agriculture has taken over the planet
has transformed our world the biosphere
has spawned cultures cities and whole
ways of life all over the planet people
tying their destinies to the land and
yet still were not really in control and
there’s not a lot you can do about it
except live with it and try and adapt
well I would just want to start off here
with one little thing talking about our
lecture tonight a photographer’s journey
from farm to table and I want you to
show you that I do have some background
in agriculture and farming there I am
bucket feeding a calf in 1953 anybody
out there if any of you ever bucket fed
a calf anybody there you have a good for
you anybody else out there I wish every
kid could have that experience so let’s
begin I want to start someplace you
don’t expect I think up here in the
Orkney Islands off the northeast tip of
Scotland five thousand years ago when
something fresh was in the hearts of the
people and in their minds and they were
transitioning to a new way of life the
Neolithic way of life they were stopping
the process of being hunter-gatherers
and they were becoming farmers and they
were putting up things like the stones
of Stenness that you see out here near
the Vanessa broad gir
now as the photographers amongst you
I’ll stop and do a little bit of this
along the way too this is out on a nice
foggy night out there at the stones of
Stenness and my assistant is back behind
that center stone with a flashlight
that’s where the light is coming from we
did a lot of lighting on these users on
this story as you’ll see using
flashlights it always isn’t all this big
heavy-duty equipment so those folks
those folks up there 5,000 years ago
we’re settling down they were building
houses not a bad little house as an area
you see there’s a couple of beds on each
wall there’s a dresser in the middle and
when this thing was blown out of the
sand dunes by a storm in 1850 there were
still combs and things sitting on the
dressers there as if the people had just
left there’s a hearth in the middle
there’s even a little fish tank so you
can keep your fish fresh inside the
house there’s even a little cubby hole
that has a stream running under that
makes you think they have indoor
plumbing and then the other thing that
they were doing is this they were
starting to plant crops they were
becoming farmers
and that’s the revolution they were
beginning a monumental journey of
transition in how we feed ourselves
that’s the important thing to remember
now I want you to fast forward of the
5000 years to today when agriculture has
taken over the planet has transformed
our world the biosphere has spawned
cultures cities and whole ways of life
all over the planet and here we are
sitting here 2014 with 7 billion people
on the planet and by 2050 we could have
9 billion by 2100 we might reach 10 or
so can we feed those 9 or 10 billion
people when we get there and will we
have a planet left worth living on that
is the essential question I want to
follow on exploring tonight 39% of the
ice-free land on the planet is taken
over by agriculture worldwide pastures
take up twelve point nine million square
miles twice as much as cropland it’s
really vast so we did this we got the
plow we transformed the planet it’s the
biggest transformation of any process by
humans in the biosphere
but then after World War two we got into
really transforming the planet using
petroleum as fuel for the transformation
this up on the Palouse but here’s what I
really want you to remember about this
when you think about world food supply
even today with that mega agriculture
peasants small farmers on farms of two
hectares or less still grow more than
50% of the world’s food industrial
large-scale agriculture that we see on
the scale out in the Great Plains and
whatnot grow 30% of the world’s food
hunter/gatherer still take in 12.5
percent an urban urban farmers still
grow seven hampers in the food so that
story that we are used to that large
industrial agriculture is the only way
to feed the planet at least isn’t true
right
now feeding seven billion people but you
also see this that there are places in
the world where you got real problems
Africa these young women were hauling
firewood ten kilometres back to their
village they were walking ten kilometres
to get it and ten kilometres back the
promise of genetic engineering the
promise of ways of very often perceived
to be Magic Bullet ways of feeding our
planet and yet still this one
fundamental reality that were not really
in control and there’s not a lot you can
do about it except live with it and try
and adapt this is a center pivot
irrigation going on out in Nebraska and
what I really wanted is I want this
water to look rich I want it to look
like gold I wanted to look like money I
wanted to have that lush rich feel to it
I went looking for places where I could
see the culture – about irrigation and I
found a town up in Colorado that had a
parade and they were naming the
irrigated corn King and the dry land
corn King the all these corn royalty you
know and and they actually had a little
model of a green elevator on a float
with this guy you know that’s golden
when you’re a photographer like me I
shot cloud plop bingo out there full
belly farm okay so yeah does anybody
need an instruction on how Cal poppin go
works here
I guess not I think you’re seem like a
pretty savvy savvy Bunch and but it was
what was nice about this for this story
was that it was a way of showing that
there was something out on the farms
that had humor to it that had a culture
to it that had life to it well then
there was this food safety when we got
to food safety there was a lot of anger
everybody was at the time and it still
are radically polarized by the whole
thing this was in Scotland up on the
Black Isle these guys were set up across
the road
protesting these crops the efficacy of
this stuff of the GMO foods of course
is pretty clear these two cotton leaves
here one of them has been genetically
engineered to be resistant to the
insects and the other hasn’t it’s really
clear that yeah it can work but it can
also do this these two salmon are the
same age one has been modified so that
it expresses the gene for growth
constantly the natural salmon only does
it sporadically so the problem of course
then is if you modify the fish and the
fish get out and crossbreed with the
native population that gene that you
modified rapidly eclipses all the other
wild genes out there the food safety
which was also part of that was was was
fun to do it was it was harrowing to do
actually because nobody in the United
States wants to let you into a packing
plant it is just almost impossible to
get any of the big corporations to let
you do that so I finally went to Denmark
which had as it turned out much more
stringent food safety regulations and
has a much safer food supply nobody in
the United States particularly the USDA
particularly wants to tell you that
other countries have a safer food supply
than we do I was convinced of it we’ve
got these huge K foes the controlled
animal feeding operations chickens
turkeys hogs all kinds of animals going
in very very large facilities this one
down in Arkansas this is down in the
University of Arkansas drawing out those
pathogens these are from swabs taken off
of chickens from a supermarket this is
not something you want to tell everybody
about the chicken that they’re getting
down at the store this was a test that
they could do to show people that they
really hadn’t washed their hands very
well that’s all this is
these folks had this powder on their
hands that would show up under black
light and you could get it on their
hands and then they would wash their
hands and they’d come back and you could
show them that they hadn’t washed their
hands very well if there’s a silver bowl
but food safety in this world it’s
probably washing your hands well now you
get into something like soil I had to
find ways of do image –is of this stuff
I went out to the Palouse because I just
felt that the Palouse was a place where
the soil was the author of the landscape
and to put it bluntly this was a place
where soil made everything that we see
it wasn’t mountains it wasn’t sea it was
soiled doing it and I had a great
co-conspirator on this Jerry Glover from
the land Institute out there in Salina
Kansas a soil scientist he came up with
the idea doing soil pits so that we
could see the root structure down
underground so that we could do this you
can see the plants up above and you can
see what’s going on down there you know
and not many people had done this before
Jerry did these wonderful things like he
would take and plant a patch of prairie
grasses in a 55-gallon drum and buried
in the ground he wait 2 years and then
he pull it out of the ground and split
the drum apart – drums probably welded
together split apart lay this thing out
on a screen and wash out the dirt with a
hose and that way you can all of a
sudden you could see a bit of Prairie
underground gia if your national reading
National Geographic and there’s a story
on soil you got to elevate these
pictures to be a little little jazzier
you know so we took that thing and we
mounted it on a on a long pole about a
15 foot pole and we stuck the pole
through a backdrop back there and
suspended it in midair
and then we got flashlights and we use
flashlights to light this like it was a
spaceship or something like that you
know fortunately Jerry had the great
beard enough Jerry didn’t have that
beard the picture wouldn’t be the same
thing at all with it you know he had the
beard that went with the roots I like
that
so I chase earthworms around a petri
dish for two days got to be pretty good
you can herd earthworms by the way I
learned that and they don’t like heat
and they don’t like light so you got a
petri dish with some earthworms in it
and you can take some light and when it
gets hot on one side they’ll kind of
squirm around the
their side you know kind of rearrange
themselves and maybe it’ll make a better
picture two days I spent doing this
stuff because earthworms are so critical
I mean I got a Evangelist for earthworms
you know they they carry stuff up and
down in the in the soil profile they
make all this stuff happen you know we
owe him a lot you know and then I found
these things the soil fungi one of the
scientists up at the Iowa State
University had these in petri dishes and
I saw them and all of a sudden they they
look like spaceships they look like
Hubble telescope images but this is soil
fungi down in the ground look at these
things they’re incredibly beautiful and
there are millions of them down there
look at this structure of this thing
species in one teaspoon of soil
nematodes a hundred species not
individuals species protozoa thousand
species fungi 25,000 species bacteria 75
thousand species total organisms in us
in a teaspoon of healthy soil 7 billion
you know the numbers of what’s going on
down there is incredible when we were
doing this story also felt that we had
to show the soil of course but all the
soil scientists what they wanted to do
need to do is go out and photograph all
the 12 kinds of soils around the world
the mall assault and all those all those
things I learned all that stuff and I
also thought oh gee people are going to
be asleep pretty fast on this one you
know so I figured out finally what I
wanted to do was to do soil pits around
the world where I could see the farmer
with their soil and make that connection
you know and that ended up working
pretty well for us on this story so
here’s Cletus Reed and his grandson Sam
out in Iowa and you notice you see they
got about 18 inches a really rich black
topsoil they’re about 1870 they started
farming out here they had 36 inches of
topsoil and the soil that’s remaining
has 50 percent of its soil carbon left
so that means in 150 years roughly they
have burned 75% of their fuel we can’t
keep doing that folks
modern agriculture is pretty much
slow-motion strip mining of soil carbon
and it’s going to catch up with a sooner
or later so soon Hariri grows barley on
that rocky soil how would you like to
plow that and if she aside now in the
share is really got tough soil and when
you look at Maruyama
abdullah in niche air you see it isn’t
just that she doesn’t have tractors she
just doesn’t have the components of
basic agriculture the fact also that we
are taking 40% of that corn from Iowa on
the number Midwest of America and using
it to make ethanol some people have
called a crime against humanity
you know and we’re going to have to stop
sooner or later if you go to Syria
around Aleppo you can see the dead
cities a hundred dead cities out there
and these cities in Byzantine times six
or 700 AD had three or four feet of
topsoil on top of all that rock and now
it’s gone when plenty the elder came to
Palmyra Syria in the second century
there were two million fig trees going
around Palmyra look at it now we can
lose all that stuff but soil also has
great hope to it I saw that in Africa
when I went to visit Jakob I saw Dogu
who was digging zai here ins I just
trying to dig a little 4×4 inch hole in
the ground maybe so that water will
collect in there and maybe you’ll get a
little soil going and maybe you could
start the cycle of growing plants and
eventually you’ll start planting trees
which Yacouba had been doing for thirty
years and because of that his soil came
back and because his soil came back the
farm was more fertile and because of
that his family started coming back we
have this problem in agriculture that we
photographed and focused on heirlooms
heritage the seeds that keep us alive
and maintaining those seeds in the face
of an uncertain world
that’s why Cary Fowler is up there in
the Arctic
what he’s got there are seeds that are
backup seeds from seed banks around the
world stuffed into a frozen mountainside
in the Arctic seeds from places like the
seed bank they’re in Iowa
rows and rows and rows of corn seeds all
stuck in bottles for the simple reason
that if you should run into something
like ug99 wheat stem rush you’re going
to hope that somebody in a seed bank
like at Kansas State University out in
Manhattan Kansas has a sample seed from
their two hundred thousand different
seeds of wheat in their collection that
is resistant to that rust if it isn’t
that wheat stem rust like you’re seeing
right there is about 80 percent fatal to
the wheat crop if something like that
gets to India you have massive famine it
isn’t just the seeds it isn’t just the
crops and the livestock it’s the passing
on of the knowledge and when I saw that
little girl there looking back at her
mother carrying crops home in the
evening what she’s three or four you
know and she’s already learning this is
already passing on these traditions are
are passing on as a photographer this is
one of those instance in which I’m out
there and I don’t know what I’m looking
for until I see it and all of a sudden
there was something much more than I
expected to see there in that little
gesture between the little girl and her
mother so finally I want to take you on
a little trip here the thing that pulls
this whole thing together is farmers the
people who grow our food Scott Dowling
up there in South Dakota is about as
traditional a big farmers you’re going
to find he grows 50,000 acres of wheat
50,000 acres in one contiguous field of
wheat up there in South Dakota in 2011
he grew 1.3 million bushels of wheat in
2012 he had an 80% loss twenty four
thousand five hundred acres of wheat
were lost that year to him the truth of
the matter is that these farmers in
Bangladesh grow more food per acre than
he does within his industrial
methodology in south
Dakotah the other thing to understand
fundamentally about farmers in the world
today is probably more than 50% of them
they’re women so whenever you see the
advertisements is always a guy out there
the fact of the matter is most the food
in the world is grown by women the
understanding of what’s going on here is
they’re harvesting prawns they’re in a
pond next to a house what was
interesting was when I saw these guys
hold up the net it really was the
background for this kid and the guy in
the middle right there in the back got
the kid from behind the net and put him
out front and I said oh yeah this is the
right thing to do
he understand what I was looking for
everyone’s want people know that they
are making a statement by being seen and
they don’t know where the picture is
going to go they don’t know that you’re
going to see it or that our readers are
going to see it anything like this but
they know that they’re somehow speaking
to the world and if I’m sort of the
vessel of that message you know it’s
incredibly rewarding to do that
the sad part about this is all those
prawns they’re not going to get to eat
them they go to Europe because they’re
much too valuable to actually eat and
fundamentally whatever goes on in the
world of Agriculture it still comes down
to this basic faith that we started out
with people putting a plant in the
ground and hoping that it’s going to
feed them and feed their children so if
we’re going to feed the planet the
billions of people who are going to be
here in 2050 this is perhaps the
greatest challenge we have in humanity
right now is feeding those people who
are already in the pipeline and who are
coming and it’s going to happen as I say
in our lifetime and in our children’s
lifetime it’s the greatest challenge we
face I hope we’re up to it thank you so
much for being part of this
Oh
has transformed our world the biosphere
has spawned cultures cities and whole
ways of life all over the planet people
tying their destinies to the land and
yet still were not really in control and
there’s not a lot you can do about it
except live with it and try and adapt
well I would just want to start off here
with one little thing talking about our
lecture tonight a photographer’s journey
from farm to table and I want you to
show you that I do have some background
in agriculture and farming there I am
bucket feeding a calf in 1953 anybody
out there if any of you ever bucket fed
a calf anybody there you have a good for
you anybody else out there I wish every
kid could have that experience so let’s
begin I want to start someplace you
don’t expect I think up here in the
Orkney Islands off the northeast tip of
Scotland five thousand years ago when
something fresh was in the hearts of the
people and in their minds and they were
transitioning to a new way of life the
Neolithic way of life they were stopping
the process of being hunter-gatherers
and they were becoming farmers and they
were putting up things like the stones
of Stenness that you see out here near
the Vanessa broad gir
now as the photographers amongst you
I’ll stop and do a little bit of this
along the way too this is out on a nice
foggy night out there at the stones of
Stenness and my assistant is back behind
that center stone with a flashlight
that’s where the light is coming from we
did a lot of lighting on these users on
this story as you’ll see using
flashlights it always isn’t all this big
heavy-duty equipment so those folks
those folks up there 5,000 years ago
we’re settling down they were building
houses not a bad little house as an area
you see there’s a couple of beds on each
wall there’s a dresser in the middle and
when this thing was blown out of the
sand dunes by a storm in 1850 there were
still combs and things sitting on the
dressers there as if the people had just
left there’s a hearth in the middle
there’s even a little fish tank so you
can keep your fish fresh inside the
house there’s even a little cubby hole
that has a stream running under that
makes you think they have indoor
plumbing and then the other thing that
they were doing is this they were
starting to plant crops they were
becoming farmers
and that’s the revolution they were
beginning a monumental journey of
transition in how we feed ourselves
that’s the important thing to remember
now I want you to fast forward of the
5000 years to today when agriculture has
taken over the planet has transformed
our world the biosphere has spawned
cultures cities and whole ways of life
all over the planet and here we are
sitting here 2014 with 7 billion people
on the planet and by 2050 we could have
9 billion by 2100 we might reach 10 or
so can we feed those 9 or 10 billion
people when we get there and will we
have a planet left worth living on that
is the essential question I want to
follow on exploring tonight 39% of the
ice-free land on the planet is taken
over by agriculture worldwide pastures
take up twelve point nine million square
miles twice as much as cropland it’s
really vast so we did this we got the
plow we transformed the planet it’s the
biggest transformation of any process by
humans in the biosphere
but then after World War two we got into
really transforming the planet using
petroleum as fuel for the transformation
this up on the Palouse but here’s what I
really want you to remember about this
when you think about world food supply
even today with that mega agriculture
peasants small farmers on farms of two
hectares or less still grow more than
50% of the world’s food industrial
large-scale agriculture that we see on
the scale out in the Great Plains and
whatnot grow 30% of the world’s food
hunter/gatherer still take in 12.5
percent an urban urban farmers still
grow seven hampers in the food so that
story that we are used to that large
industrial agriculture is the only way
to feed the planet at least isn’t true
right
now feeding seven billion people but you
also see this that there are places in
the world where you got real problems
Africa these young women were hauling
firewood ten kilometres back to their
village they were walking ten kilometres
to get it and ten kilometres back the
promise of genetic engineering the
promise of ways of very often perceived
to be Magic Bullet ways of feeding our
planet and yet still this one
fundamental reality that were not really
in control and there’s not a lot you can
do about it except live with it and try
and adapt this is a center pivot
irrigation going on out in Nebraska and
what I really wanted is I want this
water to look rich I want it to look
like gold I wanted to look like money I
wanted to have that lush rich feel to it
I went looking for places where I could
see the culture – about irrigation and I
found a town up in Colorado that had a
parade and they were naming the
irrigated corn King and the dry land
corn King the all these corn royalty you
know and and they actually had a little
model of a green elevator on a float
with this guy you know that’s golden
when you’re a photographer like me I
shot cloud plop bingo out there full
belly farm okay so yeah does anybody
need an instruction on how Cal poppin go
works here
I guess not I think you’re seem like a
pretty savvy savvy Bunch and but it was
what was nice about this for this story
was that it was a way of showing that
there was something out on the farms
that had humor to it that had a culture
to it that had life to it well then
there was this food safety when we got
to food safety there was a lot of anger
everybody was at the time and it still
are radically polarized by the whole
thing this was in Scotland up on the
Black Isle these guys were set up across
the road
protesting these crops the efficacy of
this stuff of the GMO foods of course
is pretty clear these two cotton leaves
here one of them has been genetically
engineered to be resistant to the
insects and the other hasn’t it’s really
clear that yeah it can work but it can
also do this these two salmon are the
same age one has been modified so that
it expresses the gene for growth
constantly the natural salmon only does
it sporadically so the problem of course
then is if you modify the fish and the
fish get out and crossbreed with the
native population that gene that you
modified rapidly eclipses all the other
wild genes out there the food safety
which was also part of that was was was
fun to do it was it was harrowing to do
actually because nobody in the United
States wants to let you into a packing
plant it is just almost impossible to
get any of the big corporations to let
you do that so I finally went to Denmark
which had as it turned out much more
stringent food safety regulations and
has a much safer food supply nobody in
the United States particularly the USDA
particularly wants to tell you that
other countries have a safer food supply
than we do I was convinced of it we’ve
got these huge K foes the controlled
animal feeding operations chickens
turkeys hogs all kinds of animals going
in very very large facilities this one
down in Arkansas this is down in the
University of Arkansas drawing out those
pathogens these are from swabs taken off
of chickens from a supermarket this is
not something you want to tell everybody
about the chicken that they’re getting
down at the store this was a test that
they could do to show people that they
really hadn’t washed their hands very
well that’s all this is
these folks had this powder on their
hands that would show up under black
light and you could get it on their
hands and then they would wash their
hands and they’d come back and you could
show them that they hadn’t washed their
hands very well if there’s a silver bowl
but food safety in this world it’s
probably washing your hands well now you
get into something like soil I had to
find ways of do image –is of this stuff
I went out to the Palouse because I just
felt that the Palouse was a place where
the soil was the author of the landscape
and to put it bluntly this was a place
where soil made everything that we see
it wasn’t mountains it wasn’t sea it was
soiled doing it and I had a great
co-conspirator on this Jerry Glover from
the land Institute out there in Salina
Kansas a soil scientist he came up with
the idea doing soil pits so that we
could see the root structure down
underground so that we could do this you
can see the plants up above and you can
see what’s going on down there you know
and not many people had done this before
Jerry did these wonderful things like he
would take and plant a patch of prairie
grasses in a 55-gallon drum and buried
in the ground he wait 2 years and then
he pull it out of the ground and split
the drum apart – drums probably welded
together split apart lay this thing out
on a screen and wash out the dirt with a
hose and that way you can all of a
sudden you could see a bit of Prairie
underground gia if your national reading
National Geographic and there’s a story
on soil you got to elevate these
pictures to be a little little jazzier
you know so we took that thing and we
mounted it on a on a long pole about a
15 foot pole and we stuck the pole
through a backdrop back there and
suspended it in midair
and then we got flashlights and we use
flashlights to light this like it was a
spaceship or something like that you
know fortunately Jerry had the great
beard enough Jerry didn’t have that
beard the picture wouldn’t be the same
thing at all with it you know he had the
beard that went with the roots I like
that
so I chase earthworms around a petri
dish for two days got to be pretty good
you can herd earthworms by the way I
learned that and they don’t like heat
and they don’t like light so you got a
petri dish with some earthworms in it
and you can take some light and when it
gets hot on one side they’ll kind of
squirm around the
their side you know kind of rearrange
themselves and maybe it’ll make a better
picture two days I spent doing this
stuff because earthworms are so critical
I mean I got a Evangelist for earthworms
you know they they carry stuff up and
down in the in the soil profile they
make all this stuff happen you know we
owe him a lot you know and then I found
these things the soil fungi one of the
scientists up at the Iowa State
University had these in petri dishes and
I saw them and all of a sudden they they
look like spaceships they look like
Hubble telescope images but this is soil
fungi down in the ground look at these
things they’re incredibly beautiful and
there are millions of them down there
look at this structure of this thing
species in one teaspoon of soil
nematodes a hundred species not
individuals species protozoa thousand
species fungi 25,000 species bacteria 75
thousand species total organisms in us
in a teaspoon of healthy soil 7 billion
you know the numbers of what’s going on
down there is incredible when we were
doing this story also felt that we had
to show the soil of course but all the
soil scientists what they wanted to do
need to do is go out and photograph all
the 12 kinds of soils around the world
the mall assault and all those all those
things I learned all that stuff and I
also thought oh gee people are going to
be asleep pretty fast on this one you
know so I figured out finally what I
wanted to do was to do soil pits around
the world where I could see the farmer
with their soil and make that connection
you know and that ended up working
pretty well for us on this story so
here’s Cletus Reed and his grandson Sam
out in Iowa and you notice you see they
got about 18 inches a really rich black
topsoil they’re about 1870 they started
farming out here they had 36 inches of
topsoil and the soil that’s remaining
has 50 percent of its soil carbon left
so that means in 150 years roughly they
have burned 75% of their fuel we can’t
keep doing that folks
modern agriculture is pretty much
slow-motion strip mining of soil carbon
and it’s going to catch up with a sooner
or later so soon Hariri grows barley on
that rocky soil how would you like to
plow that and if she aside now in the
share is really got tough soil and when
you look at Maruyama
abdullah in niche air you see it isn’t
just that she doesn’t have tractors she
just doesn’t have the components of
basic agriculture the fact also that we
are taking 40% of that corn from Iowa on
the number Midwest of America and using
it to make ethanol some people have
called a crime against humanity
you know and we’re going to have to stop
sooner or later if you go to Syria
around Aleppo you can see the dead
cities a hundred dead cities out there
and these cities in Byzantine times six
or 700 AD had three or four feet of
topsoil on top of all that rock and now
it’s gone when plenty the elder came to
Palmyra Syria in the second century
there were two million fig trees going
around Palmyra look at it now we can
lose all that stuff but soil also has
great hope to it I saw that in Africa
when I went to visit Jakob I saw Dogu
who was digging zai here ins I just
trying to dig a little 4×4 inch hole in
the ground maybe so that water will
collect in there and maybe you’ll get a
little soil going and maybe you could
start the cycle of growing plants and
eventually you’ll start planting trees
which Yacouba had been doing for thirty
years and because of that his soil came
back and because his soil came back the
farm was more fertile and because of
that his family started coming back we
have this problem in agriculture that we
photographed and focused on heirlooms
heritage the seeds that keep us alive
and maintaining those seeds in the face
of an uncertain world
that’s why Cary Fowler is up there in
the Arctic
what he’s got there are seeds that are
backup seeds from seed banks around the
world stuffed into a frozen mountainside
in the Arctic seeds from places like the
seed bank they’re in Iowa
rows and rows and rows of corn seeds all
stuck in bottles for the simple reason
that if you should run into something
like ug99 wheat stem rush you’re going
to hope that somebody in a seed bank
like at Kansas State University out in
Manhattan Kansas has a sample seed from
their two hundred thousand different
seeds of wheat in their collection that
is resistant to that rust if it isn’t
that wheat stem rust like you’re seeing
right there is about 80 percent fatal to
the wheat crop if something like that
gets to India you have massive famine it
isn’t just the seeds it isn’t just the
crops and the livestock it’s the passing
on of the knowledge and when I saw that
little girl there looking back at her
mother carrying crops home in the
evening what she’s three or four you
know and she’s already learning this is
already passing on these traditions are
are passing on as a photographer this is
one of those instance in which I’m out
there and I don’t know what I’m looking
for until I see it and all of a sudden
there was something much more than I
expected to see there in that little
gesture between the little girl and her
mother so finally I want to take you on
a little trip here the thing that pulls
this whole thing together is farmers the
people who grow our food Scott Dowling
up there in South Dakota is about as
traditional a big farmers you’re going
to find he grows 50,000 acres of wheat
50,000 acres in one contiguous field of
wheat up there in South Dakota in 2011
he grew 1.3 million bushels of wheat in
2012 he had an 80% loss twenty four
thousand five hundred acres of wheat
were lost that year to him the truth of
the matter is that these farmers in
Bangladesh grow more food per acre than
he does within his industrial
methodology in south
Dakotah the other thing to understand
fundamentally about farmers in the world
today is probably more than 50% of them
they’re women so whenever you see the
advertisements is always a guy out there
the fact of the matter is most the food
in the world is grown by women the
understanding of what’s going on here is
they’re harvesting prawns they’re in a
pond next to a house what was
interesting was when I saw these guys
hold up the net it really was the
background for this kid and the guy in
the middle right there in the back got
the kid from behind the net and put him
out front and I said oh yeah this is the
right thing to do
he understand what I was looking for
everyone’s want people know that they
are making a statement by being seen and
they don’t know where the picture is
going to go they don’t know that you’re
going to see it or that our readers are
going to see it anything like this but
they know that they’re somehow speaking
to the world and if I’m sort of the
vessel of that message you know it’s
incredibly rewarding to do that
the sad part about this is all those
prawns they’re not going to get to eat
them they go to Europe because they’re
much too valuable to actually eat and
fundamentally whatever goes on in the
world of Agriculture it still comes down
to this basic faith that we started out
with people putting a plant in the
ground and hoping that it’s going to
feed them and feed their children so if
we’re going to feed the planet the
billions of people who are going to be
here in 2050 this is perhaps the
greatest challenge we have in humanity
right now is feeding those people who
are already in the pipeline and who are
coming and it’s going to happen as I say
in our lifetime and in our children’s
lifetime it’s the greatest challenge we
face I hope we’re up to it thank you so
much for being part of this
Oh
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