“The agriculture that we should bring about substantially is local
scale, human intensive, ecologically sound,” says Dr. Kent Mullinix from
Kwantlen Polytechnic University. The director of Sustainable Agri-food
Systems acknowledges that, “The fact of the matter is this post
industrial agri-food system is going to require a lot of people, in
particular a lot of farmers.”

Mullinix references the work of Richard
Heinburg from the Post Carbon Institute whose research suggests that the
United States will need up to 50 million new farmers to work the land
and feed the people in a post carbon world. That’s roughly 17 per cent
of the current population. Applying that number to British Columbia
suggests that three quarters of a million of us will need to take up the
hoe. At the moment, I’m feeling woefully unprepared.

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