GRANVILLE, Ohio — Award-winning agriculture journalist Alan Guebert will be a featured keynote speaker at the Ohio Ecological Food and Farm Assoc. (OEFFA) conference on Feb. 14 in Granville.
"For more than 20 years, Alan has had his finger on the pulse of American agriculture, offering keen insights into the politics, money and technology behind our nation’s food and farm system," said OEFFA Program Director Renee Hunt.
Guebert will speak as part of the state’s largest sustainable food and farm conference, an event which draws more than 1,200 attendees from across Ohio and the country. In his keynote address, titled "Farming’s Future Faces: Shaping the Course of Our Food System," he will explore the ways in which science, technology and big business have changed farming over the last 50 years.
He will talk about the introduction of synthetic nitrogen and genetic engineering, to the rise of large grocery chains that have replaced small corner shops, and what the next 25 years may have in store. "It’s all going to change because it always changes," Guebert said. "Every 25 years or so, something really big comes along and changes everything in agriculture. My father didn’t farm like his father, and my grandfather didn’t farm like his father.
"In the 1960s it was all about anhydrous ammonia and herbicides, in the 1990s the concern was about GMO seed. What will the next big thing in ag be? My guess is it will be something we already see, something we already knew."
He plans on addressing the issue of population figures released recently by the United Nations, which project there will be 9 billion people on the planet to feed by 2050. "In a large part, no one knows what the population will be, but the human tendency is to overestimate and overshoot," Guebert said. "We need to figure out where we’re headed more slowly, as we’re not going to change things fast in five years anyway.
"We’ve already seen a slowing in these trends. First, we need not get carried away with the ‘Buck Rogers space travel food production’ ideas we hear about being promoted by Big Ag. There’s a vested interest in all these technologies and scenarios."
His keynote will explore why the future of farming will require us to focus on public policy and private muscle to ensure the tools, resources and knowledge we use today and tomorrow are intelligent, sustainable and profitable.
Much more than an ag journalist, Guebert is farm-raised. He grew up in southern Illinois, where he milked 100 cows on his family’s 900-acre farm. His experiences on the farm led to his syndicated agriculture column The Farm and Food File in 1993.
He was named Writer of the Year in 1997 by the American Agricultural Editors’ Assoc.
He was writer and senior editor at Professional Farmers of America and Successful Farming magazine, as well as contributing editor at Farm Journal. His new book, The Land of Milk and Uncle Honey: Memories From the Farm of My Youth, will be published this spring.
Guebert will also lead a one-hour session titled "Should We Have an Organic Checkoff Program?" This moderated debate will explore both sides of a proposed organic checkoff.
