Dr. Alan Greene at the Organic Farming Conference

"Good food, grown right is at the core of human health."

In my other life, I co-coordinate the MOSES Organic Farming Conference in La Crosse, Wisconsin, which happens in late February every year. I’ve done this for as long as Rock Spring Farm, having fallen into the position as an over-enthusiastic volunteer in the summer of 1999. The folks at MOSES (that’s the Midwest Organic and Sustainable Education Service) were kind enough to allow me to reprint this summary of Dr. Alan Greene’s keynote at the 2009 conference, written by colleague and friend Bridget O’Meara; I’ll serialize it here over the next several weeks.

The South Hall Ballroom at the La Crosse Center is filled to capacity at the 20th annual Organic Farming Conference in February. Participants pack the seats, stand in doorways, and gather in a nearby lobby to hear Dr. Alan Greene deliver his Friday morning keynote address, entitled "Why Farmers Are My Heroes." After a rousing introduction by MOSES Board member Atina Diffley, Greene walks onto the stage, grateful to Diffley, impressed by the magnitude of the event, and genuinely honored to have been asked to speak. He opens with a story about sitting next to a pregnant woman on the plane and reflects on how the present is part of the future as well as the past.

"Sitting next to this woman, I began to think about how the egg that's becoming her daughter was in her before she got pregnant. . . . It was in her before she knew how to walk, when she was a little girl, before she was even born, that egg was there already. . . When she was there inside her mom and her mom felt her kick, that egg was in her fully formed and waiting. So that means that this woman had been carried in her mom and in her grandmother and that the little girl she was carrying had in her already not only her baby but her grandkids as well. I sat next to five generations of women on that plane!"

While audience members laugh and try to wrap their minds around this extraordinary idea, Greene continues, "Here, today, this event represents our past, our present, and our future. We celebrate not only 20 years of the Organic Farming Conference, as amazing as it is, but also the fact that organic farming has been central to human life since the dawn of civilization. And, in the present moment, there is nothing more important. And, in the future, organic farming is the best hope for our environment, the best hope for our culture, the best hope for our economy, and, certainly, the best hope for our health."

"As a physician," he adds, "everything I do depends on what you do. In fact, what I do is the topping--what you do as farmer is the main course of health."