A quote from AgLaunch president, Pete Nelson, in “Transforming the Delta” by Robert Kunzig for Food & Environment Reporting Network with media partner, Switchyard:
“If we took 5 percent of the acres and diverted them into almost anything that wasn’t a commodity, it’s literally an additional $2.5 billion in revenue, just at the farm gate,” said Pete Nelson, president and founder of AgLaunch, a Memphis farmers’ collective and ag-tech accelerator that is partnering with WWF. Processing the crops in the Delta would funnel even more money into the regional economy.
The change would make the whole U.S. food system more resilient. Demand for fresh produce is rising rapidly. We already import around half of it, and two-thirds of the fruits and nearly half the vegetables we do grow ourselves come from one place: California. As the planet warms, that dependency is looking increasingly unsustainable. The problem is water. Farmers in California’s Central Valley have been over-pumping groundwater for decades, and climate forecasts call for longer, more severe droughts in the state, punctuated by more extreme rains. Large growers and corporate produce buyers are already looking for other sources of supply.”
Read the whole piece on this important work here.
