A panel of agricultural activists, including noted novelist and farmer Wendell Berry, stressed the idea that the future of healthy, sustainable agriculture lies in forming local economies during “A Conversation with Wendell Berry” in the Great Hall of the Memorial Union on Sunday evening.

The panel discussion also included Berry’s daughter and Kentucky farmer Mary Berry Smith, Fairfield farmer and former Iowa Environmental Protection Commissioner Francis Thicke and Mount Vernon farmer, Cornell College biology professor and Linn Soil and Water Conservation District Commissioner Laura Krouse.

The discussion, both the 2007 Shivvers Memorial Lecture and a commemoration of the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture’s twentieth anniversary, was designed to promote “rich conversation” between the panelists and the audience instead of a traditional lecture format, said Frederick Kirschenmann, professor for the Leopold Center and opening speaker.

Discussion moderator and University of Northern Iowa biology professor Laura Jackson initiated the conversation by asking the speakers to discuss problems facing agriculture – not only on their own farms – but also in the scope of national and international economics and ecology.

Berry emphasized the adaptation and struggle against roadblocks farmers must endure as environmental and economic factors present new challenges.

“There are no final solutions to any of these problems that I have as a farmer,” Berry said.

Throughout the discussion, Berry and the other panelists repeated the idea that farmers must keep sustainability and environmental responsibility as top priorities, even as new technologies – such as ethanol and genetic engineering – add momentum to farming “fads” and overproduction of single crops.

“There isn’t any one answer to good agriculture because good agriculture is diverse,” Berry said.

Smith told the story of her farm’s purchase in the early 1980s, and the unpleasant surprise of financial difficulty during their first years of conventional farming.

“We had some pretty hard times. I think, looking back, they were harder than I thought they were,” Smith said. “But we were where we wanted to be and surrounded by people we loved, and it was all right.”

Smith said she eventually noticed that conventional farming methods weren’t working for her, her family or her land.

“After we had been farming for about six years, we saw that we were not only not making any headway at all on paying off our debts, we were wearing the farm out,” Smith said.

Smith’s farm now uses more environment-friendly methods and focuses on selling to a local market, especially the farm’s grape and wine operation. She said farmers “stepping out” of the traditional market to carve new niches for themselves can have a much higher degree of success with organic and sustainable farming than those who try to compete with traditional commodity farmers.

Among the biggest problems Krouse said she had seen was the inability of current agricultural methods to sustain the entire population. After volunteering in a Florida community of migrant farm workers, she said the problem became increasingly real to her.

“It really became apparent that there’s a huge amount of poverty and a huge amount of hunger, and that the people who pick the food can’t afford to buy it,” Krouse said.

Thicke said conserving some areas of land, such as parks, while heavily using others and producing pollution is harmful, citing industrial animal production in Iowa as an example.

“It’s really the antithesis of an ecological approach,” Thicke said.

Thicke said his dairy farm reflects this ecological concern. He utilizes rotation of crops and livestock to keep the land healthy and to minimize waste.

“The reason that there is no pollution is that the waste of one species becomes the food of another species,” Thicke said. “So everything is converted or recycled and very little is lost out of the system.”

On the future of farming, the panel agreed that transitioning toward sustainable, local focus and production was the key to making agriculture a viable option for young, environment-conscious farmers.