Students Take Up the Challenge of Nourishing 9 Billion
Guest blog by Richard Crispin, CollaborateUp
If you were born in the 1800s, your career prospects began and ended on the farm. Over 75 percent of Americans made their living in agriculture. Today, less than 2 percent of us do. The average American farmer in the 1940s fed 19 people. Today, s/he feeds 155. That's a growth in productivity nine times greater than the average of all other industries.
That's the good news that greeted the nearly 100 student leaders who assembled on the campus of the University of California at Davis on the morning of May 29. Here's the bad news: if it's easy to do in agriculture, it's already been done. Getting from here to feeding 9 billion people will take some pretty sophisticated thinking—and that's precisely what these folks came to do.
As the future leaders who will take up this challenge, the students at UC Davis and an earlier cohort at Tufts University explored this complex issue at our recent Nourishing 9 Billion SolutionLabs – a joint initiative between CollaborateUp and Net Impact.
