Lester R. Brown: Author, Ecologist and Economist

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PLOWBOY: Mr. Brown, you've been a recognized authority on world food problems for more than fifteen years. Your name is a familiar one to thousands of ecologists, economists, political figures, and educators ... to say nothing at all of lay readers who've followed your work. Yet I wonder how many people really know who Lester Brown is ... how he got his start, how he came to be a world food expert. Maybe you can begin, en, by telling me a little bit about your early background.

BROWN: Well, I was born March 28,1934, and I spent my childhood in a rural part of New Jersey. Believe It or not, there is a rural part of New Jersey (laughter). It's the southern part of the state, where the Delaware River becomes the Delaware Bay. That's the area that gives New Jersey its name, the Garden State. It's an area with lots of very rich, sandy loam coastal soil, where people grow a lot of tomatoes and asparagus and sweet corn and strawberries ... those kinds of things.

PLOWBOY: What were your parents doing?

BROWN: They were farming. We had a small farm ... 40 acres exactly. It was a general farm, the kind you don't see much of anymore. Had a dairy. I milked cows for years and years as a child without ever missing a milking. You know, whenever people talk about sick leave here at the office, I just smile. We didn't know about sick leave back then ... all we knew was that those cows had to be milked. And milk 'em we did, day in and day out.

When we were in our teens, my brother Carl and I put together a tomato growing operation. Started out with an old tractor we bought for a song and overhauled. We eventually rented some extra fields and gradually expanded. I started when I was 14, and by the time I was 24 we were marketing a million and a half pounds of tomatoes a year. Tomatoes worked out pretty well for us while we were in school. The tomato season fits the academic year pretty well. It's a summer crop, and the harvest is over by the time school starts in the fall.

We're faced with a period of profound change ahead ... change that's so profound that, in many ways, it's difficult to describe.

Anyway, while I was growing tomatoes I went to Rutgers and worked on my bachelor's degree in agricultural science. At that time, you see, I wanted to be a farmer ... a very large scale tomato farmer. That was sort of my early goal. But then?after I finished up at Rutgers?I spent a winter one year living in India under the International Farm Youth Exchange Program, sponsored by the 4-H Club Foundation.

PLOWBOY: What year was this?

BROWN: That would've been 1956. Yes, 1956.

PLOWBOY: What did you do next?

BROWN: Well, after living in India for half a year, I came back home and grew tomatoes for a couple more years. And then I decided that just growing tomatoes for the next 40 years would not be all that challenging. Also, around this time I began to be interested in world agriculture, world food problems.

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