Robert Paterson's Weblog

The Awakening of the PEI Entrepreneur Community #startuppei #startupcanada

The Earthquake that is StartUp Canada (Victoria Lennox and Cyprian Szlalankiewicz) - has just left PEI. 

I will be starting a series on what happened next week when I get the videos of our interviews. But here is a summary of what I saw take place.

In short the Entrepreneur community has started to see itself. Until now most of its members had their heads down and fully focused on their own bit. Now they are starting to see the ecosystem and how they can help each other. Now the supporting people in government also has seen the full power of this sector and they too see that it is better to work together to support the system as a whole.

Silos = not good. Ecosystem = Good!

Trying to bring big mature business to PEI = sub optimal. Supporting local entrpeneurs - Optimal!

Looking to government for everything = sub optimal. Looking to the community - Best!

Here is a more detailed summary:

10^th, Startup Canada traveled across Prince Edward Island to connect with and bring together the province’s entrepreneurial community. With each meeting and event that was hosted, one message began to ring loud and clear: PEI’s entrepreneurial spirit is awakening and with the right tools, resources, and mentors in place, it has the potential to thrive.

Startup Canada is a grassroots, entrepreneur-led initiative to support and inspire entrepreneurship across the country. The Startup Canada team is on a six-month tour to celebrate entrepreneurship, identify key challenges facing Canadian startups, and ignite new community-led solutions to those challenges. In PEI, the Tour engaged more than 300 Islanders, and more than 200 entrepreneurs from a variety of sectors, including well-known Island entrepreneurs Ray Murphy, President of Murphy’s Pharmacies, John Rowe, President of Island Abbey Foods and Timeless Technologies and Regis Duffy, Founder of Diagnostic Chemicals Ltd. and Chairman of BioVectra.

“This week we met with artisans, farmers, and successful technology, real-estate and manufacturing entrepreneurs who are powering the Island by creating jobs and innovating new products,” said Victoria Lennox, Startup Canada Co-Founder. “The importance of getting entrepreneurship into schools, creating a education track for entrepreneurship, supporting the mentorship of students, and creating a one-stop service shop for entrepreneurs, were some of the salient ideas on how to create a more prosperous and sustainable PEI.”

The PEI leg of the Tour began with a Charlottetown Town Hall facilitated by Startup Canada Board Member and Founder of Relish Gourmet Burgers, Rivers Corbett. Together, more than 70 entrepreneurs began building the provincial vision for PEI’s entrepreneur community. Rob Paterson, an entrepreneur who has lived on the Island for more than 17 years, said he has never seen such a mixture of passion, vibrancy and forward-thinking in one room. 

“I saw a giant awakening where the local community of entrepreneurs and policy-makers can now see themselves as key to our economic future,” said Paterson. “Many entrepreneurs told me that, until now, they had been too busy to see that they were part of a large sector here – a sector that creates most of the real jobs for Islanders and a sector that offers our young people a real future. I think Startup Canada’s visit is inspiration for the leaders to start working together to help newcomers to the sector and a catalyst for the key policy makers to start seeing entrepreneurship as central in their plans to create a better economy for PEI.”

Another action item from this week is to develop a province-wide communications strategy to increase awareness of entrepreneurship as a viable career path. This strategy will include the training, education, and convening of the PEI education sector to equip Islanders with the knowledge, skills and networks required to create entrepreneurial schools, colleges and universities. 

Throughout the week, spotlight interviews were conducted with local entrepreneurs including, VITRak Systems Inc., Island Flow, ScreenScape, Prince Edward Distilleries and a number of others.

“I think the Startup Canada PEI Tour was a fantastic success,” said Duncan Shaw, Startup Canada’s PEI Patron and owner of the Summerside Storm. “We saw new energy in experienced entrepreneurs and great excitement in younger people focused on the future. It’s great to see so many people dreaming big and focused on making those dreams a reality.”

Alongside Startup Canada, the PEI BioAlliance co-hosted the PEI events.

“We’ve been able to celebrate the tremendous spirit of entrepreneurship that lives and breathes in PEI, and we have provided a window for the next generation of entrepreneurs to see what their future might look like in the exciting and rewarding world of running their own businesses,” said Rory Francis, Executive Director of the PEI BioAlliance 

Next week Startup Canada is moving to Ontario to visit Toronto, Waterloo, Windsor and York Region, before heading back to Atlantic Canada to round off the month of May in New Brunswick. 

Funding assistance for the PEI Startup Canada tour was provided by the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency and Innovation PEI. The PEI Startup Canada Committee is made up of the PEI BioAlliance, ACOA, Innovation PEI, The Greater Charlottetown & Area Chamber of Commerce, PEI Newcomers Association, Resources West, ITAP, PEI Business Women’s Association, CDC, Mi’kmaq Confederacy, UPEI, and Junior Achievement.

Startup Canada is proudly sponsored by Microsoft, Gowlings, Ernst & Young, Best Western Hotels, Artik Promotions, KA Media, VideoBooth, PubliAir and OTTN.

 

You will probably get cancer - but you don't have to

PEI has the highest cancer mortality rates in Canada. As you will see from the stats below, you as an Islander will have a very good chance of getting cancer and dying from it. As the husband of a cancer person, I can also remind you that the treatment is as bad as dying.  As a citizen, I also worry as the costs of treatment are very high. 

But we give only lip service to prevention.

Nothing was said to my wife about how she might live her life so to reduce her chances of a recurrence  - other than to keep her porto cath (a device put in a vein in her chest to make it easy to give her more chemo) and to take a drup Tamoxifen that has brutal side effects. 

Lung Cancer rates are down nationally. No thanks to medicine. It's all due to the public health message getting through. It is fewer people smoking.

We will get all cancer rates down, if we do the same for the underlying causes. We have to get serious about the lifestyle issues that drive the other cancers.  We have to get the facts right about what we must stop doing to have a better chance.

It is not your genes and things that are outside of your control that give you cancer. It is food and other choices. When we come to grips with this, we will have to same success that we are seeing with smoking.

Lecture over - here is the data. You can choose to be a cancer patient or not. 

Overall, though, the picture still remains quite alarming. The province continues to have the highest incidence rate among men and the highest mortality rates among women compared to the rest of the country.

The Canadian Cancer Society estimates that there will be 186,400 new cases of cancer in the country this year with 75,700 deaths anticipated.

About 880 Islanders will be diagnosed with cancer and approximately 380 will die from the disease in 2012. Of these newly diagnosed cases, more than half will be prostate, lung, colorectal and breast cancer.

The Canadian Cancer Society reports that if this trend continues, 40 percent of women and 45 percent of men will be diagnosed with cancer sometime in their life and approximately one in four will die from the disease.

Lung cancer continues to be the leading cause of death for Canadian men and women and Islanders are no exception. P.E.I. has the second highest mortality rate among men for lung cancer.

In 2012 an estimated 60 men and 45 women will die of lung cancer in this province and another 105 Islanders will be diagnosed with the disease.

Dr. Dagny Dryer, a medical oncologist at the P.E.I. Cancer Treatment Centre, is concerned by the overall high cancer rate in the province.

She notes a "significant problem'' exists with prostate cancer in P.E.I. and she is also struck by the number of new cases of breast cancer that are very advanced.

Day 1 Startup Canada's visit to PEI - The Sleeper must Awaken - #StartupPEI #StartUpCanada

What a day we had yesterday as a group of PEI Entrepreneurs met. What I saw happen was this. As we met and talked, we could feel the power. We could see that we were not alone. We could see that there is a critical mass of people who want to create some thing. People who would not wait for "Them" but take action.

Something started to awaken. The understanding that the future of PEI was in our hands. That we could regain our historic self reliance. 

Over the next 3 weeks I will share many stories from these people and I hope then that you will see what I saw yesterday. The Sleeper Must Awaken - and it will.

 

Kickstarter - Indiegogo - A Guide for Community Finance #Startupcanada

New financing tools like Kickstarter and Indiegogo will transform how we finance very small and personal business. For as we were reminded yesterday in our first day of meeting on PEI with StartUp Canada, getting conventional funding for a very small personal enterprises from banks or government is all but impossible.

Here is a short excerpt from one of my new series of books to be published in June "You Don't Need a Banker" that is written as a guide for all who wish to use Community Based Finance. I hope that it will help you access this much better source. 

If you have a real network. If people really trust you. If you have something real to offer, then you can ask your network to fund you. If you have what it takes, you get this. If you don't, you get this.

This is how it all works.

Patrick Ledwell is a well known comedian on Prince Edward Island in Canada. He needed to find a way of having an income to support him to write a book. You will see from the image above that he raised $4,290 in this financing on Indiegogo. It’s not a lot but it is enough for him. In fact he raised nearly $1,000 more than he asked for.

 

These tools offer you a simple mechanism allowing you to reach out to people with your project and to ask them to contribute.

Most of these deals have something to sell. A new online game, a new watch, pasture meat boxes (a super CSA). The tools track the investors and enable all the logistics to take place. They include a simple to use payments systems for both the principal and the contributors. And of course, they charge a fee. They have raised small amounts such as a few hundred dollars and also large amounts in the millions.

Let’s unpack Patrick’s deal and see how the old rules apply to the new tools. 

The structure of the deal was simple. He presold the book. Most of the money raised was in the $35 range where, as a contributor, you buy the book in advance. He had one big deal, for $800. For this sum he would perform at a party given by you. This was taken by a local business for their Christmas party. 

So how did he get so many to buy an unwritten book and to hire him to perform at a party? For none of this was merely a series of transactions. He was able to do this because he is already well known and liked in his community. He was relying on his position in his network to come to his aid.

This type of financing depends completely on the social capital of the borrower. The more social capital you have the better your access to financial capital.

Patrick knew that he had a deep well of social capital to draw from and he also knew that this network had a hierarchy of its own. Some people were closer to him than others and some had more influence themselves than others. If this inner group came in early they would add momentum and social acceptance to the deal. If they came in early, they would bring their network. So much of Patrick’s efforts focused on this small group. His deal had momentum from the outset.

Most of the support came from his home community of Prince Edward Island, population 140,000. Not much came from outside this network.

I think that this is an important point. Just as some people have better networks, so do some places. This is why big cities are at a disadvantage. I think that there is too much anonymity. Tech deals do well because the Valley is a kind of village where all know each other too.

Your community is not Facebook. Though connecting to your community on Facebook makes life easier in these situations. Your community are people that really do care for you. 

A dense physical network such as we find on PEI helps. We meet each other in the street. I see Patrick several times a week. In such a real community, there is strong social pressure to participate because Indiegogo and Kickstarter are also public. In a small place like PEI, we have to face people in the street or in a store with the consequences of choosing to support or not.

In a small community, the mainstream media can be a lot more help than in a big place. When we launched a project for Raymond Loo, maybe PEI’s best known organic farmer, we made the local TV news. Everyone knew about the deal and talked about it. We raised the required $12,000 in 2 weeks. 

It helps even more if your family is well known too.  Patrick and Raymond have large extended families here that have a strong and positive reputation. This would mean nothing in London or New York but it means a lot here. 

They both use their good name and so their network and the good name of the key players in their network. And, unlike a conventional financing, the positive effects do not stop once the deal has been finalized and the money paid. 

What we are also seeing is that the relationship is further strengthened once a person has contributed like this. Raymond is selling more meat at his stand at the market. Patrick is getting more gigs. People feel that they are part of the future success of the person and want to help them do even better. The community now has a stake.

So we can see that there is no instant success for the unprepared here.

If you have no network. If you have nothing of value. If you live in an anonymous city. You will find that this kind of financing will be easy. Your work then is to build a real network. 

Type 2 Diabetes - The time bomb in our young! The Wrong Approach!

Doug Currie and any health minister will have to introduce cuts to the health care system because the costs are beyond what we can pay. We will just have to suck this up. For there is no alternative.

BUT he must also ensure that he sets in motion work that gets at what is driving the costs.

And it is Type 2 Diabetes that is the villain here. What Doug can control is the advice given by Health PEI and the nature of the programs that we have for wellness.

At the moment, these programs are set up to fail. They use the wrong dietary advice and then go right to drugs. The system is captured by this and so is inadvertently driving up our costs and expanding the epidemic. 

And it's no longer the old but the young who are at risk. 

Here are the US stats that I think would be close to where we are here on PEI. (NYT)

And some 17 percent of American children from age 2 to 19 are now considered obese, roughly half the rate of obesity among adults.

And how do we respond to this on PEI? The same way as they do in the US. Weoffer adivice on diet that is Wrong. And so revert to drugs. That don't work either. And of course, the epidemic gets worse. 

The new study, published in The New England Journal of Medicine, tested three ways to attain durable control of blood sugar in youngsters between the ages of 10 and 17.  None worked very well. Almost half of the 699 youngsters had to add daily shots of insulin within a few years to lower their blood sugar. Metformin, the standard drug used to treat Type 2 diabetes in children, failed to control blood sugar in more than half of the children.

I have spoken to Health PEI's Diabetes counsellors. They advise eating according to the Canada Food guide.

This puts the emphasis on grains - grains are sugar and are at the core of the problem. When I challenged this, I was told that this is how people want to eat. This is what is driving the epidemic. This then dives the failed drug response. This then drives the costs. (Source Health PEI!)

When you get Type 2 diabetes you will be hospitalized 16 times more often for lower limb amputations than non T2D sufferers. 6 times more often with kidney disease. You will have 5 times more heart attacks. 4 times more heart failure. 3 times more strokes. You will stay 3 times longer in hospital. Have 2 times more visits to physicians and 2 times more to specialists. 

It gets worse. Most diabetics don’t just take one medication, but several. A typical regimen for an adult diabetic after a couple of years of treatment and following the dietary advice of the American Diabetes Association (eat more healthy grains!) includes Metformin, Januvia, and Actos, a triple-drug treatment that costs around $420 per month. Two forms of insulin (slow- and fast-acting), along with two or three oral medications, is not at all uncommon.

Now this is new information for many - especially in the health care system itself. The situation is made worse by the Diabetes Association that has been advising eat more grains and so cannot pull back without looking stupid.

But we the citizens pay the bills. We take the cuts. It is time to do the right thing. Time to set up a diabetes strategy that is based on what we know is the truth about metabolic syndrome. Time to look at our food system broadly - as we did with tobacco.

 

StartUp Canada's Visit to PEI - Why it is important #Work #Jobs #Population

Starting tomorrow, May 7th, a team from StartUp Canada will travel across PEI helping us showcase who PEI's Entrepreneurs are and helping us bring this community together.

What might happen as a result?

We might put PEI on track to be the resilient and full economy that we were 100 + years ago. Where every service, every product we used was offered locally. Where we had our own export markets all over the world. Where we used the network of the time, the rails, to connect us to each other and to markets far away.

Why StartUps?

StartUps are THE engine for growth and for jobs. Our only chance of pulling this off lies in us making StartUps the new normal. 

What do I hope will happen?

The StartUp Community itself will see itself and its power - Most of the nodes of the StartUp community just have their heads down and cannot see that they are part of something larger.

That the rest of us on PEI will see the opportunity that is here already. An opportunity that we have not seen clearly before.

We will see that this opportunity has three elements. A Company element. An Artisanal element and a Nurturing/Network element. 

Keep your eyes open for them - here is how they will emerge. 

The Company Track - This is the kind of business that we are all familiar with. The founder intends to start a company with employees and to grow it to as large as possible. Hard to do in Atlantic Canada as we are far away from the centre of this kind of world. But easier if you find a niche such as Bio Science where clusters of expertise can be created.

There are 30 companies in the Bio Science cluster now with 800 + employees who in turn buy cars, food and houses and employ other Islanders. All this growth has taken place in 10 years.

The Network Nurturer for this group is the PEI BioAlliance. Their role is to connect this group to each other, to resources and to markets - so that the network can add to the nodes. 

This cluster could not have come together in such a short time without the BioA. 

As a result of the visit of StartUp, I see the BioA expanding their reach to include all who are on the Company Track. For they have reached out now to all StartUps who use this model. 

The Artisan Track - We all know the craft side of Island Life, but now with the web there is a new gobal market for real things that can only be made in small operations. Real toys, real pottery, real food. The assurance of real and trust comes from the small and the personal. Toys made by hand by a person with a name. Food made on tiny plots by hand by a person with a name.

Millions of people are rejecting mass produced products and want access to the real. So while each artisan is small, collectively this is a big opportunity. It is in the reach of the hard working and the skilled - PROVIDED  they are networked. 

Again my hope will be that this track is seen for what it is - a large future part of our economy and a major attractor for immigrants who want to be part of this personal movement. 

The emerging Network Nurturer for this group is the Queen Street Commons. We started as a co working space but now we too, like the BioA are helping all in the personal sector to get connected and to find out how they can help each other. We too can do more.

StartUp Canada is the Uber Network Nurturer for all of this.  

They help connect our local networks to the regional and then to the national and finally to the global. Their visit alone has galvanized the BioA and the Queen St Commons to prepare. Now we will all see what has been hidden to all of us. 

If we can see the potential and power of this networked approach - then we can start to alter how we see jobs and work on PEI. For it is the network that is our future. We are not an isolated Island in the network world.

This should be the focus on development and on immigration. We have to look for the mismatches and the barriers too. Such as credit. Then we can start to see more clearly the mismatch in our school system . 

Then we can focus on calling to those that want to work and live in more authentic community and improve the support we give to the supporting networks.

Please join me next week as I tell you our stories and show you the many wonderful people that are working to make PEI a prosperous place again

Funding - A Challenge for Start Ups #startupcanada #pei

Many people who wish to start a small business share a problem. They cannot raise even small amounts of money.

For if you 

• Don't have a job
• Don't have a house as collateral
• Don't intend to hire lots of people full time
• Don't intend to expand

You cannot get funded by banks or the government.

Banks now only do McBanking. They lend to a central formula and have no local discretion. They, like a McDonalds kitchen, assemble applications according to the simple rules of a job = an income and a house = collateral + credit rating - yes or no. So if you don't fit this, they cannot help you.

Government development agencies are burdened by the dogma of Jobs. Jobs are how they are measured. So their model cannot accept that you will get work done under contract from your network. Their model cannot accept that you don't want to expand. And their model is very time consuming. And now they have no money anyway. 

So the micro and networked Start Up struggles to get funding. But I don't think we are doomed. I see a new system emerging that is much more helpful. It is a system based on the network and so on a new relationship between the producer and the buyer. No longer a transaction based relationship but a trust based one where the interests of both are united. 

Here is how this is playing out:

• CSA - Many micro farmers on PEI are using CSA - in effect pre selling their food at planting time to a committed set of clients. The mutual interest is safe healthy food.  Small operations can offer safe and healthy food directly to clients. In effect the CSA buyer provides free working capital and a guaranteed price for the food. Thus taking much of the cost and risk out of the equation.  This gives this kind of grower a huge advantage. Think how this will extend to other areas? What about fish? 

• New web based tools are now in use that can help scale this. Tools such as Kickstarter and Indiegogo. local examples of Islanders using these tools include Patrick Ledwell pre selling his new book - Raymond Loo preselling pasture meat - Tim Chaisson preselling music. Work is under way to launch a PEI web funding tool that will focus only on PEI. The tools will get easier and easier to use.

• Larger and more financial tools are also in play - Community Equity Funds. PEI is one of only 2 provinces that allows this. In Nova Scotia Justus Coffee has raised nearly $500,000 in several Community Equity deals with Nova Scotia residents. 

But there is nothing easy about this type of funding. Trust is key. You cannot just set up a big CSA from scratch. You will fail using Indiegogo if you do not have a network. You will fail at a Community Equity funding if you do not have a good story and stand for something.

At the heart of all of this is a new business model based on networks and real relationships and not transactions. It demands that the business person make trust her central aim. This is not the typical model that makes efficiency the central aim.

It will demand a new kind of credit system. For the one we have is based on the old model.  This opens an opportunity for a new type of banker. Who is in fact the OLD type of banker before we had McBanking.

There are people on PEI, lawyers, accountants, wealth managers etc that have expertise AND a great rolodex. They are people that know how to judge a person as bankers used to. They know how to make connections.

So one of my hopes for next week is that we all begin to think about how we can create such a system here on tiny PEI.

School - we can do better ourselves - we have no choice #startupcanada

Next week the Team from StartUp Canada come to PEI for a week to host a conversation with Islanders about how we can make the shift from relying on jobs to relying on ourselves.

We will be talking about barriers and opportunities. In advance of our discussions, I would like to offer my thoughts on what I think is the greatest barrier. 

I think it is how school works.

For school is designed to produce compliant workers and managers not entrepreneurs. 

Skills - Other than music or sport, is there any useful skill that your kids have acquired at school? They cannot fix anything, cook a meal, balance a bank account. They can't make anything. Design anything. Approach a complex problem. They don't know how to work in teams. They are spoon fed all the time and have no experience in taking charge.

Worse, anything to do with the web is off limits. Anything they learn here, they learn out of school. If they do learn anything practical, they learn it outside of school.

Citizenship and Leadership  - Do they have any responsibility for running the school? Do they have a leadership role? Do they have a role in discipline? Do they have to do anything for the school? Do they have a say in how the school is run? Do they have a say in what they are taught or how?

Do they have to take any personal risk?

Academic and communication skills - Professors I know who teach first year university are appalled at the academic skills of most of the students and these are the elite! Few can write a sentence. Few know how to construct a case. Most are numerically illiterate.  Most don't know how  to study or to research as they have all been spoon fed for the test. 

The writing they are taught is not the kind of writing that any of us need to communicate. We all have to relearn how to write and to communicate after we leave school. No one will read an academic styled paper in the world outside of school. 

No one is taught how to communicate by using influence either. All they have received is the sage on the stage - a process that does not work in society.

Love of Learning - Most think that they can only learn with a teacher and a course. They have been trained to be passive learners. Learning has been pushed at students. Most have no idea of what it is like to have charge of what they learn. Those that do have learned this love outside of school.

The new world demands that we all have to learn lots of new things all the time. There is no Training Department in the real world. You learn by yourself or sink. 

Critical Thinking - The status quo is the wrong way ahead in every part of work life. It may be the wrong way in all parts of life. It is imperative to think critically today.

Our entire system from Grade 1 - to graduation of for a BA is based on spouting the party line. Kids have been told not to challenge the status quo. They will lose marks for that and be seen as trouble makers.

So what to do? I don't see us being able to reform the system. There is too much inertia and reputational lock in. There is no time.

I think that we in the start up world can start to offer our kids an alternative.

We can fill the after school world with another kind of experience. We can "adopt" kids. After all it was normal for boys of 8 to join the navy. As parents, we can see that we cannot afford to give up all of our child's education to the school. We have to do our bit or seek out alternatives.

We don't need newspapers to get our news. We don't need a TV network to watch what we want or to make our videos. We must not rely on only school to educate our kids.

We have to take charge of this ourselves. For the jobs are not coming. But the work is.

Universities - The next wave of web disruption is here

What happened to newspapers will happen to Universities. 

David Brooks makes the case today that we see a Tipping Point in how secondary education will work. It's focus will be online and global.

The elite US universities that have the brand are taking no chances. They are not resisting. They are going full steam ahead to capture the global prize. 300 million Indian middle class who all speak English and value education. Millions of Chinese who share this passion.

And what about all of the North American kids who cannot afford 4 years in residence and the fees tied into the old way. And what about the millions of European kids who are in the same boat?

This then compels UPEI and other Atlantic Universities to think their future through immediately. 

Teaching face to face in a factory like setting and using factory processes at high costs is now no longer the the centre of the system. It will no longer be enough to recruit foreign students to come here. 

You also have a lot of infrastructure that has to be paid for.

You have a staff and administrators for whom all of this is novel.

You have a culture that has shut out the web.

Will you be open enough to see the peril and the opportunity?

(Link Here) The elite, pace-setting universities have embraced the Internet. Not long ago, online courses were interesting experiments. Now online activity is at the core of how these schools envision their futures.

This week, Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology committed $60 million to offer free online courses from both universities. Two Stanford professors, Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller, have formed a company, Coursera, which offers interactive courses in the humanities, social sciences, mathematics and engineering. Their partners include Stanford, Michigan, Penn and Princeton. Many other elite universities, including Yale and Carnegie Mellon, are moving aggressively online.

President John Hennessy of Stanford summed up the emerging view in an article by Ken Auletta in The New Yorker, “There’s a tsunami coming.”

What happened to the newspaper and magazine business is about to happen to higher education: a rescrambling around the Web.

We are horrified today by slave owning - Looks like we soon will feel the same about factory meat production

The New York Times ran a competition for the best essay on the ethics of meat eating. As you might guess the essays covered a wide ranging set of views. But one thing stood out. How we keep animals today will not stand the test of ethics, time or even utility. Here is how the Times put it:

The judges considered 29 semifinalists, and though their votes barely overlapped, they were unanimous in seeing the contest as a cultural indicator.

Several noted the widespread agreement that factory farming, which accounts for 99 percent of the meat eaten in America, is not ethical. “Lurking beneath these submissions,” Jonathan Safran Foer said, “is a shared dissatisfaction with our current system of meat production, a shared anger.”

Peter Singer placed that anger in the context of “a seismic shift of opinion about meat in the past decade.” He added, “The tragedy is that factory farming survives despite the widespread agreement that whether we are primarily concerned about animal welfare, our environment or our health, it is ethically indefensible.”

Mark Bittman suggested that just five years ago that critique would have seemed radical: “Yet 20 or at most 50 years from now, those of us still alive will express incredulity at the way we once treated animals destined to become ‘food.’ ”

Why I support a revolution in how we farm. Networks of small pasture based herds where animals have a life that they are designed to thrive in.