If old-style agriculture was a football team, it would be happiest to run and never pass. Now, it’s too late in the game and there’s no choice left.

 

Agriculture likes to be comfortable, and therefore it likes incremental growth, says John Oliver, president of Maple Leaf Bio-Concepts and one of the senior statesmen of Canadian agriculture.

 

“That’s not good enough. We need transformational change, not incremental change,” said Oliver, chosen by organizers to summarize this week’s ABIC 2007 conference in Calgary.

 

To the farm sector, it’s clear that the world faces major challenges, including population growth, the energy crunch, and climate change. To much of society, however, those threats don’t seem nearly so pressing, said Oliver. “There’s a huge wall of complacency and denial to get over.”

 

The bedrock truth, added Oliver, is that “the only life raft we have is agriculture, and our best oar in the water is science and technology.”

 

If farmers don’t double their annual food output by 2020, there won’t be enough to feed the extra two billion people that will be living by then. Yet farmers will also need to do even more. They’ll also need to grow new foods packed with new traits that are better able to bolster human health, both for the developing world where 750 million people go to bed hungry every day, and for the industrial world, where a very different 2 billion consumers are wallowing in bad food choices and an epidemic of obesity, diabetes and heart disease.

 

At the same time, farmers will also need to produce biofuels that will replace disappearing fossil fuels. And they’ll need to meet all those demands without expanding today’s 1.5 billion acre landbase.

 

“These are the hard truths,” Oliver said, going back to his football metaphor. “We’ve got to go to the air.”