Saturday’s purchase was from Liberty Farm and included an unusually large egg. Sure enough, when I cracked it open–

two yolks! It was (they were?) delicious. But why do double-yolk eggs occur? They’re usually produced by young hens with immature reproductive systems that release two yolks at once. Less often, stress could make an older hen could pop out a double-yolker. Double-yolking can be hereditary.

For a household of only two humans, we go through A LOT of eggs, but this was my first double-yolk experience. In fact, double-yolk eggs are quite rare: apparently, the probability of getting a two-yolk egg is 1/1000, but I couldn’t find an explanation of that number and what it takes into account. One would think the relative probability of finding a double-yolker in a carton of local, small-farm eggs would be much higher than finding one in a carton of graded commercial eggs, because the USDA grading and sorting process typically excludes these abnormal eggs.

I read that finding a double-yolk egg is good luck. Seems it’s also good luck for the chicken, as the layer of your lucky egg is more likely to be a local, small-farm hen, and good luck for the farmer who sold you the lucky egg and pockets your cash. Everybody wins when you buy local eggs!

If you’re interested in other wacky eggs, check out http://www.poultryhelp.com/oddeggs.html.

Resources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egg_yolk#Double-yolk_eggs
http://www.wilcoxfarms.com/news/how-common-are-eggs-with-double-yolks/
http://www.betterhensandgardens.com/2011/04/13/what-causes-double-yolks/
http://www.eggsafety.org/consumers/consumer-faqs
http://keep-hens-raise-chickens.com/eggs/double-egg-yolks
http://curbstonevalley.com/blog/?p=3612

You have to love a class where one of the first questions the instructor poses is: “Does anyone here faint at the sight of their own blood?” Good stuff. Luckily, Cheenius is known for being fearless and intrepid.

About a dozen current and wannabe orchardists met for a one day workshop led by Alexis Zeigler of Living Energy Farm. Alexis has hundreds of fruit trees at various properties, and this self-taught expert provided a wealth of information as well as hands-on experience. He pointed out that we have all been duped by a culture of deception when it comes to fruit, thinking that the shiny apples and plump peaches of the grocery store are desirable. In reality, those fruits have been sprayed with fungicides and pesticides up to 14 times during their growth. Meanwhile, because industrial farming only serves up a relatively small number of fruits varieties, we don’t realize that fruits like the paw paw, persimmon, and muscadine are much better suited for the mid-Atlantic and are incredibly disease and insect resistance. In some cases, these little-known fruits also offer more vitamins and even protein than we get from the ubiquitous red delicious apple. I was definitely inspired to think about my fruit tree choices in a completely different way.

After learning the characteristics and hardiness of some of the main fruit and nut tree families, we moved on to propagation. We covered seed and root cuttings, and then spent the rest of our time learning to graft. Turns out, once you know which parts to line up, it wasn’t that hard, but it was invaluable to have Alexis there — definitely not the kind of thing you can learn from a book. Along with knowledge, we all left with some actual grafts that we should be able to plant in 4-8 weeks. What did I end up with? Pretty excited about some blight resistant pears, hardy almonds, and some paw paw seeds that I’ve already put into pots. Planning to add kiwi and persimmon to my yard as soon as I can figure out a good location. Great class!

Thanks, Cheenius! Can’t wait to hear how your new plants turn out!

Jackson Landers; image from jacksonlanders.com

• Kudzu: parboil young leaves and use in pesto or dolmas
• Raccoon: tastes like roast beef
• Lionfish: delicious
  • Interesting aside: Catfish and lionfish have the same venom. If you get stung by lionfish or catfish, warm the injured body part and the venom is rendered harmless
• Silver carp: it tastes good and is incredibly easy to catch, as the fish literally jump into the boat, so why is creating a program to control them so difficult?
• Deer: most bang for buck (sorry) taste- and quantity-wise
• Pigeons: he chased them around near a playground in Central Park

He has not eaten a stinkbug, but has heard they don’t taste like they smell.

Hunting for food is a sustainable, ethical practice and I support it. If you are anti-hunting but haven’t really examined the reasons why, I encourage you to revisit the topic with yourself and see if any of the points above sway your thinking. If you’re still anti, please share why in the comments below.

‘Continue to ask yourself, “where did this food come from?”‘

Lecture: Advocacy for Better Health and a Smaller Footprint: The Meatless Monday Campaign

The Science

• Heart disease, cancer, stroke, diabetes–most US deaths caused by those, by far. Sat fat and cholesterol are factors in all 4 of those
• Meatless Monday: We eat 15% more fat and cholesterol that we should = 1 day a week. Hoover had a Meatless Monday originally, because of insufficient product.
• Many different reasons to eat less meat:
  • Health, health care crises
    • Studies show shifting protein sources away from red meat reduces risk of cardiovascular disease
  • Environment concerns, climate change
    • Livestock production contributes 18% of all greenhouse gases globally
  • Health and ethical concerns around industrial animal production

The Marketing

• Monday is natural because it’s the start of a new week, and people tend to live it up over the weekend, so Monday is a day of resolution. Fresh start, reset cycle. Most people in study said a healthy change on Monday would help them sustain healthy habits for the rest of the week
• Keep it simple, doable, memorable (alliteration), grassroots (not a brand, anyone can use it as they wish)
• Provide consumers recipes for meatless meals on the website. Make it easy for people to follow, understand
• Some pushback from consumers, since it’s a campaign to deprive people of something
• Working to expand reach and visibility, send positive message
• Allies: veggie burger companies, low-fat companies. Media, promotional dollars create interest
• Meat industry reaction: not happy! Putting pressure on institutions (school systems) to NOT do Meatless Monday, but their argument is not compelling, but the controversy generates awareness for the MM campaign
• Celebrities talking about it, chefs including it in weekly menus=huge outreach
• Next for Meatless Monday: shift focus from individuals to institutions. Provide tools to organizations, get more media coverage. School districts and colleges are important targets, to teach kids and fight childhood obesity. Corporate cafeterias. Sodexo, biggest institutional meal-provider, developing menus and promotional/educational materials. Stores, restaurants too.

Expanding to Healthy Monday

• Healthy Monday–more than just meatless–fitness, healthy lifestyle program, quit smoking, etc. Get other medical center communities in on it
• “The day all health breaks loose” slogan
• Kids Cook Monday: get families to cook and eat together
• Worksite Wellness pilot programs underway: eating, health screenings, activity. Promote health and wellness, help organizations design programs
• Campus Wellness programs: at over 20 college campuses
• Implement Community Wellness programs
• National Cancer Institute: Smokefree Monday
• Monday 2000: calorie consumption awareness

Lecture: Moving Toward a Better Food System

A Canadian perspective

Community food systems, business, and the green economy: The role of food policy councils and nonprofits

• The food movement’s themes are bigger: policy, social enterprise, non-profit sector, public notions of good health
• Toronto Food Policy: We live in a world of plenty, and our problems stem from not being able to manage abundance.
  • Food charter: based on “backcasting”: Where do we want to be in 5, 10, 20 years? Where do we start today to get there?
  • The city is in the food business, and citizens have the right to food
• Food is the largest:
  • Source of pollution
  • Land user
  • Occupational group
  • Employer of child labor
  • Source of poverty
  • etc in the WORLD
• Food impacts health, economics, environment–everything. It is a public policy issue, not just a consumer issue.
• Paid staff is necessary, can’t just be volunteers. Keep staff small, encourage civic activism, work with universities, create work-study options.

Functions of a food policy council

• Issue management for policy innovation. Take a raw concept and test it out, create a pilot program, see if it’s practical, make a policy change.
• Find common ground.
  • Food is not a zero-tolerance issue (like drinking and driving, sexual harassment, etc). Can change it a little at a time.
  • Many styles. Don’t force a style suitable to another movement to this one.
• Serve as a catalyst. Help other groups learn to create their own policies, bringing people together to solve their problems.
• Advocacy. Get out and promote new ideas.
• Coordinate. Education, getting groups together
• Support things. Provide support to make things happen.
• Innovate. Do something with unused capacity.
• Take a multicultural approach.
• Don’t take on implementation–create the policy and pass off the implementation part.

Why the food movement is spreading

• People want to make a difference. “Yes, we can!”
• We need a way to make sure important issues don’t fall between the cracks
  • Ex: food and water departments aren’t together in City Hall
• Connections to everything
  • Public health has many side effects. Need to think bigger than the problem and look at the whole system
  • Food links everything together.
• Food has multiple entry points
  • Form a community around food
  • Everyone eats, at every age and every income level
• Solving food problems solves other urban problems
  • Ex: reducing miles driven by people getting to grocery store. Widen, repair roads vs using money to make those trips unnecessary by supporting corner stores, farmers markets.
  • Food is the anchor of main streets. Use food to build streetscapes, required for public transit–to engage people. Create living streets with shops and coffeeshops and street vendors and streetcars. Get people to walk and linger. So food is part of preparing a town for public transit
• Food helps convert unused space to green space
  • Beautify city with edible landscaping. Plant in vacant space, make urban garden, teach young people, inspire community.
  • Unused urban space used for food: green roofs, urban gardens, goat grazing. Bring nature into city–good for people.
• Help cities build resilience. Resources are becoming scarce–oil, water. Food issues will be a training ground to help build resilience.
• Food waste as a tool
  • Food waste makes up much of overall waste. About 50% of food is wasted globally.
  • Food packages can be recycled/reused, food can be composted
  • Plastic bags: charge a little for a bag at a store to motivate people to bring reusable bag from home
  • Coffee cups: charge a little less if you bring your own cup
  • Need to look at waste as resource opportunity, not garbage problem. Get producers, ex soda companies, to figure out what to do with bottles, not cities.
  • Give food scraps to farm animals, or compost, don’t throw it away
• Promote local and sustainable food
  • Local artisans on main streets; money goes to local economy
  • Local businesses create local jobs
    • Celebrity chefs are role models for jobs in new food economy
    • Job skills for youth
    • Jobs in food production
      • Grow rare, high-quality food
      • Get paid for taking waste food
  • Intercultural food
    • Communities have their own food markets
    • Cook globally, eat locally

Food as part of a new, broader concept of health

• Ottawa Charter of Health Promotion, 1986
• New ideas about good health
  • Pool fishing event, to intro people to fishing skills who can’t get out into nature
  • Community ovens, to intro people to real food, cooking skills
  • Taking people out of isolation, giving them a skill, making them feel good about selves and have some fun
• Producers of health, not consumers of healthcare
• Food connects us to each other, to nature
  • People need to feel connected to where they belong in the world. Community gardens help with connecting to place
  • Farmers markets help people connect to each other
  • Food is associated with most important life events
  • Food creates simple pleasures: you can be poor, but still have fun, eat well
  • Often involves spirituality: grace, mother nature

Reading: The Pleasures of Eating, by Wendell Berry

http://www.ecoliteracy.org/essays/pleasures-eating/

“The industrial eater is, in fact, one who does not know that eating is an agricultural act, who no longer knows or imagines the connections between eating and the land, and who therefore is necessarily passive and uncritical–in short, a victim.”

“The consumer… must be kept from discovering that, in the food industry–as in any other industry–the overriding concerns are not quality and health, but volume and price.”

Eat responsibly.

How can we eat responsibly?

1. Grow your own food, as much as you can
2. Prepare your own food
3. Learn the origins of your food, and buy locally as much as you can
4. Deal directly with the farmer/grower as much as possible
5. Learn as much as you can about industrial food production
6. Learn what is involved in the best farming and gardening
7. Learn as much as you can about the life history of the food you’re eating

• The most important thing an effective manager needs to do to stay on top of his own behavior is to guard against desensitization to the animals’ fear and pain… A manager in a distant corporate office is too far removed to care about the animals, but a person working in the trenches can get desensitized, or habituated, to suffering… The first thing an effective manager must do to take care of the animals is get rid of employees who are bullies. (p. 191)
• Transparency has a power psychological effect because people and animals behave differently when they know someone is watching. (p. 229)
• From the very beginning of my career I saw that cattle could be raised right and given a good life and a painless death. (p. 296)
• …Our relationship with the animals we use for food must be symbiotic. Symbiosis is a mutually beneficial relationship between two different living things. (p. 297)
• People forget that nature can be very harsh, and death in the wild is often more painful and stressful than death in a modern plant. (p. 297)
• I am very concerned that programs around the world to convert grain into fuel will increase the intensification of animal agriculture… There is a lot of land where raising crops will increase soil erosion and damage the environment. Grazing animals is the best use for this land, and they help keep the land healthy. (p. 298)
• Since people are responsible for breeding and raising farm animals, they must also take the responsibility to give the animals living conditions that provide a decent life and a painless death. (p. 300)
• I think the most important thing for an animal is the quality of its life. A good life requires three things: health, freedom from pain and negative emotions, and lots of activities to turn on SEEKING and PLAY. (p. 301)
• When I read all the scientific evidence about electrical stimulation of subcortical brain systems, the only logical conclusion was that the basic emotion systems are similar in humans and all other mammals. (p. 301)

Buy the book from Amazon:

Chickens and Other Poultry

• The industry has created chickens that have chronic pain in order to get birds that grow at the far outer limits of what is biologically possible… The other problem is that modern broiler chickens have been bred to have stupendous appetites so they’ll grow super-fast and reach market weight as soon as possible… These chickens have to be kept on a strict diet just to maintain normal weight… These birds have low welfare no matter what you do. If you let them eat all they want, they have bad welfare and if you don’t let them eat all they want, they also have bad welfare… The industry is going to have to breed parent stock with smaller appetites. There’s no other way to fix the problem. (p. 219)
• Today, only a handful of companies provide all of the commercial layers and broilers around the world, which has greatly narrowed the gene pool. This has created a risky situation because genetically similar animals are vulnerable to the same diseases. (p. 222)
• How to improve chicken welfare: The first thing you have to do is raise consciousness. (p. 222)
• Wendy’s is the one chain that has a shot at changing the US chicken industry because they buy chicken from over twenty-seven slaughter plant complexes instead of only four or five because they use standard cuts of chicken. Wendy’s can throw a plant off the approved supplier list and still have enough chicken to supply their restaurants. They’re doing an excellent job auditing the handling at their suppliers. (p. 226)
• Unfortunately, even when you combine Wendy’s twenty-seven plants with the plants supplying Burger King and McDonald’s, which also audit their suppliers for welfare, you’re still auditing only 30 percent of the poultry complexes compared to 90 percent of the beef industry. That’s not enough. The other 70 percent of the plants sell to supermarkets that either do not audit or have auditing programs that are less strict. (p. 227)
• The question is: Do chickens need to do natural, hard-wired behaviors in order to have good welfare? Or can they live happily without some of these behaviors? (p. 231)
• Chickens may not have as strong a need for novelty as other animals. If that’s true, it’s all the more reason for the industry to give chickens simple enrichments like string devices. A little goes a long way with a chicken. Laying hens have the poorest welfare of all the farm animals. If we can make their lives better by giving them simple pleasures inside their cages and pens, we have to do it.

Buy the book from Amazon:

Pigs

• The winters in the Midwest are brutal, and pigs born in the winter could be lost in snowdrifts in the old system, so the mama pigs had to be kept inside. This led to the invention of gestation stalls where a sow is kept confined during her entire pregnancy. The sow can lie down and stand up, but she cannot turn around… Basically, every time the pig industry comes up with a solution to a problem, the solution costs so much to implement that the industry has to intensify production — raise more pigs on the same amount of land — to stay profitable… Most of these improvements have lowered the emotional welfare of the pigs. (p. 176)
• Unfortunately, the industry continues to prefer hard technological solutions to soft behavioral or management solutions. Keeping sows locked up alone saves on labor and training because it takes fewer employees and a lower level of skill to manage sows in sow stalls than it does to care for sows living in pens. (p. 179)
• The worst thing you can do to a pig is to repeatedly mix and remix small groups of strange animals together. (p. 179)
• So far, no one has found anything that can compete with straw for a pig’s interest and attention… The solution for limited supplies of straw is to use straw exclusively for enrichment, not for bedding. (p. 186)
• You have to handle pigs gently because they’re more excitable than cows… The lactic acid levels in their muscles skyrocket from all the exertion, and that wrecks the meat quality. (p. 193)

Buy the book from Amazon:

Cows

• The single most important factor determining whether a new thing is more interesting than scary if whether the animal has control over whether to approach the object… So you want to have no novel stimuli inside a meatpacking plant. (p. 147)
• There have been so many studies showing that good stockmanship improves milk production, weight gain, and reproduction. (p. 156)
• Sudden weaning is completely unnecessary, and people need to be encouraged to switch over to low-stress weaning. Abruptly weaned calves have reduced weight gain for a week and higher stress levels. (p. 159)
• …the Holstein calf is not fully mobile for two days. Breeders have overselected so much for milk production that they’ve created a weak, fragile animal that’s so frail it’s starting to be hard to breed them. Holstein cows can carry a pregnancy to term but it’s hard to get a pregnancy started. (p. 164)
• Another obstacle is that to be a good stockperson you have to recognize that an animal is a conscious being that has feelings, and some people don’t want to think of animals that way. This is true of researchers and veterinarians as well as stockpeople. (p. 166)
• The good news is that conditions in the plants are much better today than they were in the early ’90s. The animal welfare audits required by McDonald’s, Whole Foods, and other companies have forced plant management to monitor, measure, and improve employee behavior. Plants are maintaining their equipment better and reassigning or firing employees who abuse animals. Some plants have installed video systems on the plant floor, which solves the problem of people behaving properly when they are being watched and reverting to old rough ways when nobody is around. (p. 172)

Buy the book from Amazon:

Foodopoly reveals the behind-the-scenes lobbying, politics, and corporate power directing our food systems, and argues that consumers and farmers alone cannot fix the problem; a fundamental shift in food politics is required, as well. From the Foodopoly site:

In Foodopoly, she takes aim at the real culprit: the control of food production by a handful of large corporations—backed by political clout—that prevents farmers from raising healthy crops and limits the choices that people can make in the grocery store.

This talk was also timely for me, as I just got an overview of US food and farm policy from my Intro to the US Food System course. Read my notes here.

Wenonah Hauter signing copies of Foodopoly

What I learned from Wenonah Hauter

The Past:

• The Reagan administration changed antitrust laws, made it easier for monopolies to form
• In 1996 US joined WTO and NAFTA; those partnerships lead to pressure to deregulate farm policy
• The 1996 farm bill led to drop in corn and soy prices, saving the big food producers billions
• ’98 price collapse
  • Congress began subsidies for commodity crops to support farmers
  • Half of small/medium farmer income is from subsidies, so if we get rid of them, we need to fix antitrust policies that keep prices low
• Subsidies are a symptom of a dysfunctional system, not a cause of it

The Present:

• About 20 food production companies control most of the grocery store brands
• They need cheap ingredients, so lobby strongly for reducing and maintaining the low price of inputs
• Big 4 groceries: Wal-Mart, Costco, Kroger, Target
• 1/3 of our grocery money goes to Wal-Mart. They may be making an effort to work with smaller, local producers, but logistically, it’s difficult for any suppliers but the very large ones to work them
• United Natural Foods, Inc is largest US distributor of organic foods
  • Since corp went public, it has focused mostly on Whole Foods and no longer delivers to small buying clubs and co-ops
  • Possibly colluding w/ Whole Foods to drive consumers there?
• We need to vote with our forks, but also with our votes: keep elected officials accountable

The Future:

• Need to stop the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement
  • US would “harmonize” laws with other (less-regulated) countries, like the EU did when the US and the EU made trade agreement, and the EU’s laws were weakened to harmonize w/ the US’s
• Tyson and Perdue are trying to change the rules: to raise poultry in Asia, and increase speed of slaughter to 200 birds/min
• Can’t fix food system without fixing our democracy
• Need to undo Citizens United (Read more about that here: Overturning Citizens United)
• Need to be citizens, not consumers

Local Food Hub supplied local apples from Crown Orchard to thank guests for coming

Ms. Hauter was an excellent speaker (even with laryngitis); passionate, knowledgeable, and fluent in the topics discussed. If she comes to your area, I highly recommend you see her. I look forward to reading Foodopoly, and will surely post lessons learned from it on this blog.

For more information, visit the sites below:

Food and Water Watch

Food and Water Watch’s page about Foodopoly

Foodopoly site

Buy the book (or better, go to your local bookstore and buy it):

Lecture: The Sustainable Agriculture Imperative

Michael Heller conducts a sustainable farming practice on Clagett Farm in Maryland, which is owned by the Chesapeake Bay Foundation. Clagett Farm is 300 acres, and produces vegetables, grass-fed beef, and native nursery plants.

Avg distance the food on your plate travels: 1600-1800 mi = excessive use of fossil fuels. Buy local!

Ag is the #1 source of pollution hurting the Chesapeake Bay: >40% of the water is a dead zone

Clagett Farm
Vegetables
Need to plan for:

• Weed control
• Pest control
• Fertility

Sustainable practices:

• Crop rotation: 5 or 7 year cycles, changing crop each year to restore nutrients to the soil, optimizing for available nutrients, keeping pests under control
• Cover crops: Helps prevent erosion, improve soil, build fertility, control pests. Just as important as food crops. Fields should never be left bare.
• Mulching: Weed control, coverage when cover crops can’t be used–cover crops compete with food crops for moisture. Straw provides nutrients to soil, controls weeds by shading sun, controls pests that don’t like to walk across it.

Grass-fed beef

• Soil rebuilding, naturally: Soils rebuilt by grass and cattle on steep land, or soil “mined” by corn and soy
• Disease control without antibiotics: Keep cows happy and comfortable -> low stress -> low disease. Closed herd: all cows were raised on farm, except a bull who is quarantined before being introduced to herd. So no antibiotics needed, few health problems.
• Grass management through rotational grazing: Put cows on a plot, let them eat grass all the way down, then move them to fresh grass. Short grass allows clover to grow. Cows manage grass, so little seeding required.
• Compost for soil improvement: Winter hay includes manure. Bacteria break down manure, straw, woodchips. Keep pile aerated, warm, dry. Weed seeds in pile killed by heat of bacteria working. Used as fertilizer, rebuilds soil, provides nutrients

Decision-making criteria for sustainability

Adopting new technology, deciding what to offer CSA members, whether to cut hay or let cows eat the grass, etc. Criteria are:

• Community
  • Interactions with community via marketing; includes farm workers, farm animals, wildlife
• Economics
  • Don’t let it become the domineering criterion.
• Control for farmer
  • Does it give the farmer more or less control over what he’s doing? Ex: raising poultry for a corporation, which dictates amount of food, water, light, etc.
• Control for consumer
  • More or fewer choices for consumer?
• Energy
  • Let the cows harvest their food and spread their manure
• Ecology
  • Soil building, water quality. Are we working with or against environmental processes?

Local food systems

Cheap food good for consumer, hard for farmer, leads to consolidation into big corporate farms, less and less % of $ going back to farmer

To bring community to farm:

CSA
Buy a share of farm output. Each week shareholders weigh their veggies and bag them themselves.

Grass-fed beef
Buy a quarter steer.

Annual festival
Entertainment, farm tour

To take food to people who can’t get to the farm:
Farmers’ Market, Food Bank, Farmers’ Market coupons for low-income consumers

Video: Out to Pasture: The Future of Farming?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MrRqi8-Y8ak

• Industrial ag degrades, erodes soil, pollutes environment -> can’t support future generations
• Chickens
  • 8B animals raised and consumed in US each year. Over 7B are poultry, mostly chickens
  • Multinational corps control operations on individual farms
  • Manure biggest problem. Full of nitrogen, phosphorus, heavy metals, antibiotics. Put on soil, runs into waterways.
• Cows
  • Preserve biodiversity rather than limit it
  • Use animal waste to restore fertility to soil
  • Animals recycle plant materials
  • Cows are not built to eat grain
  • Smaller farms need to move to pasture-based system to stay in business
• Hogs
  • Produce 5x the waste of a human, with no treatment plants
  • Held in lagoons, sprayed on crop fields
  • Dust causes respiratory problems, liquid gets into watertable
  • Contract producers have to buy facilities, deal with waste, have no control, and are only guaranteed contract for a single flock/herd
  • Easier to keep hogs healthy outdoors: get minerals from ground, nutrients from trees, plants, they’re happier
  • Better meat when they’re kept outdoors
  • Humane treatment: no shockers, can’t kick or mistreat them, no antibiotics or hormones or steroids, have to give them forage, minimum space requirements
  • Hogs have personalities
• Animals connect us to the earth
• It’s not (or shouldn’t be) all about the money
• Need to educate consumers
• Need to vote with dollars
• Transform the food system one consumer at a time

Video: The Future of Agriculture, Parts I and II

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8TDjIOsWtcA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8_LNWDPwY0g

The Future of Agriculture
Being organic does not necessarily mean you are sustainable.

Think of sustainability as a concept of resilience, rather than steady-state, in the face of the challenges we will be facing in the future:

1. Energy. Era of easily-obtained carbon-based energy is coming to a close. Oil produces corn that produces ethanol–still petroleum based. Think about energy/profit ratio–there’s not going to be a technological rescuer; we have to redesign systems instead.
2. Water. Current economy enormously water-consuming. Agriculture draining water reserves at terrifying rate. Most crop production globally relies on irrigation. We need 4L of water a day to live, but we consume 2000L a day through all the food we eat!
3. Climate Change. Current ag systems highly monocultured and specialized–require consistent climate to maintain productivity.
4. Ecological degradation. Ecological resources are foundation of any ag system, but ag systems are destroying ecological diversity, most importantly: soils. Can no longer absorb and hold water as well, no longer the has nutrient capacity as when it was biologically active.