I think one of the key challenges in the 21st century for all humanity is going to be feeding ourselves as climate change intensifies. We now know that we're locked in already to a serious amount of extra warning no matter how quickly we go solar and green and all of that because of the lag effects in the climate system. So for example in Iowa where traditionally there was only one summer out of 10 where you had 95 degree Fahrenheit temperatures for three days in the row by 2040 if we stay on the current path we're going to have those kinds of temperatures of three summers out of four and the catch there is that corn does not reproduce at temperatures of 95 degree Fahrenheit and above. So if we don't dramatically upgrade our efforts to contain global warming we are going to be creating a situation on this planet where even one of the major bread baskets in the American Midwest is going to be very hard press to produce even the same amount of food that it is today. Much less the additional food that we're going to need in the coming years because human population is projected to grow to 9 billion people 9.3 the UN says by 2050 from today 7 billion and of course as people in China and in Brazil and much of the rest of the world increasingly enter the global middle class their diets will change and they will be demanding more ample more varied diets and those diets are going to require more resources. So long and short of it is that we have to find a way to increase our agricultural systems productivity even as it faces the stresses of the hottest and most volatile climate that humans have ever experienced since we began practicing agriculture on this planet 12,000 years ago. We need to undertake a transition away from the currently dominant industrial agricultural system and towards what the experts call agro ecology or ecological agriculture. In a sentence our challenge under climate change in all fields but especially in agriculture the experts say is we must it's too prompt and we must avoid the unmanageable even as we manage the unavoidable what that means we have to avoid triggering unmanageable amounts of global warming and climate change. We are already locked into a significant amount of climate change we already know that we're going to have three feet of sea level rise on average on this planet over the next 50 to 100 years that's going to be hard enough to deal with but let's make sure that it's not 10 feet of sea level rise so we want to avoid the unmanageable likewise though and at the same time we must manage the unavoidable we must face the fact that we're going to have three feet of sea level rise and that's going to be very problematic in many parts of the world because some of the richest agricultural lands on earth are in the deltas right the deltas in Egypt for example the delta in Bangladesh the deltas in the Mississippi River Delta in California the Sacramento River Delta and those deltas are unless we take undertake very smart and pretty rapid adaptation measures those deltas are going to be in real trouble and so will many of the off-shore fisheries rather where a lot of the protein for the world's poor comes from wetlands and fish based sorry sea based protein and so that amount of sea level rise is going to be problematic enough let's not make it 10 but let's also get prepared for that so we've got to avoid the unmanageable and manage the unavoidable and unfortunately the current system of industrial agriculture is a loser on both of those fronts it is a massive emitter of greenhouse gases because it relies on petroleum essentially to be running the farm equipment to be making all that chemical fertilizer that they pour on the fields to be shipping their products all through the global supply chain and then at the same time on the second half of the climate imperative of managing the unavoidable the industrial agriculture system is based on large volume monocultures you plant corn or you plant wheat or what have you over millions of acres and that volume the economies of scale that come with that kind of volume allow you to reduce the prices problem with that is that that kind of monoculture system is extremely vulnerable to the sort of volatile weather that we're going to be seeing more and more of as climate change intensifies in fact over the long term and especially in the face of climate change the evidence suggests that ecological agriculture will be much better at the kind of weather that we're going to be facing increasingly in the years to come when there's drought for example ecological agriculture has outperformed the yields of industrial agriculture by about 30 percent which makes perfect sense because it is as I said earlier able to retain much more water because they use manure in compost so we know that technically we can do this the problem is more political and economic it's not technological and to be blunt the real problem is that the current system of industrial agriculture is supported by some of the largest and richest and most politically powerful corporations in the world companies like Monsanto for example and it is also often supported by the agriculture ministries and the research institutes not just here in the United States but all around the world the old thinking that has prevailed over the last 50 years and let's face it has served humanity well it's very easy to attack the green revolution in retrospect as a lot of people do for polluting our water and so forth and it did do that but you cannot be fair about that if you don't also say that industrial agriculture and the green revolution of the 60s and 70s kept literally tens of millions of people from starving by increasing yields so we need to recognize that fact and we can't be precipitous in how we transition to the new system but we do need to transition to that new system and I think that will take very candid and far-sighted leadership from our political institutions and our economic institutions and our academic institutions and civil society to realize that if we stick with industrial agriculture we are basically hanging onto a sinking ship in the face of climate change we need to shift to ecological agriculture and if we do that it will serve all of us much better.