Well, first of all I have to tell you there have been some changes that have taken place.
The two major ones are originally we were planning for me to
do an hour, and I always have found that conversations are more important than lectures, more interesting. So I wanted to leave at least 15 minutes of that hour for Q&A, but now that it's 45 minutes instead of an hour,
I think in order to deal with the issues that I this are important to all of us, I won't be
able to leave 15 minutes but I'm hoping for 5 minutes for some Q & A.
I want to begin first of all by recognizing, or to let you know, that the kind of
conversation among farmers that we had yesterday was truly revolutionary.
And the reason that I believe that is because I think that when farmers engage each other,
especially the way that you did in terms of honestly sharing what you're actually experiencing on your own farms
that that's much more important than any
kind of lecture that I would give. And the
reason that it is much more important is
because when farmers engage each other
the way they do then it's really
revolutionary because it's contrary to
the kind of corporatization that has been
dominating our food and agriculture system
for, you know, at least 30 or 40
years. So you are really charting a path for
the future that's different.  And that's
so important, because it's going to be
the conversations that we have with each
other, what we learn from each other
when we're honest with each other and share our actual information
which is going to chart the course for the future.
So I want to thank you for your
willingness to do that and demonstrating
that it can be done. So let me first of all began by indicating that
I think that I, and I gave this a lot of thought about what might be most useful to our
thinking here in terms of a quote unquote keynote,  and I think that, oh one of the other
things I wanted to mention too. I was
planning in my talk to include some fairly
important issues around soil health and microbiology in the soil, and since Adria has already done that this
morning I'm going to touch on this a little bit and add a couple things to it, but she did a great
job of helping us understand how
important life in the soil is to everything
that are all dedicated to and want to
accomplish. I think that one of the
things that to me is concerning, and as you know I'm not only still engaged
in my farm in North Dakota but primarily
involved in academic institutions like the
Leopold Center at Iowa State University and also involved with the
Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture
out in New York. The thing that I've discovered primarily in
our educational institutions is that
and I don't mean this in any critical way,
simply as an observation of where we
need to go of what we can do together
and especially for organizations and
groups like this. And that is that you
know we still,  let me just speak about
Iowa State University
where the Leopold Center is located and where I spend half of my time.
The emphasis is still on STEM: science,
technology, engineering, math. And that's
what, when students come to the University, especially involved in agriculture,  that's what they're told is the future. This is what they have to do.
What does that really tell us? If it's science,
technology, engineering, math
it's really telling us that the general larger
picture is fine, we just have to get a little
better at it, better technology, better
science, better engineering, better math. The interesting thing to me as the new
generation of students now are coming in they kind of buy into that at the beginning when
they first come there. But within a
matter of months they began to recognize
that this is their future that we're talking about and that simply doing a
little better job with what we've been
doing does not fit the challenge that
they're going to be facing. And to me
that is very hopeful. That begins
to change the quality of our education,
the concern of our education, and what
we need to be facing in the future.
 I think one of the other
problems that were facing is that we
still, in the larger culture of things,
we're still operating under the notion
of something that's, actually from my
point of view, Lewis Mumford pointed out
in his book The Golden Day:A Study of
American Experience and Culture, which
was actually published back in 1926. And
one of the things that Lewis Mumford
pointed out is that we have developed
a culture, already he understood this in 1926, that matter alone matters. This is
really about the physical relationships. 
There isn't anything about imagination
or inspiration or those other kinds of things. It's simply matter alone matters.
And then of course in our food and agriculture if matter alone matters, what do we put
the emphasis on? Yield, and all those kind
of physical sorts of things that really
matters.  And I'm not saying that , as a farmer I certainly understand the importance of
yield,  but if yields are the only thing
that drives us then a lot of the things
we've heard already here at this
conference simply don't matter, right?
Because it's only the matter that matters, only the physical kinds of things.  And so
this then creates a kind of
materialistic culture, which takes off
the table some of the important things
that I want to share with you this
morning. That I think are important. And it also then means that if matter
alone matters, then our sense of
hopefulness is also commented with that.
Our hopefulness gets satisfied if we really
increase the matter. That doesn't have anything to do
with imagination or all these other things,
the more spiritual sort of things. I know
spiritual is not a term that probably
most of us in our culture are very
attracted to. And I'm going to talk about that is a little bit here. But the other thing that
it has led us to is a kind of
extractive economics. You know we're
successful if we can grab as much out of the economic for ourselves.
It's all about mine and now,  so we loose the sense of the commonality in
how we work together in a community
and realize the importance of the value
of those kinds of things. It's all about
mine and now. And so, of course,
while all of this has developed in our culture,  we have of course had some
luminaries that have already pointed out
to us some time ago that this is not the
future, this not how we ought to be
focusing our time and energy. We,ve had
people like Vaclav Havel and Wendell
Berry and Martin Luther King jr. who have all had a
different perspective about this and
brought some visionary and inspiring
ways for us to think about this. And that
is that hope and hopefulness is not
about how much we extract from our
economy, but it is our commitment to
justice. And it's when we do that that we begin to really become involved in the
actual experiences of life that make a difference. And many of those luminaries refer to this as
difficult hope. But nevertheless, 
it's the important part of how we think
about our future.
The thing that I want to share with you now in terms of all this
is that we need to begin to question the value of matter alone matters in our culture.
And begin to look at an alternative approach.
And one of the things that makes sense to me as we do that
there are really a three-fold approach that makes sense. That's the
ecological the spiritual and the social. Now, I'm the first one to recognize that probably
doesn't make a lot of sense in our
culture to talk about it in those terms, but
let me explain a little bit why those three
components are of value as opposed
to matter alone mattering. The ecological
from my point of view was articulated
so clearly by Aldo Leopold, when he said, among many other things,
that we are not the conquerors of the land community.
By land community he meant this 
total interdependent community of life.
And we are not the conquerors of
that, and agriculture of course is  part of that
interdependent community of life. 
We are not the conquerors, we are, as he said,
simply plain members and citizens.
So we are a part of that interdependent
community of life. And the real challenge
for us is to see how we fit in, how we can
add to the value of that interdependent community of life. And so that's
the ecological component. The spiritual
component is probably more difficult
because spirituality in our culture is
kind of like, for some
weird religious people. But I want to
call attention, and
I brought my copy of this because it
just came out a couple of months ago,
a new book, by Steven McFadden titled Deep Agroecology. And he points out in here
how important the spiritual dimension is.
That's what the whole book is about. About
how we begin to really think about
agriculture when we think about it from a
spiritual perspective. Let me just give you a 
brief quote from the introduction of the book.
He says that farming as a corporate, industrial, profit driven business?
question mark, that's the matter alone
matters approach, or is farming a way of
life in harmony with nature, serving as a clean, healthy, just and egalitarian
foundation for the high-tech digital
culture of the present and future, and
for the necessary spiritual evolution
of humanity.
Now think about that for a minute. If we were to think about food and agriculture from
that kind of spiritual dimension, along
with the ecological dimension,
how would we begin to see ourselves in
relationship to food and agriculture in
our own farming communities. And then the third component is the social. And again
in our culture we have been developing again this sense of mine and now, so it's all
about the individual. So we don't, even if any of us who you
in many of our, even in our communities we don't
talk to our neighbors anymore. You
know they're doing their thing over
there, and we're doing our thing here. And so there's this sense that the kind of
community situation is simply not
important.
And here's again where there's a great
resource if you haven't had a chance to
look at Bob Quinn's new book Grain by
Grain, in which he says one of the things
that we need to do now is to think
about community rather than commodities.
Again, think about that shift. If we were to think about our agriculture activities in terms of
community, in terms of how we relate to
others who are also involved in
producing our food. That I think would be
a major . So the ecological,
the spiritual and the social I think is a new kind of framework that we can
begin to think together as we think about the future. Now there are a number of resources, and I don't
know how many of you like to do reading, I don't like to do it all the time, but I get
inspired by some of the things I've read. 
I want to call attention to a
couple of pieces, there's about 6 or 7 I have on the list but we're not going to have time to go through all of them. 
pictures death oh my god
But one of these resources that I have 
personally found really helpful as we think about
all of these things and that's Jared Diamond's work. How many of you know about Jared Diamond's work?
Okay, a number of hands go up,
great. And you know, Jared Diamond
published several books, but two particularly that were inspiring for me.  The earlier one that he wrote,
Guns, Germs and Steel: the fates of human societies
and then the second one which just came out two years ago called
Collapse: How societies choose to fail or succeed. One of the things that Jared Diamond discovered
based on his study of past civilizations.He discovers that those
civilizations that anticipated changes coming at them and prepared for
them in advance were the ones that
tended to thrive.
Those that failed in that exercise where
the ones that tended to collapse. And when I read that I thought, wow, you know,
why aren't we, in terms of our own society today, as we think about future, why aren't we thinking about it in those terms. dissipating changes
preparing for this business and when he
Anticipating changes, and preparing for them in advance. And when he uses the term anticipating changes, he makes it very clear
he's not talking about predicting the future. Because we're not very good at that.  Because we tend to predict
the future based on current
circumstances and then of course things
change. And then the predictions become
irrelevant. But when you think about
anticipating changes what you're really
doing is saying, well, there' are some things that
could happen. And I want to mention at least two of them this morning that I think are really important for us. 
there are things that could happen that
But they are things that could happen, that doesn't mean that you're predicting that
they will happen. But since they could
happen you want to prepare for them in case they do happen. And then we are
likely to be a society thrives rather than a society that collapses.
Now if you think about anticipating changes,  the two that I think
are perhaps most important for us today,
that we have to all really take into consideration.
And one of those is climate change. We've had several people that have
mentioned that in this conference here.
But you know the most recent IPCC report indicates that
we only have about 10 years now to
really deal with climate change.
Anticipate those changes and prepare
for them in advance.
And if we don't do it within that 10-year period,
then the effects of climate change are going to become "catastrophic."
Now certainly every farmer in the room, and I've  already heard
several of you mention this in terms of your own farming operations, you're already
beginning to experience climate change. And we certainly have on our farm.
Our cropping system this past year has been the worst since I've been involved in farming.
Why? Because in North Dakota of course where my farm is, the growing season is relatively short.
So you have to make sure you get your planting done on time so
that your crops can be ready for harvest
by the time the fall weather starts to come in.
And so we always want to plant our cool season crops like flax and wheat by the second week in April,
and then it has the harvesting time before the fall weather starts to come in.
Well this year in the second week of April we had eight inches of snow in ND.
So our farmers couldn't get into the field until the second week in May when they planted the cool season crops.
And then in the second week of September
we had 10 inches of snow,
before the flax was even ready for harvesting.
So huge losses.
And then in addition to that we had more rain than I've ever seen during the summer period of time.
And that in turn, not only for our farm but as far as I know all of the farmers in ND,
caused serious problems with Vomatoxin in wheat.
Which made it unsalable.
Now our farmers expended the money to have the wheat cleaned to see if they could clean it to the point,
and the company that did that thought there was a possibility.
They're still wrestling with trying to find out
whether or not it's even salable for them now.
So right now they have 15,000 bushels of wheat in their wheat bin,
not able to sell it yet as of today,
hopefully that will change in the next couple of weeks but we don't know.
And then if they can't sell it they're going to have 15,000 bushels of wheat in the bin
they don't know what to do with. You can't feed it to animals either.
And then what are they gonna do, if hopefully we do have a
decently wheat crop in 2020, where we going to put it?
So these are the kinds of issues
that the climate change issue in terms of
the effects on farmers are having on us.
And like I say, it's not just our farm, it's others as well.
The second big issue I think that we need to think about in terms of anticipating changes
is the fact that we are now in a kind of agriculture that we've been in for basically a century.
A little bit of the history here,  we go back to 1840 is when Eustice Van Liebig applied the
law of the minimum to agriculture.
And applying the law of the minimum for him was
he was one who came up with the idea of NPK.
If you just put nitrogen, phosphorus and potash into the soil, then you can get this huge response
from that minimum input.  And that's the future of agriculture.
And of course it became quite attractive, even  though farmers had to make big changes
from managing for soil health to
managing in terms of this law of minimum.
But they also began to recognize that you know,
and my father struggled with this, was this the direction we should take or not.
And it wasn't until after the Second World War when the munitions factories
who had been making all of their money by creating munitions
and when the war was over what were they going to do?
They began to discover that they could manufacture fertilizer and sell fertilizers on a
cheap basis to farmers and get their
income, and that's exactly what they did.
And that's when my father bought into that approach to agriculture.
But we're at a point now where this kind of,
using these inputs, is increasingly becoming expensive. Why?
Because all of those inputs, as Earnest Uske pointed out, are non renewable inputs.
And so as we use them up the costs are going to go up and eventually they're not gonna be available.
And if you simply look at two of those from the point of view,
Rock phosphate, from which we get our phosphorous.
We only have four countries who still have rock phosphate reserves.
And at the rates that we're using them up the experts
who have been looking at this are telling us that rock phosphate
will only continue to be available for
another twenty years at most and maybe only another ten years.
And of course if rock phosphate keeps being depleted over the next
ten years, those costs will go up, as they already have, back in the 1960s farmers
were buying phosphorous for $60 a ton and now it's $700 a ton.
So it's not unreasonable to expect that sometime over the next ten years it will be $2,500 a ton.
So at what point does that input intensive system, and I'm not just talking
about conventional agriculture because
we've had some of this conversation at this conference,
that in organic agriculture there's also that choice
between input intensive, you simply use
natural inputs instead of synthetic inputs.
But they're also non renewable. So at some
point we're going to use them up.
So what are we going to do, what is the future of agriculture look like?
Well here is where I think is the important thing about soil health.
And the kinds of things Adria  pointed out to us this morning.
About how the microbes in the soil are the foundation of the future, of a self renewing kind of agriculture.
And this isn't brand-new. There are already
farmers who have been doing this.
In Iowa for example Ron Roseman who farms near Harlan, Iowa , some of you probably know him.
But when he took over his father's farm in the 1970s it was a typical corn soybean farm with all of the inputs.
He began to realize somehow that this was not the kind of agriculture that he wanted to support.
So he started to diversify his system, included
animals, diversified, he has 6 or 7 different crops now that he does.
He has now not purchased any nitrogen since 1980,
and only very small amounts of phosphorous once every 5 years.
So by eliminating that amount of
input that he had to buy, that he doesn't do anymore, he's actually making a profit.
And his children now are recognizing that the kind of foods that they're producing
using this kind of self renewing system is excellent food so they've started
a retail program to sell the food directly to people in their community.
I'm not saying that everybody can do exactly that,  but there are alternatives that are already being used out there.
So this sense about anticipating changes, I think,
and getting a head start preparing for them
is an important kind of lesson that we need to include in our future.
There are a number of other resources
that I could mention to you, and
I want to save a little time for us to have some Q&A.
But there's another book which also came out this past year in 2019 by Timothy Weiss.
The title of the book is
Eating Tomorrow Agribusiness, Family Farmers and the Battle for the Future of Food.
And what Timothy Weiss points out based on his travels around the world is that we are now experiencing
a transition which has already begun
in many many parts of the world where the kind of transitions
that I've been indicating here are already taking place.
And that about 70% of the people in developing countries already are doing
small-scale farms with these kinds of self renewing
and soil health being the foundation of that.
So it's based on, as he says, rebuilding
soils, nourishing a diversity of nature crops
without external inputs and healthy
soil produces healthier food.
Now that last point, healthier soil produces healthier food,  I know there's still a lot of concerns about that.
But you know, we are just again, all of these things
that I'm saying are not something that we can say, "wow this is already happening."
These are early beginnings.
That I think are going to be increasingly a part of the future.
And this connection between soil health and human health is already beginning,
not by many, but by a few health care professionals.
Daphne Miller for example who runs a clinic in California and teaches family medicine at the Univ of California.
She's written a book titled "Farmacology"
spelled Farm not Pharm as you might expect from a health care professional.
And the reason she writes this book about
Farmacology is because she's discovered as a health care professional
that when she puts her patients on whole food produced on healthy soils
they actually become healthy.
And it's not like when she gives them pharmaceuticals
which keeps them from getting worse but it doesn't make them healthy.
And then Maya Shetreat-Klein who runs the
clinic in the Bronx in New York
she's written a book called The Dirt Cure,
which she is experiencing the same thing.
When she puts, and she primarily has a
children's clinic,
so she'd primarily dealing with children,
and generally when parents find out that their children,
which is increasingly true, unfortunately in our society where children become ill.
So she found out that when she put those children or some
kind of pharmaceutical it didn't make them healthy it just kept them from getting worse.
But when she put them on a whole diet
of food produced on healthy soil then they actually became healthy.
And so now when parents have children who become ill and they take them to their
local clinic and they put them on some kind of pharmaceuticals and
then they find out about Maya Shetreat-Klein's clinic so they take them to her clinic.
And usually within a matter of
weeks the kids become healthy.
I'm not staying that this is solid science.
This is based on experiments and experiences of individuals.
And it's starting to happen in healthcare professionals as it is among farmers,
as you have all shared your stories with each other.
So I want to leave a little time for your questions on all this,
but this is basically the story that I wanted to share with you today.
Because I think this is, we're talking about a major revolution here.
And that revolution is going to happen simply because there is a need for it.
And the old system, the input intensive system
that we've used now for a century
isn't working anymore because we're
depleting the natural resources
necessary to make the input intensive system work,
and because we have these health
issues and concerns,
and also the fact that farmers are losing money.
Here's another resource if you haven't looked at.
David Montgomery published a new book
called Growing a Revolution. And the subtitle is bringing soil back to life.
And these are the stories of 8 farms that he has spent time on as a researcher.
And what he discovered is that each of these eight farms
that he features in how book, they each had been
input intensive farms and they began to discover that they were losing money.
And then in their own way they essentially did three things;
they reduced their tillage,  included cover crops which of course help restore the soil,
and they significantly increased the biodiversity of their operations.
And they started to make a profit again.
And so David Montgomery as a result 
has become convinced as a researcher
that it's restoring life of soil that's really the foundation of the future.
Now again, this is not a big cultural shift yet, but I think it's the
future that we're going in simply because
 the input intensive
system can't work anymore in our long-term future.
So, whatever we can do to make our system self renewing
and self-regulating is the part of the future.
