Why do we need Sustainable Farming?

Solving the Food Crisis:
Sustainable Solutions For the Health of
Our Planet & Ourselves
By: Ella Foster

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By the year 2050, there will be nine billion people inhabiting
the earth, causing one of the most pressing dilemmas of our
modern world: how will we feed everyone? With nine billion
people, it has been determined that we will need to yield double
the amount of produce, while ensuring that the Earth is in
good condition to grow food for future generations. For my
senior project, I researched the one of the most prominent
and lasting solutions to this crisis: sustainable farming. Implementing
sustainable practices into farming will allow us to
both establish a dependable food system and take care of our
planet. For three weeks, I have visited local farms, interviewed
industry experts, and investigated possible technological solutions
in order to better educate others about the implications
of their food. In general, food is a very sensitive topic for the
American public and people often get uncomfortable when
others begin questioning the source of the food on their plate.
For this reason, I am excited to unravel the mysteries behind
the source of our food and the implications of our current
food sourcing practices. To begin this inquiry about the future
of our food, we must ask ourselves: who we are in relation to
food, what should our relationship with food look like, and
how we can accomplish a healthy and sustainable relationship?
All the photos included in this journal were taken my me and
all information was gathered through my interviews. I hope
you enjoy and learn something new about the food on your
plate!
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Table Of Contents
Where does your food come from? .............................7
Is food production harming our planet? ....................9
What is the solution? .................................................11
What about technology? ............................................13
What can you do? .......................................................15
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A Special Thanks to...
Ranveer Chandra
Principle Researcher
FarmBeats
Microsoft
Andrew Nelson
Farmer & Technologist
FarmBeats
Nelson Wheat Farms
Jamie Porter
Director of Sustainable Foods
Operations Manager
Sound Sustainable Farms
Zerina Kapetanovic
PhD Student
FarmBeats
University of Washington
Krystal Waason
Administrative & Volunteeer
Lead
21 Acres
Tim Jenkins
Founder
Seattle Food Rescue
Rosy Smit
Director of Sustainable Agriculture
Education
Carnation Farms
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Where does your food come from?
No, the answer is actually not the grocery store. The food that we consume
daily is sourced from various farms, factories, and facilities from around the
world. Most of the food that you will find on grocery store shelves have been
shipped thousands of miles, possibly overseas, in order for it to make it into
your mouth. If you’re buying tomatoes from your local grocer in February,
have you ever stopped to think about where those tomatoes are actually coming
from? In Seattle, they’re obviously out of season during that time of year.
We live in world with an international, industrialized food system. This has its
pros and cons. Even though we appreciate the convenience factor of not waiting
months before tomatoes are back in season and we can
eat them again, every time we transport those fruits
thousands of miles, we are harming our planet through
the release of emissions from the trucks, airplanes,
and boats. Since the tomatoes were picked, stored, and
transported, they also needed to be treated with chemicals
to increase their shelf lives. These same chemicals,
however, can greatly harm our own bodies and have
been connected to a number of diseases that human
experience after a lifetime of ingesting these chemicals.
So, we have reached a point where we must ask ourselves:
is the convenience factor worth the destruction
of our environment and the poisoning of our own bodies?
If your answer is no, then you might be curious to learn
that there are people who are working to develop a new
method of producing food: one that gives back to the
planet, rather than depleting its resources, and is the
healthiest option for our bodies. As Sound Sustainable
Farms, Carnation Farms, Dancing Crow Farm, and 21
Acres are modeling, sustainable and organic farms may be the way of the future.
While some non-organic or conventional growers consider the soil as a
just medium for taking care of the plants, sustainable growers see soil as an
essential part of the biological activity on the farm. These sustainable farmers
rotate their crops so that no particular crop family is grown in the same place
for too long, in order to preserve the most nutrients in the soil and disrupt the
bug activity. They also do not till or use minimum tillage. Tillage is a practice in
which a farmer uncovers and turns the soil with a machine in order to prepare
the land for production.
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Tilling the land, however, actually causes soil erosion, disrupts the collection
of nutrients in the soil, and prevents the soil from retaining as much moisture,
ultimately decreasing production and harming the earth. Some farmers
grow food under the USDA Organic standards, which prohibits the use of
chemicals and regulates the type of seeds grown.
While interviewing Jamie Porter from Sound Sustainable Farms, I asked him
what’s one thing he would change about the current food system, and he replied,
“I would make it a requirement for all food to be organic.
The average conventional strawberry has 18 chemicals on
it. You’re eating all sorts of herbicides and pesticides and
it’s just disgusting”
A hundred years ago, people were farming locally, eating locally, and buying
what was available seasonally. You weren’t buying strawberries in January,
and you knew exactly where your food was sourced. As Jamie commented
“the entire food industry is no longer about getting your hands dirty or the
integrity of farm work, it’s simply about money”. Advertisements for food dictate
a majority of our diets and it’s simply not healthy. In North America, we
lack a distinct food culture. Contrary to other countries that pass down traditions
about what to eat, when to eat, and what to eat certain foods with, North
Americans tend to eat large portions of food at random times. As Rosy Smit
from Carnation Farms pointed out to me, “If someone hears that eating blueberries
is good for your heart, then that person is going to go out and eat ten
pounds of blueberries, which does not benefit them at all. The media knows
that people aren’t food aware and use it as a marketing tactic to get people to
buy a bunch of one type of food”. We need to start getting smart about what
food we’re eating and where it’s from, for the health of our planet and ourselves.
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How is food production harming our planet?
When we imagine climate change, we tend to think about the carbon
emissions released by cars and other machinery or polar bears sitting
on melting ice caps. Have you ever stopped to consider the food
on your plate as a contributor to global warming? Agriculture is
among the greatest contributors to global warming and loss of biodiversity,
emitting more greenhouses gases than all our cars, trucks,
trains, and airplanes combined. When the European colonists first
settled in New England and de-forested the area for farmland, it’s
measured that more greenhouse gases were released into the atmosphere
than during the industrial revolution. In our modern world,
we tend to underestimate the effect that food production has on our
planet. As consumers, we enjoy the convenience of buying any kind
of food, whenever we want, so we support a system that transports
food to us from all over the world. This international system has
grave consequences to our planet and we need to start exploring the
options for more localized farming.
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The practice of conventional farming also has detrimental environmental
impacts. Since these farmers are repeatedly growing
the same crops, using the methods of tilling and spraying chemicals,
they are depleting the farmlands. By destroying the land
as they farm, farmers need to acquire more and more land since
some of their land eventually becomes unfarmable. This is a huge
issue because we only have one planet, so if we run out of space to
farm, there’s no other easy solution. Fortunately, as Jamie Porter
from Sound Sustainable Farms noted,
“There’s still a lot of farm land available and it’s not
being used properly. A lot of it is used for commercial
growing one or two products and they are depleting
the fields of nutrients. I think if more land was dedicated
for farming for consumption practices, it’d go a long
way. There’s plenty of land to feed the entire world, if
we use it properly”.
Farming in a way that is sustainable for our generation and the
generations that follow is absolutely necessary for our survival as
a human species.
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What is the solution?
The trend of intentionally buying organic and questioning the health of different
types of food has been greatly increasing over the past ten to fifteen years,
though there is still work to be done if we are going to secure the livelihood
of our population by the year 2050. As I talked to a number of farmers, all of
them said that it’s the general population’s job to promote the message of sustainable,
organic farming and get people really talking about it. Creating an
even larger movement will put pressure on production farms, grocery stores,
and restaurants to supply organic. As Chis Cunningham from Sound Sustainable
Farms pointed out, “It’s all about free market, if you take 100% of the
customers of the restaurant and make 50% say they’re not going to eat there
unless the restaurant starts serving organic, then the restaurant is going to
change their ways. But if
nobody’s asking the question
or questioning the food,
then the restaurant is going
to keep doing what they’re
doing”. Additionally, if more
people buy organic, then the
price of organic will lower.
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The only way to convince
consumers to buy organic,
however, is to clearly communicate
the chemicals
they are consuming when
they buy conventional produce
and non-organic meat cuts. Jamie Porter from Sound Sustainable Farms
remarked “If people learned what those pesticides and herbicides are used for,
why they were developed, and why they are being used on the food we’re ingesting,
then perhaps they would start viewing organic food like an investment
in their health”. Research has shown connections between cancer, strokes, obesity,
ADHD, and infertility and the chemicals in our food. It’s incredible, however,
that people are willing to invest in the medical bills after the fact rather
than investing in their food to prevent these diseases from entering their bodies.
We’re not willing to buy healthy food when we’re younger and choose to
blindly put these diseases into our bodies, but only when we’re diagnosed with
these diseases at an older age are we willing to invest a tremendous amount in
medical bills. What if buying organic, healthy food was seen as a much cheaper
medical bill. Rosy Smit from Carnation Farms commented, “The health system
doesn’t support the food system and the food system isn’t taught to be preventative
on the health side. What you eat and put in your body has huge effects on
your health”.

The central solution to this food crisis is education. Education not only
about what you’re putting into your body, but also how to put it into your
body. Culturally, there’s been a massive deskilling when it comes to food.
People prefer to order ready-made food than cook their own, and kids are
being raised without the knowledge of how to cook their own food from
raw ingredients. It’s much harder for people to be connected to their food
without the experience of making a meal from scratch or harvesting from a
farm. It’s important for people to make trips to visit farms and bring their
children to farms to augment our perception that food is different from
nature. The boneless chicken breasts and pre-peeled hard-boiled eggs that
we find on grocery store shelves look so far removed from real chickens
and farm-fresh eggs that it’s easy to forget that some food was once a living
creature. Again, our obsession with convenience has hurt our perception of
our food.
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What about technology?
There are numerous ways that technology is being integrated into farming in
order to make our food production more sustainable and more efficient. This
is particularly evident in Microsoft Research’s FarmBeats project, led by Ranveer
Chandra. Ranveer told me that
“Right now, farming is primarily based on farmer instinct,
but it needs to be more data driven. These innovations
bring down the cost of getting data about the farm and improve
the lives of farmers”
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FarmBeats has
developed sensors
for light, carbon
dioxide, atmospheric
pressure
and temperature,
wind speed and
direction, rainfall,
and soil moisture
and temperature.
These sensors
collect data that
the farmer is able
to access at their
fingertips, saving
them both time and
money. Andrew
Nelson, a wheat
farmer and Farm-
Beats researcher
from Eastern Wash- ington told me, “I
calculated it out
and if I sprayed all
my crops this year,
that would cost
me $80,000 and
how much I ended
up spraying cost me about $7,000.
It makes a huge
difference moving
forward”. Farm-
Beats technology
helps farmers save
time and money
on resources, help-
ing them identify
exactly which parts
of their farm need
water or soil care.
If we’re going to
need to produce
more food with less
resources, then
utilizing technology
is going to be essential. Andrew also told me that “I think there are great
applications for AI in farming and helping with decision making. In ten years,
I think I’m going to have a swarm of smaller flying drones to spray on my
crop so that the wheels of a sprayer aren’t damaging my crop and to precisely
spray the locations that need to be sprayed”.

Since many farmers have limited connectivity out at their farms, Farm-
Beats has developed a technology known as TV whitespace. TV whitespace
boxes make use of unused TV channels to relay data from the farm back to
the farmer’s PC. Connecting farms without the expenses of a Wi-Fi router
makes a huge impact in the lives of farmers.
Using sensors and other artificial intelligence in farming is more currently
more reasonable for large farms, simply because of the cost. After talking to
Jamie Porter and Chris Cunningham from Sound Sustainable Farms, however,
I learned that integrating sensors and drones could even be possible
on smaller organic farms, as long as this doesn’t become an implementation
of large automated systems that undermine the organic approach to farming.
Dancing Crow Farm, a deployment site for Microsoft’s FarmBeats, is
a great example of a small, sustainable farm that is successfully using TV
whitespace technology and soil sensors. We have yet to see what the future
of farming and technology might hold.
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What can you do?
1. Buy Organic Food
2. Visit a local farm or
farmer’s market
3. Get connected with your
local food system
4. Eat at restaurants that
source their food sustainably
5. Ask questions about your
food and start the conversation
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Thanks for reading!