Green Right Now Interview with Dickson Despommier

Now that the book has been released, media outlets are increasingly interested in Q &A's with our VF guru, Dr. Despommier.  Below is an excerpt from a recent interview done by Samantha Weinstein of Green Right Now. 

What would happen if this was put into effect on a grand scale? What would happen to small farmers who are already struggling?

This is what happens already: The farms eventually fail and big corporations step in and say, “It’s okay. I don’t care if your farm fails. We will supply you with seeds and we will pay you a living wage to farm with our seeds.” So you have Monsanto and Cargill and other corporations taking over these small farms. Even if the farms fail on an annual basis for many years, it wouldn’t matter to Cargill because they own so much farmland that 80 percent will succeed regardless. That is why 2 percent of the farmers in the US control 50 percent of the farming. They take advantage of the farms that are already there. They buy their farms and say, “You can stay in business. We will even double the amount of money you made farming, but we want you to farm what we want you to farm.” And some farmers agree to that because they like farming. That’s not a solution though, is it? That’s an industrial application of a failing technology to an increasingly difficult situation where fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides have to be used more and more to produce the same amount of food. It wears out the land and spoils the environment.

To read the interview in its entirety, head on over here.

And if you haven't already, go check out the book!