I'm Liv. I'm a cook here.

And I'm just honored today to be here with John Jeavons and

to introduce him to you.

If you care anything about what your food tastes like, if

you've dug a fork into food, you really care about digging

a fork into the Earth.

And that's my whole connection to all of this.

You care about not just the quality of food, but whether

food is going to feed everybody on this planet,

which is one of the main questions we have to answer

these days--

enough food, enough nutritious food for everybody.

When I was assigned to China as a reporter a few years ago,

for me, the most heartbreaking thing I saw was in the

countryside to see these dense concentrations of farmers who

were asked to leave the land that they had farmed for

generations and put in densely populated living conditions no

longer close to their land because

land was that precious.

And the government wanted to develop it.

And here, I saw people who knew the art of farming--

and it is indeed an art, growing food

and growing it well--

who had been through chemical industrial farming who were

told that some of the land that they farm was now too

toxic, over-fertilized, and over-chemicalized for them to

do any more, but who still in their genes and just one

generation back knew how to grow food in mainly a

sustainable way.

And to me, I brought that home with me.

And to me, it's the overriding question for this age

and for all of us.

So from the time I was an immigrant that arrived in this

country, I'd heard about double digging.

I'd heard about biointensive.

And today, for me to meet John and realize that he is this

complete visionary who isn't just a farmer, but is thinking

about food for all of us and for the future of this planet

is indeed an honor.

So please welcome John.

[APPLAUSE]

JOHN JEAVONS: Thank you, Liv. Take the

lights down on the screen.

They got me lit.

Before we begin, I'd like to make one

reflection to set the tone.

What Liz said about China in some way reminded me of it.

In 1995, we had an intern come and train with us in Northern

California for six months.

And he shared with me that the cost of farmable soil in

Monterey, Mexico, was $4 a pound.

Do you realize that gasoline only costs $50 a pound

currently at the pump?

$50.

Oh, there we go again.

We're going to have to redo this one.

Do you realize that in Monterey, Mexico, that

farmable soil, if you go to purchase it, costs $4 a pound,

where gasoline at the pumps today costs $0.50 a pound.

So they have their priorities right.

They realize the preciousness of the soil.

And they realize that the soil is worth eight times gasoline.

Wow.

That's really hard to wrap our minds around, I think.

Even for me, it is, and I've been working

with this for 41 years.

So now let's go and look at our presentation for today,

Food for the Future Now.

To know, challenge, and hope.

To feel, relieved and empowered.

And to do, act where you are.

Creating a new and better world.

Creating a new and better world.

This is going to be the only thing we need to focus on.

The joy of the process, it's really a lot of fun.

You can see the happiness in my daughter's face.

And even manual food-raising, which is really

skill-intensive, not

work-intensive, is a lot of fun.

The Earth needs our help now.

You probably know that already.

But this is literally the Earth that's underneath our

feet needs our help right now.

Let's grow soil.

It's not about farming it.

It's about growing it.

Every time we eat a pound of food grown with regular

food-raising practices, an average of 6 pounds in the

United States, 12 pounds in developing countries, where

90% of the world's people live, and 18 pounds in China,

where 20% of the world's people live, and 24 pounds of

farmable soil in California are lost due to wind and water

erosion because of the types of practices being used.

In contrast, over here on the right, you can see

Biointensive Sustainable Mini-Farming has the capacity

to build, to grow, to create up to 20 pounds of farmable

soil per pound of food eaten--

not deplete 6 to 24 pounds per pound of food eaten, but to

build up to 20 pounds of farmable soil, soil we need to

feed people.

I don't think anyone realizes the number of people that are

born each day, really.

It's 216,000 people net.

That's births less deaths.

It's like Motel 6, and the light's on all the time.

This is enough to repopulate San

Francisco every three days.

Wow.

Costa Rica every 17.

Mexico City, the second largest city in the world, 3.5

times a year.

And Beijing, China, 8.6 times a year.

What does this mean?

It means--

and this is even more important than those

population statistics--

it means that 34,000 additional acres of farmable

soil need to be found or built daily to feed these people.

It's not happening.

It's probable that organic farming indirectly results in

the loss of three to five and a quarter pounds of farmable

soil per pound of food eaten because of the needs of inputs

in the form of compost, manure, and organic fertilizer

which are taken from other soils.

So we may have our perfect organic farm.

But we're depleting a soil somewhere else

in order to do it.

We don't need to.

But the pattern we're using now does.

Organic farming is a good start.

It's a great start.

It's a major positive step towards more sustainable

agriculture.

Yet, we need to take at least three

more major steps forward.

We need to go beyond organic.

The planet is becoming increasingly urbanized.

Something that's incredible is India's already 91% urban,

China 90% urban.

That's 40% of the world's

population virtually urbanized.

One of the results of this urbanization is that we're

losing our farming literacy.

We don't really know how to farm.

As a result of all these factors, agriculture, as it

is, population growth, the loss of our farming skill

base, most of the world's soils have become

significantly demineralized, compacted, and contain little

organic matter unless all these

elements have been imported.

This isn't a pretty picture.

Though, I think the art here is very pretty.

You can make a case that the entire planet may be

desertified in as little as 69 years.

I'm 70 years old.

That's in less time than I've been here on the planet.

| don't know how long you've been here.

But that's a short time.

What to do?

We need to make farming truly sustainable on as much of a

closed system basis as possible.

It is possible.

We need to grow our own organic matter inputs on the

soil we cultivate and recycle all the nutrients--

all the nutrients--

contained in the crops we grow back into the soil.

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization has

noted that 13 years from now, in the year 2025--

that's soon--

about 2/3 of the world's people, 5 billion people, will

probably not have sufficient water available for food

growing to live a life with reasonable

nutrition if at all.

We don't have to wait for 2025 for that to happen.

We're going to see that happening in just three years,

the effect of this.

This means a situation of peak water and peak food.

70% to 80% of all the water used by people in the world is

utilized in food production.

There is some hope.

We'll get to that soon.

You can also make a case that as little as 49 years of

farmable soil remains on the Earth.

This is partly because as the soil quality is depleted, the

rate of depletion increases more rapidly.

So we have a situation of peak farmable soil.

And it's here now.

There's also a major different kind of peak energy crisis.

The peak energy crisis really is between these two points

and these two points--

our will, the will to face these things and make a

positive difference.

And I wouldn't tell you these things if we couldn't make a

positive difference.

Feed your dreams and your fears will starve.

So in the future, as you begin to be overwhelmed by

challenges, and there's a good chance that we will all have

that feeling some of the time, feed your dreams. And you'll

find that the dream that you're envisioning will begin

to manifest.

And the reason that we can dream these dreams is because

there are realistic solutions.

We need to utilize our skillful will.

There are psychologists who have studied the different

forms of will that we have. And the most important one is

skillful will, the ability to make and fulfill our choices

with the greatest efficiency and least effort necessary.

I think Google is dedicated to this concept.

What we need is a transformational paradigm

throughout many areas, including food-raising.

Growing food was actually the original green.

And it can be again.

In fact, 10,000 years ago--

this is unbelievable if you really sink into

this and feel it.

This next thing is just totally

unbelievable and wonderful.

10,000 years ago, early Stone Age farmers raised 100% of

their calories per person with just 20 hours of labor

annually, growing the first spelt wheat.

These people were farming literate.

I often give participants in our workshop a handicap, a

fivefold handicap.

And I challenge them to learn how to grow all their food in

100 hours a year during the following three years.

We really can do it.

We don't believe we can, but that's where the problem is,

here and here.

In 1911, China grew complete diets on 3,600 square feet.

And China, Japan, and Korea used biologically-intensive

farming successfully for four millennia until the 1950s when

current practices began to be adopted.

The Chinese used to call their farmers living libraries.

And if you want to read about this type of farming, there's

a book out by F.H. King called Farmers of Forty Centuries.

I recommend you read it.

It's published by Dover Press, and it's not expensive.

In the Philippines, the illiterate Hanunoo Stone Age

culture have a 200-crop, 5-year rotation with 40

varieties of rice grown annually.

So no matter what the climate, hot, cold, wet, or dry, they

achieve a sufficient quantity of calories.

They are living libraries too.

There are no agricultural universities that I know of in

the world that have any kind of rotation system that's as

sophisticated, or as complex, and uses so many varieties as

this one does.

And these people don't know how to read

and don't use computers.

Oh my god.