The Morning Sentinel

July 30

Keynoter doesn't sugarcoat message in Skowhegan

Kneading conference attendees hear about food, environmental problems

By Erin Rhoda erhoda@mainetoday.com
Staff Writer

SKOWHEGAN -- The solution to sustainable agriculture lies beneath our feet, according to one expert in ethics and food production.

Restoring the biological health of the soil is essential for maintaining healthy ecosystems and creating food sources for the world's growing population, said Dr. Frederick Kirschenmann, a keynote speaker who kicked off the fourth annual Kneading Conference on Thursday.

If agriculture is to be sustainable, he said, to "green things up" with more energy-efficient cars, for example, is not enough. Rather, he believes in "fundamentally redesigning" food and agricultural systems to "farm in nature's image" and, among other practices, return nutritional balance to the soil.

More than 160 people attended Kirschenmann's address at the Skowhegan State Fairgrounds to learn how to renew the land's biological and genetic diversity. Some of those strategies include rotating crops, using varied seeds and animal breeds, planting more perennials to reduce erosion, and using waste as fertilizer.

Kirschenmann is Distinguished Fellow for the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State University and president of Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture in New York. He oversees management of his family's 3,500-acre, certified-organic farm in North Dakota. He is also a professor in the university's religion and philosophy department.

His talk is one of many events taking place during the Kneading Conference, which continues today with nine lectures, 10 bread-related workshops and a keynote address by Jeffrey Hamelman, employee-owner of the King Arthur Flour Company in Vermont.

Also coming: the free Artisan Bread Fair runs from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. on Saturday at the fairgrounds. It features bakers at work with wood-fired hearth ovens, oven builders, grain millers, artists, book sellers, live music, storytellers, seed vendors and baking and agricultural equipment vendors.

Over the next three or four decades, Kirschenmann said, changes need to take place in five main areas that affect agricultural production:

* Energy

Contrary to popular assumption, he said, life will not carry on as usual if people wean themselves off oil and convert to renewable energy. Alternative energy sources cost more than oil relative to the amount of energy derived.

Because fossil fuels have driven the United States' food production system -- with pesticides derived from fossil fuels and equipment made with them, too, for example -- any industry that depends on oil will have to "change radically," he said.

* Water

Seventy percent of the earth's fresh-water resources are used for irrigation, he said, which is unsustainable and needs to change.

* Climate destabilization

People need to realize that "climates are going to be much less stable than they were in the past," he said. Changing climates will affect what and how farms produce crops.

* Soil

It is not just dirt, he said. "There is a more populous and biotic community beneath the surface of the earth than above it." Soil that contains more organic matter retains more water, which reduces the need for irrigation.

* Farm populations

Seventy-five percent of the U.S.'s total agricultural production comes from 192,442 farms, he said, and 30 percent of farmers are over the age of 65. We face "a very, very serious human capital problem," he said.

Erin Rhoda -- 474-9534

erhoda@centralmaine.com