For the last week, I’ve been running the night shifts (9PM – 3AM and 3AM – 9AM). Typically, these are the shifts that run through the most remote areas of a country – small towns, fields of corn and forest. These shifts can sometimes feel like the “filler” miles that get our group from one metropolitan area to another where we can hold a large outreach event. Two things have defined my time in these “spaces between”: Agriculture and tractor-trailers.

Agriculture: The vast majority of my runs in Europe have been along fields of corn, wheat and the like. I am always astounded by the size of these plots – seemingly never-ending stretches of farmland. But, this should come as no surprise; according to National Geographic, over 50% of the planet’s land surface is claimed by farming (excluding Antarctica).

In Germany (where we are today), about 1/3 of all land is agricultural. The scale of the world’s farming industry has a major impact on water resources and availability whereby agricultural use accounts for over 70% of all water use.

Trucking: The teams on the night shift are often joined by a continuous march of tractor-trailers carrying all of the “stuff” with which we fill our super-market shelves and cupboards. In a globalized world, the ingredients of our lives come from every corner of the planet – water from Fiji, wood from Brazil and coffee from Rwanda. On average, the contents of our meals in North America travel 1,500 to 2,500 miles before reaching our plate. Getting it there requires an army of trucks driving through the aforementioned “spaces between.”

Stepping back, the juxtaposition of the tractor-trailer driving through local food production is an interesting depiction of the world in which we live.

>From Berlin, Germany - happy trails