Lindsay Falvey is an Australian agricultural scientist and author renowned for his contributions to sustainable agriculture and rural development. He has held careers in business, government and academia and is currently an Australian Commissioner for International Agricultural Research, among other governance and advisory roles. In his writing, he focuses on topics concerning agricultural science and philosophy, religion, international development and spiritual development. He was a resident at the Bellagio Center in 1996 and 2010, studying at the intersection of spiritualism and agricultural development.
A few words from Lindsay
“Back in the 1990s, the residents’ seminars were stimulating and diverse, especially those about or by experts from less developed nations.”
A Quote from Food Environment Education
“It was agriculture that enabled human beings to become producers rather than hunters and gatherers, and in doing so to settle into communities. From these earliest settlements have developed the elaborate and complex societies of today. During all these millennia, we have tended to take agriculture for granted. This is unfortunate, and unfair by all those – farm men and women in the fields, scientists in their laboratories, and policymakers in parliaments and elsewhere, for instance – who have contributed to the development of agriculture; an enterprise that is as significant as it is exciting.”
Synopsis
Agricultural education faces the choice of becoming a variable output from science or skills-oriented courses with less understanding of the interactions between science, people and the environment, or of shifting its own orientation to embrace public requirements and emerging technologies. Individual institutions and nations will determine their own response if they indeed recognize the choice. The great agricultural education centers of the world next century will, more probably, be those that are able to offer their services within areas of specialization on an international basis, and which create a learning environment that encourages motivated students to understand agriculture as the management of risks within the environment – the management of natural resources.
Related
September 2024
The September 2024 Bellagio Bulletin highlights innovative work from Joseph Stiglitz, Lesly Goh, Emiliano Rodriguez Nuesch, Manuel Pastor, Chris Benner, and Payal Arora, all focused on creating more sustainable and equitable global infrastructures.
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