SC Talk: “Feeding the Future – Climate Change, Population Growth and Technology”

Speaker: Evan Fraser, Director, Arrell Food Institute; Department of Geography, Environment and Geomatics, University of Guelph
Introducer: Jim Gurd

ABSTRACT:
Today the same technologies that brought us the Internet and are transforming medicine are reshaping food and farming systems. Smart tractors that know where they are in the field and plant the right seed in the right place and give it the right amount of fertilizer, robotic milkers that boost productivity while maintaining herd health and reducing potentially harmful inputs such as antibiotics, vertical farms that allow any crop to be produced anywhere anytime, and alternative protein products that provide high quality foodstuffs to consumers at minimal environmental cost… These technologies are all on the cusp of going mainstream and are talked about with breathless anticipation in the media. In this talk, Dr. Evan Fraser from the University of Guelph will provide a high-level overview of the potential for these technologies to create stronger and more resilient food systems while also reflecting on limitations, barriers, and bottlenecks. In a presentation that will be one-part techno-optimism and one-part critical reflection on the application of technologies, Dr. Fraser will attempt to describe some of the things that need to happen if we want the digital agricultural revolution to make food systems more sustainable, resilient, profitable, and nutritious.

BIO:
A full professor of Geography at the University of Guelph, Evan Fraser helps lead the Food from Thought initiative, which is a $76.6 million research program based at the University of Guelph that explores how to use big data to reduce agriculture’s environmental footprint. He is also the director of Arrell Food Institute at the University of Guelph, co-chairs the Arrell Food Summit, and manages the Arrell Food Scholarship program as well as the Arrell Food Innovation Awards that deliver hundreds of thousands of dollars annually to groups that have made tremendous impacts on global food systems. He has written for the Globe and Mail, the Guardian.com, CNN.com, ForeignAffairs.com, the Walrus and the Ottawa Citizen, and has two popular non-fiction books about food and food security including Empires of Food: Feast, Famine and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations that was published by Simon and Schuster and shortlisted for the James Beard Food Literature Award. He has also co-produced/co-hosted 3 1-hour radio documentaries for CBC’s premier documentary show Ideas on the future of food. Between 2006-18 he co-convened an ad hoc working group made up of producer groups, the food industry, philanthropy and civil society to propose that the Federal Government of Canada should create a National Food Policy Advisory Council. The creation of this council was announced by the Minister of Agriculture and Agri-food Canada in the summer of 2019.

Evan’s web video series on “feeding nine billion” has been watched over 500,000 times, he has self-published a graphic novel called #FoodCrisis about a fictitious food crisis that hits North America in the 2020s. He has also created a card game about global food security that won a gold medal at the International “Serious Play” conference. The videos, the graphic novel and the card game have been pulled together in a series of teacher-friendly high school lesson plans that are used in classrooms around the world. Evan’s latest book, Uncertain Harvest, was released May 7th, 2020.

The link to register is https://forms.office.com/Pages/ResponsePage.aspx?id=JsKqeAMvTUuQN7RtVsVSEKo-DHaj3xRAluk2q6EEM7NUOU9XU05IQVFETEtBVkpUMkdUVDFWQ0hKWC4u

The deadline to register is the Wednesday of the talk at 8:00am. The Zoom link will be sent to registrants only on the morning of the event.