FASTCON: Food, Ag & Supply Chain in Tech Conference

Amanda Little, a professor at Vanderbilt University and an award-winning environmental journalist, spent five traveling through a dozen countries and as many U.S. states in search of answers to the question: What will we eat in a bigger, hotter, smarter world? Her journey took her from an apple orchard in Wisconsin and tiny Kenyan cornfields to massive Norwegian fish farms and computerized foodscapes in Shanghai. The race to reinvent the global food system is on, and the challenge is twofold: we must solve the existing problems of industrial agriculture while also preparing for the pressures ahead.

Amanda will share insights from her interviews and adventures with farmers, scientists, activists, and engineers. Her book tells a fascinating story of human innovation, exploring new and old approaches to food production while charting the growth of a movement that could redefine sustainable food on a grand scale. Climate models show that global crop production will decline every decade for the rest of this century due to drought, heat, and flooding. Water supplies are in jeopardy. Meanwhile, the world's population is expected to grow another 30 percent by midcentury. So how, really, will we feed nine billion people sustainably in the coming decades?