From Farm to Table

Jim Richardson: Agriculture has taken over the planet, has transformed our world, the biosphere, has spawned cultures, cities and whole ways of life all over the planet. People tying their destinies to the land and yet still we're not really in control. And there's not a lot you can do about it except live with it and try and adapt.

Well, I would just want to start off here with one little thing, talking about our lecture tonight, A Photographer's Journey From Farm to Table and I wanted to show you that I do have some background in agriculture and farming. There I am bucket-feeding a calf in 1953. Anybody out there, have any of you ever bucket-fed a calf, anybody? There... you have? Oh, good for you. Anybody else out there? I wish every kid could have that experience.

So, let's begin. I want to start someplace you don't expect, I think. Up here in the Orkney Islands, off the northeast tip of Scotland. Five thousand years ago, when something fresh was in the hearts of the people and in their minds and they were transitioning to a new way of life, the Neolithic way of life, they were stopping the process of being hunter-gatherers and they were becoming farmers. And they were putting up things like the Stones of Stenness that you see out here near the Ness of Brodgar. Now as a... the photographers amongst you, I'll stop and do a little bit of this along the way too. This is out on a nice foggy night out there at the Stones of Stenness. And my assistant is back behind that center stone with a flashlight. That's where the light is coming from. We did a lot of lighting on this story, as you will see, using flashlights. It always isn't all this big, heavy duty equipment.

So, those folks, those folks up there, five thousand years ago were settling down, they were building houses. Not a bad little house, is it? There you go, you see, there's a couple of beds on each wall. There's a dresser in the middle, and when this thing was blown out of the sand dunes by a storm in 1850, there were still combs and things sitting on the dressers there, as if the people had just left. There's a hearth in the middle, there's even a little fish tank, so you can keep your fish fresh inside the house. There's even a little cubbyhole that has a stream running under it, makes you think they have indoor plumbing.

And then the other thing that they were doing is this. They were starting to plant crops. They were becoming farmers. And that's the revolution. They were beginning a monumental journey... ...of transition in how we feed ourselves. That's the important thing to remember. Now, I want you to fast-forward with me 5,000 years to today, when agriculture has taken over the planet, has transformed our world, the biosphere, has spawned cultures, cities, and whole ways of life all over the planet. And here we are, sitting here, 2014 with seven billion people on the planet. And by 2050 we could have nine billion, by 2100 we might reach ten or so... Can we feed those nine or ten billion people when we get there? And will we have a planet left worth living on? That is the essential question I want to follow on exploring tonight.

Thirty-nine percent of the ice-free land on the planet is taken over by agriculture. Worldwide pastures take up 12.9 million square miles twice as much as cropland. It's really vast. So, we did this, we got the plow, we transformed the planet. It's the biggest transformation of any process by humans in the biosphere. But then after World War II we got into really transforming the planet, using petroleum as fuel for the transformation. This is up in the Palouse. But here's what I really want you to remember about this. When you think about world food supply even today, with that mega-agriculture, peasants, small farmers on farms of two hectares or less still grow more than 50 percent of the world's food. Industrial large-scale agriculture that we see on the scale out in the Great Plains, and whatnot, grows 30 percent of the world's food. Hunter-Gatherers still take in 12.5 percent and urban, urban farmers still grow seven and a half percent of the food.

So, that story that we are used to that large industrial agriculture is the only way to feed the planet, at least isn't true right now feeding seven billion people. But you also see this, that there are places in the world where you've got real problems. Africa, these young women were hauling firewood ten kilometers back to their village. They were walking ten kilometers to get it and ten kilometers back.

The promise of genetic engineering and the promise of ways of-- very often perceived to be magic-bullet ways of feeding our planet, and yet, still, this one fundamental reality... that we're not really in control. And there's not a lot you can do about it, except live with it and try and adapt. This is center-pivot irrigation going on out in Nebraska, and what I really wanted is, I wanted this water to look rich, I wanted it to look like gold, I wanted it to look like money, I wanted to have that lush, rich feel to it.

I went looking for places were I could see... ...the culture too, about irrigation. And I found a town up in Colorado that had a parade and they were naming the Irrigated Corn King, the 'Dryland Corn King, the-- all these corn royalty, you know? And they actually had a little model of a grain elevator on a float with this guy, you know? That's golden when you are a photographer like me. I shot Cow Plop Bingo out there at-- Okay, so yeah... does anybody need an instruction on how cow plop bingo works here? I guess not. I think you're-- you seem like a pretty savvy, savvy bunch. And... what was nice about this, for this story, was that it was a way of showing that there was something out on the farms...that had humor to it, that had a culture to it, that had life to it.

Well, then there was this: food safety. When we got to food safety there was a lot of anger. Everybody was, at the time, and still are, radically polarized by the whole thing. This was in Scotland, up on the Black Isle. These guys were set up across the road protesting these crops. The efficacy of this stuff, of the GMO foods of course, is pretty clear. These two cotton-leaves here, one of them has been genetically engineered to be resistant to the insects and the other hasn't. It's really clear that, yeah, it can work. But it can also do this. These two salmon are the same age. One has been modified so that it expresses the gene for growth constantly, the natural salmon only does it sporadically. So, the problem, of course, then is if you modify the fish and the fish get out and crossbreed with the native population that gene that you modified rapidly eclipses all the other wild genes, uh, out there.

The food safety, which was also part of that was fun to do. It was harrowing to do actually because nobody in the United States wants to let you into a packing plant. It is just almost impossible to get any of the big corporations to let you do that. So I finally went to Denmark, which had, as it turned out, much more stringent food safety regulations and has a much safer food supply. Nobody in the United States, particularly the USDA, particularly wants to tell you that other countries have a safer food supply than we do. I was convinced of it. We've got these huge CAFOs, the Controlled Animal Feeding Operations. Chickens, turkeys, hogs, all kinds of animals growing in very, very large facilities. This one down in Arkansas.

This is down at the University of Arkansas growing out those pathogens. These are from swabs taken off of chickens from a supermarket. This is not something you want to tell everybody about the chicken that they are getting, uh, down at the store. This was a test that they could do to show people that they really hadn't washed their hands very well. That's all this is. These folks had this powder on their hands that would show up under black light, and you could get it on their hands and then they would was their hands and they'd come back and you could show them that they hadn't washed their hands very well. If there's a silver-bullet of food safety in this world, it's probably washing your hands.

Well, now you get into something like soil. I had to find ways to do images of this stuff. I went out to the Palouse because I just felt that the Palouse was a place where the soil was the author of the landscape. And to put it bluntly, this was a place where soil made everything that we see. It wasn't mountains, it wasn't sea, it was soil doing it. And I had a great co-conspirator on this, Jerry Glover from the Land Institute, out there in Salina, Kansas, a soil scientist. He came up with the idea of doing soil-pits so that we could see the root structure down underground, so that we could do this. You can see the plants up above and you can see what's going on down there, you know, and not many people had done this before. Jerry did these wonderful things, like, he would take and plant a patch of prairie grasses in a 55-gallon drum, and bury it in the ground, he'd wait two years, then he'd pull it out of the ground and split the drum apart, two drums probably welded together. Split them apart, lay this thing out on a screen and wash out the dirt with a hose. And that way you can, all of a sudden, you could see a bit of prairie underground.

Gee, if you're National-- reading National Geographic and there's a story on soil, you've got to elevate these pictures to be a little jazzier, you know, so we took that thing and we mounted it on a long pole, about a 15-foot pole, and we stuck the pole through a backdrop back there and suspended it in midair and then we got flashlights and we used flashlights to light this like it was a spaceship or something like that, you know? Fortunately, Jerry had the great beard. And if Jerry didn't have that beard the picture wouldn't be the same thing at all, would it, you know? He had the beard that went with the roots, I like that.

So, I chased earthworms around a petri-dish for two days. I got to be pretty good. You can herd earthworms, by the way, I learned that. They don't like heat and they don't like light. So you got a petri-dish and some earthworms in it, you can take some light and when it gets hot on one side they'll kinda squirm around to the other side, you know, kinda rearrange themselves. And maybe it will make a better picture. Two days I spent doing this stuff. Because earthworms are so critical. I mean, I got to-- I'm an evangelist for earthworms, you know? They carry stuff up and down in the soil profile, they make all this stuff happen, you know? We owe them a lot, you know?

And then I found these things, the soil fungi. One scientist up at the Iowa State University had these in petri-dishes. I saw them and all of a sudden, 'they looked like spaceships. They looked like Hubble Telescope images.' But this is soil fungi, down in the ground. Look at these things, they are incredibly beautiful. And there are millions of them down there. Look at the structure of this thing. Species in one teaspoon of soil. Nematodes, 100. Species, not individuals, species. Protozoa, 1000 species. Fungi, 25,000 species. Bacteria, 75,000 species. Total organisms in a... teaspoon of healthy soil, seven billion, you know? The numbers of what's going on down there...is incredible.

When we were doing this story we also felt that we had to show the soil, of course. But all the soil scientists what they wanted me to do was go out and photograph all the 12 kinds of soils around the world. The Mollisols and all those, all those things, I learned all that stuff. And I also thought, Oh gee, people are going to be asleep pretty fast on this one. You know? So... I figured out finally what I wanted to do was to do soil-pits around the world, where I could see the farmer with their soil. And make that connection, you know, and that ended up working pretty well for us on this story. So, here's Cletus Reed and his grandson, Sam, out in Iowa. And you notice, you see they got about eighteen inches of really rich, black topsoil there. About 1870 they started farming out here, they had 36 inches of topsoil. And the soil that's remaining has 50 percent of it's soil carbon left. So, that means in 150 years roughly, they have burned 75 percent of their fuel. We can't keep doing that, folks. Modern agriculture is pretty much... ...slow motion strip mining of soil carbon. And it's going to catch up with us sooner or later.

Hassoun Hariri, grows barley on that rocky soil. How would you like to plow that? Issia Saidou in Niger, he's really... got tough soil. And when you look at Mariama Abdoulaye in Niger, you see it isn't just that she doesn't have tractors. She just doesn't have the components of basic agriculture. The fact, also, that we are taking 40 percent of that corn from Iowa, and the upper Midwest of America and using it to make ethanol, some people have called a crime against humanity, you know? And we're going to have to stop sooner or later.

If you go to Syria around Aleppo you can see the dead cities. A hundred dead cities out there, and these cities in Byzantine times, 6-or-700 AD, had three to four feet of topsoil, on top of all that rock. And now it's gone. When Pliny, the Elder came to Palmyra, Syria, in the second century there were two million fig trees growing around Palmyra. Look at it now. We can lose all of that stuff. But soil also has great hope to it. I saw that in Africa when I went to visit Yacouba Sawadogo, who is digging zaï here, and zaï is just trying to dig a little four-by-four inch hole in the ground maybe, so that water will collect in there and maybe you'll get a little soil going and maybe you can start the cycle of growing plants and eventually you'll start planting trees, which Yacouba had been doing for 30 years. And because of that his soil came back, and because his soil came back, the farm was more fertile, and because of that his family started coming back.

We have this problem in agriculture that we photographed and focused on... heirlooms, heritage, the seeds that keep us alive, and maintaining those seeds in the face of an uncertain world. That's why Cary Fowler is up there in the Arctic and what he's got there are seeds that are back up seeds from seed banks around the world. Stuffed into a frozen mountainside in the Arctic. Seeds from places like this seed bank there in Iowa, rows and rows, and rows of corn seeds all stuck in bottles. For the simple reason that if you should run into something like UG-99 wheat stem rust, you're going to hope that somebody in a seed bank like at Kansas State University, out in Manhattan, Kansas, has a sample seed from their 200,000 different seeds of wheat in their collection that is resistant to that rust. If it isn't that wheat stem rust like you are seeing right there, is about 80 percent fatal to the wheat crop. If something like that gets to India you have massive famine.

It isn't just the seeds, it isn't just the crops and the livestock, it's the passing on of the knowledge and when I saw that little girl there looking back at her mother, carrying crops home in the evening, what, she's three or four, you know? And she's already learning. This is already passing on, these traditions are passing on. As a photographer this is one of those instances in which I'm out there and I don't know what I'm looking for until I see it. And all of a sudden there was something much more than I expected to see. There in that little gesture between a little girl and her mother. So, finally I want to take you on a little trip here.

The thing that pulls this whole thing together is farmers. The people who grow our food. Scott Dowling, up there in South Dakota, is about as traditional a big farmer as you're going to find. He grows 50,000 acres of wheat. Fifty thousand acres in one contiguous field of wheat up there in South Dakota. In 2011, he grew 1.3 million bushels of wheat. In 2012, he had an 80 percent loss. 24,500 acres of wheat were lost that year to him. The truth of the matter is that these farmers in Bangladesh grow more food per acre than he does with his industrial methodology in South Dakota. The other thing to understand, fundamentally, about farmers in the world today is probably more than 50 percent of them are women. So, whenever you see the advertisements it's always a guy out there. The fact of the matter is most of the food in the world is grown by women.

The understanding of what's going on here is they are harvesting prawns there in a pond next to a house. What was interesting was, when I saw these guys hold up the net, it really was the background for this kid. And the guy in the middle, right there in the back, got the kid from behind the net and put him out front. And I said, Oh yeah, this is the right thing to do. He understood what I was looking for. Every once in a while people know that they are making a statement by being seen. And they don't know where the picture is going to go. They don't know that you're going to see it or that our readers are going to see it, anything like this, but they know that they're somehow speaking to the world. And if I am sort of the vessel of that message, you know, it's incredibly rewarding to do that. The sad part about this is, all those prawns, they're not going to get to eat them. They go to Europe because they are much too valuable to actually eat.

And fundamentally, whatever goes on in the world of agriculture it still comes down to the basic faith that we started out with: people putting a plant in the ground and hoping that it is going to feed them and feed their children. So, if we're going to feed the planet, the billions of people who are going to be here in 2050...this is perhaps the greatest challenge we have in humanity right now, is feeding those people who are already in the pipeline and who are coming. And it's going to happen, as I say, in our lifetime and in our children's lifetime. It's the greatest challenge we face and I hope we are up to it. Thank you so much for being part of this.