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TEDxUVM - Deborah Neher - Economies of Food and Unintended Consequences

933 views · Published 1 September 2010 · 8:47 · Indexed 10 October 2026

Channel: TEDx Talks · 2010 · Education

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Deborah Neher is a Professor and Chair in the Department of Plant and Soil Science. Dr. Neher is a soil ecologist that studies nematodes and microarthropods as indicators of soil quality for environmental monitoring of terrestrial and wetland soils. While it would be more than a full time job to understand the unknown communities in our soils, Dr. Neher is an agroecologist who takes a systems approach to her research. For her TEDx talk she will step back and question how Our current food system has been designed for economy of scale but has exceeded a threshold where catastrophic failure and vulnerability exceeds the benefits. Corn monocultures in the Mississippi Basin correspond with unprecedented loss of soil and nitrogen in the Mississippi basin creating a dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico. Separation of crop and animal production increases the risk of environmental pollution. Dr. Neher will examine the future policy needs in order to avoid the unintended consequences of our current food system.

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