I am not a scientist or a technician. I am a farmer and a philosopher. I am aware that in our industrial culture that makes me intellectually suspect and a bit of an oddball as a lecturer at a meeting of an agriculture honor society.

In my defense I want to note that philosophers and farmers have played an important role in human civilization. Farmers have helped us to stay alive, and philosophers have helped us to learn how to live.

Perhaps that is belaboring the obvious. But in our "technopoly" culture we have been led to believe that agriculture need ask only one question: "How much does it produce?" Indeed, Paul Thompson at Purdue University argues that farmers in our culture have been taught to subscribe to only one ethic---produce as much as possible regardless of the cost. (Thompson, 1995) And we believe that technology is all we need to achieve our production goals. And increasingly technological innovation to increase productivity has become the sole research goal of both public and private research institutions. Farmers, consequently, have been driven to become primarily appliers of technology, and philosophers have been relegated to esoteric functions with little to contribute to the public good. In fact anyone who appears to have little to contribute to our global industrial economy---the growth of which is increasingly the single goal of our society---incurs the risk of being considered a vestige of the past (or worse, a "Luddite"). Accordingly, we don't expect much in the way of meaningful intellectual leadership from either our farmers or our philosophers.

Philosophers, however, have the annoying habit of asking questions that the prevailing culture doesn't like to ask. It's what got Socrates into trouble. Having said that, I want to be clear. I'm not offering to drink hemlock tonight and I trust I won't be accused of corrupting the nation's youth, which you will recall was Socrates' crime. But I think it is time to ask some questions of agriculture that aren't being widely discussed today. I can think of no better place, than this place---here among agriculture's honor students, here in Iowa---to begin asking these questions. I assume you are our brightest and best, otherwise you would not have been inducted into the coveted Gamma Sigma Delta. And Iowa is the heartland of American agriculture. The questions we ask of agriculture here may begin to shape the questions we ask nationally.

I can also think of no one who is more obliged to begin asking these questions than the Director of the Leopold Center. The Iowa State Legislature created the Leopold Center to be an agent for change---to be instrumental in the development of a resilient agriculture for the state of Iowa that is consistent with the philosophy of Aldo Leopold.

Many of the questions I will be asking us to consider tonight are, in fact, similar in character to some that Leopold asked himself. Early in his life Leopold was convinced, as most of us are, that science and technology could solve most of our problems---including those facing conservation. Later he warned that we needed to be wary of "salvation by machine," (1933) and that without a compelling land ethic that was ecologically grounded, we wouldn't make much progress, long term, toward our ecological, social or our economic goals. (1949)

So I'd like to challenge you tonight to begin thinking with me and my colleagues at the Leopold Center about three questions that confront agriculture as we enter the 21st century.

I. What is Our Vision for Agriculture?

This continent has, in fact, enjoyed four visions for agriculture during its history. The first vision was one held by native Americans. Their vision for agriculture was to feed the village---everyone in the village---and to do so in a manner that disturbed nature as little as possible. So during the 15,000 years that native Americans lived on this continent before Europeans arrived, they developed the three sisters agriculture (corn, beans and squash) which they planted as companions in small, almost unnoticeable crevices of the ecological landscapes in which they lived.

The second vision for agriculture was brought to this continent by the Puritans in the early 1600s. They were driven by a vision of "taming the wilderness and building the kingdom of God." And agriculture was a key component of that vision. Their vision of the kingdom of God included cleared forests, plowed prairies and nice neat rows of corn. It was an integral part of the social order they envisioned for their "new" life on this "new" land. A third vision for agriculture dominated this continent in the 18th and 19th centuries. That vision saw agriculture as a civilizing force. Thomas Jefferson was its leading voice. Jefferson envisioned a democratic republic consisting of thousands of small farm landholders, none beholden to political patronage or economic dependency, and therefore free to speak their minds and vote their conscience.

In the 20th century, our vision for agriculture became part and parcel of our industrial dream. We envisioned an agriculture that could produce all of our food and fiber (plus that of much of the rest of the world) with a dramatically reduced labor force, "freeing" citizens to engage in industrial and professional pursuits that could dramatically improve our common quality of life.

Now it is important to recognize that in each of these visions agriculture is seen as a public good---not simply a means of producing food and fiber. Agriculture was seen as the vehicle for:

• feeding the village in a manner that would please the inhabitants of the land seven generations into the future;
• building a kingdom of God, thereby fulfilling a divine destiny;
• creating a free and democratic society;
• developing an economic system that freed people from the drudgery of hard work to pursue lives of pleasure and leisure.

Each of these visions was compelling. They invited society to support agriculture because agriculture was part and parcel of a mission that served a greater good.

In a forum sponsored by the Leopold Center several weeks ago, Karl Stauber, president of the Northwest Area Foundation, suggested that one of the dilemmas facing us today is that we have no compelling vision for agriculture as we enter the 21st century.

Today agriculture is perceived more as a public problem than a public good. If agriculture comes to mind at all for modern suburbanites, it is usually in connection with a problem that agriculture is perceived to have created. If agriculture is not perceived as the origin of our polluted groundwater, it is the culprit that is devastating the landscape with eroded soils, destroyed rain forests, intolerable odors, or end-of-stream dead zones. If it is not perceived as a leviathan force that prevents consumers from exercising freedom of choice in the marketplace, or denying farmers access to free markets, it is seen as a threat to public health, implicated in everything from mad cow disease, to E. coli, to cancer, to endocrine disruption.

So one of the challenges we face today is to develop a vision for agriculture that will enable citizens to perceive it, once again, as a public good. That vision must be grounded in observable results that meet the public's expectations. Those expectations now, as in the past, go beyond providing adequate quantities of safe, nutritious, good-tasting food.

Today the public expects, at least, that agriculture produce healthy ecosystems, human communities that enable families and farm workers to live a decent life, and domestic animal environments that show respect for normal animal behavior. Any vision for agriculture that fails to meet these "on the ground" objectives is not likely to be sufficiently compelling to enlist the support of urban and suburban citizens. Simplistic cliches like "feeding the world" won't do.

So I invite each of you to join us at the Leopold Center to meet this new challenge, to begin the process of developing this new vision for agriculture. This is not an easy task, nor one that we will complete in the next six months. But at least we can begin by asking the question---what kind of vision do we want for 21st century agriculture?

II. What are the New Problems Facing Agriculture in a "Full" World?

The fact that agriculture is vision-less and perceived as a public problem is an opportunity rather than a barrier. Since the problems of agriculture are widely recognized, there will be broad public support to develop a new vision that addresses those problems.

Agriculture is already part of some of the most important and preeminent social agendas of the world. Two years ago Jane Lubchenco, then president of one of the most prestigious scientific professional associations in the world, the American Association of the Advancement of Science, challenged the entire scientific community to rethink its social contract based on the fact that we now, for the first time, live in a human-dominated planet---or what Herman Daly likes to call a "full world." (Daley, 1996)

Living in a full world means we no longer have unlimited natural resources to satisfy all our desires or unlimited sinks for the wastes generated by our activities. We no longer live in a world in which the impact of the human species is easily absorbed by the ecosystems in which we live. The size of the "ecological footprint" (Rees, 1999) that we leave today is now so large that we can no longer ignore the impact that our agricultural activities have on our local ecosystems.

Agricultural activities are central to our ecological footprint. When Jane Lubchenco issued her challenge to the scientific community to craft a new social contract---asking them to "devote their energies and talents to the most pressing problems of the day ..."--- easily half of the problems she outlined are directly related to agriculture. Not least among the problems she identified is the fact that "more atmospheric nitrogen is fixed by humanity than by all natural terrestrial sources combined." (Lubchenco, 1998) In other words, scientists both inside and outside agriculture now increasingly recognize a mounting set of problems created at least in part by agriculture. We simply have to deal with them if we are going to survive very far into the next century with any kind of quality of life.

Those problems include, but are not limited to:

• Water logging and salinization, much of it caused by unwise irrigation practices. (Baskin, 1997)
• Desertification. Seventy percent of the world's drylands are now threatened by desertification, and no one to date has found a way to reverse the process once it begins. (Baskin, 1997)
• Depletion of water resources. "One-third of the world's food is now produced on artificially irrigated lands" and we are losing our capacity to harvest water, much of it due to the way we have changed the vegetation of the planet with our farming and forestry practices. (Baskin, 1997)
• Soil erosion. The world's farmers are still losing 24 billion tons of topsoil each year. (Baskin, 1997)
• Pollution. Soil erosion not only accounts for the loss of precious soil, it also causes eutrophication. Fertilizer (the annual use of which increased from 14 to 143 million tons between 1950 and 1989) runs into lakes and streams causing an algae overload and the eventual death of all oxygen-dependent life. (Baskin, 1997)
• The increasing population of the human species. All of the above ecological changes are taking place at a time when the human species is increasing in unprecedented numbers. The combination of the increased number of humans in relation to other species, and the increased size of the ecological footprint that humans (particularly those of us in the developed world) are leaving on the planet, presents us with a difficult and complex set of problems that go far beyond simply producing enough food to feed the extra mouths. How do we produce the additional food to feed the additional mouths without doing additional harm to an already damaged planet? How do we redesign the food system so that the hungry will be entitled to the food we produce? We currently have over 800 million malnourished people on the planet and insufficient production is clearly not the problem. How do we restore the health and diversity to our ecological communities to mitigate the additional disease that will clearly come with several additional billion humans in a world that is already too full? These and many other problems make it clear that an expanding human population requires much more than simply producing more foodstuff.
• The loss of farmers. We are now at a point where (given the consistent decline in farm numbers, the increasing age of the remaining farmers, and the decline of young people growing up on farms) we are in serious danger of losing our most important human agriculture resource---the farmer. We are, as Calvin Beale pointed out almost a decade ago, in a "free fall" situation. (Brown, et. al. 1993). According to 1997 statistics, farm numbers in the United States have declined from 6.5 million in 1935 to just over 2 million in 1997. More troubling is the fact that of the 2 million remaining farms, 1.3 million are part-time, residential, or retirement farms while fully 61 percent of farm sales are captured by just 163,000 large industrial farms. And 63 percent of these industrial farms are tied to some kind of value chain through contract with a large corporation, so they aren't really farms at all in the traditional sense. (Cochrane, 1999)

Now, many in our society would argue that while the environmental problems noted above are indeed critical, the declining farm numbers are not. As one federal government official put it when I asked her about the declining farm population some years ago, "If two or three farmers can produce all the food and fiber we need to meet our domestic and export requirements, who cares? In fact, if robots can do it who cares?"

Well, the brutal fact is that if all we expect from agriculture is that it produce as much as possible regardless of the cost, then she is right. Indeed, if all we ask of agriculture is that it produce sufficient quantities of food and fiber as efficiently as possible on a global scale, then Steven Blank, professor of Agriculture and Resource Economics at UC Davis, was correct when he suggested recently that the United States should get out of the farming business altogether because it can't compete with low-cost producers in other parts of the world. We should then, as Blank argued, put our national resources to work on higher value producing activities and leave the production of raw materials to others.

But farms are more than food factories. Farms aren't just an economic bubble floating in space with unlimited resources coming in, unlimited capacity to produce within the bubble, and unlimited space outside the bubble for waste going out. The 20th century vision for agriculture, producing as much as possible as efficiently as possible and externalizing all of the costs, may have worked in an empty world. It doesn't work in a full world. Farms are ultimately not factories, they are biological organisms. As such they are an integral part of the ecosystems in which they exist. As biological organisms they function in a context of biological restraints that we cannot ignore for very long.

Craig Holdredge (1996), a young biologist in upstate New York, reminds us, with a simple illustration, why that is true. When we treat a cow like a milk factory whose milk production can be increased by tweaking some isolated part of the cow's physiology, we lose sight of the fact that for every additional quart of milk that the cow is forced to produce, an extra 300 to 500 quarts of blood must flow through the udder of the cow. To pretend that increasing the milk production of the cow can be done without having any effect on the cow, or the environment in which the cow exists, or the community of which the cow is a part, is---if nothing else---bad science.

The reason that good farmers are important to the future of agriculture in a full world, is that ecosystems cannot be managed like factories. As Niles Eldredge, paleontologist with the Museum of Natural History, reminds us, there is no such thing as a global ecosystem---there are only local ecosystems, and the health of our planet depends on the health of the combined local ecosystems. (Eldredge, 1995)

So we cannot manage the restoration of the health of our global home on a mass scale through centralized, global planning. Each local ecosystem is unique. The free ecosystem services that feed each ecosystem, and that ultimately make agriculture possible in it, are unique to the location in which they exist. So the only way we can manage farms within local ecosystems in an ecologically sound manner, is if we have farmers living in those ecosystems long enough and intimately enough to learn how to farm in them in an ecologically amenable manner.

The reason we need farm families living in local ecosystems with the knowledge of those local ecologies passed from one generation to the next is that it is the most efficient way (and perhaps the only way) for agriculture to function in an ecologically sound fashion. Preserving the family farm has nothing to do with nostalgia, it has everything to do with maintaining a resilient agriculture in a full world.

In this regard, agriculture is not an isolated enterprise in trouble. It is not just agriculture that must learn how to fit into a full world, it is all of our human enterprises. The task before us is to reshape the way we relate to the ecosystems in which we live so as to permit renewal and restoration of both the ecosystems and the institutions we have created in them---including agriculture. And that requires a fundamental paradigm shift in our thinking. Lance Gunderson and his colleagues have characterized this indispensable shift as abandoning our illusion of control management and replacing it with adaptive management. (Gunderson, et al. 1995)

That provides us with one of several clues that may help us chart our way toward a new agriculture.

III. What Clues Do We Have for Developing a New Agriculture?

Neither I, nor my colleagues at the Leopold Center have a blueprint for getting us where we need to go. But we are willing and eager to be a catalyst for change. To start us on our journey I want to offer a few clues from various sources that may direct our work.

1. An Ecological Standard First, and perhaps most critically, we need to agree upon an ecological standard for agriculture for the next century that is at least as compelling as our economic standard has been for the last century.

   I think that Aldo Leopold's "land ethic" standard still provides us with a good point of departure:

   "A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community, it is wrong when it tends otherwise." (Leopold, 1949) Leopold can perhaps be forgiven if he did not incorporate the more complex notion of the dynamically changing equilibrium of any evolving ecological, economic or social institution, in his powerful ethical statement. But if such an ecological standard is to be applied in agricultural enterprises, it must be made concrete. The challenge to the agriculture research and extension community, in concert with our colleagues in biology, ecology, sociology and ethics, is to better understand how local ecologies function and how to fit agriculture into them in ways that make both agriculture, and the ecologies in which it exists, more robust and resilient. We know precious little about how the prairie ecology in Iowa functions and how we might rethink agriculture to take advantage of the free ecosystem services that that ecology offers while regenerating that ecology rather than destroying it.

   It was precisely such ecological principles that informed the new rice research in China, reported recently in Science magazine. (Science, 2000) Two types of rice, adapted to local growing conditions, were seeded together, replacing the practice of rice monoculture planted with genetically uniform seeds bred for universal application. The result was an 18 percent increase in overall productivity and a dramatic reduction in the need for inputs that are potentially harmful to the environment.

   What makes this project doubly interesting is the fact that it meets both ecological and production goals without burdening farmers with the cost of purchasing additional inputs.

   What is the ecological equivalent of this research for more robust and resilient production on the prairies of Iowa? One suspects that there may be thousands of similar farming practices waiting to be unearthed in every ecological neighborhood if we only had a better understanding of how local ecologies function and how agriculture could be adapted to them.

   One also suspects that as long as we only invent narrowly applied technologies to achieve short-term production goals, we will never discover these free ecosystem services for agriculture.

   On the other hand, if we were to begin applying an ecological screen, similar to Leopold's land ethic, to all of our agricultural practices, we might discover new opportunities for improving both productivity and environmental restoration. And if we made Leopold's standard concrete by establishing clear ecological goals, similar to those proposed by Paul Hawkin, we might reap benefits for both agriculture and the environment. Suppose that:

   • all waste in our farming systems became food for something else in the system;
   • the biodiversity in all our farming systems was increased, rather than reduced; and
   • all of the energy used in our farming systems was current.

   How might that effect the resilience and biological efficiency of the farm as well as the ecosystem in which the farm exists?

   And if we required all agricultural research to answer the question---"How will the agricultural practice, resulting from this research, effect the health of the ecosystem, including the human community, for which it is proposed?" before the research is launched. Might we begin to discover more ecologically elegant farming practices?

2. A New Economic Standard
   The second clue follows from the first. Applying an ecological standard to agriculture implies the need for a new economic standard. It is interesting to note that most of us who quote Leopold's land ethic never bother to note the fact that his brief land ethic statement is couched in the context of some rather caustic observations about economics. The paragraph that contains his land ethic begins by reminding us that

   "The 'key-log' which must be moved to release the evolutionary process for an ethic is simply this: quit thinking about decent land-use as solely an economic problem." (Leopold, 1949)

   He then goes on, in the next paragraph, to declare that "The fallacy the economic determinists have tied around our collective neck, and which we now need to cast off, is the belief that economics determines all land use." (emphasis his) The problem as William Rees at the University of British Columbia reminds us, is that most of our economic analyses are "money-based." And thus "They ignore both the biophysical basis of the economic process and the behavioral dynamics of the ecosystems within which it takes place." (Rees, 1999) Our economic models for the 21st century must include these additional, vital economic components.

   We simply can no longer afford an economic model that only measures yield per acre in a given field in a given year. We need economic models that measure at least decade-long productivity of whole farms measured against the costs of such productivity to the farmer, to the community, and to the ecosystem. One wonders, in this regard, if the China rice research project would have gotten any press if the results had only demonstrated ecological health and more stable production, without the immediate productivity increase. Indeed the final line in the Science magazine report was "more rice... more money." That seems to be the prevailing mantra of our current agricultural paradigm. We need a new economic vision.

3. Adaptation vs. Control
   Perhaps even more central to our new vision is the need to move from control management to adaptive management. The notion that we can control nature was born out of naive conclusions, articulated in the 17th century, which assumed that nature functioned in a mechanical and predictable manner, like a clock. Those assumptions have long since been proven false. We now know that nature cannot be neatly reduced to "matter and motion." The advent of quantum mechanics forced us to abandon the clockwork picture of nature in favor of ideas of probability. Consequently, the rigid causality theories of classical physics on which our optimism about controlling nature is based, have been set aside. In agriculture we still seem to be addicted to the belief that we can "bend nature to our will," as Francis Bacon admonished us to do.

   We have now entered the biological era with a long history of coming to understand how the planet and its life systems evolved. And one thing has become abundantly clear---the earth is essentially a bacterial planet. Bacteria either drive, or provide the essential components, for every significant biological cycle on the planet. And we now know that bacteria have developed an enormous capacity to adapt to almost any threat. This is probably due to the fact that bacteria have been around longer than any other living organism.

   We also know that bacteria reproduce with alarming speed, running through approximately 50 generations every 24 hours.

   All of this means that any effort to make room for agriculture within local ecosystems by controlling nature is not likely to succeed for anything but very short periods of time. It also means that this kind of control management turns out to be very expensive since we are constantly having to come up with new technologies to replace those that are made ineffective by nature's capacity to adapt to them.

   So we have a science disconnect here. We seem to insist on using our newly found biological knowledge in a further attempt to control nature, in the face of a new physics that suggests it can't be done. Wouldn't we be on sounder scientific ground to use this new knowledge to better understand how nature works and how to fit agriculture into it? This would seem to be a good time to move beyond the single gene, single cause-effect, control approach to agriculture, to a more whole systems, dynamic, probability, adaptive approach. Besides, our control paradigm seems to misapprehend how problems are constituted. Most problems do not lend themselves to control management. C.S. Holling, distinguished professor of Ecological Sciences at the University of Florida, reminds us that most problems are systemic, nonlinear and have an evolutionary character. He argues that this is true, both for problems in social institutions and ecosystems. Since problems consist of these complex, dynamic qualities they seldom lend themselves to quick technological fixes or to control measures. (Gunderson, et al., 1995)

   But the psychology of control is deeply ingrained in our culture and I suspect that shifting from a control management to an adaptive management model will be one of the most difficult shifts for us to make as we struggle to craft a new vision for agriculture.

4. Marketing the Farm Instead of Farming the Market
   But introducing an ecological standard, creating new economic models, and shifting to adaptive management strategies will not bring about much change in "on the ground" agriculture unless we also create new marketing opportunities. Our prevailing view seems to be that farmers must listen to market signals and produce what the market demands. Farmers, in other words, should be passive recipients of market signals from the few processors that buy their commodities.

   There are at least two problems with this approach. First, this passive marketing system has now reduced most farmers to raw materials suppliers for a globalized food system. And our globalized food system achieves efficiencies by demanding mass production of a very few commodities that can be manufactured into a wide range of food products. This means that our farms are forced to become specialized monocultures.

   But monoculture agriculture is hopelessly at odds with any reasonable ecological standard. Natural ecosystems thrive on diversity and the only way that we can fashion a resilient agriculture that thrives on nature's free ecosystem services is by introducing at least a modicum of diversity in agriculture.

   Farmers, however, cannot introduce a diversity of crops and livestock unless there is a market for a diversity of commodities. According to some studies, "only 10 to 20 crops provide 80 to 90 percent of the world's calories." (Brown, 1981; Mayer, 1981)

   Farmers can't produce diversity on the farm if the food system is based on specialization.

   The second problem with the "farming the market" approach is that it increasingly reduces farmers to "serfs on their own farms" as a Time magazine article put it almost a decade ago. (Time, 1992) If farmers have no economic power they have no decision-making power. That is why farms increasingly look like the factories that lay claim to the commodities the farmers' produce.

   Almost no other economic enterprise in our modern society is content to be a passive respondent to the market. Most suppliers of goods and services try to create market demand rather than passively respond to it. If farmers are to become dynamic players in shaping a new food system that creates a market for food products that support ecologically sound farming, we have to abandon the passive marketing strategy of "farming the market."

   Of course, one of the barriers to developing such a proactive marketing system is the fact that as the food system becomes more centralized it increasingly tries to dictate market demand, rather than simply creating it. Dick Levins, professor of agricultural economics at the University of Minnesota, cited a poignant example of such efforts to dictate market demand at a Leopold Center-sponsored forum on visioning the future of agriculture. He told us that an executive of a large food corporation informed a seminar at the University of Minnesota that the corporate strategy of his company was to "spend all of its lobbying money to resist labeling" of GMO foods and "all of its internal capital to build solidarity so no food company would break ranks and take advantage of the non-GMO market."

   But the customers who buy food in local food markets still ultimately hold the power to shape the food industry. (Miller, 1995) And when farmers and food customers join forces they form a powerful synergy in the marketplace. An engaged and informed dialogue between farmers and food customers can bring dramatic changes in the food system.

   This means that rather than farming the market, farmers need to start marketing the farm. Farmers need to tell their story and listen to the stories of their urban and suburban cousins around food issues. For the foreseeable future there is still a special magic in this farmer/customer linkage. My friend, the late Ken Taylor, who organized the Minnesota Food Association, described this special magic in a graphic observation. "People in urban communities no longer like to get their hands dirty, but they certainly want to shake the hands of someone that does." If we are willing to openly engage each other, empower public participation in the agriculture research and implementation agenda, invite farmers and food customers to work together to embrace a common vision, and develop farmer/labor/small business coalitions around food issues, we can revolutionize the food industry and create new markets for farmers---markets that encourage farmers to develop more ecologically elegant farming systems.

   A new vision for agriculture that honors a strong ecological standard, that adopts economic models that serve both people and the environment, that uses adaptive rather than control management strategies, and that engages the producers and eaters in a common cause, can transform the food system. And the time is right. As Robert Goodman at the University of Wisconsin puts it---"Unmistakable signs exist that humans must replace the exploitative model manifest in our pesticide-dependent, industrial system of agricultural production ... The emerging principles of ecology, integrated with genetics, and wisely used, offer society enormous promise to move toward an agriculture consonant, rather than in conflict, with environmental quality and sustainability." (Lockeretz, 1997)

   We should also entertain the notion (radical though it may be to some) that if it makes good ecological sense to attend to the local, it may also make good marketing sense. Perhaps it is time to re-examine the native American vision of feeding the village first. Certainly farmers must know by now that making exports their top marketing priority for the last three decades has not served them well.

Epilogue

Agriculture, of course, is one of the great pragmatic arts. Visions that only dance in our heads won't do here. This is a dance that literally has to take place on the ground. So our task is not merely to dream new dreams, but to engage each other in a collaborative process that transforms both, the way we farm and the way we eat.

"On the ground," measurable results must include more than productivity in a single growing season. They will include closing the ozone hole, less cancer, more clean, clear water, less obesity and diabetes, more biodiversity, less global warming, more robust rural communities, and more families on farms who are as much caretakers of the land as they are producers of food. And, it should go without saying, a dramatic increase in the pleasure of good eating for all the citizens of Iowa---and the rest of the world.

I invite each of you to join us on this journey toward a new agriculture. The future is full of potential. The seeds for the new food system have already been sown. What we need is a new and compelling vision that binds us to a common purpose.

References:

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Brown, David L, Donald Field and James Zuiches (eds.) 1995. The Demography of

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Brown N.J. 1981 and Mayer, J. 1981. Quoted in Carroll C. et.al. 1990. Agroecology. McGraw Hill, New York.

Cochrane, Willard W. 1999. "A Food and Agriculture Policy for the 21st Century." Unpublished manuscript. Available from the author.

Daley, Herman. 1996. Beyond Growth. Beacon Press, Boston.

Eldredge, Niles. Dominion: Can Nature and Culture Co-Exist? Henry Holt and Company, New York.

Gunderson, Lance, et. al. 1995. Barriers and Bridges to the Renewal of Ecosystems and Institutions. Columbia University Press, New York.

Holdrege, Craig. 1996. Genetics and the Manipulation of Life: The Forgotten Factor of Context. Lindisfarne Press, Hudson, NY.

Leopold, Aldo. 1933. "The Conservation Ethic." John Wesley Powell Lecture.

Leopold, Aldo. 1949. A Sand County Almanac. Ballantine Books, New York.

Lockeretz, William. (ed) 1997. Visions of American Agriculture. Iowa State University Press, Ames, Iowa.

Lubchenco, Jane. 1998. "Entering the Century of the Environment: A New Social Contract for Science." Science. 23, January.

Miller, Daniel. (ed) 1995. Acknowledging Consumption. Routledge, New York.

Rees, William, 1999. "Scale, Complexity and the Conundrum of Sustainability," in Michael Kenny and James Meadowcroft, (ed) 1999. Planning Sustainability. Routledge, New York.

Science. 2000 "Variety Spices Up Chinese Rice Yields," 2000. Science 18, August.

Thompson, Paul. 1995. The Spirit of the Soil. Routledge, New York.

Time. 1992. "Arkansas Pecking Order." October, 26. ** NOTICE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed for research and educational purposes only. **