Presentation highlights need to maintain sustainable food source
By Ethan Smith
Published in News on February 4, 2015 1:46 PM
There is no such thing as cheap food.
Not even on the dollar menu.
Somebody is paying somewhere to subsidize the cost of food traded globally, and more often than not that payment is not monetary.
It is in loss of ownership over the very food they produce and grow.
It is in the loss of a stable environment in an area that was once friendly to agriculture.
So on Tuesday, Jan. 27 in Wayne Community College's Moffatt Auditorium, Dr. John O'Sullivan, a professor at North Carolina A&T State University and co-director of the Center for Environmental Farming Systems located in Goldsboro, spoke to a crowd of dozens of people to address what communities can do to bring agriculture back home.
The effects of growing crops and spending money locally, he said, are tremendously positive.
Per year, he told the audience, 10 percent of what North Carolinians spend on food totals $3.6 billion.
"Can you imagine if that money was spent here instead, if that money went back to local farmers?" O'Sullivan said. "I don't know what would happen, but I think we should do an experiment and find out."
The issue facing America's farmers today is that of an aging worker demographic and the globalization of trade. While advanced methods of transportation have nearly eradicated famine across the world, there are other downsides to moving food away from where it is produced, he said.
"I'm not as concerned about GMO's (genetically modified organisms) as I am the patenting of life forms," O'Sullivan said. "There is a guy now who has figured out how to breed cows that don't grow horns, and he's probably going to patent that. There are also places that grow quinoa that don't eat what they grow, because it has been patented, so it is being taken and sold to the person who pays the most for it, and it takes away the ownership over what the grower creates."
Current global trade routes date as far back as the 1500s, O'Sullivan said, and have created a linear method of shipping food. This means corn is taken from Mexico to feed pigs in China, but the circle never fully closes -- crops and livestock go one way and never come back.
What this does is wreak havoc on the natural habitat of these products, causing chaos in a certain environment.
"They're having to save the seeds that are planted for corn now in Mexico. They have to take them and hide them in a refrigerator somewhere so they can live," O'Sullivan said. "Mother nature was very good at closing that circle and making sure everything thrived in its environment."
Wayne County, he said, is an agricultural powerhouse of the United States, and a perfect place to attempt to close the circle and keep products local and thriving.
"We can know who we are and know our heritage, or we can ride the shipping container," O'Sullivan said, referencing the ocean freighters that carry up to 21,000 containers of products across the globe. "But I think we should be asking ourselves if that's what we really want. We have to start asking ourselves, what is food? Do we want the stuff with the amazing shelf life?"
The key to solving these questions, he said, is critical thought, as discussed in "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life" by Barbara Kingsolver -- the focus of Wayne Reads for 2015, and the book that spurred the talk.
O'Sullivan believes a food system founded on identifiable products, a minimal environmental footprint and knowing the relationships between the earth and the human body creates the strongest foundation for a thriving local agricultural system.
He argues other benefits of a local food system, too.
"The average American has less than three days of food stores in their home," O'Sullivan said. "That's fine as long as the food trucks keep coming. You know they're coming to the store every day dropping off food. But what happens when they don't come? We have to be ready for that. It's about food security."
At the end of O'Sullivan's talk, he entered a question and answer session. Audience member Anthony Greene asked a question that looped back to an important point in O'Sullivan's talk: Where are the young farmers in America?
The average age of farmers in America today is 60, O'Sullivan said. But there is hope for Wayne County.
"We are currently working with 60 young people that are training to be farmers here in Wayne County," said Gabe Mitchell, Chair of the Department of Agriculture and Natural Resources at Wayne Community College.
Young farmers are the key to hopping off of the shipping containers and getting back to our own local dirt to create a thriving local economy, O'Sullivan said.
"So the question I leave with you tonight is where do we go from here?" O'Sullivan said. "Let's do our own experiment and see what happens."