Growing Through the 21st Century

Growing Through the 21st Century

Growing Through the 21st Century. I'm Greg Martin with Colorado Ag Today.

Feeding the worlds population seems to be the elephant in the room. How can we continue to feed him when farming acres are shrinking and with fewer farmers? John-Paul Maxfield is the Founder of Waste Farmers has a mission of building a bridge between convention agriculture and more sustainable models.

MAXFIELD: Our mission is to empower farmers of the 21st century with sustainable tools to grow consciously and really what that is we're just a sustainably driven company focused on agriculture. We view farmers of the 21st century as kind of the small scale farmer and so we break that into subsistence farmers throughout the world that grow on sub 2 or sub 3 acres. Then the growing trend for controlled environment and intensive ag and then trying to get people connected with the food system again by growing food at home.

He hopes to be able to bring the two different agriculture sides together.

MAXFIELD: There's this divide between industrial ag or kind of the industry or kind of conventional and consumer led effort to change the food system. Each of those are at seemingly polar extremes and there's a lot of general pronouns like "they are this" on both sides. "They" being industrial ag is destroying the world and making us unhealthy. And on the flip side, "They" being environmentalists and government officials making it difficult for me to make a living. What I want to do is say as a company want us to be a bridge between those two worlds because both have valid points.

Maxfield will be one of the speakers at this year's Ag Summit.

And that's Colorado Ag Today. I'm Greg Martin, thanks for listening on the Ag Information Network of the West.

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