Spirit in Action
John Ikerd - Sustainable Agriculture, Local Food
John Ikerd was the keynote speaker for the 2008 Midwest Value Added Agriculture conference, held in Eau Claire. Agricultural economics is his field, and his work with with sustainable agriculture and the move toward localization of food. The conference is hosted annually by River Country Resource Conservation and Development Council, Inc.
- Broadcast on:
- 16 Mar 2008
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- other
[music] ♪ Let us sing this song for the healing of the world ♪ ♪ That we may hear as one ♪ ♪ With every voice of every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ ♪ And our lives will feel the echo of our healing ♪ ♪ With every voice of every song ♪ Welcome to Spirit in Action. My name is Mark Helpsmeat. Each week, I'll be bringing you stories of people living lives of fruitful service, of peace, community, compassion, creative action, and progressive efforts. I'll be tracing the spiritual roots that support and nourish them in their service. Hoping to inspire and encourage you to sink deep roots and produce sacred fruit in your own life. ♪ Let us sing this song for the dreaming of the world ♪ ♪ That we may dream as one ♪ ♪ With every voice of every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ Today on Spirit in Action, we'll listen to the keynote address delivered to the 2008 Midwest Value Added Agriculture Conference. With sessions like "Exploring the Food Footprint," "Peloting Native Grasses for Bio-Heat," and "Local Food for Everyone," connections between hunger prevention and local food, you can tell that this is a group that goes far beyond the modern corporate farm. In fact, central concerns are sustainability and local food. The keynote address of the Midwest Value Added Agriculture Conference this year was delivered by John Eichert. John is something of a cross between your typical county agricultural agent, a college professor, and a traveling evangelist. He believes fervently in sustainability, and he talks about it with words like "faith, hope, and love." He knows the nitty-gritty of the system, having been raised on a dairy farm, and with his PhD and decades of experience with several universities in agricultural economics. He is cooperated with the USDA providing leadership for research and education related to sustainable agriculture. John Eichert's books include "Sustainable Capitalism," "A Return to Common Sense," and his latest "Small Farms are Real Farms." Let's listen to John Eichert's keynote address at the January 24, 25, 10th annual Midwest Value Added Agriculture Conference, held in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, where John's topic was "The Relocalization of Food, Values Added Agriculture." I really appreciate the opportunity to be here with you tonight. I was here some years ago at this conference. It was a good conference, and I was glad to be invited back now. And I meant to love to see what year it was, but the main thing I remember about it, it was about 25 degrees below zero. If anybody remembers what year that was, that was the last year I'm here. So I'm pleased to be invited to come back. You know, it's kind of an honor, once people have heard you, they say, "Well, we want to come back again." But it's kind of a challenge also, because if you go out the first time and nobody has ever heard of you and they don't know who you are, they don't know what to expect. So if you do have to do half way decent jobs, you know, they're relieved and pleased. But if they invite you back, then they expect a little bit more out of you a second time. So that kind of puts you under pressure, so I feel a little bit of pressure here or not. I see some familiar places, not just from this conference, but from other locations where I've spoken around Wisconsin and Minnesota and places like that. And I'm always concerned when I see people, you know, that I respect, that I have to speak again, and they've heard me speak before, that I really won't have anything new to say. But that was bothering me one time when I was speaking down in North Carolina, and I had several speaking engagements around the south, and I looked around, there were several people around there that I'd seen before. And before being in North Carolina, it made me think that that was the home of Billy Graham, who was the longtime evangelist. And you know what, Billy Graham preached for about 40 or 50 years, and he basically used the same message every time he got an increase. So I guess if Billy Graham can do that, then maybe I can too. That maybe it doesn't matter so much if something is new, as long as it's true. And what I want to do tonight, I can't swear that what I say is true, but what I say tonight will be my truth. And I say it with conviction because it's what I believe to be true. And if your truth is different from mine, then that's all right, but I'm not so egotistical as to think that I have a corner on the truth, and I think most of us are simply just searching for the truth, and we'll never quite know whether we've found it or not. But what I want to talk about is my truth, and when you talk about putting together words, the title I chose, my presentation tonight was "Relocalization of Food, Values, Adding Agriculture." Now most of the people here probably picked up on the internet, or maybe on the TV or something, that local board, and OCA VORE, was selected by the New Oxford American Dictionary as the word of the year for 2007, as the new word of the year. And I looked it up, I just happened to get one of those dictionaries from them with their Christmas this year, but I looked it up on them to see how they defined it. And they defined local board as a person that shows a preference for food that has global ingredients that's seasonally available with few deafening preservatives is what they call them. And there was commentary about local board on the internet, and other places that I picked up in articles, and some people thought it was just a bad thought, it was a bad choice of a word, it was just something that would be passing along. But I think that most of the people that have been involved over the years in what I call the Sustainable Agriculture Movement, they realize that local horror and the local food movement is just but the latest phase in a trend that's been going on in food for several decades. It's a trend, it's a fundamental food move, but if you will, that I think is fundamentally transforming the nature of agriculture in our food system in this country. Now, when I talk about the re-localization of food, the reason I say leave re-localization, because one thing about being old, I can remember when food was local. In fact, if you go back, if you go back prior to World War II, I can't remember much back in that period of time, but prior to World War II, basically all foods were local. At that time, about a third of the people in this country lived on farms, and most of those people produced most of their own food. And a lot of the rest of the folks in this country lived in small towns out there weren't too far from farms, and they bought their food from local merchants who bought their produce, their vegetables, and their meat, and their milk, and their eggs from local farmers. So even the people in town in those days weren't too far removed from the food that was mostly local. And even if you want to urban areas, such as St. Louis, I know, but probably the same thing is true if we talk about Madison or Minneapolis, St. Paul, or whatever, that the urban areas in those times were surrounded by truck farms, and dairies, and orchards, and even the people in the urban areas were even pretty local when it came to the things that were fresh and perishable. But then we began the delocalization, if you will, began after World War II, because it began as a consequence of the industrialization of agriculture. That was what started the whole thing. After World War II, they had the military or war technologies, so the fertilizer plants were really munitions plants that were turned over, producing nitrogen fertilizers, and the poison gas that they produced during the war turned into pesticides. And the fertilizers and the pesticides allowed farmers to move away from the diversified farms that they had up at that time and began to specialize in producing specific crops and livestock items which made them and made possible by these industrial technologies. And as they specialized in producing particular things, then the quantities were too large to sell in the local community and the local market, and they began to have to ship it to other distances, but it all made sense because it was more efficient. And then the specialization came with mechanization and the larger sized farming operations. And that was followed in the specialization on the farm, the geographic specialization. And that was brought about by the improvements in the highway system in the country, particularly the interstate highway system that came on in the 1950s, which made it easy to ship food and agriculture products all across the country. Because up until then, you had to ship it by rail and it was slow and costly and inconvenient to ship many of the food items that way. And that way we began, after that we began to see the emergence of particular production areas such as California and Florida that would produce the person that produced and the fruits and things of that nature. And when we got to that point, it was no longer necessary to eat local because you could eat stuff that was shipped in from all around the country. And it was no longer necessary to eat in season because you could simply ship something in from somewhere where it was in season. And there was no need to preserve things locally in season and store them because you could get things all year round. About that same time in the 1960s, we began to see the big supermarkets, the Safeway, the Crow, the AMP, began to replace the local mom and top grocery stores that they've been buying from local farmers in the big supermarkets. We bought it forever in the country that they could get it at the lowest price and move it around the country where else it's going to go. And then in the 1970s we saw that fast food places come in and we saw that McDonald's and the Kentucky Fried Chip and the Pizza House and that freed the housewife from the kitchen and felt that they no longer had to worry about it. How you got to prepare the food because you could always get somebody else to prepare for you. And as we look at the food system today, it's not only non-local, it's global. It comes from all over the world. At any time of the year, from anywhere, most people don't know even how it works. There's various studies that have been done, but most of them come out with something like an average of about 1,500 miles that the average food item travels. Some goes 19 and some 12 under the 15s are good round numbers. And most people in this country have no idea whether their food's local or not because they don't have no idea where it comes from. Most people don't know whether it's seasonal or not because they don't even know what's seasonal. At a particular time of the year where they're eating food. And even if they knew where to get good local long food, they wouldn't know how to prepare it. Because they've forgotten how to prepare the things that they can grow in their own area. But one thing it's important to remember when you go back over that transition from local to the non-local and global. Just remember that that transition in large part happened during about a 50-year period. That seems like a long time. Some of you young folks, but some of the rest of us, it's not all that long. It happened mostly during the last half of the last century. And equally important, I think, is to remember that almost from the very beginning of that investigation of our food system, there was a food movement that rose up in opposition. A counter-industrial food movement, if you will. And it began back in the '60s. And it began with the natural food movement. The natural food movement that emerged in the 1960s, and I would contend that today that the local food movement essentially a continuation of that food movement that began in opposition to the industrialization going on about 50 years ago. When you ask people today about the local food movement, we saw surveys, and I've seen many of these, ask people, "Why do you need local food? Why do you choose local food or go to the farmer's market?" Most of them will say something like freshness. They'll be at the top level. They'll buy fresh, buy local food. But I think we need to understand that freshness and flavor, while they're important, is just one part of the local food story, and maybe not even the most important part of it. You could look at organizations that are looked to, and I had a visible part of this kind of local movement, such as the soul food movement, which has over 80,000 members of the lifestyle check in 50 countries around the world, 12,000 here and 140,000 different, what they call it, come convivians or local chapters, if you will. On their website and what they talk about, they talk about producing food that tastes good, they start with branches and flavor, but they also talked about food that's produced in a clean way that protects the environment and protects the health of animals and the health of the people that eat it, and go on to talk about food that's produced in a way and processed that also gives a fair economic return to the local farmers that produce it. And there's another national organization called the Chefs Collaborative. It has about 1,000 chefs in the West, that's all around the country. And the Chefs Collaborative is about local foods, and it's about seasonal and artisanal foods. But on the Chefs Collaborative website, what they talk about what they're trying to do is they're trying to maintain the cultural and the biological diversity associated with food production. And they talk about food that's produced in a way that maintains the health of the earth and the health of people, and they talk about the biological diversity being important because it's essential to the sustainability of the overall food production system. It's not just about fresh flavor, it's about sustainability, it's about biological diversity, it's about the health of people, it's about the treatment of animals, it's about our relationship with the earth, it's about our relationships with each other. That's what it's about. I've intended, again, with the natural food movement in the 1960s. I had an opportunity a couple of times to speak with an organization out in the northwest called the Providence Alliance. The Providence Alliance is a group of people that first started off with the natural food movement. They were the hippies, that's what they called themselves, out of California, Washington, out in that area of the country. And they were celebrating their 30th year, and they talked about it back in the early years. The first time that they had their annual meeting, they met in the state park, and they all camped out in tents and made their own food. They're kind of proud of that. But that's where it began. Back in the '60s in California, there were probably similar movements in maybe even in Wisconsin, and maybe in Pennsylvania, in places like that, people, some of you may have been involved in those. And those people were responding to the beginning of the industrialization of agriculture, and they went back to the, back to the woods, so to speak, what does it become, back to the earth, or whatever, but they raised their own food. And they were the ones that kind of started the farmer's markets, and they had their own markets, and they started, they were the early ones that started the food cooperatives, and the first natural food stores were started by these folks and a lot of the foods that you see, the branded items that you see in the natural food stores today, they created those items from scratch and learned how to package them and put them in the market. They weren't driven just by freshness and flavor. That was important to them, but they were driven by concerns for the industrialization of food systems, and the chemicals, particularly the fertilizers and the pesticides, and the impact that they perceived that those chemicals had on the health, and on the natural environment, and they were looking for something that was fundamentally different. They wanted to eat that industrial food. And then in the early 60s, there was the Rachel Cross's roadside spraying, and there was a whole environmental movement broke out in, and suddenly it wasn't just the hippies anymore that were eating natural food and organic. And then the 70s and the 80s were the environmental movement that you saw. Organic began to come on to see. Organic was simply attempted to put more standards on, or clear definition, on what natural food was about. And with the organic growing at the rate of 20% per year, during the decade of the 90s, and meant that it was doubling about over three or four years, it was the growing, the fastest growing segment of the food market. In the early, organic movement was about vegetarian, water for vegetation, vegetables and fruits, and that sort of thing, but also in the 90s we began to see organic animal products coming on, particularly meat and milk, and the concern there wasn't just about freshness and flavor, it was about the use of hormones and antibiotics in the livestock agriculture with the industrialization, and later on it became the large-scale confinement animal operations, and it was the treatment of the animals in those operations, and the pollution and destruction of the rural communities that was the concern, that was driving the preference for the alternative natural local foods. And then it became concern for the farm workers, the workers in the fields of California and Florida, and the treatment of those workers, and the lack of pain, the lack of housing, and the disrespect for people in the food system, and the lack of appreciation for the contribution that the farmers and others, and it became a broad social movement that was driven by social and ecological concerns, as well as just the quality of food. The thing is driving the movement today as much as anything we look for the future, is concerns about the nutrient value. There's a growing number of scientific studies that are credible, scientific studies out there, and there's more under way that are showing that the industrialization of food, we increase the quantities we boost the cost when we left the nutrients out. And so we're ending up with food that's high in calorie and high in fat. We maybe have a lot of taste to it, but it doesn't have much substance to it. And we hear about the epidemic of obesity around the country, and diabetes, and heart disease, and things. And all of those things are obviously related to diet, and people point to the sedentary lifestyle that I think we'll find that while the sedentary lifestyle may be a contributing factor, that we've got people that are eating themselves still are overweight because they're starving for the nutrients that we've taken out of the industrial food. Health is also driving the growth in grass fed meat and grass fed milk. When we look at the health concerns, the feed live animals, and we see that in the grass-based animals, they have higher levels of the omega-3s, and the CLAs, and vitamin E, and all of those things that's putting it on. But increasing demand for grass fed meat, milk, and cheese, and also we know that we're finding out now that when we're concerned about E. coli 157H7, the one that does the most damage to human beings, that there's far higher levels of that particular E. coli organism in the roomness of animals that are put on heavy grain diets in the feed lots of the large-scale confinement operations, and far lost smaller amounts in the animals that are dead of grass. There's healthy issues that are driving it. I think Michael Collins' new book will probably come out, and that's what he's going to focus on now. And to mention Michael Collins, another thing that's driving the local food movement, and this whole food movement I'm not talking about, is the growing, probably, awareness of what we've done to the food system and the visualization process. There's two books I recommend to everybody. I don't care where you're from, but what it's about. One of them is Fast Food Nation Eric Swasser, who came out with that several years ago. And it's a book that doesn't just talk about the fast food industry and the empty calories in the fast food, but it talks about a food system that's degrading of practically everything that it touches. And it's deceptive and everything from flavor to advertising. It's a book that talks much about the food system today and the way that the jungle did. It looked in Sinclair back in earlier times that led to a revolution. And then there's a new book out, relatively new, by Michael Collins' Come Omeletors Development, which is another one that everybody should read and what Fast Food Nation talks about the food system and Michael Collins talks about what's going on at the agricultural level in terms of the policy and the subsubation of cheap food, the cheap corn that leads to the cheap calories in the supermarket and poor diets and poor health and the things that go with that. What we're talking about is systemic problem, a fundamental problem that permeates every aspect of our food system today. It's an ecological problem, it's a social problem, it's an economic problem. We've created a system that simply is not sustainable over the long run. And whether we talk about chemical revenues or the problems with junk food or fast food or GMOs or our own or antibiotic resistance, lack of humameless of the treatment of the animals or the workers or the exploitation of farmers or the land or whatever, it all has the same basic origin in treating a living biological system of a mechanistic process. It's exploited, it's extractive, and more and more people are realizing that it's a fundamental systemic problem that we have to basically reinvent the food system to solve it. The symptoms are deep, psychological, philosophical, social flaws. And the logic of how we organize the production system. Industrial farming systems inevitably degrade the land and become chemical, defend the chemicals, the things that caused problems and end up in the mistreatment of people and the workers. The industrial food system inevitably leads to the exploitation of farmers with barely a living wage and farm workers in the system. The system is using up the natural resources and the human resources that the ultimate productivity of agriculture in our food system depends and it's simply not sustainable over the long run. My truth, you may not agree, it's my truth. The local more stage is being driven now by something even deeper and more fundamental among the values of people that are driving this system. It's political, it's ethical, it's philosophical, if you will. A growing number of people that I can be running contact with are concerned now about the globalization of food from the standpoint of food security. As we've gone now to kind of feed this industrial system through exports, we're exporting the raw materials and importing the food, we're becoming a nation that's increasingly dependent upon the rest of the world of our food. In fact, last year, if we hadn't had a collapse in the value of the dollar that made for imported food much more expensive, we would have imported more food last year than we exported in terms of agriculture products. And I don't think anybody's saying that we're going to get out of agriculture in this country, but I think people look around realistically and say, we could easily become as dependent upon the rest of the world for our food, sometime in the future as we are today, for our oil, and what are the consequences of that? They're looking for local foods for security in the future. They're looking at the ecological realities of our dependence upon fossil energy that's declining. They're looking at problems such as climate change that's associated with that fossil energy use, and they're saying, we want to eat closer to home. There's growing evidence that we're approaching if we haven't passed a peak in oil production, and from there on out, the fossil energy that this industrial microculture depends upon is going to be going to be more costly than this one can be smaller in quantities. And we looked at alternative citrus cold and we see the problems of greenhouse gases and the rising problem of global warming, and we look at nuclear powers and alternative then there's environmental problems there as well, and we look around the world at counties such as India and China growing demand for energy, and we recognize that this energy dependent industrial agriculture is going to be facing higher energy costs, and it's not just about the transportation of food across the country around the world, but it's rising cost of fertilizer and fuel and everything else associated with agriculture. And folks, we're using about 17% of the fossil energy in this country on our food system, and we have a food system that uses about 10 calories of fossil energy for every calorie of food we produce, and we're confronted with a world where we may be running out of energy and we don't have a clue as to how to feed ourselves in that world without fossil energy. Maybe for a long time we can afford to pay the rising cost in this country, but what about people in other countries as we turn agriculture production to producing fuel, they hit, afford it, and how long can we go on paying the higher cost of bringing food to this country when the rest of the world is starving when we get in a period of time where we're running out of energy of all kinds. You're listening to the keynote address from the 2008 Midwest Value Added Agriculture Conference held in no Claire, Wisconsin. The conference is a hotbed of alternative farmers, folks with community-sponsored agriculture farms, organic growers, and many more. My name is Mark Helpsmeet, your host for Spirit in Action, and I selected John Eichert's keynote address to pass on because of his breadth of vision and his keen eye for the spiritual implications and roots of the natural, organic, slow food and local food movements. John Eichert is very aware of the issues and the mechanics, but he sees the big picture too, always a spiritual point of view. Let's return to John Eichert and his keynote address, the relocalization of food values added to agriculture. The environmental realities weren't enough. The economic realities are causing even more problems today because we've got a country that's running its economy on less than the empty, on deficits. Consumers in this country spend more money than they take in. Our savings rate is negative in this country. People have maxed out their credit cards and you turn on the radio and it says that consumers in this country quit spending even though they don't have any money, the economy is going to collapse, and if our consumers don't spend more import into much economies than other countries, they're going to collapse. Do you know what I want? People used to have equity in their house. We've convinced people to take all the equity out of their house, and they don't have any question to worry about this, and now we have the interest rates going up and the payments in houses going up and they're losing their homes because they don't have anything less. And if they don't keep spending, we've got a big problem. And the illusion of growth in this country in terms of economics is mainly about bringing in cheap stuff in other places and exporting to jobs, and so we don't have the employment to create the income because of outsourcing. And at the same time, at the federal level, we're running the whole government, a big desk for providing a trillion dollar war and borrowing money and can't tax yourself because we don't have it in providing from China and from the Arabs. Most of our equity in these countries come from the people who are buying the expensive oil from them. Folks, I've come to Britain and more people all the time that are trying to buy food local because they're trying to get ready when this whole thing comes from collapses on top of them. I'm not suggesting or predicting that will happen, but I'd be lying to you if I told you to make good. There's all kinds of reasons, in addition to freshness and flavor, that there's people all over this country that are trying to relocalize the food system. It's not just about some city folks going down here that are yuppies that want to spend a little more money on some organic, fresh local food. It's calling for a term of mental transformation in our food systems. Increasingly the people out there, they've lost confidence in the food systems. They don't trust the corporations to give them food that's safe to eat, that has a good food value. They don't trust the government to ensure that the food system is safe or secure. They don't trust the phone around food security of the country. And certainly after survey says that about three-fourths of the people prefer local food. If they can get it, particularly from local family farmers, for a lot of different reasons, and it isn't just a market fad that's about freshness and flavor. It's a reflection of a fun event concerned that permeates every aspect of our society, and it simply happens to be reflected for us in the demand for local food. And the reflection of that, we see that the number of farmers markets in this country doubled during a period of time when organic food was moving into the supermarket. People wanted to connect with people and know who they're getting their food from. It wasn't just about fresh food. It's about connecting with people and vibrant local communities. People are looking for ways to reconnect socially in this time of uncertainty as well. They're looking for face-to-face relationships, and they can find those in CSA's where they can develop relationships with their particular farmers. They're trying to find some way to ensure the ecological, social, and economic integrity, and they're doing that by getting food from people. They know people they trust because they simply don't know and trust the rest of the food system. That's what it's about. And we see that emergence and we see it growing. We see it in the low-type farm CSA. CSA's are tough, but we see farmers that are getting together and forming more than one CSA and they kind of divide up the work, and this creates more opportunities for more farmers. And it creates opportunities for more consumers as well. We see this emergence in this new food system and organization, such as grown locally up in Northeast Iowa, where there's a group of about 15 farmers that got together, and a couple of them have vegetable CSA's, and there's others that have green fruit, and milk, and eggs, and flour, and bread. You can buy all kinds of things, and they put it on the Internet. You can go on and order it by week, and farmers go on and miss what they've got available on the Internet. It's not just about going to the farm and picking it up, or even the farmers market. You can go to the farm if you want to. They have different delivery points that you can go, or they'll bring it right to your house. They change the assortment by season. It goes year-round, puts in seats in there locally. That's just one example. There's others around that have been working that out of those bounty happens when falls out of a lap in that particular area. There's organizations similar to that as in Wisconsin. There are people that are responding to this growing demand, and it's emerging out of this long-term trend in organic, and natural, and local, and simply becoming more convenient is becoming more available all the time. And you see it in retail food markets today. New seasons markets in Portland, Oregon has nine stores out there. It's modern as you'd see anywhere in the country. The fastest growing chain in Portland, Oregon. They're not competing with Walmart, even Whole Foods. They're a community-based system. They build local connections. They're part of the community, if you will. You go in there stores that looks like a Whole Food, or any other supermarket with a bakery, and a deli, and so on, but you go around and every item in the store has not only with its country of origin, but they have, but it has its farm of origin, if you will. And everything that comes from Washington, Oregon, Northern California has a different label on it. It's put at eye level where people tend to buy in the market. And the other stuff that's imported or comes from other states has put it differently. And they're supporting local farmers. And that's what they're building their reputation on, and that's what they're growing on. And whereas other supermarkets may have two or three produce suppliers, they have 150 or 200 local farmers that they buy from, and they have a produce person that works full-time, it's liaison, between the farmers and people that are in the store. In closer to home, there's the in-house markets in Kansas City, Missouri. And there's a local organization called Good Nature Family Farmers, and some of you probably heard Diana Yankov speak at conferences. And they started off, they had about 30-some farmers down there, and they started off with a high-end beef that went into in-house markets, but they've expanded now into sausage and milk and eggs and poultry and honey and I don't know what all this stuff in there. They joined up with the grown local, grown fresh program. Last time I met with them, they were being growing in production at a rate of 35% in the market. For a year, they were looking for at $5 million in sales last year, and I talked to Mary Henderson, one of my colleagues down there, and he said this year they're looking at $8 billion in local sales through 13 stores, with the in-house market, and the in-house is taking its future. On the low, it's not the right face-to-face, but the farmers that sell to them have to show up with the markets a couple of times during December, so the customers can meet them there. That's where they're growing. It's not just in the supermarkets, and I can name you others that are doing the same thing. The higher volume markets also include the schools. In the last Cal Act, there was a thousand different public schools in the country that are trying to move toward local sources of food. We'll wait a second to find 95 colleges, but I know that's probably not even half of the colleges, because every college campus I go to, there's a group of students trying to get local food. It's not just about the kids, they're bringing them to the nursing homes and hospitals, and other places that are going to local foods. The folks have a whole broad movement out there, and it's not just about fresh, and it's not just about flavor. It's about a fundamental transformation in the food system. As we move through this transformation, the food system continues to change, but it's always driven by the same principles, the underlying principles, if you will, and that's the important thing to realize is that we may be something after local, but it would be the same principles that are in local, that are in natural, and within true organic to begin with. No same principles will be there as we go into the future. When the chefs' collaboratives talk about biological diversity, they're talking about creating the food system on the fundamental ecological principles that underlie healthy living systems of all kinds. And diversity is one of those principles. Every healthy living system has diversity. It's different kinds of elements, different components within those natural ecosystems, and also within society. And these systems, because of the diversity, the relationships among those different parts are important, and those relationships is what makes the whole greater than the sum of the parts. And natural systems are always holistic in their nature. They're holes, they're not just collections. And so in different parts fit together, and there's another fundamental principle in order to have a living sustainable system, that those relationships among the diverse parts have to be interdependent, they have to be mutually beneficial, not extractive, not exploiting, and those are foundational principles of all living systems. And that's what's reflected in this food movement that people are looking for today. That's the ecological integrity that they're looking for today. And when the local forest talk about building no harm to humans, and no harm to animals, and relationships among people, and building strong society, they're talking about fundamental principles of social integrity, because this is about community. Back to the earth people, they had communes, it was community, and community, and relationships at the farmers' markets, and face-to-face relationships. It's about connections among people, and there's fundamental principles that drive every positive relationship among people, and those basic values transcend religion, and culture, and nationality, and their fundamental core values, such as honesty, and fairness, and responsibility, and compassion, and respect. We agree on those things, and we know that when we live and relate to each other by those principles, that our relationships grow stronger. And when we violate those principles, our relationships grow weaker, and the folks in this local bar movement, they're looking for relationships of integrity. We put together honesty, and fairness, and responsibility. It's relationships of trust, and trustworthiness. They're looking for people they can trust, they don't trust the government, they don't trust the corporation, and if they can't trust you, you know, better than them. And sometimes we need more than just fairness, and responsibility. Sometimes we need mercy more than we need justice, and true relationships are based on kindness, which is about caring, and compassion, and respect for other people, and that's what they're looking for. They're looking for relationships that are based on kindness and care. And the third closing principle that permeates all of this is the courage, to stand up, to be honest, and be trustworthy, and to reject the deception, and inequity, and the irresponsible, and their ruthlessness, and the disrespect that permeates the food system that these people are looking at today. And it takes courage. And finally, it has to be economically viable as well. There's fundamental economic principles that are just as important, and economic value is different than intrinsic value. If you will, economic value is based on scarcity. It means that there's not enough of everybody to have all they want without giving up something else. Error has tremendous intrinsic value. We have to have to live on, but it's not scarce. So it has no economic value, friendships have no economic value. Landscapes have no economic value. But folks, if you're going to have a system that has economic integrity, you have to be producing something of economic value, not just friendships and landscapes and things of that major, even though they're important. It's a fundamental principle. You have to produce something with economic value, and another principle you have to do in efficiency efficiently is when you get out relative to what you get in. And if we're only having sustainable food systems, we've got to make efficient use of our resources, the human resources, the land resources, the natural resources, and so on. We have to reflect those economic principles in the way we go about doing the business to survive economically. And finally, it's about sovereignty. We don't hear much about that. But a fundamental economic principle, sovereignty, and that means maintaining the freedom to choose to make our own decisions and accept responsibility for the consequences of those decisions. And that's the kind of food system we have to have economic integrity. That's what people are looking for. Systems that have integrity that are based on those values and based on those principles. And integrity that means hold us, complete us in strength. And those same principles have to permeate every aspect of the system. There's ecological principles of diversity and holism. And interdependence have to be reflected in social relationships as well. We need diversity among people within culture. Our relationships can't be expected and extracted. They have to be interdependent. We have to reflect that. Our economic system has to be in the same sense of being diverse. Having interdependent relationships within our economic systems and our social systems have to reflect those principles that we talked about in terms of ecology. Because we're more than a collection of individuals within our community. Our community is a whole. And relationships among people have to be interdependent and mutually beneficial. As well, just as ecological integrity depends upon social and economic integrity. Social integrity depends upon ecological and economic integrity. And finally, within the economic system, to have be sustainable over the long run. The economic system has to be diverse, it has to be holistic interdependence, but it also has to be an economic system not based on rules and regulations and exploitation, but upon trust and upon caring and upon sovereignty. All of those things are important in having the courage to do it. Folks, the current concerns that are driving the food system will change. The food system will evolve. And if we allow, get into a point where we go back to the organic system, you know, came out of the natural system. One reason people want to local for an organic, because when we industrialized the organic, when we defined a universal kind of national standard, then it made it easy for the large corporations to come in and get involved in that system, meet the minimum standards at the lowest value cost. And that's the reason people want to be on that to local. Folks, if we standardized local, standardized grass-fed, I can guarantee there'll be people that will find ways to meet the legal definition, but it won't meet the heart of it and it won't fulfill these principles, and there'll be another movement. But it'll be based on these same fundamental values and principles that I've talked about in ecological, social, and economic integrity. Because that's what people are looking for. Every time you mess up what it is they have now, then they will simply go somewhere else looking for integrity. And every time you, as a producer, they mess up what you're doing now. If you have integrity, you'll find customers. And this whole thing will continue to work. The local food movement is not just about questions and flavor. It's about values. And it's about ecological values and social values and economic values. But most important, it's about the most fundamental of human values. It's about faith. It's about love. And it's about hope. You know, there's people that realize that there's something fundamentally wrong in our food system and our society as a pope, something fundamentally wrong. And you know folks without faith, there is no sense of right or wrong because without faith there's no sense of purpose. And if there's no purpose, there's no right or wrong, there's no good thing to do, no bad thing to do, because there's nothing in particular to do or not do. And without faith there's no sense of purpose because folks, you simply cannot prove that life has any purpose. There's no way good. We accept that life has purpose simply by faith. And that what gives us a sense of right or wrong about what we're doing. We can't prove it, but we accept it. And the re-localization of food is about people that realize there's something fundamentally wrong. And that means they have a sense of purpose, and they have a sense of a right and wrong way to relate to each other and to relate to the earth that emerges from that sense of purpose. And it's about faith. The local food system is driven about concern for other living things, concerned for the sustainability of human life, which is interrelated with all other life on earth. Without love, folks, there's no really reason to be concerned about that. You're concerned about sustainability. You see, love in the most generic sense is a belief in the goodness of something. We generally think of love among people, and that's particularly important because that kind of love can be returned. But love for another person means that you believe in the inherent goodness of that other person, or that other thing, which you can love an old power, you can love an old car. Do you just believe that they're inherently good? They might prove anything, you just believe. That's what love is. But the most important love, as far as we're talking about here, is the love of life. It's the belief in the inherent goodness of life. If there's no love of life, if there's nothing inherently good about life, then what difference does it make? Whether humanity is sustainable, whether anything is sustainable, how we treat any other living thing. If life is not good, then there's no reason to sustain it. And what we're talking about in the local food movement and sustainability is ultimately about a belief in the goodness of the life which needs meeting the needs of the living things today, but making sure that there's life as we go into the media. And what about hope? Hope is the belief and the possibility of that goodness. And what the local wars and the local food movement is about is in spite of all of the things that are moving against them within the food system and have been there overall. They know that something good is possible. They know that it's possible to recreate and to transform this food system into something that's fundamentally different and to something that's fundamentally good. They realize that there's a growing realization that the localization of food and the local food movement is just one little piece of a much larger movement that's permeating all aspects of society and all around the globe. Paul Hopping the writer talks about it in his book, "Blessing on Rest." He says, "It's the biggest social movement in the history of humanity that no one seems to come in. And it's about social justice and equity, and it's about world peace, and it's about ecological integrity, and it's about truth and justice and peacefulness all across the world, ecological, social, economic sustainability and the long run rather than exploitation." It's part of that great movement that others refer to as the cultural creatives that are creating a fundamentally new and different and better culture. It's about purpose, it's about goodness. What we're talking about in local wars and local foods is adding those values, if you will, those fundamental values, and the hope in spite of everything that's working against it comes from the faith and the love because in faith and love, folks, there's always hope. Thank you very much. [Applause] All right, if somebody else has different truth, then that doesn't say it. [Laughter] I can see somebody kind of squirming down in that early part, and that's fine. You know, I told you, I was going to tell you what I thought was tricky. You think something different than truth, that doesn't mean I disrespect you. It just means we have a different team. Do we have any questions or comments seriously? I'll even pass around the microphone if you need to. Yes, sir. How do you achieve economic sustainability in a commodity-sized world? Right. The way we do it right now, and the longer run, there's other things. The way we do it right now is you find life-minded consumers. You find people that value those values that you have, and they'll pay the cost of it. You just simply say those people that are concerned about pricing convenience, I call it quick convenience sheet food. They're not your customers. The Walmart customer is not your customer. That's somebody else's customer. That's not yours. But there's plenty of people out there. I convinced that based on several different things, that there's probably 25 to probably at least a quarter, probably a third of the people in the food system today that are really looking for something different. The local ors, as I call them, they make my call themselves other things. That's based on a number of different things. Probably the one that makes most of the directly food is the Heartland Report, which all of the natural food retailers depend upon the national surveys that do it on a record basis. But the last report I saw, they had two categories. They called being true naturals in the New Green mainstream. Together, they made up 28% of the total consumers, food consumers. These were people that not only had a preference for local or organic or whatever, but these are people that will pay a premium for it. They'll pay the full cost of it. And I'm one that's in that category. I spent the first half of my life as a very traditional economist, and I was one of those economists, one of those historians, where I squeezed every penny to the pinch. I wouldn't have any more of anything than I had to, because it was kind of a professional badge of being in Congress to do that. But right now, I'm learning for food that I have confidence in. I don't want to spend my money on food that's going to end up exploiting somebody or exploiting the earth, not being... The food's produced in a way that doesn't reflect my values. And the question is not anymore what it costs. The question is, can I afford it? But it's not that it has to be cheaper. It just has to be that I can afford it, and I'm willing to pay quite a bit to reflect my values. And there's a lot of other people like that. Well, life and I have been in CSAs for the last seven or eight years, and for various reasons, we have changed a couple of times. But the last time we changed, we agreed that we don't want to pay more, and we're paying more now, because we didn't feel like we were paying enough to the last time. And I'm not unusually kind or anything else. I just want my food dollars to be spent in a way that I can feel good about. If you produce food for me and I feel good about what you're doing, and if I can afford it, then I have to be cheaper. I will pay you whatever it takes to give you a better return than there's plenty of other people out there that will do. We're not providing more than about four or five percent of the total food market in terms of natural organic, grass-based, anything different than industrial. And the market is at least five or six times that big. All you have to do is find them. It's not easy to find them, but they're out there. Yes? What about the people that can't afford it? If people that can't afford it, I'll argue anybody can afford good food. But if you have less money, you can't afford more of everything. But if you think about it, eighty percent of what we spend on food, if advertising is not food at all, is transportation, processing, advertising, packaging. And when you buy local food that's minimally processed or raw food, you avoid practically all of that. It costs you something to get out and get it to the farm or whatever. But you can avoid about eighty percent. If you've got four people that have low income, let's say they're spending fifty percent of their income on food, and a lot of times low income people, because they don't have money ahead, they buy smaller quantities, buy more processed food or whatever. But they say they buy the average food. If they're spending half their income on food, they're spending forty percent of their income on packaging processing, transportation and advertising. If they can buy the raw middle-day processed food and prepare it themselves, that's equivalent to forty percent of the income. It's a pretty good part of our time job. But the thing is that we can't make food cheap or we can't just say, "Well, we'll get it. We've got to care about people." And that's the values that I'm talking about. Low income people, four people won't be eating good food until the rest of us care enough about them and their well-being to help them find a way to get food. I'm hoping that my response next book is going to be about people like Lil Island and Bob Walter about Oklahoma and Harky Media. There's a new CSA out in the northwest. They only accept food stamps. There's a movement within this local food movement that are saying, "It's our responsibility to make good food affordable to everybody. We can do it, but if we have to break out of our little box, we can't do it by making more of energy for a local cheap. We've got good by caring about people and making sure that all people have an opportunity to eat good food and be well fed and be happy, satisfied, and wise. You know, the hunger in the world today is not about food and food, it's too little caring. We really care about hunger and people today that be well fed. So what's going to make low income people well fed, but the food is an increasing caring. It's about values. It's not just about power since then. That was the keynote address of the 2008 Midwest Value Out of the Agriculture Conference, delivered by John Ickert. His books include sustainable capitalism, a return to common sense, and his latest small farms are real farms. I've got a link to his site, and you can find his books easily via the web. I hope, as you listen to John Ickert speak his truth, that you found some pearls and inspirations, and that you leave today's spirit and action program with a sense of a very practical way you can make a difference in the world, the kind of difference that spirit calls us all to. My appreciation to Lindsey Rob of the River Country Resource Conservation and Development Council, and to Sean Emberts of the Chippewa Valley Technical College for their help in providing the session recordings. The theme music for this program is Turning of the World, performed by Sarah Thompson. This spirit and action program is an effort of Northern Spirit Radio. You can listen to our programs and find links and information about us and our guests on our website, northernspiritradio.org. Thank you for listening. I am your host Mark Helpsmeet, and I welcome your comments and stories of those leading lives of spiritual fruit. May you find deep roots to support you and grow steadily toward the light. This is Spirit in Action. With every voice, with every song, we will move this world along. With every voice, with every song, we will move this world along, and our lives will feel the echo of our healing. (upbeat music)