Stories

Climate change and the challenges it presents to state agriculture is of great significance to Iowa in the coming decades. In strategies for how to continue to feed a growing population in a tumultuous environment, many have drawn attention to the potential value of a plant-based diet.

"It's not just Iowa [that needs to consider adapting], it's everywhere in the world that grows plants and animals. The way I like to think about it is that, you can think of food as kind of a concentrated form of solar energy. The farms are out there in the sun, and they're absorbing solar energy, they're turning it into chemical bonds we can digest or we feed to animals...

as there are more and more people in the world, and as we are having a larger and larger environmental impact, we really have to think about efficiency now. And, feeding animals, or rather sending our food through animals before we eat it ourselves, that's just inefficient. That doesn't mean everybody needs to become vegan, that doesn't mean we need to never eat any meat, however we need to start thinking about the inefficient use of energy that represents, and we need to think about are there ways to make that more efficient."

Brian Green, director of technology ethics, interviewed by Talk of Iowa on Iowa Public Radio.