000124 Agriculture's Future Outlined

Great Bend, KS -- Widespread social and lifestyle changes, coupled with unprecedented household wealth, will allow 21st Century farmers to use emerging technologies to deliver safer, healthier foods to consumers at premium prices, a futurist says.

Lowell Cattlett, a professor at the New Mexico State University, outlined his vision for the future at a recent conference.

Changes in the past century have created a spoiled society with the money to demand agricultural products that integrate the latest medicinal benefits and are produced on environmentally safe farms, he said.

“It means we are not just feeding hungry mouths. It means we can take agriculture to the next step,” Cattlett said.

Technologies are now being developed that will intertwine medicine and agriculture to produce foods that can vaccinate the world against diseases such as small pox.

The future of Kansas wheat production, for example, may lie in growing genetically modified wheat to produce bread for people who are glucose intolerant, he said.

“It is a world totally inseparable from medicine, totally inseparable from the environment,” Cattlett said.

As 1900 dawned across America, the average person lived to the age of 46. But by the end of 1999, the average person lived to age 76 1/2.

“We have four generations of people alive and healthy -- with lots of money,” he said.

That money -- $36 trillion in household wealth in this country -- will play an increasingly bigger role in the coming years, he said, because $26 trillion of it is held by an aging generation that will soon pass it on to the free spending, baby-boom generation.

“When we get the $26 trillion, we are going to spend it,” Cattlett said.

In agriculture alone, $7 trillion in farm real estate is going to change hands as aging farmers retire in the next few years, he said.

“It's a phenomenal change -- get ready for it,” he said.

The two-day Vision 2000 conference was sponsored by Kansas State University, Water Protection Association of Central Kansas and the consulting firm of Kennedy and Coe, LLC.

The conference explored some of the emerging technologies and issues shaping agriculture in 2000 and beyond. Among them is growing use of precision agriculture to do such things as help farmers calculate -- using ground positioning systems from orbiting satellites -- the exact amount of fertilizer to put on a field.

For some, the vision of the future includes returning to some of the practices of the past.

Pete Ferrell, a Butler County rancher, has put together the Tall Grass Prairie Producers Cooperative to help him and his neighbors raise beef cattle in the Flint Hills in the same manner that buffalo once roamed the plains -- without intervention from the rancher.

“For all our technology and hoopla, we haven't improved over nature,” Ferrell said.

His vision for the future includes cooperatives where ranchers have pooled their land to allow cattle to range unfenced prairies.

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