2020 Ag Innovation Showcase

IoES is happy to partner with Larta Institute on their upcoming Ag innovation Showcase.

The ongoing COVID-19 crisis has yielded versions of scarcity everywhere, and has put a spotlight on long-standing issues. The constraints on the supply chain have severely affected farmers, producers, distributors and consumers. The inability of farmers to get their products to market has resulted in a crisis of waste, with hundreds of thousands of animals slaughtered and destroyed, crops rotting in fields, and more. The world is in crisis of access and affordability of nutritious food. It is no longer sufficient for us to numbly point to the need for exponential increases in agricultural output to meet an expected exponential increase in world population. As we have discussed at the Ag Innovation Showcase, at least since 2017, and as it has come to be well accepted, nutritional deficiency is a by-product of our industrialized food system; thus “regenerative agriculture” as a concept and a set of practices seeks to focus on why and how we can restore the health of the soil, the producer and the consumer. This troika of interests and aspirations cannot be separated out from practices that generate waste in production and consumption, and from the increasingly alarming issue of resource fragility, under pressure from both climatic factors and resulting issues of exotic pestilence.