Tuesday afternoon I headed to Des Moines to participate in the Borlaug Dialogue and World Food Prize events. After my customary travel delays, I rose early yesterday, with only a couple hours of sleep, to attend a breakfast meeting/discussion with the 2018 Borlaug Laureates on the topic of agriculture and nutrition. The statistics presented were alarming, in both positive and negative ways:

• A $1 USD investment in nutrition leads to an economic return of $8 to $138 due to improved health outcomes

• According to the director of nutrition at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, a person in Nigeria in the 4th income quintile, would spend 44% of their income to purchase an egg every day, and

• For the third consecutive year, global hunger has not declined. In fact, it has increased the last 2 years.

If you're not familiar with the Borlaug Dialogue International Symposium, it is an annual meeting to honor Norm Borlaug, father of the Green Revolution' and his work to end world hunger. I've attended regularly since my days at Iowa State. A couple of things have always surprised me. One is the small number of scientists that I have recognized over the years. The other is the lack of presence from California. These are changing, a bit. The Feed the Future Innovation Labs meet at this event now, increasing the presence of scientists. And this year, the California presence was a bit stronger. Beth Mitcham was present, perhaps due to her connection with an Innovation Lab. Also, Helene Dillard is a panelist tomorrow, talking about women leading food and agriculture research. A.G. Kawamura is here as well and was a panelist during yesterday's morning session.

I really enjoyed A.G.'s comments. He talked about his farming operation, pointing out that he is in his 40^th year this year and referencing Howard Buffet's book, which I would highly recommend even for non-readers like myself. A.G.'s comments were really focused on the feasibility of farming small parcels of land owned by airports, churches, cities, etc., pointing out efforts in the area of built environments. A.G. also talked about opportunities to farm specifically for food banks, in his case working with an FFA chapter. I noticed he attended one of the side events this morning. The topic was vertical agriculture and the speaker was the owner of Skyscraper Farm. The speaker shared the company's work with Virginia Tech on an NSF INFEWS project. The company holds 2 utility patents on the building design, focused on getting light in. They envision as tall as a 52 story building (200' x 200') with 5 floors of condos, 5 floors of commercial space, a ground floor farmers market and 41 floors of growing space. An interesting concept and clearly vertical, compared to other indoor agriculture units that still have a large footprint because they don't build up.

What interested me most in the conversation was the concept of ‘speed breeding' to achieve desirable traits much faster than traditional breeding allows and even further acceleration in indoor growing environments. I need to read up on this a bit but definitely something where CA should be at the forefront.

Still more to learn before I head back.