An Interview with Wes Jackson, Sun Magazine

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Fred Bahnson‘s (Kellogg Food & Society Fellow Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy) interview with Wes Jackson, one of the godfathers of the organic movement and one of our most ardent defenders of topsoil in the land. It’s out in the October issue of The Sun magazine. To read the full interview you’ll need to hit up your local newsstand or Whole Paycheck grocery store. A snippet of the piece can be found on the link below.

Jackson, along with his intrepid staff at the Land Institute in Salina, Kansas, are hard at work developing perennial grains. Alongside Wendell Berry and Fred Kirschemann, Jackson is trying to convince the USDA to develop a 50-year farm bill. The goal is that 50 years hence most annual crops will have been replaced with perennials, thus greatly decreasing soil erosion.

EXCERPT “If you’re a hunter-gatherer, it’s pretty hard to cause serious ecological trouble, but once you start tilling the soil, you have become a troublemaker. Agriculture is dependent on the depletion of the earth’s capital stock.”