Recorded May 1 2026
Broadcast May 10, 2026
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North Dakota is a rural state. Without family farms and ranches, we’d be a very different place with very different people. Are we just an extraction economy and how should we evolve to meet the needs of the future? This depends on what we think agriculture is for. Is its primary purpose food production, propping up rural economies, preventing climate change, or advancing technology? These are philosophical questions before they are practical ones. They reveal our values and our visions of what it means to be human being on this planet.
Paul B. Thompson is professor emeritus at Michigan State University, where he held the W.K. Kellogg Chair in Agricultural Food and Community Ethics before retiring in 2022. He is the author or co-author of over two hundred articles and books including From Field to Fork: Food Ethics for Everyone, which won the 2015 “Book of the Year” award from the North American Society for Social Philosophy. His new book What is Agriculture For? was published last year by Oxford University Press.
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