Big Picture Agriculture

Last week I had the opportunity to visit with Colorado State faculty member, Dr. Ajay Jha, who travels extensively to help create ideal small farming operations. His primary objective is to find profitable models for sustainable, nutritious, local urban and small acreage food production. He feels this is where the need is since half of the world’s people now live in urban areas and that number continues to increase rapidly.

He wants to see solutions which use inputs efficiently, particularly water, and he’s interested in setting up greenhouses which can grow food year round using minimal energy inputs.

With a background in horticulture, propagation, and business management, he calls himself a serial entrepreneur. From India, his first degree was a PhD from the University of Delhi. He furthered his education and training on sustainable agriculture in Israel, where he has closely associated with Dr. Daniel Hillel who won the 2012 Food Prize for his life’s work in drip irrigation.

He wants a cross-disciplinary approach to solving problems through an agriculture and horticulture innovation lab, working on the global challenges of the food, water, and energy nexus. For example, the construction management department at CSU is helping Dr. Jha to design net zero energy greenhouse modular systems.

Projects implementing his ideas are currently underway in Colorado, India, and Pakistan, and he travels extensively in his work to promote solutions for agriculture. In Pakistan, he is working with a group of women using a “farm in a kit” and always, wants the knowledge to be disseminated. In India, he has helped merge 300 small farms in Andhra Pradesh so that farmers can work more efficiently together than on tiny plots. In Afghanistan project, farmers are successfully farming with two-wheeled tractors manufactured in China as an appropriate technology which was supported by USAID/Afghanistan program where Dr. Jha was involved as specialist for the appropriate technology transfer. Dr. Jha’s approach is always through the system solution like increasing local employment through local manufacture of technologies, increase household nutrition and incomes, and promote economic health and well-being of rural areas around the globe.

Dr. Jha says that in academics it is important to walk the talk, to have two feet planted firmly on the ground of reality. And he knows that the economics of food production has to work or it is not a worthwhile project.

One of Jha’s key and upsetting statements during our visit, was that the innovation of food production in other countries of the world is much more advanced beyond what we are doing here in the United States.

I see two big reasons for this. One is that we don’t have as urgent a need to innovate where food production systems are concerned because we are a food abundant nation that exports to the rest of the world. Secondly, our government has thrown most of its subsidization power towards Midwestern monoculture crop production using industrialized intensive methods. One might wonder about regulatory obstacles, too.

He is optimistic about the role of indoor verticle urban gardens, citing their successful operations in Japan, and has an indoor window box project under development, also for urban use. I do not share his optimism in these two areas due to light and energy requirements, but he’s studied them more than I have, so I hope he’s right.

Finally, Dr. Jha is the director of IGATT, the “Institute for Global Agriculture and Technology Transfer”. IGATT’s mission is to provide affordable and appropriate technology to small acreage farmers around the world to make them productive, and to promote sustainably built agriculture enterprises for the food security and nutritional availability which contribute to regional economic development.

In the summer of 2014, IGATT is going to host a “Global Agriculture Innovation Summit” in Denver, Colorado. The theme of the program will be innovation and appropriate technology dissemination in agriculture through the use of a multidisciplinary collaboration of stakeholders for systemic solutions in agriculture. According to Jha, there will be 10-12 parallel thematic sessions of agriculture-related issues, and exhibitions will be organized. Also, there will be a business competition for agricultural innovation and global agricultural enterprise combined with the summit.