In this series, we're sitting down with Swette Center affiliated faculty to catch up on food systems, innovation, and what makes a good meal. See the rest of the series on our Faculty Profiles page.
Read on for an interview with Timothy Richards, Professor & Marvin and June Morrison Chair of Agribusiness in the Morrison School of Agribusiness.
How did you become interested in food systems?
I was born on a farm in western Canada, so farming has been my whole life. Literally, I've never had a job other than either working on the farm or talking about agricultural economics and agribusiness here at ASU. As an undergraduate, I went to business school at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. It was an interesting degree because it was a 5-year undergraduate program with 12 courses a year, so I had lots of options in terms of the classes I could take and I noticed that there were some agricultural economics courses available to me. I decided to go ahead and take some even though I was technically a business school guy. While I was taking these classes, it turned out I was the only farm kid there, and everything that we were talking about was super intuitive to me, whereas the other students, mostly from Vancouver, didn't have a clue about what they were talking about. We were learning about things that farmers simply know to be true. I fell in love with that experience, majored in economics and finance, and decided to pursue a PhD right away. That took me to Stanford, and I knew exactly what I was going to do for a dissertation topic the day that I hit the ground. Ever since then, my work has been all about agribusiness and agribusiness sustainability.
Can you share a glimpse of your current research and how it applies to food systems transformation?
I've been at ASU for 30 years. Over that time, I’ve run the gamut in terms of research topics, but I’m currently really interested in farm labor. I work very closely with industry and organizations like the Western Growers Association, the International Fresh Produce Association, and the Farm Foundation. From working with these groups, I’ve found that one of the most chronic problems in agriculture that we struggle to solve is farm labor shortages. This is not a sustainability issue in the environmental sense we often think of, but it directly affects the financial and economic sustainability of farms. If we can't find the people to produce food in the United States in an economical way, we will end up importing everything that we eat, which I don't think is a strategic move. So, we need to solve labor problems somehow, whether that's through incentivizing people to work on farms, raising wages, moving entirely to mechanization, or opening the borders to more immigrant worker programs. There's a number of these potential policy solutions, and we're working on a range of them.
What’s an innovation in food systems that you're excited about?
I do a lot of work with the Organic Trade Association and the Organic Produce Association, and controlled environment agriculture (CEA) is expanding. CEA is essentially hydroponics, but it encompasses practices from vertical farming all the way down to more traditional covered crop growing like greenhouses. That's something that I'm really excited about, because it can solve most of the problems that we face today in agriculture—water problems, soil quality, land use, labor—you name it. CEA, I think, is the future for a lot of agriculture. It’s amazing how much we already import from Canada with CEA; energy is the big limiting factor in CEA and Canada is relatively abundant with energy resources. From a core economics perspective, it makes a lot of sense. Obviously, it's limited in the sense that it won't be able to grow corn and soybeans in CEA anytime soon. But for the fresh produce that I concern most of my research with, CEA really is up and coming.
What’s your favorite weeknight meal?
Well, I have 2 boys and one of them is super picky, so our creativity in meals is driven by him. My favorite meal is whatever stops him from complaining, which is usually pasta, chicken thighs, and peas. It sounds boring and super standard, but that’s what makes him happy. So, that's what we eat most of the time.