I’ve now got a YouTube channel! A few months ago Elwyn Lear filmed me giving a talk in Leominster, Herefordshire. He has kindly and skilfully edited the film and created a YouTube channel for me. This film is one hour and five minutes long. We are hoping to create more films to put on the channel over the coming months, most of which we envisage being very much shorter.

In the current film the question I seek to answer is ‘Can we feed 9 billion people sustainably?’ To which basically I say an emphatic YES, but with some pretty big ‘ifs and buts’. We need to change global income distribution to eliminate poverty, probably via a global universal basic income. We need changes in diet and in farming systems, which probably need to include a decrease of 70 or 80% in global meat consumption. We need to use the best of modern technology, which includes greenhouses with integrated renewable energy for heating, cooling and, where appropriate, desalination. (Genetic modification seems something of a red herring: there is very little evidence that it helps sustainably increase productivity.)

In the film I talk about a dozen or so farms that I think are showing the way to go. They are a very diverse bunch, emphasizing that there is no one single solution, but indicating that with many more farms like these, we could indeed feed 9 billion people and do so incredibly sustainably. As most of the farming systems I focus on produce vastly more food per acre than is the norm there should be a vast increase in space for rewilding. Also as these systems use few if any chemical inputs on-farm biodiversity should also flourish.

This is rather a long film at one hour and five minutes, which is quite a long time to listen to me chunttering on. If you do get around to watching it, please send me any comments you like. I always find the feedback useful.

The film is here.