For the first time since the start of the global COVID-19 pandemic, more than 3000 participants, mostly from the USA, gathered to exchange new ideas, results, and concepts at the Salt Palace Convention Center in downtown Salt Lake City, UT. The meeting was called "A creative economy for sustainable development." Meeting attendees and presenters shared their ideas about how to solve global issues related to the environmental sustainability of agriculture. Finding ways to develop sustainable agriculture and to construct management practices that are aimed at reducing the environmental impact of agriculture is becoming a very important issue in USA and around the world. Unfortunately, here, in Israel, sustainability is not yet a focus. While Israeli agriculture is prized around the world for its innovation and technological advances, the environmental impact of agriculture is not studied enough.
Roughly 50% of the speakers in the sessions I attended presented on ways to reduce nitrate leaching and soil greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Nitrate contamination from Israeli agriculture is unprecedented, already two times higher than the Organization
for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries’ standards for drinking water, and yet neither our Ministry of Agriculture nor our Ministry of Environmental Protection are funding research to reduce it. The situation with GHG emissions
from Israeli agriculture is even worse. Currently, we simply do not know how much our agriculture is emitting and what practices could help to reduce emissions. Israel, as a member state of the OECD, is obligated to report its GHG emissions, which
is currently done based on general formulas provided by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that are not specific to our country. Recent research in the Environmental Biogeochemistry Lab showed that the values currently reported
by Israel to the OECD are potentially overestimated by ~80–90%.
Considering the international effort to develop sustainable agriculture, it strange that Israel, one of the most innovative countries in the world, is left behind.
The triple society meeting was not complete without meetings with friends and colleagues from around the world. Professor Emeritus Yiftah Ben-Asher, Yoni Ephrath, and I met in a Mexican restaurant in Salt Lake City. The food was not that great, but once our waitress started to sing LuYeHi in Hebrew, everything changed. I was sitting (again) in the army dining room during the Shabbat supper, and two older friends were singing along with the waitress, and all of the restaurant’s customers were gazing at our table trying to understand why these strange people are singing in that strange language in a Mexican restaurant in the Mormon capital....