One of the top voices in the future of sustainability on campus was wrong. Jack Colby, co-chair of the Campus Environmental Sustainability Team and associate vice chancellor of Facilities Operations, claimed that agriculture taught at the University was “sustainable in its roots.” Nothing could be farther from the truth.
This line of thinking is out of the realistic scope of the University’s and the state’s holistic opinion on agriculture. In a 2010 interview with Dr. Nancy Creamer, horticulture professor, director of the Center for Environmental Farming Systems in Goldsboro, N.C. and member of the USDA Specialty Crops Advisory Committee to the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture, she explained to me that traditional agriculture is still what is predominantly taught in universities, including N.C. State. She admitted things have changed over the last 25 years, but sustainable agriculture is still not at the forefront of common agriculture practices.
Majority of the planting practices, waste management and resource allocation strategies used in North Carolina are not sustainable. There are upwards of ten million pigs and 39 million turkeys in the state, all of which require food and produce waste. Future farm managers will have to deal not only with managing these needs, but also what dealing with the effects of how they were dealt with in the past. Many more facts and figures like this are thrown around, but without awareness and further education, future farmers and consumers cannot make informed decisions about how to deal with them and make them more manageable. Colby exemplifies this need for education and education with his use of glowing, inaccurate generalities that N.C. State is just continuing from its “roots,” which turn out to be unsustainable.
Dr. Michelle Schroeder-Moreno is the advisor and one of the founders of the agroecology program at N.C. State. While the program remains a concentration within the plant and soil science major, she is pushing to establish it as a separate major and rename it to reflect sustainable agriculture. By helping move this process along and highlighting the importance of these principles in other areas and disciplines, Colby and CEST can create a baseline and make sure future leaders in agriculture from N.C. State can make farming in North Carolina and across the world sustainable. This will reestablish N.C. State on the cutting edge of agriculture and help it catch up with other universities and research centers across the country.
While it is understandable that the points presented at the sustainability town hall meeting and outlined in the drafted plan online are general since this is the planning stage, Colby still answered many of the questions presented to him yesterday with vague, blanket answers and inaccurate generalities. This leaves doubt about whether CEST realizes the scope of sustainability already established in academics and research and what the sustainable climate is within the state. If CEST is to make sustainability truly inherent in the agriculture program at N.C. State, then it needs to understand the reality of agriculture today and make the push for sustainable agriculture as the standard at N.C. State.
For more information about the Sustainability Strategic Plan: http://www.ncsu.edu/sustainability/strategicplan.php.
To submit feedback, e-mail: sustainability@ncsu.edu.
