For the past forty years our food system has been driven by the availability of cheap oil and government policies promoting large-scale industrial food production. While the system has succeeded in feeding us, increasingly this is made possible at great peril. With one fifth of all our oil consumption going into food production and its transportation, our food system has become profoundly vulnerable at every level to fuel shortages and rising prices which are both now inevitable.
In response to this growing perception of our food system’s vulnerabilities, there is growing community support for the promotion of local food-producing initiatives. Boulder County presently has some 30,000 people that are food insecure. Only a slight increase in energy and consequent food costs could dramatically elevate this number.
There has been no time in history when anything less than 70 percent of the population was involved in the production of food. Currently this percentage is less than 5 percent. With a drastic decrease in our farming community, achieving local food security is a daunting challenge. The transition from relying on a national industrial food system to one that is local will require great innovation and concerted community and local governmental effort.
If we as a community are to build capacity and an organizational structure sufficient for pursuing maximum local food security, this process must now begin in earnest.
It will be a focus of this conference to engage people with expert experience in sectors of our food network. Together this group will share their concerns and insights with the goal of achieving greater local food security in Boulder County.
Towards this end it is expected that participants will identify areas requiring greater clarification and focus through subsequent subcommittee initiatives. Some of the expected areas for future consideration might include the following as they apply specifically to Boulder County:
- Health and Wellness issues
- Climate change and the role of peak oil
- A food needs assessment
- Facilitating the bridge between supply and demand for food
- Food policy analysis and recommendations
- Energy use in agriculture
- Education and outreach to promote food-related issues
THE GLOBAL FUTURE OF FOOD IS LOCAL!
Keynote Presentation for the 2008 Food Summit: Achieving Food Security in Boulder County,
by Michael Brownlee, Boulder County Going Local, March 8, 2008
Welcome to the kickoff of the 2008 Food Summit: Achieving Food Security in Boulder County.
- Thanks to:
- Boulder Outlook Hotel & Suites, and Patrick King
- Dave Georgis and Everybody Eats!
- Boulder County Going Local staff, volunteers and interns
- Everybody behind the scenes who helped to make this weekend possible
Tonight, Dave Georgis and I are going to attempt to set the context for the Food Summit taking place in this room tomorrow, and I'll start with talking about the big picture. I don't expect that everyone will agree with everything I'm going to discuss tonight. I'm bringing this perspective forward to stir things up a little, to stimulate thinking, discussion, creative exploration.
We're here this weekend to begin considering how Boulder County can achieve local food security. And what we're doing here, of course, is part of a much larger renaissance of local that's catching fire in communities across the country and around the world (Relocalization Network, Transition Towns).
Here's the background: In the last couple of hundred years, our human population has exploded upon this planet. This has been made possible by abundant and cheap fossil fuels. In this incredibly brief period in time, we've been busily building an entire globalized economy based on the values of bigger, faster, and more. Economic development, powered by cheap and abundant oil, has chewed up farmlands, devastated forests, made dead zones out of oceans, dried up rivers and aquifers, and has spewed vast quantities of waste and toxins into our atmosphere, into our precious water supplies, fouling our biosphere—not to mention our own bodies.
In the process, we have lost our connections with the earth, with the sky, with other living creatures on whom we depend. We have lost our connections with each other, with the sacredness of life, with the natural processes and cycles that are fundamental to all life.
If this process were to continue for much longer, the devastation would be complete. The long list of species becoming extinct would quickly include our own, and we would lose everything.
But the process of economic globalization will not continue for long. It has just about run its course. Awesome feedback from all over the planet tells us that economic globalization is about to hit a wall.
It's now clear that the age of cheap fossil fuels—which has produced global warming and climate change, among other things—is rapidly coming to an end. Because our entire global economy is based on an abundant supply of inexpensive oil, and because we've abandoned the knowledge and capacities that we possessed in the era before cheap oil, and because almost no one anywhere in the world is preparing for Peak Oil, we're in for some pretty dramatic changes.
Economic growth will likely cease and reverse course. We will have to quickly adapt to new realities. The future is going to be very different from what we have expected.
A Global Food Crisis
We're now beginning to understand that one of the unexpected consequences of economic globalization is a rapidly-growing global food crisis:
“Humanity is now eating more food than it is producing. As world food prices soar to record levels, scientists are warning that global food supplies are rapidly diminishing due to water shortages, fiercer and more intense droughts, soil loss, increased land competition from crops grown for biofuel, and humanity’s apparently insatiable appetite for meat.”—The Age (Australia), January 2008
“While public awareness of climate change has grown exponentially, the world remains relatively ignorant of the fact it is entering a prolonged period of food shortages. No government in the world is really focused on this.” —Julian Cribb, The Coming Famine
“There are 854 million hungry people in the world and 4 million more join their ranks every year. We are facing the tightest food supplies in recent history. For the world’s most vulnerable, food is simply being priced out of their reach.” —Josette Sheeran, Director, UN’s World Food Program
“If you combine the increase of the oil prices and the increase of food prices, then you have the elements of a very serious social crisis.” —Jacques Diouf, UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization
Though most of us here in Boulder have hardly noticed, here's part of what's been happening:
- Wheat futures prices have tripled since 2004
- Corn prices have almost tripled since 2005
- Soybeans have tripled since 2006
- Crude oil is up 60% in the past three years
- Meanwhile, U.S. stock prices have advanced only 10% since 2005
- A large pepperoni pizza now costs about as much as a share of Citigroup
Turns out we're essentially at Peak Food, because of:
- Rising oil prices (fuel, fertilizer, pesticides, transport)
- Looming fuel shortages
- Increased demand for biofuels (crops for fuel, not food)
- Shortage of farmers
- Global climate change and extreme weather events
- Degradation/loss of basic natural resources (topsoil and fresh water)
This is enormous, and it's happening rather suddenly--or at least we're suddenly waking up to it:
“Until now, food crises in world history were regional concerns that arose from crop failures, war or pests… What’s happening now is a lack of supply everywhere at once.” —Jon Markman, MSN Money (3/6/08)
Industrial Agriculture
What's gotten us into this situation is Industrial Agriculture, and the fallout or unintended consequences from the so-called Green Revolution:
- Negative health impacts
- Increased obesity and degenerative diseases
- Food-borne illness
- Lowered life expectancy
- Increased medical costs ($2300 for food annually yields $5000 in medical expenses vs. $3500 for food and $2500 for medical care in Europe)
- Diminishing diversity
- Deteriorating soil
- Poisoned land and waterways
- Tortured animals (CAFOs)
- Fossil water drawdown
- Loss of rural culture, loss of community
Is Food Too Cheap?
“The price we pay at the supermarket or fast-food take-out…is not such a bargain. If we were to count up all the hidden costs of eating commodified food—the pollution, the subsidies, the poor health—we would find that cheap calories actually cost us more than food that is locally and sustainably produced.” —WHY LOCAL LINKAGES MATTER: Findings from the Local Food Economy Study, Sustainable Seattle
“Today we have a profit-driven food system that has nothing to do with quality. It takes more calories and energy to transport carrots from California than you get from eating them, and that’s a system that runs on a deficit. And when you consider what may be in them and on them, it’s even worse.” —Future of Food Conference, Canada 2007
We're often being told these days that oil is too cheap. But is food to cheap?
- In 1950, the average American family spent 20 percent of its income on food.
- Today we spend less than 10 percent of our income on food.
- The true costs of food are not reflected in the price.
David Korten articulates this in a very powerful way:
“Corporations have created a system of dead agriculture subsidized by our tax dollars that kills the planet, destroys families and communities, and alienates us from the earth to produce dead food that poisons our bodies. Dead agriculture poisons and depletes our soil and water, reduces the nutritional value of our food, destroys families, family farms, and communities, and alienates us from the earth. It provides an abundance of top-of-the-food-chain delicacies to the rich. It offers nothing to the poor. It leads to houses without dining tables or even kitchens… Economists tell us it’s the most efficient system of agriculture ever known. We ask, ‘Efficient at what?’” —David Korten, The New American Agriculture
Well, this system of "dead agriculture," as Korten calls it, is going to take a tremendous beating in the near future, because of the peaking of global oil production and the decline of oil supplies:
“The current ‘hub and spoke’ system of multinational corporate food supply chains has no future under peak oil. Price shocks caused by declining oil supply will ripple out into the economy, causing economic downturns, loss of tax base, loss of personal and industrial mobility, loss of portability of capital, mass migration, and most importantly, loss of access to cheap food… At projected oil price hikes, these impacts could occur in as little as 5-7 years.” —Future of Food Conference, Canada 2007
I think we’ll be seeing these impacts even sooner. And it won't be long before this global food crisis will impact us here--because we're almost totally dependent on an industrialized global food system that is totally dependent on cheap fossil fuels.
Richard Heinberg puts this into sharp perspective:
“Food is so cheap and plentiful that obesity is a far more widespread concern than hunger. The average mega-supermarket stocks an impressive of exotic foods from across the globe, and even staples are typically trucked or shipped from hundreds of miles away...
"All of this would be well and good if it were sustainable, but the fact that nearly all of this recent abundance depends on depleting non-renewable fossil fuels whose burning emits climate-altering carbon dioxide gas means that the current situation is not sustainable. This means that it must and will come to an end…" —Richard Heinberg , What Will We Eat When the Oil Runs Out?
The End of Industrial Agriculture?
So, is industrial agriculture coming to an end? Well, it is likely to go through a dramatic reform:
"To get to the heart of the crisis, we need a more fundamental reform of agriculture than anything we have seen in many decades. In essence, we need an agriculture that does not require fossil fuels… The transition to a non-fossil-fuel food system will take some time. Nearly every aspect of the process by which we feed ourselves must be redesigned.” —Richard Heinberg , What Will We Eat When the Oil Runs Out?
Clearly, in a number of ways, agriculture is already in decline:
- In America in 1900, nearly 40% of the population farmed.
- Currently this percentage is close to 1%.
- There are more farmers over the age of 65 than there are under the age of 30.
“Today so few people farm that vital knowledge of how to farm is disappearing. The average age of American farmers is over 55 and approaching 60. The proportion of principal farm operators younger than 35 has dropped from 15.9 percent in 1982 to 5.8 percent in 2002. Of all the dismal statistics I know, these are surely among the most frightening.” —Richard Heinberg, 50 Million Farmers
So, who will grow our food in the future?
- To transition from fossil-fueled agriculture, Cuba involved 15-25% of its population in food production.
- The U.S. may need 40-50 million farmers in the next 20-30 years as oil and gas availability declines.
We'll also need to change our ideas about farms and farmers:
“We should perhaps start thinking of a farmer as someone with 3 to 50 acres, who uses mostly hand labor and twice a year borrows a small tractor that she or he fuels with ethanol or biodiesel produced on-site.” —Richard Heinberg, 50 Million Farmers
Agriculture Without Fossil Fuels
What would an agriculture without fossil fuels look like? How do we get there?
- Shift to organic farming (permaculture, biointensive, biodynamic, ecological, natural)
- Reduce or eliminate fossil fuel inputs (fertilizers, pesticides)
- Reduce or eliminate tillage
- Reduce or eliminate reliance on mechanized farm equipment, increase human labor
- Rebuild soil, reverse soil and land degradation
- Keep carbon in soil, grasslands, and forests
- Dramatically reduce “food miles”
- Increase local consumption (GROW LOCAL!, EAT LOCAL!)
- Reduce meat consumption, especially red meat
- Heal land and community
- Rebuild community relationships
Yes, we need to shift to agriculture without fossil fuels, and a food system that is locally based. Right now, it seems like one option among many. I think it's not really an option, but will soon be a necessity:
“The transition to a fossil-fuel-free food system does not constitute a distant utopian proposal. It is an unavoidable, immediate, and immense challenge that will call for unprecedented levels of creativity at all levels of society…
"A hundred years from now, everyone will be eating what we today would define as local organic food, whether or not we act. But what we do now will determine how many will be eating, what state of health will be enjoyed by those future generations, and whether they will live in a ruined cinder of a world, or one that is in the process of being renewed and replenished.” —Richard Heinberg
To be sustaining and sustainable, agriculture must make the transition from an oil-based industrial model to a more labor-intensive, knowledge-intensive, localized, organic model. This means a radical reduction of fossil fuel inputs, accompanied by an increase in labor inputs and a reduction of transport, with production being devoted primarily to local consumption.
Cuba is one country that has already made the transition, though not by choice, and there is much we can learn from them:
- Experienced peak oil crisis in 1990 (average citizen lost 20 lbs.)
- Searched country for farmers
- Adopted Permaculture methods
- Became 80% organic in 18 months
- Instituted major reforestation program
- Switched to mostly vegetarian diet
- Urban gardens now produce 50% of nation’s vegetables
The end of Industrial Agriculture is now in sight. What will replace it? What will replace it in Boulder County?
Boulder County Agriculture
Now let's turn to the situation here in Boulder County. Here's an overview (the numbers are from the USDA in 2000, so are a bit dated—but they give us a sense of what’s going on here):
- 736 farms in county
- 107,629 farm acres (22% of total land)
- $32.8 million total sales (~$305/acre)
- Median farm size is 38 acres
- 468 farms are less than 50 acres (131 of these are 9 acres or less)
- 379 farms produce hay and forage crops
- 252 farms produce animals for sale (cattle, pigs, sheep, poultry)
- Only 30 farms produce vegetables for sale (636 acres total)
Boulder County Farms by Size
- 1000+ acres 25
- 500-999 acres 25
- 180-499 acres 61
- 50-179 acres 157
- 10-49 acres 337
- 1-9 acres 131
Here's part of what's been happening to our farmland:
“Because of massive population growth and housing development, we lose five family farms a week. Since 1992, we lost 2.89 million acres of agricultural land. At the current rate of growth, Colorado loses 3.1 million acres of prime farmland by 2022. That's 16 years from now. If you extend that to 2040, you've got a whopping added 3.3 million more farmland acres destroyed for human development.” —Frosty Woolridge, Borderfire Report, 2006
“A true comprehension and appreciation of farming life - understanding where food comes from, what it takes to get it to the grocery store and how much of a bargain it is - are missing today. Small farmers are disappearing almost as fast as their land…” —Boulder County Parks & Open Space
Replacing Industrial Agriculture in Boulder County
What will it take to build a resilient, sustainable, localized food system in Boulder County? What will replace industrial agriculture? Here's what will replace it:
- More Open Space acreage devoted to crops for food (not fuel or silage)
- More farms producing food
- More biointensive, organic food production
- More farmers (a lot more)
- More CSAs
- More/bigger farmers’ markets
- More infrastructure for storage, distribution, and preservation
- More financial resources
- More education and training
- More backyard and frontyard gardening
- More community greenhouses
- More commitment by our communities to bring new awareness, energy, and vitality to the local food system, promoting closer connections between members of the community and those who grow our food
Of course, we'll have to deal with the thorny issue of the cost of local food:
“The perception that buying locally-produced food costs more is being challenged as both businesses and customers come to understand the benefits of community-building and caring for the community’s resources.” —WHY LOCAL LINKAGES MATTER: Findings from the Local Food Economy Study, Sustainable Seattle
It's going to take a lot of commitment, but it's our best path forward. But can a local food system be sustainable?
“A local food system is not sustainable without a commitment to sustainable agriculture… Local, organic food is the best long-term option and will be critical to develop due to the decline of chemical pesticides and fertilizers from peak oil and peak natural gas.” —Megan Quinn Bachman, The Community Solution
And as I like to insist, often to the annoyance of the sustainability crowd:
"If it's not local, it's not sustainable."
We need to remember, though, that food security and sustainable agriculture are about much more than eating.
“Food and the soils that grow it are the foundation of life and community. Food nurtures our souls, as well as our bodies. The bonding of family, friends, and community has long centered on sitting together at a table to share food. Food and agricultural practices distinctive to place are a foundation of the sense of identity and social bonding that make a community more than a place where we go after work to watch TV and sleep. This is why our work on local food security is so important. It is about restoring the healthfulness of our foods, bodies, communities, cultures, and ecosystems.” —David Korten, The New American Agriculture
A local food system gets built from the ground up, starting at the grassroots level. All of us have something to contribute to this process, and our skills and knowledge and passion are very much needed now--for the current realities are sobering:
- Approximately 43,000 - 48,000 people in Boulder County are food insecure (don’t know where next meal will come from).
- That’s about 15% of the county population.
- As energy prices increase and the economy slides, more will join their ranks.
With current agricultural system, we can feed only ~20,000 people in Boulder County. With greatly expanded individual/community plots, increased farming for food, bio-intensive methods, reduced calorie intake and simplified diet, this can perhaps be increased to ~185,000 people. Boulder County population is 300,000
We're fortunate to live in a place where our county government is responsive to the situation, open to changes. One of the most exciting signs of change is the creation of the Food & Agriculture Policy Council, precipitated at the energetic insistence of Cindy Torres, who among other things is the manager of the Farmers' Market in Longmont. Here's the charter of this group, which is being selected as we speak. It's big news:
“The Boulder County Food and Agriculture Policy Council was established to connect the community to local farmers and agricultural food systems by influencing policy that improves the community’s access to nutritious foods, sustains biodiversity, encourages responsible stewardship of ecosystems, and promotes productive and profitable agricultural development.”
David will be talking more in depth about the foodshed concept, but I want to put on the map here the idea of a foodshed alliance. Based on other foodshed alliances, here's a possible mission statement:
“The Foodshed Alliance is a grassroots, non-profit devoted to promoting profitable, sustainable farming and locally-grown, fresh, healthy food in Boulder County. We believe that the future of our health, our land, and our communities depends, to a great extent, on the existence of local farms—that farmers are the keystone to our connection with our food, the land, and our sense of place. It is this conviction that drives us to work with farmers, consumers, and agricultural professionals to foster a self-sustaining foodshed that supports farmers, nourishes people, respects the land, and strengthens our communities.”
Bold Moves
I believe we're ready to make bold moves in instituting a local food and agriculture revolution in Boulder County. We're not alone in moving in this direction, and we can be inspired by what's been happening in other communities. For instance:
- More than half the vegetables consumed in Havana, Cuba are grown within the city.
- Oakland has adopted a food policy that mandates that 40 percent of the vegetables consumed in the city will be grown within a fifty-mile radius of city center by 2015.
- New Mexico Governor’s Executive Order 2006/#69 calls for local, organic food to keep 11 million metric tons CO2 equivalent out of the atmosphere through 2020.
Could we set goals like this here? I think we can.
The opportunity we have here is to meet the growing demand and need for locally-produced food in a way that preserves and regenerates the web of relationships that is the foundation of our communities.
Like the people involved in Sustainable Seattle, as they said in their Local Food Economy Study, I am convinced that:
"We can grow the local food economy to a scale that meets the regions needs for justly and sustainably produced food through locally directed spending, the building of relationships, and strategic public and cooperative ventures. These investments will make a difference to the economics of our region's food producers, manufacturers, distributors, restaurants and grocers; to preserving farmland; and to providing access to healthy, affordable food in all of our communities. They are investments in a sustainable and prosperous future."
I want to close with some final thoughts.
Here's part of what we've been learning:
- A fossil fuel-based culture of consumption—and the economic globalization that it spawns—destroys community.
- Community is our most important and most endangered resource.
- Only by building community self-sufficiency in food, energy, and economy can we preserve what’s most important about the human species and ensure the future of human freedom.
This relates to something said by David Holmgren, one of the founders of Permaculture:
“The hope that in a sustainable future we can continue to live isolated from each other is the social side of the illusion of a sustainable future in the technosphere… The belief that human nature demands that we live segregated and uncooperative lives is arguably a greater impediment to a sustainable future than the belief that technology and human brilliance can solve environmental problems.”—David Holmgren, Permaculture: Principles & Pathways Beyond Sustainability
I think what he's saying is that we can't continue to live in silos any more. And, in a way, that's what the 2008 Food Summit is all about.
Conclusion
It’s now undeniable that we must learn to reweave the fabric of fundamental connections and relationships that have been at the heart of human civilization from the beginning. We must learn to reconnect with the earth, with the seasons, with our biosphere, with each other. We must rebuild our relationships with those who live in our neighborhoods, with those who grow our food, with those who produce and sell the goods we need, with those who supply the services we require. And we must do it all locally as much as possible, rebuilding local living economies. Only through profoundly local living can we curtail our out-of-control consumption, end our contribution to global warming, and restore balance and sanity to our planet.
Our communities are being called to quickly become largely self-sufficient, to develop the capacity to produce locally our most essential needs. This is the heart of the Relocalization movement, and the impetus behind what we’re doing here in Boulder County.
Our vision is a future where life is more socially connected, more meaningful and satisfying, more sustainable, and more equitable in a greater community of relocalized communities; where production and consumption occur closer to home; where long and fragile supply chains—now vulnerable to surges in oil prices and economic volatility—have been replaced by interconnected local networks; where the total amount of energy consumed by businesses and citizens is dramatically less than current unsustainable levels.
The longer-term vision is that such relocalized communities will naturally trade their surpluses interdependently with surrounding relocalized communities, forming self-sufficient bioregions that trade surpluses with each other. This will be a radical and welcome shift from the tangled web of codependent relationships that we call a globalized economy.
This transition to a local living economy will take some time, even though we don't have much time. The BOULDER COUNTY GOING LOCAL! Campaign, launched in March of last year, is our man-on-the-moon project here in Boulder County, and we anticipate a ten-year transition to a stronger, more localized economy in a carbon-constrained future.
Our message is simple, expressed in a series of themes or memes: Buy local first. Eat local. Grow local. Produce energy locally. Develop local currencies. And in the process, rebuild community. It’s all part of a great renaissance of local that is rising from the bottom up among people everywhere. People respond intuitively to these memes, and they are gladly and rapidly joining us.
What is far more difficult to communicate is just how urgent it is that we do this, and how vital it is that we join in this effort together as a community of communities. Human unity, collaboration, cooperation, partnership—these are our most important and most urgently needed technologies now. We must learn to unite our efforts together, or we will fail.
We'll be going through a process together tomorrow, as some of the key players in our local food system—growers, distributors, restaurants, organizations, institutions, government—will be gathering for the 2008 Food Summit, to explore Achieving Food Security in Boulder County.
Guiding us through it will be Susan Skjei, the director of the Authentic Leadership program at Naropa University and a long-time corporate consultant and facilitator. She'll be assisted by Jane Underhill, a graphic facilitator from Denver.
In a way, we began this process last weekend, as we called together a community think tank at the Altona Grange, on the question: “How will Boulder County feed itself beyond the age of cheap oil?” The outputs from that eye-opening afternoon are now posted on our website. People are concerned, and they want to be involved!
Tomorrow, we hope to give the process a bit more structure, and begin putting in place the mechanisms to make it ongoing.
We have an opportunity this weekend to send the Food and Agriculture Policy Council a clear message. We can all be part of the process of building a resilient local food system.
Finally, Paul Hawken sums it up for me:
“We can no longer import our lives in the form of food, fuel and fundamentalism. Life is homegrown, always has been. So is culture. And so too are the solutions to global problems.” Paul Hawken
And now I'd like to turn it over to Dave Georgis, founder of Everybody Eats!
Foodshed
Foodshed analysis will foster change and help to educate. 
We Must Change
