"Not that I have realized my dreams here, what we are doing today is much, much further than all my dreams, hopes and expectations," says Werner Lampert at the press conference to celebrate 10 years of Zurück zum Ursprung.
Ask me personally what Back to the roots is, I have to tell you that it is the most extraordinary project in agriculture that I know of.
What drives us, what are the challenges we will face? What will the future bring?
As everyone is aware, we are heading towards an unstable time:
Lifestyles, consumer behavior and the way agriculture ensures our food supply will change massively. Economic systems that have brought us prosperity will no longer feed us, will no longer satisfy us.
Across the EU, 115 million hectares of agricultural land are at risk from water erosion and 42 million hectares from wind erosion.
A culture only exists as long as it has enough productive land to feed its population.
The emerging climate change and the way agriculture is often practiced today will exacerbate this situation.
And the other problem:
Our agriculture is far, far too dependent on energy from outside, on proteins in livestock farming, on the petroleum industry: industrial fertilizers, pesticides, etc., as well as on investments.
The ratio of what comes from agriculture to what has to be used as energy is catastrophic.
For example: a root crop farmer from the heart of Africa earns 65 times more from his field than he uses in energy. According to one study, the factor for a dairy farmer in Europe is only 0.37.
An American study says that small-scale farming is 60 times more productive than industrialized agriculture.
The 2008 World Agriculture Report sums it up even more clearly: it says that only ecological, regional, solidarity-based agriculture will be able to feed future generations.
So it is not surprising that we see it as our task to create a model to show how our population - future generations - can be fed, regardless of what climate change and global, political and economic upheavals will bring.
An example from salutogenesis helps here.
This is a concept that comes from medicine, which understands health not as a state but as a process and describes the use of one's own resources for health.
This concept teaches us how and why agriculture will be able to feed us in the future despite different pressures and how we must shape it and preserve its resources.
First of all, we need to create an agricultural system that does not become an opponent or destroyer of other ecological systems, but uses them for its own benefit and is strengthened by them.
Agriculture has functioned and operated for thousands of years from the dimension of the CONTINUUM.
This awareness needs to be revived. Our work will - or at least should - increase the adaptability of our farmers' agricultural systems in order to meet future challenges - climate change, economic and political change.
- Creating resilience among farmers, in the regions in which we operate, ecologically, economically and socially, is part of our responsibility.
- Maintaining, expanding and pooling the resources of farmers - this is how we are on the way to healthy farms and healthy suppliers for our population.
We also try to strengthen agricultural businesses through reliability, openness and consistency. We are convinced that if what comes from outside is predictable, farmers can plan their own resources and use them to meet the requirements.
This creates security and the certainty that your own efforts and commitment will pay off. This makes the challenge manageable for the farmers.
Yes, and why all these considerations, why are we doing our work in this direction?
Many people who are concerned with our future, with future nutrition, are aware that we could face food supply shortages in a few decades.
We are convinced, and hence the reference to salutogenesis, that we can influence our future to a great extent with our work and our commitment.
This conviction and certainty that we have the task of achieving food sovereignty for the local population with our agriculture guides us in our work for authentic, regional, sustainable, organic agriculture.
That is our task, our responsibility, our goal. We want to set an example that encourages us to ensure the supply of high-quality food to our population.
Werner Lampert (born 1946 in Vorarlberg/Austria) is one of the pioneers in the field of sustainable products and their development in Europe. The organic pioneer has been intensively involved in organic farming since the 1970s. With Back to the origin (Hofer) and Ja! Natürlich, he developed two of the most successful organic brands in the German-speaking world.
