Defining Sustainability

Defining Sustainability
I’m KayDee Gilkey with the Northwest Farm and Ranch Report.

A popular buzz word in agriculture is sustainability. Often, each person seems to have a different definition or meaning.
Travis Meacham, one of the five AgForestry Class 33 members who selected the topic of sustainable ag as a public policy project, shares more about how they decided on creating a documentary film more than three years ago.

Meacham: “It’s a really vague topic and it is something that we wanted to look into and see if we could kinda of narrow it down. The more we dug into it, the wider the topic got. So we decided to make a video about it to see what farmers are doing out there without anything being mandated by the government or doing anything else. So we are going to come up with a video that we want to show documenting four different production operations and how their sustainability practices are being implemented.”

Their video, “The Perpetual Farm” will be a 27-minute educational documentary that poses the question, “Can we farm forever?” It is designed to stimulate thinking among both producers and consumers about what it really means, in practical terms, to grow food sustainably.

Meacham: “We kinda of bit off a pretty big project and it seemed like a lot to overcome but as we keep working on it we get more excited. I think we are going to end up with something that really educates the public on what sustainability truly is and almost gets people thinking about more than in the past.”

To learn more or purchase your copy of the film, go to agforestry.org.