I want to tell you a little bit about how this book with my mother actually came about, and then read from my long list of bitter complaints about what's wrong with U.S. agriculture, particularly in Iowa where industrialization is at its most extreme. It's important to see how environmental degrad ation, water pollution, soil degradation and other problems that we are seeing both within our state, in the Gulf of Mexico and other places around the world, tie into our loss of bi ological diversity. We often separate our natural resource degradation from biological diversity or species loss, and I believe they are two parts of the same set of issues.

Land grant universities can help agriculture face major challenges in the future by focusing research on biodiversity, ecological and soil health, and providing resources for a knowledge-intensive production system that encourages private entrepreneurs.

Basking in the apparent glow of the industria l revolution it is easy for us to assume that the way we live our lives, entertain ourselve s, provide for our shelter, and produce and distribute our food, is sustainable. We have, after all, been incredibly successful in overcoming most of the challenges that hum ans have faced in their long history of acquiring enough food on a sustainable basi s to feed a rapidly growing human population. There are no longer any doubts that we are now producing enough food to feed the entire human population of over 6 bi llion people currently living on the planet. While more than 800 million continue to be severely malnourished, it is clear that this deficiency in food availability is not due to any lack of production.

Why has it been so difficult to bring about sustainable agriculture on a large scale in the United States? Or, for that matter, why don’t we already have an agricultural system that would better fit most definitions of sustainable?

For most of us the pleasure of good eating probably consists of chowing down a gusty steak, a delicious pork chop, fresh vegetables with tastebud-exploding flavors, or a savory tree-ripened peach that melts in your mouth. In truth, the pleasure of good eating consists of much more than tasty treats.

Kirschenmann outlines several shifts that will need to take place – and the opportunities they present – in a future of more people and fewer natural resources. The paper was prepared for presentation and discussion at a September 2011 gathering in Mountain Sky, Montana.

The United Nations “Millennium Ecosystem Assessment Synthesis Report” published in March of 2005 detailed some disturbing conclusions. Produced by 1,360 of our leading scientists from 95 countries the report’s core findings can’t help but alarm us. The report found that over the last half century, humans have polluted or over-exploited two-thirds of the earth’s ecological systems on which life depends, dramatically increasing the potential for unprecedented and abrupt ecological collapses. And the report determined that most of these ecosystem damages were the direct or indirect result of changes made to meet growing demands for ecosystem services---in particular the growing demands for food, water, timber, fiber and fuel.

This was presented at the 25th anniversary conference of the publication of Wendell Berry's The Unsettling of America, April 25-27, 2002, Georgetown University. He notes the move to a bifurcated food and farming system with increasingly large farms that produce a single, undifferentiated bulk commodity for world markets compared to very small farms the sell products with many specific attributes directly to the customer, and the social, economic and biophysical changes that have occured.

A revolution in agriculture has been quietly taking place, and neither rural nor urban citizens may like the changes it will bring to our food and farming system, or to our landscapes.

The foundation of modern science has deep root s in Western culture, reaching back to the 16th and 17th centuries. The central dogma underlying this science is rooted in the mathematics-based science of Rene Descartes. In his Meditations published in 1641, Descartes asserted that one could and must separate the thinking mi nd (or subject) from the material world (or object). By doing s o, he believed one could establish objective certainty, wholly determinable, and free of any subjective bias. It was on this basis that Descartes reduced material reality to mechani cal functions. This perspective formed the basis of the “disinterested” sciences and eventually yiel ded the knowledge, technologies and culture that made industrial science and ultimately industrial agriculture possible. This philosophy of science also sh aped our perceptions of soil within modern agriculture.