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I made one of my longest journeys to come here today. We are all living in interesting times, but you are living in particularly interesting times. You have made a big change in how you will be governed. My dream is to see that energy continue to make change. I don’t expect anything from Obama—I expect a lot from the American people. We have a habit of thinking that democracy is about putting someone in a position of power and relinquishing power, but democracy is about using our own power.

I started in quantum physics, which is a long path to get to seeds. I’m a biological illiterate, but decided to let life teach me about life. Everything I have learned about food has come from living in agricultural systems. The more we distance ourselves from food, the more we forget that food is the currency of the web of life. We are below the bugs—they get us in the end. We are biodegradable, other than the bits of our body that are nonbiodegradable. How much continues to stay food and how much is nonfood is a test of agriculture. Genetic engineering is recent, but there has been a mutation of food to transform it from the ecological web of life that maintains, nourishes, and replenishes life into things that are not food and that take life away from ecosystems. There are 2 billion human beings eating things that are not food, which is why we are getting obesity and food-related diseases. Molecules are put into the food system that are not designed to be part of our bodies, or the earth’s body.

The wars triggered production of chemicals on a massive scale. Factories that produced chemicals for war did not retire—they deployed the chemicals in agriculture, and that is how pesticides came to be. The big learning about the violence that has become intrinsic in our food systems came in 1984. Life was not that costly, but two events in India were 6 times worse than 9/11. One was violence in Punjab (sp?). It was the most prosperous part of India. The “Green Revolution” of 1965 had nothing to do with sustainability—to be green was merely to not be red. The Green Revolution was a package of pacifying the countryside by bringing farmers into a commercial agricultural system with seeds and chemicals that had to be bought. It worked at first because of the subsidies. When those subsidies were withdrawn there was, by then, an increased dependence on chemical inputs. 30,000 people were killed at a time when there should have been peace and prosperity. If the Nobel Peace Prize had been awarded to the Green Revolution, how could it have produced such violence. Then later in 1984 we had the worst industrial accident in Pohpot (sp?)—hundreds of thousands crippled for life, 3,000 killed immediately, babies still being born today from the toxins from the Union Carbide chemical spills (Dow now owns the company and are still spending all their time insisting they have no need to clean up, which is why the toxins still enter the food systems).

The issue of food has become an issue of seeking real peace—we are at war with our bodies, we lack peace in our communities. We are eating oil, in part through the chemical fertilizers, in part through displacing small farmers with giant machines. I have seen the Amazon cut down, incredible biodiversity lost, and then an army of 100 combines working to plant a monoculture of soy beans, which then forms the basis of our current food system. Oil is used to transport food further and further away. Food is the original solar energy and should be our solar energy today.
Large scale industrial farms do NOT produce more food if you look at the data honestly. The trick is that they remove the inputs—they do not count input except for the human labor component. By removing people from the lab the “productivity” goes up because it is measured on a per person output. Empty countrysides means exploding cities. It means monocultures. Small scale farming has many different plots, with 12 different plots within a field. It becomes like a large garden. The delicacy that small scale work requires is the delicacy that allows biodiversity to thrive.
The more biodiversity you have the more food you produce. Different crops: we used to eat 1,500 different crops, but now we eat three or four: corn, soil, canola, wheat, rice. Plus cotton, which is not food. There are royalties attached to these crops, so Monsanto makes more money. Food prices have doubled, and the corporate profits have increased (Monsanto’s profits increased by 44% while new millions were pushed to starvation). In the middle of the most recent food crisis Monsanto increased the price of a bag of corn seed by $100.

The other nutrition is that which we give to the soil. See Terra Madre. We were taken to a farm where a man ate only that which he could grow—he was on a totally vegetarian diet, and had no deficiencies. Our fertilizers are Nitrogen, Phosphorous, and Potassium, but that is not all that should be in the soil. If our bodies receive the right nutrients because our soils have the right nutrients than our bodies will create the B12 and other nutrients we need. I increasingly feel that the most important work of growing food is not growing food to feed humans, but growing food to feed microorganisms, which then feed us. If we let that trust happen there will be no hunger or starvation.

Food as a commodity creates more hunger. The more commodities you produce, the less food you produce. Commodities are not food. When food becomes a commodity animals imprisoned in factory farms have more access to grain than the people starving in developing nations—70% of the grain goes to these animals.

Ethanol is not a green solution. To squeeze diesel out of soy beans takes a lot of work. It takes 1.5 gallons of gasoline to create a gallon of ethanol. In 2006 the U.S. used 20% of its corn to substitute 1% of its oil use. If 100% of its corn went to ethanol, only 7% of its oil could be replaced. So there has been a huge land grab to make more corn to divert to Biofuel. The United Nations has put out a corn alert. Biofuels have a compulsory blending law and huge subsidies that are driving the conversion of crops to Biofuels. Not surprisingly, the same companies (like Monsanto) that created food as a commodity are the ones being enriched by the Biofuels movement.

It is imperative to make a shift. To realize that every person has a right to food. The right to health is not health insurance—it is good nutrition. Food and agriculture have not been part of the discussion in regards to climate change. My new book, Soil Not Oil has just been made available in the U.S. 30-35% of greenhouse gas emissions come from the way we grow and transport food. Synthetic fertilizers are major contributors to nitrogen emissions, which is a much more potent greenhouse gas than CO2. Plus the industrial system creates a lot of calories. The industrial system uses 10 times more water than if food is produced ecologically and microbes are cared for. The industrial system uses 10 times more energy inputs than it creates in output.
We have reached peak oil. There is less being extracted this year than last year. Energy slaves, the machinery, is going to become very costly so we will have to put people back into the food system. Campuses have a huge role in this because the distorted agriculture came from campuses. Chemical farming is a gift of land-grant institutions. I realize there is inertia, that there are academics whose mantra is “nitrogen, phosphorous, potassium.” In 1905 Howard ? was sent to improve agriculture—he was an “economic botanist.” He wrote a book called the Agricultural Testament, which is being reprinted (as the “Bible” of ecological farming). When he saw the fertility of the soil he decided to turn the pest and peasant as his teachers. The most important thing he learned is that nature works with diversity, never with a monoculture. The second thing he learned is that nature always follows the law of return. Part of what you grow must return to the soil to give you future food. The mechanistic mindset has treated the food for the soil as a waste. Straw is treated as waste and is burned. That straw is meant as food for the soil—we have been robbing food from the millions of microorganisms. We have been dousing them with chemicals. Charles Darwin called the earthworm one of the most incredible organisms on the planet, recognizing its role in creating soil—try sprinkling a little urea on an earthworm.

In India 50 MILLION people have lost their homes due to dams being built, which were built to support the intensive irrigation of the green revolution.

We are operating under toxic rules. The toxic web of destruction or the generous web of life. . . the same companies sell all the costly inputs and then buy cheap from the farmers. Small farms of this country did not disappear because people no longer wanted to farm. Every farmer to leave the land is a tragedy. This country now has more people in prisons than on the farms, because the system is designed to drive people off the land. In the U.S. it happened over 100 years. In India it happened in 10 years, ripping people from the earth, which they regard as their sacred mother. The first suicide of farmers happened in 1997, now there have been hundreds of thousands of farmer suicides.

We have started a campaign called Seeds of Hope. We went into these areas of farmer suicides and are helping restore organic farming, including organic cotton. Fibers of Freedom provides organic cotton, which I hope you will participate in. Bt cotton is full of toxin—the goats in India are dying while grazing in the fields, the cotton gin workers are developing allergies.
We need a food democracy—active participation in shaping a better world. You have brought democracy back—you need that same energy and momentum to work on food democracy. Food democracy is about reembedding into the community of species and the community of producers that make food happen. Universities should become the source of transition. They are powerful institutions spread across the country and world. If the campuses made a commitment to go as local as possible and to insist on ecological growth then the change could spread. So much is happening with the schools for the little ones. We should have edible school yards. The campuses are huge and should be edible too. The two things that really add value to health, nutrition, and education is biodiversity (the wonderful herbs are good for taste, health, and healing). Biology departments should create biodiversity gardens. Life is not a machine. We cannot cut out our planetary lungs and liver and persist. We should not stuff the poor cows with grain. The feed industry is where the money is being made—more money is made in the feed lots and the shrimp feed, etc. Of course, when you stuff grain down a cow, which is meant to eat grass, it emits more methane.

Every campus should make its own transition team for a food transition. We must have food beyond oil. Food beyond toxics. Food beyond genocide. A shift from monoculture to diversity. From monopolies to democracies. In favor of life and sustainability rather than against it.

Food is so important as a climate issue, but to think of food as a solution to climate change we need to move away from the idea that carbon is a problem. If we lived in a zero-carbon world we would all be dead. We have criminalized carbon. Fossilized carbon is a problem when we put up 400 years worth of biological matter in one year of unsustainable living. But we need a living carbon economy. We need lots of living carbon. Our mechanistic mindset limits us. Life creates abundance, it multiplies, it replenishes. We need to move out of the mechanistic view of life and we will gain hope again in a single seed. There is a Palestinian poem that says something like “You can destroy my land, bomb my village, burn my literature, and I will not despair because I have a seed, which I will plant.”

A lot of my work has been to preserve seeds. The seeds I have been trying to save were called primitive, yet they are 40 times more nutritious than rice or wheat and use far less water. You can get abundance from millet with no inputs. Why were they driven out? Because they are dark—it is food racism. We need to learn that every plant is beautiful!
I would invite all of you to travel. Go to India and see our biodiversity—our temples of nature. Regard our peasants not as pathetic creatures but as the teachers who can bring us out of our toxic life. Come to our School of the Seed. Every ecosystem of the world has a unique way of providing the nourishment that humans need. We have crippled ourselves by our mindset. There is only one thing in periods of uncertainty that can give you peace of mind—diversity.