[Music]
good afternoon everybody good afternoon
thank you so seven and a half billion
does a number of people who live on the
earth today 32 years from now and 2050
that number is likely to be more than
nine and a half billion an approaching
10 billion so we’re going to go from
seven and a half billion to 10 billion
in thirty two short years people we are
sixty percent water we’re mostly bags of
water and everybody eats now I don’t
know where you’re going to be in 32
years or where I’m going to be but i can
guarantee us all that we’re still going
to be eating and drinking and figuring
out how to produce enough food and clean
water for 10 billion people in the next
thirty two years is a really big
challenge now here in america we take
our food for granted we expect to be
able to go to the grocery store the
market and get anything we want pretty
much anytime we do understand that many
parts of the world have shared in our
plenty our agricultural system is the
envy of the world that’s incredibly
productive but we also know that their
parts of the world that live in extreme
poverty where malnutrition is rampant
their places where food cannot be enough
food can’t be produced for the people
who live there and those people are
dependent on imports from other
countries even in America we have
situations where there’s food scarcity
their their areas of urban decay some
are small and scattered and others are
vast and undeniable and what happened in
Flint Michigan to the
water supply is a real problem so even
in America we should not take our food
and our water for granted so feeding
leading the world’s demand for food and
water in 2050 32 years from now that’s a
big problem what are we going to do one
thing is for certain we cannot continue
to do what we do right now there’s not
enough fertile arable land on our planet
to just scale up agriculture and so if
we want to succeed at meeting the demand
for food in the future we need to
reinvent agriculture we need to reinvent
food manufacturing and we need to think
about water resource management how we
going to do that that’s a big job how we
going to do that I’m going to talk about
three ways the first thing that we could
do is to share the knowledge that we
already have we know how to do some
really cool things in agriculture we
know how to do precision agriculture we
know how to do drip irrigation we know
how to do a lot of a lot of really neat
things we know how to control farm
vehicles remotely do remote remote
plowing and harvesting and what we need
to do is share that technology and that
information with places in the world
that don’t know about it or have yet to
adopt it this is not a big problem it’s
a problem of education and outreach it
might be hampered by let hampered by
language barriers or political
situations but on the big scale of what
we need to do this one is doable it’s a
communication issue it has to do with
the words we use and how we should
choose to share their the second
strategy that we need to use is to take
technologies that are being developed in
other areas and apply them to food
production so areas like engineering or
computer science biomedicine information
technology are making rapid advances
that can be applied to our agricultural
system if we set up the right
collaboration
tissue engineering stem cell research
nanotechnology data science genome
sciences all of these can make a huge
difference in plant production animal
husbandry in helping us to design
devices that will monitor the safety of
our food on the shelf and in our
refrigerators and their lives and data
science promises to help us figure out
supply chain logistics and get food all
over the world where it needs to be
agriculture is not a separate science it
shouldn’t be sequestered away in a
particular college or viewed as
different from other sciences no we need
people who are trained in engineering
math chemistry biology computer science
all of those areas to go out to the best
universities and colleges get the best
possible training they can and then come
together to solve these problems of
producing enough food and water for the
world the second strategy the third
strategy is to develop completely new
technologies that are driven by the
needs of agriculture but that have never
been thought of before or never really
done robustly one example is to figure
out how to really efficiently convert
sea water to a form that we can drink
now people already know how to
desalinate seawater but it costs a lot
of money and it’s not very efficient it
takes a lot of energy to do it
ninety-seven percent of the Earth’s
water is in the oceans so we really
don’t have a water shortage we just have
a potable water shortage and we need to
think about how to do that conversion
much more efficiently do you think we
could produce food in a structure like a
great big fancy greenhouse where weather
wouldn’t matter come hailstorm no
problem where we wouldn’t have to put in
very many inputs we would use no
pesticides we would have almost no waste
and we would be using energy that we
could recover
so that we weren’t wasting it and so our
food the footprint of producing our food
would be very very small can you imagine
that we could produce food on a space
station could we think of ways to
trigger human satiety that feeling that
you’re full in a big meat after a meal
so that’s something like obesity would
be a human affliction like polio
something that you’re going to read
about in a history book can we unleash
your imaginations and give you
incentives and help you make that list
much longer than it is your creativity
and ingenuity is greatly needed to solve
this problem now I know you’re
independent school kids you have a great
future ahead of you but that does not
let you off the hook right now so there
are some things that you can do right
now I want to talk about this for a
minute first I think you can be really
aware and knowledgeable about this
situation you can understand that we
take our food for granted we understand
that there’s starvation in the world but
it’s at somebody else’s in their
understand that we cannot hope for a
peaceful and free world where society
there isn’t more and people respect each
other as long as we have people walk in
the earth who are hungry and thirsty and
we need to if we continue to allow
American agriculture to move offshore
following precedents that have been said
in other manufacturing sectors than our
food supply is going to be dependent on
trade agreements and world politics we
could find ourselves competing for food
something we’ve never done in America
food safety is at the very core of human
health we should have zero tolerance for
contaminants in our food sings like
microbe
contaminants or pesticide residues or
toxic chemicals even ones that might be
produced by a plant itself we should
have zero tolerance for that in a world
where terrorism threatens food and water
our Achilles heels and finally we need
to be aware we need to always be
thinking about about this problem it’s
not so acute as some of the others that
bother us but when we think about
societal concerns we all have our
individual list but i bet that own them
are gun violence and global warming and
crime in the streets and threats from
disease pandemics please add food
security by that I mean food security
means the ability to get the food and
water that you need add that to the list
and remember that two percent of the
american population produces all the
food that all of us eat so when you say
your Grace’s and you enjoy food with
friends and family don’t forget to be
thankful for the people who produced it
it’s very hard work the second thing
that you can do is not waste food and
water so think about food waste for a
minute from the time that we plant seeds
in the ground and grow the crops and
then harvest them how much do we leave
in the field and then we move that food
we distributed or we process it and it
ends up in a grocery store how much
never makes it through the cash register
to the consumer but it ends up staying
in the dairy counter or in the meat
counter of the produce counter or maybe
the back counters and it never gets
bought and so it’s wasted there and then
went for the food that we bring home how
much of it sadly gets forgotten in the
back of our refrigerators never cooked
to never eaten and on our own plate how
much do we throw in the garbage so the
answer to that is way too much okay can
we agree the answer to that is way too
much and so all of us food is wonderful
cooking is fun we all love to eat we
should but we need to be mindful of
wasting food and
not to do that now the third thing I
think you can do is you can consider
dedicating yourself and your career to
solving this problem there are jobs in
this field and there will continue to be
jobs in this field the problem is not
going away we need people like you to go
out and get the best possible education
in an area that is very challenging for
you but very fun it could be math it
could be chemistry it could be medicine
it could be all kinds of things and then
we need groups of people to come
together and to work together to solve
this problem meeting the world’s demand
for food and water in the future is
going to be a big challenge and we need
the brightest minds around to do it I’m
going to end by talking about this
problem as a school assignment because i
know you have school assignments all the
time so first of all it’s required it’s
not an elective so you can’t opt out of
this course second there won’t be any
part credit for it said a half-baked
answer or something that we didn’t
really do our best stone no one’s going
to curve the grade on this assignment
okay third you can use any resource you
can find and by all means you can work
together we can all work together but
together we have to get an a-plus and
forth we procrastination is just
unacceptable this is not an assignment
that we can put off to the last minute
we can’t even put it off till later the
time to work on this assignment is right
now so 32 years from now in 2050 when
the world population is approaching 10
billion people I hope we do things
differently and I hope that we will all
look back and be very very proud of the
awesome advances that your generation is
going to make it’s really important ten
and a half billion people are depending
on what we do thank you very much
you
[Applause] [Music]
good afternoon everybody good afternoon
thank you so seven and a half billion
does a number of people who live on the
earth today 32 years from now and 2050
that number is likely to be more than
nine and a half billion an approaching
10 billion so we’re going to go from
seven and a half billion to 10 billion
in thirty two short years people we are
sixty percent water we’re mostly bags of
water and everybody eats now I don’t
know where you’re going to be in 32
years or where I’m going to be but i can
guarantee us all that we’re still going
to be eating and drinking and figuring
out how to produce enough food and clean
water for 10 billion people in the next
thirty two years is a really big
challenge now here in america we take
our food for granted we expect to be
able to go to the grocery store the
market and get anything we want pretty
much anytime we do understand that many
parts of the world have shared in our
plenty our agricultural system is the
envy of the world that’s incredibly
productive but we also know that their
parts of the world that live in extreme
poverty where malnutrition is rampant
their places where food cannot be enough
food can’t be produced for the people
who live there and those people are
dependent on imports from other
countries even in America we have
situations where there’s food scarcity
their their areas of urban decay some
are small and scattered and others are
vast and undeniable and what happened in
Flint Michigan to the
water supply is a real problem so even
in America we should not take our food
and our water for granted so feeding
leading the world’s demand for food and
water in 2050 32 years from now that’s a
big problem what are we going to do one
thing is for certain we cannot continue
to do what we do right now there’s not
enough fertile arable land on our planet
to just scale up agriculture and so if
we want to succeed at meeting the demand
for food in the future we need to
reinvent agriculture we need to reinvent
food manufacturing and we need to think
about water resource management how we
going to do that that’s a big job how we
going to do that I’m going to talk about
three ways the first thing that we could
do is to share the knowledge that we
already have we know how to do some
really cool things in agriculture we
know how to do precision agriculture we
know how to do drip irrigation we know
how to do a lot of a lot of really neat
things we know how to control farm
vehicles remotely do remote remote
plowing and harvesting and what we need
to do is share that technology and that
information with places in the world
that don’t know about it or have yet to
adopt it this is not a big problem it’s
a problem of education and outreach it
might be hampered by let hampered by
language barriers or political
situations but on the big scale of what
we need to do this one is doable it’s a
communication issue it has to do with
the words we use and how we should
choose to share their the second
strategy that we need to use is to take
technologies that are being developed in
other areas and apply them to food
production so areas like engineering or
computer science biomedicine information
technology are making rapid advances
that can be applied to our agricultural
system if we set up the right
collaboration
tissue engineering stem cell research
nanotechnology data science genome
sciences all of these can make a huge
difference in plant production animal
husbandry in helping us to design
devices that will monitor the safety of
our food on the shelf and in our
refrigerators and their lives and data
science promises to help us figure out
supply chain logistics and get food all
over the world where it needs to be
agriculture is not a separate science it
shouldn’t be sequestered away in a
particular college or viewed as
different from other sciences no we need
people who are trained in engineering
math chemistry biology computer science
all of those areas to go out to the best
universities and colleges get the best
possible training they can and then come
together to solve these problems of
producing enough food and water for the
world the second strategy the third
strategy is to develop completely new
technologies that are driven by the
needs of agriculture but that have never
been thought of before or never really
done robustly one example is to figure
out how to really efficiently convert
sea water to a form that we can drink
now people already know how to
desalinate seawater but it costs a lot
of money and it’s not very efficient it
takes a lot of energy to do it
ninety-seven percent of the Earth’s
water is in the oceans so we really
don’t have a water shortage we just have
a potable water shortage and we need to
think about how to do that conversion
much more efficiently do you think we
could produce food in a structure like a
great big fancy greenhouse where weather
wouldn’t matter come hailstorm no
problem where we wouldn’t have to put in
very many inputs we would use no
pesticides we would have almost no waste
and we would be using energy that we
could recover
so that we weren’t wasting it and so our
food the footprint of producing our food
would be very very small can you imagine
that we could produce food on a space
station could we think of ways to
trigger human satiety that feeling that
you’re full in a big meat after a meal
so that’s something like obesity would
be a human affliction like polio
something that you’re going to read
about in a history book can we unleash
your imaginations and give you
incentives and help you make that list
much longer than it is your creativity
and ingenuity is greatly needed to solve
this problem now I know you’re
independent school kids you have a great
future ahead of you but that does not
let you off the hook right now so there
are some things that you can do right
now I want to talk about this for a
minute first I think you can be really
aware and knowledgeable about this
situation you can understand that we
take our food for granted we understand
that there’s starvation in the world but
it’s at somebody else’s in their
understand that we cannot hope for a
peaceful and free world where society
there isn’t more and people respect each
other as long as we have people walk in
the earth who are hungry and thirsty and
we need to if we continue to allow
American agriculture to move offshore
following precedents that have been said
in other manufacturing sectors than our
food supply is going to be dependent on
trade agreements and world politics we
could find ourselves competing for food
something we’ve never done in America
food safety is at the very core of human
health we should have zero tolerance for
contaminants in our food sings like
microbe
contaminants or pesticide residues or
toxic chemicals even ones that might be
produced by a plant itself we should
have zero tolerance for that in a world
where terrorism threatens food and water
our Achilles heels and finally we need
to be aware we need to always be
thinking about about this problem it’s
not so acute as some of the others that
bother us but when we think about
societal concerns we all have our
individual list but i bet that own them
are gun violence and global warming and
crime in the streets and threats from
disease pandemics please add food
security by that I mean food security
means the ability to get the food and
water that you need add that to the list
and remember that two percent of the
american population produces all the
food that all of us eat so when you say
your Grace’s and you enjoy food with
friends and family don’t forget to be
thankful for the people who produced it
it’s very hard work the second thing
that you can do is not waste food and
water so think about food waste for a
minute from the time that we plant seeds
in the ground and grow the crops and
then harvest them how much do we leave
in the field and then we move that food
we distributed or we process it and it
ends up in a grocery store how much
never makes it through the cash register
to the consumer but it ends up staying
in the dairy counter or in the meat
counter of the produce counter or maybe
the back counters and it never gets
bought and so it’s wasted there and then
went for the food that we bring home how
much of it sadly gets forgotten in the
back of our refrigerators never cooked
to never eaten and on our own plate how
much do we throw in the garbage so the
answer to that is way too much okay can
we agree the answer to that is way too
much and so all of us food is wonderful
cooking is fun we all love to eat we
should but we need to be mindful of
wasting food and
not to do that now the third thing I
think you can do is you can consider
dedicating yourself and your career to
solving this problem there are jobs in
this field and there will continue to be
jobs in this field the problem is not
going away we need people like you to go
out and get the best possible education
in an area that is very challenging for
you but very fun it could be math it
could be chemistry it could be medicine
it could be all kinds of things and then
we need groups of people to come
together and to work together to solve
this problem meeting the world’s demand
for food and water in the future is
going to be a big challenge and we need
the brightest minds around to do it I’m
going to end by talking about this
problem as a school assignment because i
know you have school assignments all the
time so first of all it’s required it’s
not an elective so you can’t opt out of
this course second there won’t be any
part credit for it said a half-baked
answer or something that we didn’t
really do our best stone no one’s going
to curve the grade on this assignment
okay third you can use any resource you
can find and by all means you can work
together we can all work together but
together we have to get an a-plus and
forth we procrastination is just
unacceptable this is not an assignment
that we can put off to the last minute
we can’t even put it off till later the
time to work on this assignment is right
now so 32 years from now in 2050 when
the world population is approaching 10
billion people I hope we do things
differently and I hope that we will all
look back and be very very proud of the
awesome advances that your generation is
going to make it’s really important ten
and a half billion people are depending
on what we do thank you very much
you
[Applause] [Music]
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