Sustainable Agriculture

I just met a woman whose company develops and deploys sustainable agriculture solutions, and I had the opportunity to ask her about her viewpoints on the topic.  A quick summary:

• No-till farming.  This is an agricultural technique for growing crops with minimal disturbance of the soil.  It decreases the amount of soil erosion, while increasing: the amount of water that infiltrates into the soil, soil retention of organic matter, and nutrient cycling.

• Spot spraying.  As one might hope in the information age, the idea of spraying certain chemicals, whether they are intended to kill insects or weeds, can be minimized.  Modern technology makes this possible.

• Vertical farming.  We’ve all seen this concept whereby (thus far) relatively small amounts of produce are grown indoors, in containers that encourage the plants to grow “up” as opposed to “out.”    One’s initial reaction might have been negative:  OK, we have the sun above, the fertile earth below, and rain that has made “horizontal” farming work, for the last 10,000 years.  What’s the matter with letting nature takes its course?  The answer resides in the growing scarcity of arable land and fresh water.  We now have grocery stores that grow the produce they sell on their roofs.

• Social media’s scorn of vegans.  There have been vegetarians for the last couple of hundreds of years, but it’s only been in the blink of an eye, since the dawn of social media, that meat-eaters have begun to ridicule those who have decided that killing and eating cows (or sheep or pigs) may be bad for human health, cruel to the animals, and bad for the planet.  By ridiculing sensitive and thoughtful people, humankind has arrived at a new level of meanness and stupidity.

• Plowing under rain forests to make room for more cows.  It was at this point that this erudite, sophisticated woman dropped the F-bomb to describe her repulsion for a society that eagerly welcomes its own death if that means more hamburgers.

Great to meet a kindred spirit.