This past holiday weekend, hundreds of people gathered for a free conference, called Food Justice, hosted by the University of Oregon’s Wayne Morse Center for Law and Politics. In the words of the conference organizers the purpose was to, “Explore the history and future of our food system with a focus on three themes: community, equity and sustainability.”

With a heavy hitters Fred Kirschenmann and Dr. Vandana Shiva offering inspiring plenaries and a host of academics and practitioners sharing their latest research and ideas, the event was as stimulating as it was frustrating. As Dr. Shiva so eloquently said in her closing plenary, “No other species has achieved the amazing success of depriving itself of food.”

As I was manning the Civil Eats table at the food fair in the student union all day Monday, I wasn’t able to attend as many sessions as I’d like, but I do want to offer a few notes and ideas that I gathered. There is no way to capture everything, clearly, and the following may seem out of context, but hopefully something will spark new ideas and actions.

I’m particularly interested in the language we use to express this movement and advocate that we all get on the same page, so to speak, especially with terms that will resonate with consumers, therefore new or recommended terms always peak my interest. To that end, some of the words I overheard: The word local isn’t cutting it, we should use instead, “resilient” and “foodshed.” We need no longer say “climate change” when we should call it “climate destabilization” and need to refer to GMOs as “transgenesis.” The best wheat to buy is “small wheat” and fish from the Pacific Northwest should be “troll caught” to ensure the future for farmers and the fish. And, finally it looks as if almost everyone has started to say “Food and Farm Bill” in reference to the 2012 Farm Bill.

At Saturday night’s opening plenary with Kirschenmann, we heard from Pete Sorenson, Lane County Commissioner, who started the evening off saying, “A crisis is a terrible thing to waste.” Kirschenmann followed and framed my experience for the conference when he said, “We are all just citizens of the biotic community and we need to start [designing a just food system] from this perspective.” He continued by saying, “Not all local systems are the same size … therefore it’s about community engaged as a local ecosystem as a part of a larger ecosystem … so it’s about the health of each impacting the health of the whole and about a network of healthy foodsheds.” He also talked about “coming into the foodshed” and that “our first priority should be to make food for people in the foodshed by people in the foodshed.”

There were conversations about: Measuring the cost of food by its nutrition value; a resurgence of the concept of food commons; the idea that we’ve become too linear in our thinking as a result of the industrial food system – that it causes us, as humans, to think in terms of either this or that, one or the other, rather than holistically and bio-diversely; that there is no one definition of food justice.

Net neutrality, a free Internet, should be a second priority to any food security solutions we work towards.

What if deliciousness were the solution to the problem? How would that re-order our priorities? What would that food system look like?

As citizens participating in food, we have obligations, we have power and our resources are supposed to be equitable, so it’s up to us to fight for them. (There were a lot of references to Egypt … when will Americans stand up for what’s truly just?)

Chuck Benbrook, a leading scientist at The Organic Center told us, “Our community needs to up its game in terms of how we respond to our current food system.” He and University of California Berkeley’s Ignacio Chapela presented on my favorite panel entitled, “Sustainable Agriculture & Emerging Research in Plant Genetics.” Chapela, whom I’ve heard speak on transgenesis in the past, is a total anti-GMO bad ass. He presented, in detail, how the scientific community was derailed and high jacked by the promises of the Manhattan Project and how a small group of people created a national program, in secret, to push technology as the new frontier and led us inevitably into what he calls a “bio ponzi” scheme, or “faciscm as they call it in Italy” – the GE era. He advocates for science that is free and independent (more reason to support the Union of Concerned Scientists) and says “we are bundling when we should be diversifying.”

There was a riveting presentation about wheat production and seeds that lead to the question, do you want to rent your seed or own it? Resulting in a call for revitalizing local mills and keeping wheat in county; as well as breeding our own varieties so Monsanto can’t sue everyone for saving, cleaning, or supposedly stealing seeds.

Our very own Naomi Starkman presented, with Leslie Hatfield on New Media & Food Activism. In “Digitally cultivating food justice” they explored the impact of Twitter (“it’s the tool”) and Facebook, advocated for everyone to use Wikipedia to define their work, and told us that the Huffington Post is our friend. Naomi encouraged anyone interested to become one of their bloggers because, “If we don’t frame this debate, they will.” Plus, it’s quite easy and once you do, “the doors are open.”

One of the attendees asked a question that I must throw out there: When thinking about a new food system, it’s become apparent that we’ll have to do it with the big guys, not against them. So, if that’s the case, that we’ll have to work with Monsanto, McDonald’s, Wal-mart, etc., what are some of the non-negotiables? Panelists didn’t have any answers, but I thought of two, to start: People who work to produce food are paid a fair living wage and if commodity crops get subsidies so should soil health and bio-diversity.

These snippets are a mere tip of an iceberg of notes, fodder for my own advocacy and continued learning, all valuable indeed. But as my head spun with theories, facts, concepts and case studies, I had to wonder why we don’t use our time together more meaningfully when we gather at these conferences. Here you have rooms full of activists, academics and advocates — all concerned, interested eaters hungry for action and change and yet we do nothing but listen and ask questions. Fill our heads with more information. I’d like to challenge all future conference organizers to come up with one action that everyone can take, en masse, some galvanizing call that will give these people something to actually do when they are all together. You know, the old power in numbers theory.

On a final note, Alison Carruth, the conference organizer and resident scholar at the Wayne Morse Center for Law & Politics, said in her closing remarks, “Food justice happens when communities define it with each other.” Great. Let’s get to it!

Last week, 200 young farmers gathered at the Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture in Tarrytown, NY for a conference with the aim to provide education and support to sprouting farmers. This was the second year of the Young Farmers Conference, filled to capacity and begging the question, will the conference go national next year, or stay local?

The feeling in the air was one of excitement; despite the obstacles, these twenty- and thirty-somethings were eager to better their skills and be a part of the revolution in how we feed ourselves. Workshops included those on composting, poultry processing, creative ideas for accessing land, navigating Farm Bill programs for beginners, soil nutrition, agroforestry and tree crops, farming through the winter, permaculture, bringing meat to market, and more.

As a wannabe farmer-gardener myself, I also learned a lot. Like, for example, that the USDA defines a beginning farmer as someone who has been farming for less than ten years, but who has three years of farm management experience under their belt. Traci Bruckner from the Center for Rural Affairs and Aimee Witteman from the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition walked us through a number of programs that beginners are encouraged to apply for, like the Value-Added Producer Grants and Community Food Project Grants.

In another session, Severine von Tscharner Fleming, the leader of the Greenhorns –  an organization that puts on events and provides tools to young farmers — led a talk on seeds. Tom Stearns from High Mowing Seeds, Pete Johnson from Pete’s Greens, and Ken Greene from the Hudson Valley Seed Library discussed the difficulties around starting a seed-based business: the trial testing, erratic income, the need for marketing. All seemed happy, however, to be a part of the movement to reclaim seeds from agribusiness. (This is the best time of year to help these farmers out by buying seeds early, by the way, as they’ve put up capital to produce their catalog and package the product. Seeds make great holiday gifts!)

Rounding out the first day, Wes Jackson gave a talk to the group, whom he referred to as the “refugia,” saying “we need your help!” He spoke about the work he is doing to perennialize wheat and other grain crops at the Land Institute, and added that “human cleverness should be subordinate to nature’s knowledge.” He also spoke about the visit he made with Wendell Berry and Fred Kirschenmann (who also spoke) to Washington, D.C., saying that Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack and Deputy Secretary Kathleen Merrigan still haven’t responded to their calls for a 50-year Farm Bill. (The gist of which can be read in their scary op-ed from the New York Times earlier this year).

In another session I attended, the focus was on the ins and outs of land leasing, and yet another featured two farmers, Benjamin Shute and Hector Tejada, discussing the things they’ve learned as farmers with a few years under their belt. There were many sessions I wish I could have taken part but missed… well, there is always next year.

Kirschenmann, President of the board at Stone Barns, focused his talk at the end of the conference on building a “knowledge-intensive agriculture,” and being hopeful. He gave a few pieces of advice: 1. Challenges are always opportunities. 2. There will be plenty of space in the new system for all young farmers who want to farm, no matter how difficult the obstacles seem now, because resource availability will require it. 3. The economy of community will be important moving forward. He said we must work on reducing transaction costs where ever possible, through the spirit of cooperation. He also suggested a book called the Real Wealth of Nations, by Riane Eisler. 4. Civics matter; demand policy changes. 5. And pay attention to the models emerging. Small systems can be very productive, he said, giving the example of Will Allen’s Growing Power, where 10,000 people are fed from 3 acres. (Kirschenmann was also on the Leonard Lopate show last week with two young farmers. You can listen here.)

Surprisingly, there were farmers from much further out than the northeast; I met a young woman who’d been farming in rural Wisconsin, and there were two people who’d come together from a Michigan agriculture school, among others. (I also noticed the crowd was not very diverse, made up of mostly college-educated and white farmers.) This prompted me to ask Nena Johnson, Public Programs Director at Stone Barns, whether or not there were plans in the works for an outreach strategy, to make the Young Farmers Conference a national event. Instead, she told me, the intention was to create a training program so that similar conferences can be held all across the nation using locally based knowledge. One big success according to Johnson: calling on young farmers to design the programming.

The final session I attended, Building the Young Farmers Movement (pictured above), was led by Shute and Fleming. On a sheet of paper, Fleming wrote out all of the problems facing young farmers as we called them out: infrastructure and community building, land access, getting the training you need, building political will, access to healthcare, sustainable finances, and isolation, to name a few. But quickly the page was turned and begun anew: in a full room in the back of Blue Hill restaurant, young farmers began to hatch a plan for staying connected, and discussed coalition building to push for a sustainable farming agenda.

The discussion on American agriculture is evolving every day, and as a result, agribusiness has been stoking a backlash against those pushing for a change in how we grow our food. Notably, Michael Pollan has been a target at recent university speaking engagements; a few weeks ago at Cal-Poly, when a feedlot owner threatened to rescind a donation if Pollan was allowed to speak solo, the university caved, making his talk a part of a panel discussion. This is all an indication that the conversation on fixing our broken food system is gaining traction, as the discussion grows more nuanced, more solutions-oriented and more threatening to the status quo.

Last month in New York, Lisa Hamilton, author of Deeply Rooted: Unconventional Farmers in the Age of Agribusiness, hosted just such a nuanced discussion on the current state of agriculture featuring Verlyn Klinkenborg, New York Times writer whose column is called “The Rural Life,” farmer Fred Kirschenmann, Distinguished Fellow for the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State University and President of Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture, and farmer Mary Howell Martens, who grows 1400 acres of organic corn, beans and other grains with her husband and three children in Penn Yan, New York.

The panel focused on assessing the situation farmers are now caught in, and discussed solutions, including focusing on improving the foodshed, rebuilding rural communities and strengthening “ag in the middle” through trade partnerships.

Hamilton began the talk by telling a story about an opinion piece she wrote that ended up in both rural newspapers and on various progressive outlets, including Civil Eats. She thought this was telling, because it showed that both rural and urban dwellers have an interest in redefining what it means to be a farmer, and bringing back a human scale to agriculture. Here is a quote from Hamilton’s piece from last May:

In the future, farmers’ importance will only grow. Their intimate, human-scale knowledge of the land is what will allow agriculture to adapt to climate change. And as the cheap energy that industrial agriculture depends on disappears, it is farmers, with their small-scale innovation and sheer manual labor, who will feed us. Why do we care about having more farmers? Because deep down we know they are essential to a functioning food system.

She defined a farmer as “someone who grows crops in sufficient quantity to be a true commercial entity, yet is still close enough to the ground to bring human scale and values to the process.” While the amount of small farms (1-49 acres) grew by about 100,000 between 2002-2007 according to the most recent ag census, medium-sized farms, most of which fit her description, have suffered, while the largest farms (with more than 2000 acres) have continued to grow. Martens brought this point home by talking about the crisis her medium-sized farm faced in 1993 when she realized that “500 acres of conventional crops cannot support a family financially.”

Martens also spoke about the dairy crisis as emblematic of the deeper problems facing our food system, in which the quest for slight increases in margins by numerous farmers has led to overproduction and then collapse. This happened in the dairy sector through the use of “sexed semen” which has increased dramatically the amount of female cows online to milk, and the use of rGBH, a growth hormone, which increases production (with risks to the health of the cow and the public). “We are sort of on the threshold of a major change, if we do this wisely, or a collapse if we don’t do it wisely,” she said.

Kirschenmann gave some historical perspective, describing how farming was the last place where the principles of industrialization (specialization, simplification and economies of scale) were applied, and unsuccessfully, as we are now seeing a strain on resources that cannot continue into the future. He described infrastructure as a key to getting farmers out of this broken system. Right now, they are not able to grow other crops because there is no market; elevators in Iowa are only prepared to buy corn and soy. He suggested a new model of localism, revaluing the foodshed around towns and cities, and he encouraged farmers to band together and create cooperative structures and share technology, so that they all benefit from access to new markets. We must move away from a discussion of “black hats and white hats,” he said, referring to passing judgment on farmers who choose GM seed or chemical agriculture. “Conventional farmers’ backs are against the wall,” he said, adding that they, too, are “looking for alternatives to expensive inputs.”

Klinkenborg spoke about extending the conversation to places like Iowa, stating that we should ask ourselves, “not how broad we can make local, but how personal we can make it.” He reminded us that the decrease in social and biological complexity in rural America was not the natural fulfillment of the free market operating, but instead a purposeful chain of events leading to such a consequence. As a result, he said, farmers have fewer and fewer choices about what they can grow. He cited his cousins, who grow GM corn and soy in Iowa, and saw the decision to change seeds as an attempt to increase yields, and thus margins. This comparison paralleled Martens’ dairy example, but issues of pricing with commodity crops are often masked by subsidies.

Martens and her husband, Claas, are great examples of how, beyond the land, farmers can also be stewards of the community. In reaching out to their neighbors, they have shown many of them a way out of the trap of chemical-based agriculture and helped them to transition to organic. “We need to bring back the sense that farmers have some control over [the choices they can make on their land]” she said.

For a taste of the discussion, check out this short video produced by Wicked Delicate co-conspirator and Civil Eats contributor Curt Ellis:

On a cold, sunny Kentucky day at a solar-powered livestock gathering, otherwise known as the American Grassfed Association’s annual conference, I began to feel something like nostalgia. I say “something like” because it was an ironic reminiscence for a past agriculture I’ve never known yet at the same time feel connected to. Maybe this experience was not nostalgia, but instead an apparition of a sensibility returning to sow the seeds of posterity’s stake.

Inspiring this apparition was the contrarian and prophetic voice of Wendell Berry, a farmer, a poet, a lover of grass, a lover of sod. The Unsettling of America, his critique of the myopic “get big or get out” agricultural model that dominated the 1970s, was far ahead of its time, yet seemed and still seems to sit, collecting dust, on the shelves of those who’ve made major agricultural policy decisions since the 1970s. And with the same awareness he shared in The Unsettling of America, Berry now offers a concise and declarative message for agricultural planners and farmers alike—“all farmland needs to be under perennial cover.” This is the message he’s written in the forward of a forthcoming book called Grasslands by Fred Kirschenmann.

In his address at the conference, Berry expanded on that message to describe how a spongy sod under perennial cover benefits the health of our land, watersheds and people. He elaborated on the consequences of the present, temporary and highly specialized agriculture, which is based on cheap fossil fuels and chemicals and treats living organisms as machines. This agri-industrial model is predestined to be a relic for the simple fact that it uses up to produce. Enter perennial grassland. In contrast to this agri-industrial approach, which undermines soil fertility and food security, a perennial plant-based agriculture builds, through deep and extensive root systems, a healthy, responsive sod that is more adaptable in times of drought, disease or flood. A perennial plant-based agriculture is also more supportive of natural ecosystems, increased biodiversity and soil—our common ground and connection to all.

The benefits of a perennial agricultural approach are manifold, and will significantly increase under the devoted care of young and new farmers. As Mr. Berry states, these farmers will need to have complex and extensive minds, unlike the simple minds of the agri-industrialists. They will need to fit their farming to the nature of their farm and to understand and honor soil fertility. They will need to know their neighbors and respect their debt to nature. They will need to conserve, through husbandry and artistry, the balance of plants and animals on a diversified farmland. They, first and foremost, will be friends of grass and will, with humility and courtesy, remain true to the land.

Furthermore, this new generation of farmers will recognize this need not as a back-to-the-land folk agricultural recollection, but a call to action for a new era of growing that will all at once be demanding, desirable, delicious and down-to-earth. And like they to their land, we, armed with a considerable power of choice and resistance to standardless salesmanship, will remain true to them by what we choose to buy or not to buy. This, as Mr. Berry maintains, will impact the health of whole communities—ourselves, the place where we live, and all the humans and other creatures who live with us.