant institutions routinely do – is to alter the core ideas of CSA. Even though “business model” and “marketing strategy” have become widespread approaches to CSA, in my view emphasizing those concepts shifts the focus from where it needs to be.

CSA farms will likely always be at a disadvantage in the “market” in the realms of price, consumer choice, and convenience. But that’s not what the CSA model was developed to address. CSA was developed by a wide community of people as a way to renew our relationship with the land, with the people who grow our food, and with each other.

Asserting this view now, in light of the trend to define or frame CSA as a business model, will likely be regarded by some people as either anachronistic, or as dewy-eyed idealism. I’m among those who think otherwise. I think it’s essential to keep the focus and the framing of CSA on the core ideas. CSA is not structured to be part of a competitive commercial marketplace, where market forces will always be the determining factor, rather than farm needs, farmer needs, and community needs. It is, after all, not just community supported agriculture, but also agriculture supported communities.

The steady morphing of CSA from a farm-and-community collaboration to a marketing strategy is, in my view and the view of others, off the mark and ultimately inadequate to the challenges of intensifying political and climate turbulence. Something different is required, and that difference has been the ideal and overlighting spirit of CSA: communities and farmers working together on the land to create new ways of living in relation with each other and the natural world which we all depend upon for survival. Ideals, of course, exist in the realm of the mind, and in practice the best we can do is strive toward them.

To survive and perhaps prosper in an era of climate and political turbulence, CSA needs to remain the realm of mutually beneficial community association. That’s a fundamental CSA concept that gets sidelined or obscured when CSA is treated as a marketing strategy.

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Some of this understanding has found expression in the Community CSA Charter that was developed earlier this year by an ad hoc community initiated by CSA author Elizabeth Henderson.

In a community e-mail discussion of various charter drafts, Anthony Graham (a CSA farmer for 30 years at the Temple-Wilton Community Farm in NH) made this point eloquently: “Our farm members are just that – members who support the farm. We make it clear to them from the start that they are supporting a farm and receiving the produce as a consequence of that support. They are never seen as or referred to as customers and especially not as consumers. Instead the community aspect of our farm lives here very strongly – almost everyone feels some ownership and willingness to share the risk of crop failures as well as the bounty that can allow them to process extra food for the winter.”

He concluded, “Our farmers have always felt that it is important that we have regarded our farm as a community and not as a business – we always try to aim at agriCULTURE rather than agriBUSINESS.”

To endure and perhaps thrive in our extreme era, CSA cannot be redefined to a competitive selling system dependent on “customers.” CSA was never intended for that purpose.

In a CSA working toward the principles embodied in the CSA Charter (as opposed to a customer-food subscription business) people are not “buying boxes of food.” The people who comprise the community (whether a city neighborhood, a town, a workplace or place of worship) are providing direct support to a whole farm or network of farms, and then partaking in a share of the harvest. This is a key distinction.

CSA embodies the potential for a new way of life upon the land for farm, farmers and supporting community. The economic impulses are associative, rather than competitive or exploitive, the impulses that have impelled industrial agriculture to become such a destructive force nationally and globally.

Some progress has been made in the direction of CSA as a new form of economics and relationship with the land, the farmers, and the people who as a community become part of a farm. Much more is possible. And I think much more is necessary.

“Whoever controls the seeds in a culture is going to control life.”
                                                  ~ Emigdio Ballón, Tesuque Pueblo Farm

My notes from the impressive Mountain West Seed Summit in Santa Fe, New Mexico over March 3-4, 2017 – a gathering  of seed savers, and people representing seed hubs and seed companies:

Belle Starr, co-founder of the hosting organization, the Rocky Mountain Seed Alliance, an organization started just three years ago: “We are working to build strong food hubs around the country. The local food movement is huge and growing. But how many are saving seeds? That part is missing.

“What is our duty? Diversity. I hope the thing we carry out of this summit is passion to empower and inspire. That’s how we are going to get diversity. This has to be a grassroots movement. The more people who save seeds, the more resilient the system we create…We hope this will go on for generations.”

Emigdio Ballón, a Quechua native from Bolivia, Agricultural Director for the Pueblo of Tesuque, NM: “The seeds are calling us. They are asking us to help them continue their evolution as they help ours.

Emigdio Ballon (R) speaks with his fellow farmers outside the seed bank at Tesuque Pueblo Farm.

“It’s very difficult for the seeds now. In 2011 we talked about seed security and its relation to food security. That’s when we started our seed bank to protect the seeds handed down to us from time immemorial. Now we are talking also about climate change, and how that is impacting us. How can the seeds sustain us, and our unborn? They need to be protected because of the corporations polluting the earth, and claiming patents over nature. Indigenous people care. Indigenous peoples are protectors.”

Clayton Brascoupe, a Mohawk/Anishnabeg farmer, founder of the Traditional Native America Farmers Association: “What is a seed? Seed is life, mother, embryo, treasure, potential, possibility, relative, our child. All of those things. There is a fundamental, essential relationship that we have.

“We’ve been going along side by side with each other for thousands of years, and now we are in this present generation. We have a treaty, a covenant with the seeds. The seeds are a part of who we are. We have to take care of our relatives, the seeds, and they in turn will take care of us.

“Seeds are the first link in the food chain, and this link is now under threat. Our responsibility is to preserve them for forthcoming generations.”

In remarks to initiate day 2 of the Seed Summit, Bill McDorman, director of the Rocky Mountain Seed Alliance spoke about the importance of developing Seed Hubs in parallel with Food Hubs and other local farm and food initiatives. “There’s a real need globally for many more regional operations. Seeds are the foundation not just of our food system, but of civilization itself…This can save us. Regional organizations are the key.”

Andrew Kimbrell, founder and director of the Center for Food Safety, gave a riveting keynote presentation. He began by mentioning that with the financial backing and technical expertise of entrepreneurs from Silicon Valley, the Center is about to launch an international online network for seed savers.

He placed this forthcoming network, and the importance of seed saving, in the context of three pending corporate mergers: Bayer-Monsanto, Dupont-Dow, and ChemChina-Syngenta. These mergers, likely to get green-lighted by the Trump-Republican Administration, will place over 60% of the world’s remaining seeds in the corporate control of just three companies. They dominate.

All these multinational corporations are intent on continuing to patent life forms, and to sell allied chemicals as essential, expensive, and polluting inputs to the industrial agriculture system.

The accelerating pace of global climate change and corporate seed and chemical control underscore the imperative need to establish non-corporate seed-saving networks, he said. “We don’t know what seeds we are going to need. But the network will be a key. These are dark times.”

Drawing from some of the material in the well-known book he edited (Fatal Harvest: The Tragedy of Industrial Agriculture) he outlined a history of seeds and agriculture in the USA. “Remember the robber barons of the gilded age?” he asked. “We are in the second phase of that.” A century ago the robber barons made their fortunes in railroads, coal, steel, and oil. As succeeding generations of billionaire barons sought further pots of gold, their gaze fixed upon agriculture.

With hybrid plants, poison chemicals (biocides) and patents, robber barons and their corporations over time mutated the meaning and the reality of seeds. Instead of being a commons that united people in ancient and sacred community traditions of caring for a foundational source of life, seeds became a commercial commodity.

Farmers became trapped on technology treadmills: functionaries basically serving as corporate pass-through operations for commercial seeds, chemicals, machinery, oil and gas. Corporations took culture out of agriculture, and substituted industry. For farmers, indebtedness ruled. Whereas just over a century ago as many as 40% of the population was involved in caring for the land and the seed that everything depends upon, only about 1% of the population now has this connection.

Consider where we are now, he said. Via monoculture and intensive chemical use, we continue to deaden and to lose soil. The nitrogen fertilizer of industrial ag leaches out to waterways, creating massive dead zones in our oceans. We’ve lost 90% of our seed diversity. The Center for Food Safety estimates that 35 to 45 percent of greenhouse gases are generated from industrial ag. Thus, the essential elements of farms and food (soil, water, seeds, industrial livestock, etc.) have become zombies.

This system is already dead, Kimbrell said. “It’s a zombie walking. But it’s still unbelievably dangerous. It’s steadily destroying the planet.”

“We are the future. Sometimes we look at these dominant forces, and wonder how can we possibly overcome? But the zombie system is already dead.”

Corporations used to wallow in hubris, believing that nature was no match for biotechnology. But it turns out that biotech is no match for nature. The idea that you are going to control the traits of living things is false.

The answer Kimbrell argued, is for our economy to transform into a wholly owned subsidiary of ecology. “We can only use things to the extent that they regenerate themselves.” We have to go local, biodiverse, humane, and socially just, he said.

Fundamental to all of this transformation is seed. None of it makes sense without seed. Seed is the center that we need.

While stating that he sees organics as a floor for the future of agriculture, he reminded the audience that it’s under attack. The Freedom Caucus (about 30 hard-right Republican members of Congress) has targeted the National Organic Program for destruction.

In response to a question from the audience, Kimbrell commented on the upcoming 2018 Farm Bill. “If Dante were alive today,” he said, “The Inferno would be about the farm bill.” He said we need to get environmental groups together with farm groups right now, in 2017. “Unless we get ahead of the game,” he commented, “we are lost.”

Three times during his talk Kimbrell quoted the late Rachel Carson, author of Silent Spring. One example: “I believe natural beauty has a necessary place in the spiritual development of any individual or any society. I believe that whenever we substitute something man-made and artificial for a natural feature of the earth, we have retarded some part of man’s spiritual growth.”

Echoing this insight toward the end of his talk as an encouragement to seed savers and to others working to build a just, healthy and equitable farm and food system, Kimbrell said: “We face the spiritual challenge of moving from a culture of death to a culture of life.”

~ END ~