The Land Institute sits atop a sloping hill on the south end of Salina, Kansas, its 600 acres showcasing a living laboratory of grasses and grains being bred to “solve the problem of agriculture.” Founder Wes Jackson lays out the urgent necessity of this task in his latest book, Consulting the Genius of the Place: An Ecological Approach to a New Agriculture, published in October 2010.

Jackson delves into the problem of agriculture by looking to our dependency on fossil fuels, the resulting, rapid degradation of the land, and the reductive, Enlightenment-era thinking that continues to drive us further into deficit spending of the earth’s resources.  He does not mince words in his account of our current predicament, but takes us on a tour of the rabbit hole that has led us to the brink of ecological disaster.  Points are laid clear through personal and evolutionary histories that highlight a need for ecosystems thinking (Part I), accounts of our losses through industrialization and climate change (Part II), and immediate possibilities for the future (Parts III, IV and V).

Throughout his life, Jackson has been informed by the prairies of Kansas and South Dakota and his encounters with such prominent figures in the conservation movement as Aldo Leopold, Wendell Berry, and Stan Rowe.  These men were both his mentors and friends and he regularly draws upon their wisdom in his writing.  Through his promotion of ecosystems thinking, Jackson disputes mainstream cultural and economic assumptions that value monetary capital over ecological capital.

He pushes the reader to undertake a major ideological reorientation that acknowledges the life-giving properties of the non-living biology (i.e., the soil and atmosphere) that is our lifeline.  In taking up this challenge, we are offered the possibility of a new agriculture that can at once conserve the land and sustain the human population.  This is the work of The Land Institute, which Jackson details through an FAQ and a 50-year farm bill he and others recently presented to Secretary of Agriculture, Tom Vilsack.

Jackson engages the reader with personal anecdotes and individual histories, while also requiring a willingness to mull over the information as a cow chews on its cud.  Put another way, Jackson’s style will suit those who have the patience to follow a line of thought and aren’t afraid to delve deep.  For these individuals, it will be a pleasurable and refreshing experience.  However, there are occasions when the point may elude the reader, but this should not detract from the overall breadth of the work.

This book is best suited to the conservationist or to the devoted reader of authors like Wendell Berry.  Yet it is also accessible to the educated reader possessing a passionate interest in conservation and sustainable agriculture.

Whether or not you agree with Jackson’s assertions on our current environmental reality and future prospects, Consulting the Genius of the Place is a thought provoking read that challenges mainstream perspectives and raises issues we cannot afford to ignore.  With 40 percent of our agricultural land seriously degraded and with the loss of an additional 25 million acres each year (pg. 130), Jackson offers a timely solution that promises the potential for a “sustainable and resilient” future.

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 day before, Dr. Jackson opened the Institute with the first keynote speech of “Why Sustainability Matters.” This crowd of food writers and activists are constantly searching for a better, all-encompassing term to describe everything “sustainability” has come to illustrate, and that discussion alone could take up it’s own two day Institute. Jackson spoke about sustainability as a value term, like justice or health. These are things that cannot be defined because they are all subject to human history. The responsibility falls on those people who are passionate enough about value terms to defend them. That being said, his definition for the thrown around and subjective term is simply “living within our means,” the best examples are nature’s own ecosystems and economies, such as rainforests or prairies where water and sunlight act as vast self-sustaining recycling systems.

But then the “doom” descended when he told us that the “population bomb is still ticking and consumption is on the increase.” He aptly compared our country’s financial deficit spending mess to how we treat the environment, starting 13,000 years ago with the first agricultural systems. Without our overdrawn soil, forests, and coal carbon, we would still be a healthy hunter-gatherer society. Today, a 10 year old has consumed 25% of all oil ever burned and a 22 year old has consumed more than 50%. In a nutshell, these statistics he presented indicate the alarming rate of consumption we, as a planet, are gobbling up in the modern day compared to pre-industrialization. And when 70% of our calories on a global level are derived from grain, it makes agriculture the primary cause of the planet’s degradation.

Last month I wrote a piece here at Civil Eats that presented, in my mind, examples of “sustainable” food communities. For me, the solution that always makes the most sense when thinking about our current food system is to bring the focus back in, to zoom the macro lens to micro and do everything on a local level. Between bites of golden beets and shaved fennel I posed this idea to the kind Dr. “Don’t we just need to create self-sustaining systems one small community at a time?” I rosily queried. He turned to me and gave me this answer: “Well, I’m not sure, but it strikes me that that might be escapism.”

Yep. I’ve been a bit naïve. Although the “buy fresh, buy local” ideology is wonderful, and “food not lawns” should reign supreme, some of these ideas may just be a simplistic, black and white way to rationalize my safe little bubble of privilege living in progressive, fertile California bounty. When examining the real problems of global hunger, climate change, peak oil, etc., just skipping over to my favorite farmers market for a basket of strawberries doesn’t seem to fit into the fix-it equation. Paul Robert’s article “Spoiled” in the last issue of Mother Jones discusses this problem as well. He writes, “When most of us imagine what a sustainable food economy might look like, chances are we picture a variation on something that already exists-such as organic farming, or a network of local farms and farmers markets, or urban pea patches-only on a much larger scale. The future of food, in other words, will be built from ideas and models that are familiar, relatively simple, and easily distilled into a buying decision: Look for the right label, and you’re done.”

He goes on to discuss that our ideology of local equals better does not always take into account food miles accurately. Sometimes the carbon footprint of a fully stocked semi carrying goods from a single source distributor is less than the food miles tallied up from all the farmers participating in a single farmers market. In fact, at Cooking For Solutions 2007, CEO of Bon Appétit Management Company (BAMCO) Fedele Bauccio discussed this same idea. His company is a great example of how big does not always mean bad. They have made a strong commitment to being a leader in responsible food practices and have the power to actually fund research, implement programs, and alter trends on a corporate level. While putting together the impressive BAMC Low Carbon Diet program, Bauccio found that completely local purchasing models were actually less efficient than regional spending. And this program also corroborates that the emissions released due to transporting food is actually less than one-tenth of its total environmental toll. We should be looking at how food is produced (fuel and water inputs/outputs for things like meat and dairy) much more than if it is made in this county or the next, and limiting how much of those high methane gas and nitrous oxide generators we put into our diet.

But the carbon impact is just one issue. What about space to actually grow all of this sustainable food? Will we just hope that the people in our society who actually have the money to afford large expanses of land will want a variety of fruits and vegetables growing there? And is there even enough rural land on this planet to feed our entire population without the use of pesticides and synthetic fertilizers? Robert sites environmental scientist Vaclav Smil who essentially says that farmland would have to possibly triple, eliminating rainforests, grasslands and prairies, and our whole labor force would have to become field workers.

Okay, so I’ve been hit in the head with a reminder to think outside of myself, to broaden my scope and remember that we are tiny ants in a huge universe that needs some work if we are to survive. What should I do now? What are the big solutions if growing my own tomatoes and sharing my Meyer lemon marmalade isn’t enough? Too bad, it’s not that simple. There won’t ever be a checklist for being sustainable. All we can do is stay motivated, note advances and focus on ideas that prioritize balance within all the issues, from carbon footprints to labor rights to accessibility to the environment. Putting aside stoicism and unwavering one-track thinking to embrace a little cooperation, even if it means (gasp!), learning something from a farmer that uses a little bit of Roundup once in awhile. (Also read fellow Civil Eats blogger Rose Hayden-Smith’s post, “There Is No Box: Big Ideas About Urban Agriculture and Local Food Systems”)

After a whole life of studying botany, biology and genetics, Dr. Jackson has come to the conclusion that we need to perennialize crops to end fossil fuel dependency and reduce chemical contamination and dead zones. We need a 50-year farm bill and we need to grow double the amount of vegetables and trees. Some other current thoughts dwell on polyculture, vertical urban farming, roof top gardens on big-box stores, inner-city produce mobiles. The ideas are out there, the theories are abundant, but remember to shake yourself from time to time and make sure the whole picture is in view.

Yesterday, two of the sustainable food movements great leaders, Wes Jackson, plant geneticist and president of the Land Institute, and farmer/writer Wendell Berry opined on their growing concern for the havoc we are wreaking on our soil.

They talked about the long term damage of even normal rainfall, “by the little rills and sheets of erosion on incompletely covered or denuded cropland” — should there not be practices in place to consciously rebuild the soil — and went on to state outright the other great threat, “degradations resulting from industrial procedures and technologies alien to both agriculture and nature.”

Those alien technologies and procedures? Our current industrial agriculture system, which promotes a one-crop-at-a-time policy, and ignores the lessons learned over 10,000 years of agricultural practices (inter-cropping, small-scale farming using minimal oil inputs), instead promoting the discoveries from agribusiness-funded labs over the last half-century.

Most chillingly, Berry and Jackson reminded us that “Civilizations have destroyed themselves by destroying their farmland.” For further reading, see Jerad Diamond’s best-seller Collapse.

But they didn’t stop there.  The authors throw the gantlet down on the theory and values behind our economy over the last 50-60 years, when “we have let ourselves believe that as long as we have money we will have food.”  They go on:

“If we continue our offenses against the land and the labor by which we are fed, the food supply will decline, and we will have a problem far more complex than the failure of our paper economy. The government will bring forth no food by providing hundreds of billons of dollars to the agribusiness corporations.”

Their suggestions included increasing acreage in perennial plants and long term thinking in our next Farm Bill.  But will Obama stop taking the limp approach to food that he has so far (see Vilsack) and finally recognize the centrality that food has to all other issues?  We shall see.

The authors credit the growing interest of producers and consumers for beginning to change our unhappy fate.   I for one don’t know enough about soil, but I’m learning.  I’ve decided to begin composting in my basement — I’ll be picking up my worm house from the Union Square farmer’s market on Saturday.  And I’m hoping to set up a composting station on the roof for myself and my neighbors in the springtime, hopefully to produce some good soil for our garden.

I know for most people, the word soil alone is enough to make your eyes grow heavy.  But it is time to wake up to the fact that our whole life is dependent on good topsoil, and we are slowly but surely sealing our own fate.