Translator: Mercia Costa
Reviewer: Denise RQ I've invested a lot of my own money
into organic and sustainable farming, and to converting
American farmland to organic, and I'm here to dispel
some misperceptions about organic food. There is this prevailing notion that organic farming is more expensive
and less sufficient, right? And that we need industrial agriculture
and factory farms to feed the world. "Feed the world." Well, I'm here to dissect
some of the assumptions behind that logic, and to share some information
that leads to a very different conclusion. We all know organic food is expensive. This is a fact. And it's logical to therefore assume
that it's for the 1%, the foodie elites, the rich people, not for ordinary people. Well, that's actually not correct logic,
and I will show why in a second. It also leads us to assume
that if organic food is expensive, organic farming must be more expensive,
which then leads to wonder, surely, it can't feed the world, and back to concluding
that it's only for the 1%. Well, those assumptions
actually are wrong as well. The idea that organic food
is only for the rich, only for the 1% is a powerful one, with huge implications
on both business and policy. And we need both business innovation and policy change in this country
to support organic. Think about it, if you are
a business person or a politician, the way to be successful
is to come up with products or policies that cater not to the 1%
but to ordinary Americans. And so we need businessmen
and policy makers to recognize that organic food is not just for the 1%, it's for everybody,
it's for ordinary Americans. And the first step in that change
is to change that perception. So, who is buying
this expensive organic food? Who in America is buying it? According to Nielsen and NMI research, three out of every four Americans
have consciously chosen to buy organic food in the past year. Some of them might have only bought
a single organic product, but there is a subset that there are
the so-called devoted organic shoppers, that represent the vast majority of all
organic food consumption in this country. These so-called foodies are not 1%, they are 25%, one out
of every four Americans. Now let's look at these elite foodies. What does the elite foodie look like? Two out of five of them have
an annual household income of less than 50,000 dollars. One out of five has
an annual household income of less than 30,000 dollars. These elite people are about
20% people of color, and another 15% Hispanic. Six out of ten of them shop at Walmart. How does that profile compare
to the general U.S. population? It's exactly the same. The general U.S. population is about
two out of five income less than 50K, one out of five income less than 30K. About 20% people of color, 15% Hispanic,
and about six out of ten shop at Walmart. In every respect, the foodie elite who are buying organic
are the average ordinary American. And it's one out of four Americans, and they're already buying organic
in spite of how expensive it is. Just imagine how many more Americans
would be buying organic food if it wasn't so damn expensive. Well, we actually know
some of the answers to that. Walmart asked its consumers and found that 91% of them
would be buying organic. So, why is organic food so darn expensive? It must be because organic farming
is more expensive, right? Not true; organic farming
actually saves a ton of money on a lot of very expensive inputs. Fossil fuel is expensive. Fertilizers are incredibly expensive. The chemicals, the antibiotics
that are used by factory farms. These things are very expensive. Not just their externalized costs, but their actual dollar
costs are very high. Well, so maybe organic farming saves money
but perhaps it produces less food. That's not necessarily true either. This is not a blanket statement,
it varies by crop and region, but there are lot of ways
in which, when done right, organic sustainable farming
can produce more food. One part of that is crop
and livestock rotations, so that nutrients
are recycled into the soil. Growing multiple crops at the same time,
increasing the revenue of the land. Exploiting natural synergies. One of my favorites examples
of this is sheep and asparagus. Sheep love to graze but they do not like
the taste of asparagus. And so, when the asparagus farmer
has a weed problem, rather than spending a lot of money buying a chemical herbicide
to spray in the fields, they can invite in a sheep farmer. The sheep will clear the weeds. The sheep farmer gets free pasture
for his or her animals, and the asparagus farmer
gets free weed control. And, the sheep add fertility to the soil. You must be thinking: "Well, great, but industrial agriculture,
for all of its ills, surely at least the one thing it has
is that it's more efficient, right?" I would say that it has
the illusion of efficiency, and it's a short-lived one. For example, think about the topsoil. America's topsoil, perhaps the single, greatest
national treasure this country possesses, this rich topsoil, is like a bank account
that we're drawing on every year. Withdrawing money
and not putting it back in. That's not efficient. It's inefficient and unsustainable. Similarly, the way we treat nutrients. Nutrients are supposed
to come from the soil, go through the body of a plant,
into the body of an animal, and back into the soil. We all learned that in high school. And that's not how the vast majority of
North American agriculture works today. Instead, we're mining minerals in Morroco,
shipping them across the Atlantic, spraying them on the fields, only to have them wash off
into the waterways, and end up in dead zones,
and places like the Gulf of Mexico. That's not efficient,
it's incredibly wasteful. Not just ecologically, but economically. Similarly, what I said earlier
about fossil fuels, antibiotics to feed
the factory farm animals. And all of this to increase
the yield of corn and soy. Crops that humans don't even actually eat. We're maximizing
the yield per acre of corn and soy, yet the vast majority of American farmland
does not feed humans. It's either used to create ethanol
or to feed livestock. About less than 10%
of the corn crop in this country actually goes to feed humans. This is the system
that is supposed to feed the world? Well, it's actually
not feeding the world today. If you measure, the right way
to measure productivity in agriculture is not the yield of corn per acre
or soy per acre, but the yield of human food per acre. And when you measure how much
human food is produced per acre, America is not a leader. We're not even average. We're behind the world average, and we're behind countries
like India and China, that are making a much better job of
feeding the world population than we are. So, if you were smart, you would realize
what's really behind that status is the fact that these other countries
consume less meat that America does. And, so, who is going to produce all
the increasing appetite for pork in China, And surely, American industrial
agriculture and factory farms are going to step forward
to supply all the meat. Well, I'm not sure that's true either. The leading exporter of pork
in the world today is Denmark. Denmark is a country
that has for many years banned the use of sub-therapeutic
antibiotics in livestock. One of the most disgusting and reckless
practices of American factory farms has been banned in Denmark, yet Denmark has continued to maintain
high yields and low prices for their pork, and is the number one exporter
of pork to places like China. Ironically, China has
recently banned pork imports from several U.S. pork producers
because of the use of antibiotics. The real question though is: What's the most efficient way
to produce food if people are going to eat more meat? Well, if you look at one acre of corn, it can produce about enough corn
to feed one head of cattle. This is an approximation,
this is not very exact math. That same acre-I wouldn't advocate
planting organic corn to feed the cattle - that same acre can produce about
enough grass to feed one head of cattle. Now, it's not an exact math. I'm approximating, and there is a lot of other things
that change the equation. Corn is a more efficient crop
in a lot of ways. It's a wonderful crop,
it allows for a lot more control, it has less seasonality, but it also has a lot of other costs
on the balance sheet. At the end of the day,
it's not a slam dunk that industrial agriculture is
more efficient, even for producing meat. Now, the truly more efficient way
to feed humans is to use that land to produce crops that people eat, like fruits, vegetables, wheat or rice. But the benefit of growing
meat on pasture is at least those animals
fertilize the land, and if you do a rotation between
those animals and fruits and vegetables, you can actually produce
more off that same land. It must be about the money then, right? These so called evil corporations
like McDonald's and Monsanto. Perhaps they are shoving
this industrial food down our throats because it's more profitable, right? Well, that's actually not true either. In fact, using the techniques
I just described, Farmland LP, - which I'm a very large investor in - converts farms
from conventional crops to organic, and significantly increases their profits. They've done a cohort analysis of farmland that they've been progressively
converting to organic, and in doing so, significantly
raising the income from the land, from something like 100 dollars
to 450 dollars per acre. You might think: "Well, that's great
but perhaps it can't scale." Well, the answer is actually organic
and sustainable agriculture is scaling. For one thing, Chipotle, which is the closest we have
to a fast food organic company, is the single fastest growing
fast-food company of the past decade. And, more broadly, organic cropland
in the U.S. has grown tremendously, more than tripling
in less than two decades. So, organic saves money,
is less expensive, can produce as much or more food,
is more profitable, and is scaling. Then, what the... why the heck
is organic food so expensive? And the answer is because the demand
for organic food is growing even faster. That graph of organic cropland growing
is still a drop in the bucket, and it pales compared
to the surge in demand for organic sustainable food
in this country. The total amount
of organic cropland in America is about 1% of this country's
agricultural land. The total amount
of consumption of organic food is between 4 and 5%, and that does not even
reflect the total demand. That's how much has actually
been consumed. One out of every four Americans
is a devoted organic shopper, and 91% of Walmart customers say they would be interested
in buying organic food. The demand that we need
to satisfy is not just that 5%. But you might wonder
where is that 4 or 5% of organic food coming from
if not from our cropland? It's being imported. And where is organic food
growing on this planet? In developing countries. 80% of the certified organic farmers
are in developing countries. The country with the most
organic farmers is actually India. So, the poor countries
of the world are feeding the food that the majority
of want to eat. So, I think America should stop worrying
so much about feeding the world, and focus a little bit more
on feeding itself. The solution to this
is actually relatively simple. We need organic sustainably
managed cropland in this country to increase dramatically,
to catch up with the enormous demand. I put my own money where my mouth is, and I've invested a lot of money
in Farmland LP as I mentioned, which is converting land to organic, and I think we need both policy change,
and more business innovation to accelerate the expansion of sustainable
organic agriculture in America. Thanks very much. (Applause)
