Future of food production and climate change

The year has been and still is one of the most challenging in living memory. Harvests almost without exception have been reduced and many arable farmers are struggling with sowing winter crops.
How can we secure our food supply with the rapidly changing and unpredictable climate? Every sector of Agriculture pushes itself forward as the answer to all our future unknown problems.

The large monolithic corporations claim their chemical and genetically modified systems will solve all our problems. Yet the production loss due to drought in the USA this year has not been alleviated one jot by GM crops or pesticides.
The wet year in the UK has proved difficult for both the conventional and organic sectors. Organic wheat growers are concerned about disease implications for seed raised in the wet summer while conventional farmers are struggling to harvest and sow crops with heavy machinery on wet ground.

In an unpredictable and changing world we cannot know what methods of production will succeed. One thing seems certain, a small number of widespread and uniform production methods puts us at serious risk of food shortages. The monopolistic nature of the big agribusinesses and their blanket approach to production surely risks catastrophic crop failure at the point of radical climate change.

So where is the solution, what should our food production system look like? The answer lies in diversity. The wider the range of production methods and scales the better. It would be naive to believe that we can do away with industrial production methods overnight or even in the medium term. It is equally foolish to put all our eggs in the agri corporations basket if we want to avoid the risk of acute food shortages.

Diversity is the key in our food supply network. The wider the range of methods of  production and distribution the wider the range of solutions we will have to future food crisis. Governments are always looking for the silver bullet that one solution that will solve all our food issues, the bad news for them is that life is way more complicated than that.

We need large farms, small farms, mixed farms, Community Supported Farms, Farms Shops Bio-dynamic Farms, Organic Farms, Permaculture Farms. A wide ranging and complex industry for food production and retail will provide us the best opportunity for solutions in an unpredictable future