agriculture

Cory Booker: Taking on Big Ag & Going Big on Climate

BenTestani — Thu, 22 Jun 2023 22:31:05 +0000

Cory Booker: Taking on Big Ag & Going Big on Climate

06/23/2023

Our food and agricultural systems are helping fuel the climate emergency. But climate isn’t the only harm; these systems also impact local economies, human dignity, and animal welfare. The upcoming Farm Bill presents an opportunity to infuse more climate-smart practices in American agriculture, which accounts for about 10% of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. But doing so involves confronting industrial practices that focus on short-term gains and commodity subsidies that have deep support in both parties.

Senator Cory Booker has a plan to address our broken food system. He introduced legislation that would challenge large industrial beef and pork packagers and tilt the balance of power in our industrial agriculture system, giving family farmers, ranchers, and workers a better deal. But what chance do these elements have of passage? And what other options are there for decreasing the concentration of power in Big Ag?

This episode features a contribution from Elizabeth Rembert.

Guests

Cory Booker

U.S. Senator (D–NJ)

Meat Accounts for Nearly 60% of Agricultural Emissions (theguardian.com)

Why The Farm Bill is High Stakes for Climate (americanprogress.org)

Senator Booker’s Bills to Reform Food System (booker.senate.gov)

Black Farmers Call for Justice from the USDA (npr.org)

Note: Transcripts are generated using a combination of automated software and human transcribers and may contain errors. Please check the actual audio before quoting it.

Greg Dalton: This is Climate One. I’m Greg Dalton.

Ariana Brocious: And I’m Ariana Brocious.

Greg Dalton: Often the climate conversation has been about tailpipes and smokestacks. But it’s not all about how we move or how we produce energy. One of the big overlooked levers is what we eat.

Ariana Brocious: Our food system accounts for one third of human caused emissions. There are many factors at play there, but raising meat and dairy is a big part of it.

Greg Dalton: and while we’re electrifying transportation and building solar and wind farms, not as much is being done to reduce emissions from the food system.

Ariana Brocious: And while addressing climate can feel daunting, this is one area where I personally feel I have some agency. I’ve been a vegetarian for about 20 years, and while I know that my diet alone won’t make a difference, it makes me feel like I’m living aligned with my climate values. And while I’ve never been one to convince others how they should eat, I do know that if more Americans ate less meat and dairy on a large scale, we could begin to impact these huge systems.

Greg Dalton: And it’s not just climate issues, the food system hits about every issue we care about: equity, compassion, justice.

Ariana Brocious: That’s what motivated Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey to get on the Agriculture Committee – because he finds all the issues important to him wrapped up in our agricultural system.

Cory Booker: When we started really looking at our food system, I was stunned to realize how savagely broken it is.

Greg Dalton: Our food system is broken.

Ariana Brocious: And just like so many other areas of our economy, agriculture is becoming dominated by fewer and fewer companies, who wield most of the power and receive most of the benefits. Row crop farmers – who grow soy, corn, etc – are incentivized to amass larger and larger farms to make a profit, and the mechanization of agriculture has dramatically reduced the number of people who make a living from agriculture in the last few decades.

Greg Dalton: And as power becomes more concentrated, it tends to lack empathy.

Ariana Brocious: And there’s a lot of places where that lack of empathy comes through.

Greg Dalton: I recently had a conversation with Senator Booker live at the Commonwealth Club of California. He is a gifted storyteller, and started the conversation with a story that surprised many in the audience.

Cory Booker: I always try to tell stories, where histories replete our lives or replete with the small actions of individuals making big changes. I always tell people the quick story about a white guy sitting on a couch in New Jersey watching TV and seeing the crisis on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. And he is so disturbed by these people being beaten with billy clubs and gas that he decides to go to Alabama then laughs because he can’t afford a plane ticket not to mention to close his business. All he says, well, I’m gonna give an hour a week of pro bono work to a civil rights organization in New Jersey. And finds us one call the Fair Housing Council works with them over the years to design these test cases where you send a black couple look at a house there, turned away, and a white couple comes. Five years later after they get good at it, they amazingly he says he gets a case file where black family coming up in the South looking for communities with great public schools and is turned away from housing. They set up the sting operation and the black couple’s told the house is sold; the white couple put a bid on the house for the black family. Bid is accepted, papers are drawn up. On the day of the closing the white couple doesn’t show up, the lawyer and the black man does. They get attacked in the real estate agent’s office. Real estate agent punches the lawyer and sics a dog on the black guy. But after a lot of legal rigmarole the black family in 1969 moves into the home, has this incredible community, incredible public schools. And 41 years later, the baby in that family becomes America's fourth black person ever popularly elected in the United State Senate, me.

And so, a lot of people underestimate what a small action on big issues can actually do when it ripples out in time and space. So, don't discount your power. The most common way people give up their power is not realized that they have it in the first place. And even you can’t do everything about an issue, do something today that you didn't do yesterday. Do something this year that you didn't do last year to be a part of a larger movement for change when it comes to climate.

Greg Dalton: And food is one area where climate can often seem very abstract like power plants and things remote from people. But food is a place where people, if you’re fortunate you can vote three times a day with your fork. I didn’t know that agriculture is the third largest industry in New Jersey. So, talk about food and climate and what brought you to be so passionate about food.

Cory Booker: Well, on the point we’re making before a lot of it is our, you know, W. E. B. Du Bois in The Souls of Black Folk talks about the tragedy of men, forgive the genderize language, but the tragedy of humanity is that we know so little about each other. And lot of things allow injustice to fester is not being focused on learning about your neighbor, learning about your fellow person. And that means that we often get involved in these very impersonal systems that sustain and perpetuate injustices. Like I always say that I did not know the ills of fast fashion, for example. And I bought t-shirts, wore things just never put my thought into wait a minute, who made the shoes I'm wearing. What were the providence of the clothing I’m wearing and how am I and my dollars and my ignorance participating in systems that are pushing injustice on the individuals who are making them just as on our environment? And so, for me, I never imagined 10 years ago when I got to the United States Senate that I would be battling not really battling but having to ask and maneuver myself to get on to the agricultural committee. I just never thought I would do it. And I did it because one of my great staff members came up to me and said every issue you care about, all the issues you care about and have been working on intersect within our food system. And the more I listened, at first, I laughed at him, then I joined him, which is often the process. But I thought you're insane why do I want to sit on the ag committee for. But when we started really looking at our food system, I was stunned to realize how savagely broken it is. And the only people that really works for are these big multinational corporations that more and more controlling everything that we eat. It is a system that’s broken for farmers. If you interview farmers and majority of American farmers are actually small farmers, but the system does not support them. They have higher suicide rates they’re going out of business at alarming rates. There is mass consolidation of farms. It’s broken for farmworkers. I was challenged by the United Farm Workers Association to go out and work on a farm. I was stunned that number one how difficult the work it was. But what was more stunning to me besides the fact that I was sore for days and days afterwards was just having conversations with the farmworkers about sexual harassment, wage theft. It’s broken for our ecology what we prioritize and emphasize and incentivize is a farm system that poisons our lands, poisons our rivers and streams causes flooding even though farmers are great stewards of the land they are pushed into a system that often is very destructive. It's broken for our environment, climate change issues. It's broken for the end-user. I give this last example of how Americans are trapped in this unjust system because their government is subsidizing all the food to make a six while one party government tells you half of your diet should be fresh fruits and vegetables. Less than 10% of our accepts these go to that.

And so, kids in San Francisco or in Oakland can walk into a corner store and find a Twinkie product cheaper than an apple not because of the free market, but because government has decided that we’re gonna cheapen the happy meal we’re gonna cheapen the Twinkie and all the other stuff that we want you to eat we’re gonna make more expensive, harder to access and drive rates of disease that most Americans should be stunned by. We live in a nation right now where one out of three of our government dollars. Your tax dollars is being spent on healthcare. And to pay for healthcare with the majority of the things we’re paying for are preventable diseases. The majority of them are diet-related diseases. So, this food system is broken for everybody, but mostly it’s broken for all of us. Because we are seeing in America diabetes rates, hypertension, all of these rates of illness and disease and suffering spiking up. And our government is fueling that because they’re subsidizing the fast food or the hyper processed foods and then we’re paying for it again on Medicaid, Medicare and health care benefits. There is a way out of this broken system. And that's one of the reasons why we moved to the ag committee start finding common sense, win-win solutions to get America out of this sickness, illness, economic injustice, environmental injustice, climate fueling injustice as well as injustice for American farmers.

Greg Dalton: Big ag makes us sick and big farmers there to sell us pills when we get sick.

Cory Booker: Yes.

Greg Dalton: Well, we’re at this moment now where talking about this food system. The farm bill comes up every five years. It is happening now. This is a big unwieldy thing. What would you like to see in the farm bill to make both a healthier people and a healthier planet? There's been some talk about climate smart agriculture getting into the farm bill. It’s a big massive thing. What would you like to see in it?

Cory Booker: Well, I want to set the stage a little bit. So, my team has put out a suite of bills often endorsed by the Farmers Union by healthcare groups by environmental groups to deal with our food system. Whole suite, involves everything from composting to food waste to big factory farms, CAFOS, to the overuse of antibiotics on our food system. We decided to put up a whole bunch of bills that can point to the way out. And we want to show folks that it doesn't have to be this way and there are smart policy solutions that can do something about it. More than this, though, we wanted to go a little deeper and start talking about unfortunately, the power of big ag in Washington. People often think that the oil industry is one of the most powerful lobbyists. I would say that actually big food is more powerful because of their deep influence in the way we draw our policy up on both sides of the aisle. So, simply it’s something that should not be controversial should be based on science like nutrition standards or school lunch programs become these hotbeds of fights for folks that want to continue to push unhealthy food, deeply sugar filled processed foods and we’re aware of that. So, here's this farm bill as you said that rolls in every five years. We have tried to put out bills about the way to go. And what we're trying to do now is have some realpolitik on one hand about what knobs can we turn in this farm bill that could get us closer to some of our ambitious goals for health, well-being, climate change, and more. But at the same time what I think is lacking in every great movement is just that courageous empathy we started with. You know I look at I'm a product of civil rights activist parents who would tell me that the civil rights movement wasn’t a movement of black people for black rights. It was a conscious movement of creating a movement based on common ideals and our common values. But the biggest obstacle was getting people to understand the crisis in our country that they were participating in and that their silence, inaction was contributing to. So, the great thing about these incredible artists of activism in the civil rights movement is they found ways to dramatize what other people could not see. That's why the big standoff with Bull Connor, the big protests that they were able to do that all of a sudden got people off the sidelines to realize what's happening. So, this farm bill I'll talk about the specific objectives we have, but our ability to make the change is really dependent upon the average American understanding that the system is broken and that I can do something. Because there is not enough political will yet to make the kind of dramatic changes. So, in the farm bill there’s a number of different areas where we’re trying to turn knobs up. So, one of them is this understanding to trust American farmers. They are very good stewards of the land and they often know that they're doing things that are killing their soil. Soil which is rich in biodiversity, rich in the power to sequester carbon to hold on to water. What’s happened now is things that are allowing too much runoff drought poisoning their soil. I remember going to meet with a Republican farmer in the Midwest who told me I used to be able to fish in my creek. I used to be able to drink from my well. But since the CAFO has moved here I can't do either anymore. And so, what we saw when I got onto the ag committee is that there are some very small programs in the ag committee. Things like EQUIP that have acronyms so I probably can't name every word for. But environmental programs incentivize farmers to engage in environmental practices that help create goes win-win-win-wins but they were way over subscribed. So, one of the things in the Inflation Reduction Act that my team was able to do was to put billions of dollars into these programs which farmers rejoiced in because now they are able to do things like cover crops, rotational grazing and other things that we know fundamentally can not only help farmers be more successful but actually could do things that help our ecology and our environment. And so, those are the programs we’re going after now to say, can we expand certain things. But one of the specific examples I’ll give you and I could go on talking about the farm bill for a long time but I want you to know this is one example. Because the farm bill has two sides. There are agricultural programs, but another big part of the farm bill is food stamps.

Greg Dalton: SNAP is the biggest part of it.

Cory Booker: SNAP. And remember what SNAP is, Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program. I'm not exaggerating, Coke and Pepsi make billions of dollars annually. Think about this for a second, because of SNAP payments being used to buy sugar water. Billions of dollars. And the correlation between sugar waters and diabetes rates is stunning. And what used to be adult onset diabetes is now proliferating on our children and our families. Half of Americans now are diabetic or prediabetic stunningly a quarter of our children are diabetic or prediabetic. And so, there are some people that think we should go about this by banning the use of SNAP on certain things. That becomes politically fraught. What we want to do is expand the program to create incentives. So, let me give you an example. When I was mayor of the city of Newark. We knew we had a crisis of food deserts all around our city. And we're trying to expand access. We did a lot of different creative things. One of the things I love was taking massive plots of city land and turning them into farms. One of them was an entire city block in a very low-income neighborhood in Newark that we turned into an urban farm. I returned to that farm recently to film a documentary Food, Inc. 2 and did not realize as I'm filming it that women would be coming up and wanting to offer their testimony. So, I'll never forget these two elders African-American women. One had gut issues that she had a $700 with prescription drugs to deal with the problems she was having in her gut. Her co-pay was hundred dollars and then the rest was being picked up by taxpayers, these prescription drugs. But as soon as she started sourcing her food from an organic urban farm in her neighborhood, her gut issues went away. The other one was an octogenarian who had diabetes for years. And she has a little now an Instagram account about being a vegan in her 80s. But she actually reversed her diabetes completely. And so, the program that they were taking advantage of that we’re talking about has a terrible name, GusNIP. But it’s basically the double bucks program where if I go to the supermarket and use one dollar of my SNAP to buy sugar water or highly processed food. I get a dollar like any consumer. But if I go to fresh fruits and vegetable markets, I can get double that. And when I went there, I used $10 to buy an amount of food at this urban farm. I couldn't believe how much food, put Whole Foods to shame. But then I realized that other people using SNAP payments could double that amount. And so, what we believe in our philosophy right now in this fight until the consciousness of our country gets higher and higher and higher. And by the way when you create these points of light, all of us wanna condemn darkness. When people point of light show the way it attracts a lot of attention. We want to expand these programs that can show dramatically that we can make a difference in people's lives for local farmers and others if we do these things.

So, we want to expand the GusNIP program. We want to expand programs that incentivize farmers in their practices. We’re in the farm bill looking to do things okay, you know what I may not be able to end the over subsidization of highly processed foods, but we had a hearing last week in Washington with a local what they call specialty crop farmers. What are specialty crops in America, fruits and vegetables? I mean it’s the majority of what we’re told to eat. The commodity crops are going to things like ethanol standards in gasoline. They're going to feed, not food, but feed for animals. It’s the number one reasons for rainforest deforestation right now is clearing land that grow commodity crops to feed animals. And so, what we said is well let's talk about why can't people who do specialty crops get crop insurance. Or other programs that help to sustain the growth of these more regional local farms that actually create more resilient of food systems. So, that’s what we’re looking in the farm bills. What dials can we turn up what changes can we make what pilot programs can we put in to advance the cause and create more points of light that can begin to cast away the darkness and show people like the North Star the way to go.

Greg Dalton: You’re listening to a Climate One conversation about our food system with Senator Cory Booker. Please help us get people talking more about climate by giving us a rating or review. You can do it right now on your device. On our new website you can create and share playlists focused on topics including food, energy, EVs, activism.

Coming up, the ripple effects of a pivot away from globalized supply chains.

Cory Booker: We know that when we create holistic localized systems for food and other critical supply-chain elements that we are a stronger, more resilient and more nationally secure society.

Greg Dalton: That’s up next, when Climate One continues.

This is Climate One. I’m Greg Dalton.

Let's get back to my conversation with Senator Cory Booker. Recently the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of California allowing the state to uphold a proposition related to the sale of pork meat. It forbids meat sold from places where pigs are confined in “gestation crates” – barely bigger than the pig’s body.

Cory Booker: California won. That's the only time I’ve ever written an amicus brief to the Supreme Court maybe my law professors now will respect the fact that I actually use my law degree. But California is doing so many things that are forcing, because you are 40+ million people here and such a big powerful consumer market. When you all make changes it's hard for those corporations not to have to change your practices nationwide. And I'm really grateful these propositions on humane raising of animals, these propositions on things like or these laws you’re all passing things like composting makes such a big difference. And so, my team looked at this composting problem and again we think that what's lacking in America is a composting infrastructure. And what we’re trying to do to our composting law is to create more incentives for state and local communities to shift towards composting. And the power of it as you alluded to is that we have a, first of all, we have a food waste problem we've another bill all about food waste where we have a food waste problem in this country that is horrific. About a third of our food is wasted and goes into landfills that create methane, which is significantly more harmful to our climate problem than carbon. And so, what we have said is let's figure out a way not to punish, not to make people complain my friends on the right about overregulation. But let's start creating grants and incentives to build out that infrastructure and show again points of light of people that are using that composting in such constructive ways. Where instead of throwing something away you compost it and you’re actually creating industries you’re creating materials for farmers to use for growing foods. It has again this multiplier effect for the investment of a government dollar in the growth of local economies in the support of local agricultural industries and more. And so, that's what folks lose in this whole thing. And we all in our language have to start getting away from falling into the partisan divide. And it’s really problematic when you have issues that should unite Americans around common values. And I understand there are big concentrated corporate interests. But when you start having conversations with human beings and start around what our common values are. You can often arrive at policy conclusions that make it hard for the big corporate concentration to go.

Greg Dalton: So, one part there we’re talking a lot about carrots or whether it's incentivizing people to buy an apple versus a Twinkie. One thing in the IRA was it’s basically a tax bill that rewards people for buying a heat pump or electric car, etc. It's not the regulatory stick that Democrats usually wield.

Cory Booker: Exactly.

Greg Dalton: And the Republicans in this recent, you know, debt ceiling thing that I don’t want to get into very much because I’m kind of sick of it, is that one reason they didn't go after the IRA because it is that its tax policy it's carrots. Do you think the Democrats should learn a lesson from this and use incentives more and less of that regulatory approach that they are so known for?

Cory Booker: A hundred percent. We have got to find ways, understanding politics. And again, as consciousness grows more things become possible. Civil rights legislation failed for years until consciousness grew and we all get things done. But for now, we have got to be better at looking for win wins and not falling into a partisan divide. Creating incentives is a good way, especially if I can demonstrate to you. And again, the way the Congressional Budget Office measures things often comprise difficulty. But when you can demonstrate that this action you are incentivizing will help to encourage behavior that provides a greater societal benefit and often a greater economic benefit as well. And we as Democrats need to focus on those strategies and then defend them. Because there are interests, like for example the billions of dollars we got into climate smart solutions for farmers. That money is being gone after now. In the coming budget battles, they’re gonna be trying to cut a lot of these wins that the Biden administration got that actually farmers love. I love that Chuck Grassley and I, with a lot of our differences, were able come together and fight in my early days in the Senate for wind tax credits. Because when I went out to Iowa to run for president, I was surprised how many windfarms I saw on farm. Farmers were getting win wins with that. And so, when you do programs that actually benefit people despite their party, they begin to defend the fight for those programs.

Greg Dalton: They call that mailbox money.

Cory Booker: Yes, exactly. Farmers call it money that they're going to get. And that's why I've fallen in love with farmers, the more I sit with them. Again, Republican or Democrat they may identify different parties than me but we share common values. People in my inner city of Newark and farmers in the Midwest. They may have a lot of things that they may seem to divide us but the lines that tie those groups together are so strong that if we start to affirm those connections, we can overcome the political gridlock.

Greg Dalton: You also sit on the Foreign Relations Committee. And one thing that unites Republicans and Democrats these days seems to be, you know, banging on China. And China's commonly cited as enemy for both parties. China also have as it control most of the supply chain for both solar panels and batteries and that are needed to transition away from fossil fuels. So how does the escalating tensions with China fit into the energy transition.

Cory Booker: Right.

Greg Dalton: Hard one by doing the other.

Cory Booker: Right. I tried to, the Chinese government and often when people say China and I heard this from the previous president. It fuels a lot of hate towards Chinese-Americans and towards Asian-Americans in general. And at the time when the skyrocketing hate crimes against Asian-Americans in this country it’s important that we remind people --

Greg Dalton: Thank you. My wife is Chinese. My kids are biracial and they were afraid of the anger.

Cory Booker: I mean I cannot tell you coming to San Francisco and hearing a lot of my Asian-American friends talk to me about the hate crimes that are there and something we should keep present. And so, the Chinese government is definitely doing things that should have us all conscious. I mean the pandemic was full of lessons, collateral lessons, despite the over a million Americans have died as a result of COVID. We should not lose the lessons that came from that horrific pandemic. And one of things like supply chain security and defense. And so, when it comes to the unifying Democrats and Republicans around this idea of China competition it's working across the board. And one of the reasons why Joe Biden had perhaps this most successful Congress in my lifetime because everything from the CHIPS Act to the IRA, a lot of these things were about doing things to counter China. And again, globalization we can argue about pros cons of all of it, but we know that when we create holistic localized systems for food and other critical supply-chain elements that we are a stronger, more resilient and more nationally secure society. And so, that is another way that I'm finding alliances with Republicans again that people in the right like to often demonized. But from Lindsey Graham to young Republicans like young, to Mitt Romney. There's a lot of really good alliances going on that are doing things that are gonna help our country have greater national security but also have incredibly inspiring environmental benefits as well.

Greg Dalton: And Chris Coons and Kevin Cramer, Republican have a new bipartisan bill on tariffs which is partly aimed at China to get at that. Race is also part of, we’re talking about race or relations in China it’s also part of food. And the USDA is responsible for implementing the farm bill and yet the agency has a real historic problem with racist practices. Last year I talked with John Boyd, president of the National Black Farmers Association. He told me personal stories of his application for farm operating loan being thrown in the trash can by a USDA official who was later found guilty of discrimination but still allowed to keep his job. Let's hear from John Boyd.

Cory Booker: Yeah, please.

John Boyd: We had two settlements, but nobody was ever fired. No senior person at USDA or no local person, for that matter was ever fired for the act of discrimination. And as I organized it further, I went South, Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas, Tennessee, Louisiana. The discrimination was more pervasive with many blacks weren't even given a loan application. I was given one mine was tossed in the trash can and all kinds of stuff that I personally faced. But the further I went South the more egregious and more blatant the discrimination was for black farmers.

Greg Dalton: John Boyd, president of the National Black Farmers Association. Senator, your reaction to John Boyd and what the USDA is doing to address its legacy.

Cory Booker: Yeah, John’s become a strong ally of my office as soon as the Biden administration won their election that got them the presidency. And we saw what the shift in Congress we immediately went to the administration to try to start doing things that would rectify these specific past harms. And John's one story, but lots of great news organizations around the country have elevated these stories of black farmers who have been cheated denied resources discriminated against. It is stunning. Black farmers used to control, there used to be over a million black farmers in America proportionate to the population of African-American is all coming out of slavery blacks return to the land. But that history, especially even since 1950, blacks have been moved off their land continuously losing opportunities and dwindling down to a very small amount. And so, I've taken this problem on and won some victories, got court battles that set back but still have some resources right now and the billions of dollars trying to help African-American farmers and farmers who have been subject to specific discrimination. But it's still not enough. This is one of the sadder chapters. And when we think about generational wealth in this country the number of Americans can trace their family wealth to the Homestead Act for example, or other policies which excluded predominantly African-Americans. It is a very sad chapter that contributes to a lot of the income disparities that we have today. We, as a society have to begin to look for ways to win, especially when there's a specific measurable harm to looking at those communities and finding ways to make them whole. It is the very ideal of America to be a nation of liberty and justice for all. But these are lot of farmers in America who are very frustrated that faced unimaginable injustice and haven't found a way to be made whole and make it right.

Greg Dalton: Meat accounts for about 60% of greenhouse gas emissions from food production. One of the biggest tensions in climate conversations is the weight of individual choices versus actions. What should the average person focus on building more healthy and just food system.

Cory Booker: Well, I think this is a personal choice we all make and I'm one of these folks. I’m a vegan, but I only supposed the last thing I want my government to do is to tell me what to eat. Very ideal freedom is eat whatever you want. But I will tell you this. I don’t want my government picking winners and losers. I don’t want my government that is subsidizing some foods to the harm of other foods. We should be creating a far more level playing field and understanding that we are a nation right now that is using practices forget your diet for a second that are unsustainable. And as the entire planet earth is moving more towards the standard American diet, SAD, as the globe is moving more towards our diet. We will probably need about four planet Earths just to have the land necessary to feed the exploding demand for pork, chicken and beef. These are not the way we are doing these practices right now are not sustainable. So, I'm just a big believer that we need to start looking at alternative proteins. We need to start making more awareness out there of different alternatives and also stop picking winners and losers. That said, there's exciting things going on whether you’re vegan or vegetarian or carnivore or what have you. There's a lot of exciting things going on that should inform us all in our policy decisions and perhaps maybe in our personal decisions. So, I just sat with Dr. Mark Hyman yesterday or day before yesterday in my office. And all he wanted to do is talk to this vegan about buffalo. And Mark believes that you should reduce the meat increase vegetables but he loves his meat and he loves eggs. But he was telling me about this powerful Buffalo regenerative farm that he had been to. And I was blown away by the way he is talking about because they're doing rotational grazing environmentally practices that really harking back to the days of buffalos used to rule the plains. And so, he went to explore it and he said he couldn't believe what this regenerative buffalo farm has achieved. He said that, especially when you compare them to others that are doing it the standard American way.

Greg Dalton: Factory farms.

Cory Booker: Factory farms. And he said, in these prairies, the biodiversity exploded. Species of plants that roam the plain that people hadn't seen in years and years and years. The soil became biodiverse the nutrients in the soil it was exploding again with life not dirt but soil. And then he said what was really interesting to him was because the soil held the water and I’ve seen these pictures of people who do farming with chemicals that kill everything in the soil and dirt and it's flooding rolling one off right next to farms that use regenerative practices that are green that are rich you can see the life in the soil. But the thing that I've never heard before that marked to me was, he said that in this vast acreage historically, there have been streams and rivers in them, but they had all dried up. But as soon as they turn it back because the soil was holding so much water the streams the rivers the creeks came back and flowing to the point that neighbors were jealous. Wait a minute, how did you get this water back on your land. And they weren’t doing anything they weren’t out there watering. It was just the power of nature to heal itself if you go back to these regenerative practices. And so, again I want people to be happy. I think joy should be the center of our being. So, I'm not telling you what to eat, but the more I find that I grow my consciousness and align my diet my shopping habits, especially those of us who are privileged enough to have some flexibility and are not living paycheck to paycheck, which unfortunately is 40+ percent of Americans. But the ability to align your values and your personal habits together that's integrity.

Greg Dalton: We’ve been talking with Cory Booker about how the ag industry is dominated by a few major multinational corporations. Let’s pause my conversation with him to take a closer look at one way cattle ranchers are attempting to circumvent the tightly controlled meat market.

Ariana Brocious: The meat industry has transformed since the 1980s, when the Reagan administration loosened antitrust laws. Today, just four companies control 80% of the market. That’s meant higher prices for consumers, and a lower return for the people raising the animals. Senator Cory Booker is critical of how that economic concentration hurts ranchers and rural communities, and of the larger system of factory farms or CAFOs--concentrated animal feeding operations where most of our meat comes from. His Farm System Reform Act would address monopolistic practices of meatpackers and put a moratorium on large factory farms. As Elizabeth Rembert reports, one group of ranchers in Nebraska is creating their own meatpacking plant to gain greater financial sustainability.

Elizabeth Rembert: Hundreds of cows crowd close to the edges of a pen to push their necks through a fence to get to the golden corn grains in a feed trough.

Trey Wasserburger looks out at the cattle from his pickup. He runs this feedyard outside of North Platte, Nebraska, along with his father-in-law.

Trey Wasserburger: These will be probably ready to go here in the next 30 or 40 days and they'll go to a large packer and they'll be in the beef supply chain in 60 days, probably.

Elizabeth Rembert: Wasserburger adds up the time it takes to breed, birth and raise the cows on ranches to get them to this point.

Trey Wasserburger: Geez … yeah, you're talking this is a three year deal probably to get here.

Elizabeth Rembert: And now the feedyard work starts. Cassie Lapaseotes runs her family’s feedyard in western Nebraska and says it’s kinda like how you expect a clean bed at a hotel.

Cassie Lapaseotes: When these cattle come into a feed yard, we want their pens to be clean, their water tanks to be clean, the feed to be freshly laid out in front of them.

Elizabeth Rembert: Wasserburger and Lapaseotes are proud of how they take care of their animals to bring quality meat to the market.

But when companies buy their cattle to turn it into steaks, they basically get a predetermined rate … which is based on the price of cattle that’s a much lower quality than what Wasserburger and Lapaseotes are raising.

Trey Wasserburger: Be like an Audi and a Kia…and the Kia sets the price for the Audi. It’s a broken system, totally.

Elizabeth Rembert: Right now their paychecks don’t reflect the sweat, science and money they’ve invested.

Trey Wasserburger: <TUTS> Not yet, that’s where Sustainable Beef comes in.

Elizabeth Rembert: Wasserburger and Lapaseotes are founders and board members of Sustainable Beef, a meatpacking plant designed and owned by ranchers and cattle feeders.

Wasserburger and his father-in-law are planning to integrate solar panels, manure collection and methane gas recovery to lessen their environmental footprint. The ranchers hope that keeping processing closer to home can help them regain control – and profit – to keep their livelihoods sustainable into the future.

The idea gained momentum after the pandemic when COVID forced packers to limit operations and turn away market-ready cattle.

Trey Wasserburger: I still remember June of 2020. We couldn't get any cattle in anywhere. I lost a third of my equity in cattle almost overnight.

Elizabeth Rembert: It was a new low, as ranchers lost buyers and shoppers faced empty shelves. But it wasn’t a new problem.

For decades companies like Tyson, Cargill, JBS and National Beef have absorbed other meat processors, leaving less buyers to compete for animals. Feedlots and cattle ranchers have been forced to take lower and lower prices. From 1980 to 2017, 40% of them went out of business.

So the ranchers in Nebraska came together to create their own plant, where they can process the meat and give fair prices for premium beef.

Sustainable Beef CEO David Briggs drives around the construction site, where 100 people work to move dirt and set up a foundation.

When the plant is operational, it’ll process around 1,500 cattle a day. That’s about 1.5% of the nation’s capacity, Briggs says.

David Briggs: Our mission was not to just be a local, it was to help with the national security concept, and actually be a player in the overall industry.

Elizabeth Rembert: Walmart will help them do that. The retailer has invested in the project and agreed to buy and distribute all of Sustainable Beef’s product. Even with a boost from the nation’s most popular grocery chain, Wasserburger says they’re not trying to compete against the Big Four packers.

Trey Wasserburger: This is like comparing the Yankees to my son's T-ball team. We don't want to be the Yankees and we're not trying to be and we're not pretending like we are. This model works for us and our families and so we're gonna play ball how we know how.

Elizabeth Rembert: Austin Frerick is a Yale fellow who’s studied concentration in the meat market, and says they have an uphill road. This isn’t the first time ranchers have tried coming together to start their own packing plant.

Austin Frerick: If they succeed, that means the Big Four lost a little bit of market share. And there's nothing in recent history that says those four will lose a point of market share without a fight.

Elizabeth Rembert: Past startups have tripped over logistics, collapsed under market pressure or even been swallowed up by one of the giant packers. Still, he hopes the ranchers can find a foothold.

Austin Frerick: If they can carve out a niche where they can play T ball, at least are playing baseball …

Elizabeth Rembert: But he says the broader industry needs regulation to truly level the playing field for projects like Sustainable Beef.

Austin Frerick: I want a bunch of baseball teams. The best thing we can do for them is break up the big four, put competition back into these markets, so they have a chance to succeed.

Elizabeth Rembert: Briggs and the ranchers know it’s a challenge. But for a new future in cattle, they think it’s worth a try.

For Climate One, I’m Elizabeth Rembert.

Ariana Brocious: Elizabeth is a reporter with Harvest Public Media, a collaboration of public media newsrooms in the Midwest and Great Plains. And I just want to say one note about the term about sustainable beef which can kind of seem like a misnomer on a climate show.

A lot of the cows people eat are raised on ranches, they start their lives eating grass but at some point they move to these feedyards or feedlots where they’re kept in more concentrated operation and from there they go to the slaughterhouse. So that's pretty conventional, that’s the majority of beef you find at the grocery store. So when we talk about sustainability from an agricultural emissions standpoint, that might be things like capturing the methane that comes off manure lagoons or dairies. That’s not what we’re talking about here, we’re talking about the idea that the concentrated market of selling cows is just unfair and this is trying to create a more regional and economically sustainable option for farmers.

Greg Dalton: Coming up, what if the biggest obstacle to progress is ourselves?

Cory Booker: The most toxic threat is the hate that is growing on Americans for each other. And this is creating an environment where we can't even talk to each other.

Greg Dalton: That’s up next, when Climate One continues.

This is Climate One. I’m Greg Dalton. Let’s pick up my conversation with Senator Cory Booker.

Cory Booker: The most powerful way and my favorite story in leadership is about Gandhi entertaining visitors in his tent. The mother who asked Gandhi emphasize dietary discipline and Gandhi talk about vegan this guy was like a fruitarian vegan. And she says, tell my son to stop eating sugar. And he goes, I won’t. And she seems to protest. And he goes, no, I’m sorry I won’t but come back in two months and ask me again. She comes back into the tent with her son two months later, Mahatma, sir with great respect my son will listen to you. He has terrible dietary habits his health is suffering would you tell him to stop eating sugar. Gandhi gets up, put his hands on the boy. Mahatma touches this child and says, my child, you must stop eating sugar. The mother was pleased the child was affected and she's going to leave, but she stops and says forgive my disrespect, but why didn’t you just tell my son to stop eating sugar two months ago? And he said, because two months ago I was eating sugar. And so, I have seen in my life the greatest impact I can have on others is when I'm deeply authentic living according to my values. That's what often this is. Nothing worse than a politician that talks right and walks left.

[Applause]

And so, I want people to pursue their joy. I want people to expand their understanding of Americans. Because the most toxic threat to our nation right now I believe this and we have real problems in America and we have real problems globally. But I think the most toxic threat is the hate that is growing on Americans for each other. And this is creating an environment where we can't even talk to each other or far more common values. I was campaigning pretty hard in the last midterm election traveling all around the country. And I sat down on a plane and I often have people saying nice things to me often, unfortunately, people usual send me Mother's Day cards because I often get called you mother something else. So, I get all kind of reactions across America as I crisscrossed the nation. But people are being really nice to be on this plane ride and I sit down next to a mom and a daughter 80 and 60 and they don't know who I am. And here I am large African-American male and for my ego some people might think this is wrong, but for my ego I love hearing what they said. They go, sir, who are you? Are you a professional athlete? And I'm like, well, I could be if I wanted to. But I said no ma'am, I'm a United States senator. And immediately all of us in America if you need a politician congressperson you want to know what tribe they’re in. Are they in your tribe, their tribe or my tribe? The other rising, the impersonality of that. Where do you stand with me or against me? And too much we have a binary world in America. And I said ma'am, I'm a Democrat. And she looks angry at me and says, I should've brought my Trump hat.

Now there is a moment all of life our power is not in what happens to us. Our power is never in the stimulus it's always in the response. And we have a choice to respond with love, empathy, compassion, or to respond with negativity hate lower frequencies of our being. And I look at the woman and I'm not dancing to this tune. And I look at her and I go, oh my gosh, Donald Trump, he signed two of my biggest pieces of legislation into law. And she seems surprised by that. And I go through some of the common values of that legislation. One on criminal justice reform. One on getting investment into low income rural and urban areas in America. And the record was scratched. It’s a long flight, but in the end of the flight we are talking about our personal lives. I learned about their family they learned about mine. We’re affirming our commonality and talking about some of the problems in America being we don't talk to each other. We don't listen to each other.

And so, my biggest worry about a lot of these issues is when they fall into the pardons we stop listening. There's a paper I remember if I remember correctly, they did a study where they took arcane educational issue policy and this is a Democrat policy. And immediately 80% of Republicans were against the policy because it was labeled Democratic policy. But Democrats were not much better when they flip it around. When it says Republican policy, all Democrats hated it. And that is the crisis because the issues we’re talking about cannot be solved in a partisan way. I'm looking at the Senate right now and I hate to tell you the map for 2024 is looking pretty bad. We are defending a lot of seats we being Democrats are defending seats are gonna be hard, I hope I'm gonna be everywhere from Montana to Ohio to even West Virginia if Manchin will have me. But my point is we have got to start not only I think every election matters every election is important, but somehow, we have to commit ourselves to creating more dialogue, more ability to affirm each other's humanity and still believe that we have common cause in this country. Because when America acts with a sense of increased compassion and empathy and common cause we dazzle humanity in what we achieve. From immigration laws that let the entire plan is diversity come here and breakthroughs in science defying gravity going to the moon to even affirmations of human rights and human dignity that have put us as a standard bearer for our planet that’s still struggling with LGBTQ rights as we see in Uganda and elsewhere. We can do these things when we stop hating each other. And even if we disagree find ways to affirm this commonality. I call it love people who call it just affirming your fellow citizenship.

[Applause]

And so, I'm not saying that there are big issues I keep returning to gun violence that anguish me. I've lost people I know to assault rifles. I'm not saying that we’re gonna solve those with kumbaya moments. But I know we can't solve those unless two things happen. One is we stop demonization which often prevents coalition. And number two is what King said. When we rush to demonize the other side, we forget the wisdom of what King said. So, what we have to repent for in this day and age is not just the vitriolic words and violent actions of the bad people, but the appalling silence and inaction of the good people. To me whether it's climate change or gun violence. If you pull these issues, Democrat Republicans, most people agree with us. But yet there’s too many people that are not turning their head and their heart.

As Frederick Douglass says, I prayed for years for my freedom and I was still a slave. And it wasn't until I started praying with my feet that I found my freedom. More people need to get up off the couch like the guy watching the Edmund Pettus Bridge who said, you know what I'm not going my inability to do everything to undermine my determination to do something. I’m gonna do the best I can with what I have where I am. But the key is to do something. This is what we’re missing. There are too many people on the sidelines of America and don't realize they’re needed to make history and to save the future.

Greg Dalton: Oil companies have lied and deceived the American public for a long time, in particular executives. And again, like you said about China it’s the Chinese government, not the Chinese people. Not every rank-and-file worker who works in the fossil industry they hear that and might say, oh you think I’m bad have that division. Executives certain companies, particularly Exxon. Some people in climate and the left think that oil companies that anything that's bad for that, you know, anything that’s good for them must be bad. They have to be like run out of business don't want to deal with them. What’s your approach to the villains which in this case, the industry you talk about empathy and working with people you disagree with? How do you apply that to the fossil fuel industry?

Cory Booker: Well, I’ll say some things that, you know, Abraham Lincoln said, too much agreement kills a conversation. I am a guy that really believes because I'm on the foreign relations committee I see the global context, that Americans are demanding oil, they are. So, when you point your finger and want to vilify the people that are delivering oil to your pump you got to look in the mirror first.

Greg Dalton: That's hard.

Cory Booker: It's hard. And then Americans might want to, and it’s a global market by the way. We're not living on the oil that we’re drilling here in the United States. We’re buying oil from around the world. And we may succeed in stopping some drilling here, but if we’re still not doing anything about demand guess where that oil is coming from.

Greg Dalton: Nigeria.

Cory Booker: Places that have worse environmental protections. Your oil drilled here has better carbon models than the oil drilled over there and then these are petro-dictators who are engaged in that oil is like you’re paying blood money there. So, let's not be too self-righteous about the problem we have here. I'm a big believer that we need to be fast tracking our efforts to get the demand for oil lower. And without vilifying but start to try to expand the promise. And I'll give you one example you’re talking about this in the car right over here because we thought you are gonna bring this up I'm grateful you didn't, so I don't know why I'm about to. This is my staff is like, you know, they find this a driving test. If you look at the, don't look at the barrier, you look in the barrier you drive into the barrier. They made me look at this beforehand. But we just had a big moment on the Senate floor where part of the debt ceiling fight were some permitting issues. And I’m surprised they get Democrats telling me Corey, we got to do some permitting reform. And I’m like, yeah, I’m all for permitting. In order to get the transmission, we have massive transmission problems now with solar, wind, how are we gonna get that. We definitely need permitting reform or else that slowness of our transition off of oil is going to be affected. I'm the biggest believer in permitting reform. And I'm the biggest believer in just dumb regulation stopping things.

When I was mayor of the city of Newark, I had people bringing in cargo putting it on trucks and driving it to Exit 8A far away from Newark warehousing and there. And then when they needed to be sent out, they took back into Newark spewing all this carbon into the air and smog that gets my kids four times the asthma rates. So, I said all this vacant land in Newark I want a bill down there but the EPA comes in and says, well you have to have groundwater standards at the same level of residential. And so, I had to start jumping over all these environmental hoops that ultimately, we’re gonna reduce the amount of carbon that I have. You’re causing the problem to your environmental delays that I need to do. So, we’ll find very few Democrats that’s friendly towards me as understanding. That we need to have the common goal here and not mess it up with all this muckety-muck. But what I get so frustrated about and I wish Americans could have seen everything that I see. We did this environmental injustice tour to America. And from going to Duplin County, North Carolina, where the CAFOs are where these contract farmers who have miserable lives because they are short of sharecroppers. But these big multinational port corporations who three or four of them control the whole market dictate to the contract farmers how they have to raise things big warehouses of pigs all the feces going through these grades into massive lagoons and then they’re sprayed onto fields in low income communities.

And so, you walk through these communities, community of African-Americans who has been on that land since slave times since slavery was around. And now the value of their land is going to the floor. They can’t open their windows. They can’t put their clothing on the lines they have respiratory diseases clusters of disease there spiked and they said how can we have this happen. How could Americans eat their bacon and not understand how we’re suffering. Again, it's the lines that divide us that stop us from having empathy and understanding. Whatever religion love your neighbor it’s not a geographic thing we’re all each other's neighbors. But I travel to a place called Cancer Alley. You don’t need to know. Look up Cancer Alley you’re gonna see section of the Mississippi that's near Baton Rouge where again it happens again to be a low-income community this is a low income African-American community where the particulates in the air all of these things have been permitted that’s spewed these chemical plants are spewing stuff in there the cancer rate cancer clusters. I sat and I couldn't hold back my tears. As family after family in this crowded black church were getting up and telling about their family members who have died of cancer. I could take you Uniontown, Alabama I could go to the places where we don't know the absolute misery and suffering of other Americans based upon systems whether it's petrochemicals or the food industry that are poisoning Americans right now. And so, that's my bigger frustration is that again there are too many people that just don't know about the systems that we’re participating on. And when you expand that lands beyond America – And you start visiting other countries, whether it's people working in warehouses that produce the devices we carry around or the clothing that we have. The poverty that worries me most, and I’m a United States senator made a decision to live the last 25 years in the community or below the poverty line where we don’t mistake wealth with worth. I do a lot of economic justice things the child tax credit. Me, Bennett, Brown others fought for that help cut poverty, but we couldn't get it to be permanent. Common sense things to address poverty I do it internationally. But the poverty that most worries me every day is the poverty of empathy in this world. Somehow we just don't understand the suffering of someone that often is not that far away that we feel again it’s not about blame it’s about responsibility, that we feel no responsibility in and live in a blissful ignorance of the challenges that are affecting people Democrat, Republican, forget they’re affecting people human beings. Until we can close that gap then things are not, until we close that gap, we’re not gonna make the changes we need to make.

Greg Dalton: Thank you for that. I wish more senators thought that way and talk that way. And thank you Senator for bringing the power of your heart and your mindfulness into this conversation here today with us.

Greg Dalton: Thank you very much. Senator Cory Booker.

Climate One’s empowering conversations connect all aspects of the climate emergency.

Greg Dalton: Climate One’s empowering conversations connect all aspects of the climate emergency. To hear more, subscribe wherever you get your pods. Talking about climate can be hard-- AND it’s critical to address the transitions we need to make in all parts of society. Please help us get people talking more about climate by giving us a rating or review. You can do it right now on your device. You can also help by sending a link to this episode to a friend. On our new website you can create and share playlists focused on topics including food, energy, EVs, activism. By sharing you can help people have their own deeper climate conversations.

Ariana Brocious: Brad Marshland is our senior producer; Our managing director is Jenny Park. Austin Colón is producer and editor. Megan Biscieglia is our production manager. Wency Shaida is our development manager, Ben Testani is our communications manager. Our theme music was composed by George Young (and arranged by Matt Willcox). Gloria Duffy is CEO of The Commonwealth Club of California, the nonprofit and nonpartisan forum where our program originates. I’m Ariana Brocious.

3:35 – Senator Booker shares a personal story about activism
10:54 – Senator Booker on the Farm Bill
15:28 – Senator Booker on improving SNAP
24:14 – Senator Booker on Incentives vs. Regulations
30:24 – Senator Booker on racism in the USDA
37:07 – Contributor Elizabeth Rembert Field Piece on Sustainable Beef
54:29 – Senator Booker on Permitting Reform

Play

Climate Smart Agriculture with Secretary Tom Vilsack

Otto Pilot — Fri, 17 Feb 2023 08:01:00 +0000

Climate Smart Agriculture with Secretary Tom Vilsack

02/17/2023

From tilling soil to fertilizer use to belching and farting cows, agriculture is a major climate polluter, responsible for around 11 percent of U.S. emissions. Conventional farming aims to maximize crop production using practices that contribute carbon to the atmosphere.

“For 60 years, the message that's been conveyed to farmers across the United States has been, you've gotta produce more. You've gotta produce more,” says Tom Vilsack, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture, a role he also held for eight years under President Barack Obama.

But by using tools like cover crops, compost and rotational grazing, soil also holds the potential for massive carbon sequestration, which is good for the climate, crops and farmers. For years, the government has incentivized environmental best practices through federal programs that address things like habitat, watershed health and erosion. But the Biden administration has put more money and support into those efforts with a climate lens. In 2022, the USDA launched a Climate-Smart Commodities program, investing more than $3 billion into 141 projects, including many small and underserved producers.

“That's one of the principal reasons for doing climate smart practices: not just to reduce greenhouse gas emissions or to sequester more carbon, but to improve soil health. And as we improve soil health, we're also going to improve productivity,” Vilsack says.

Despite domestic and international pressure for climate action, Secretary Vilsack says the voluntary nature of these programs is better than regulations.

“When you try to regulate farming operations, what you do is you essentially invite a series of lawsuits, a set of efforts to delay the implementation of a particular regulation. We're gonna get much further, much faster, listening to farmers who basically said, ‘if you create a voluntary system, which is incentive based and market-based, we will respond.’”

And there are other incentive models out there to encourage farmers to change their practices for climate reasons. As Executive Director of Zero Foodprint, Anthony Myint works to support healthy soil as a climate solution by organizing restaurants and businesses to add a small surcharge on meals and food. These funds are collected and distributed to participating farmers to pay them to implement things like cover cropping, compost and other climate smart practices. Myint says the amount each consumer contributes is small, but can have a big impact.

“One percent actually adds up to quite a lot. At the society level, 1% of GDP would generate a trillion dollars a year towards climate solutions. And according to Project Drawdown, that $1 trillion a year between now and 2050 would actually be enough to lower global temperatures,” he says.

Highlights:
2:25 Secretary Tom Vilsack on methane reduction
6:20 Tom Vilsack on Climate-Smart Commodities and voluntary incentives
13:13 Tom Vilsack on using less fossil-based fertilizers
17:30 Tom Vilsack on working collaboratively with tribes for forest stewardship
20:00 Tom Vilsack on addressing USDA’s history of racial discrimination
27:30 Jeremy Martin on corn ethanol versus gasoline
31:20 Jeremy Martin on updates to renewable fuel standard
40:00 Anthony Myint on current agricultural subsidies and incentives
43:20 Anthony Myint on Zero Foodprint’s mission and work

Guests

Tom Vilsack

Secretary, US Department of Agriculture

Anthony Myint

Executive Director, Zero Foodprint

Jeremy Martin

Senior Scientist, Union of Concerned Scientists

Zero Foodprint (zerofoodprint.org)

USDA Climate-Smart Commodities (usda.gov)

Note: Transcripts are generated using a combination of automated software and human transcribers, and may contain errors. Please check the actual audio before quoting it.

Greg Dalton: This is Climate One. I’m Greg Dalton. Agriculture is responsible for around 11 percent of U.S. emissions. Conventional farming aims to maximize crop production using practices that contribute carbon to the atmosphere.

Tom Vilsack: For 60 years, the message that's been conveyed to farmers across the United States has been, you've gotta produce more. You've gotta produce more.

Greg Dalton: And yet by using tools like cover crops and compost, soil ALSO holds the potential for massive carbon sequestration, which is good for the climate and farmers.

Tom Vilsack: That's one of the principle reasons for doing climate smart practices, not just to reduce greenhouse gas emissions or to sequester more carbon, but to improve soil health.

Greg Dalton: So how do we change the practices on the ground and get more farmers using these tools?

Tom Vilsack: We're gonna get much further, much faster, listening to farmers who basically said, if you create a voluntary system, which is incentive based and market-based, we will respond.

Greg Dalton: Climate Smart Agriculture with Secretary Tom Vilsack. Up next on Climate One.

Greg Dalton: This is Climate One, I’m Greg Dalton.

Ariana: And I’m Ariana Brocious.

Greg Dalton: When we think of climate-harming emissions we often think of smokestacks, powerplants, and car tailpipes. But agriculture is a huge part of our total carbon footprint.

Ariana Brocious: From tilling soil to fertilizer use to belching and farting cows, agriculture is a major carbon emitter. For years, the government has incentivized environmental best practices through federal programs that address things like habitat, watershed health and erosion.

Greg Dalton: Now the Biden administration has put more money and support into those efforts with a climate lens.

Ariana Brocious: Tom Vilsack is U.S. Secretary of Agriculture, a role he previously held for eight years under President Barack Obama. In 2022, his agency, the USDA, launched a Climate-Smart Commodities program. The USDA is investing more than $3 billion into 141 projects, including many small and underserved producers.

Greg Dalton: We’ll get into the climate smart ag in a moment. I began my conversation with Tom Vilsack by asking about the Global Methane pledge, which was signed by 150 countries and aims to cut emissions from dairy 30% by 2030. California is aiming to cut methane emissions 40 percent in the same period, prompting me to suggest the US plan lacks ambition. Secretary Vilsack disagrees.

Tom Vilsack: The fact is there are nine separate dairy projects associated with our climate Smart Agriculture and Forestry Commodity Partnership Initiative, which are looking at a variety of processes for reducing methane, capturing methane and converting methane from dairy production. And I think those programs will provide us a very clear pathway for both large and small dairies to basically embrace climate smart practices, which will lead over time to methane reduction. In addition to that, the Inflation Reduction Act contains additional resources to decarbonize our utility grid in rural communities. And I suspect strongly that you're gonna see an increase with that funding and the renewable energy for America program funding under the IRA in digesters. So I think there's a lot of activity that may not be on the surface, or may not be as prevalent as one company's commitment. But I think the industry here in the US is committed to getting to net zero by 2050 and is working towards that goal.

Greg Dalton: The dairy digesters that you mentioned turn waste into electricity. That requires some real scale to make that investment. And some people are concerned that that hurts local air quality, local pollution. It helps globally and creates electricity. But people who live near large industrial beef and dairy operations, does that come in conflict with some of your priorities about helping traditionally marginalized communities?

Tom Vilsack: No, I don't think so because part of what we're working on through the climate smart commodities effort is a separation technology in which we are separating the solids and the liquids, reclaiming the liquids so that we have better utilization of our scarce water resources and taking the solids and basically pelletizing those solids, which I think will eliminate a lot of the concerns that folks have. And I think ultimately this is a technology that as we utilize it will significantly reduce many of the challenges that the livestock industry has faced relative to waste. In addition, these digesters not only take a focus on animal waste, but they also are a good source for food waste, which can eliminate the utilization of and placement of food waste in landfills, which is a very significant methane producer. So I think there are a number of technologies that are gonna lead us to a much better place for our livestock industry, for farm income, for the quality of life in rural communities and for us as a country, providing leadership in terms of climate change.

Greg Dalton: The partnership for climate smart commodities uses incentives to encourage farms, ranches, orchards, and forests to clean up their operations. What do you say to people who say that incremental voluntary approaches by industry won't be enough or fast enough to slow rising climate disruption and meet the Paris goals?

Tom Vilsack: Well, I would say that they need to understand what works in the countryside. I can tell you that if you understand the economics of farming, it can be incredibly challenging. And when you try to regulate farming operations, what you do is you essentially invite a series of lawsuits, a set of efforts to delay the implementation of a particular regulation. We're gonna get much further, much faster, in terms of climate smart practices by listening to farmers who basically said, if you create a voluntary system, which is incentive-based and market-based, and you create an opportunity for us to have a value-added proposition in the marketplace, we will respond. And the proof of that is in addition to the 141 projects that we actually funded, there were roughly 850 other projects that were proposed that we couldn't fund because of limitation of funding. So there's tremendous interest out there in the countryside. The Inflation Reduction Act, and to a certain extent the infrastructure law, provide additional resources that will complement the Climate Smart Partnership effort. So I'm confident we're gonna see significant progress and there's a factor of this program that people often don't focus on, which is there's a measurement, verification, monitoring, and reporting requirement associated with these projects. So we're gonna know what works and what doesn't work, and we'll be able to funnel and target resources in the future to promote what does work.

Greg Dalton: And you mentioned those 140 some odd programs. USDA programs often favor industrial companies that have capital and resources to make the transition and it takes money to get money out of the federal government. You talked recently at Tuskegee University in Alabama about helping small and historically marginalized landowners transition to climate smart practices. So what is being done to help small scale farmers, ranchers make this transition that involves investment and learning new ways of doing things?

Tom Vilsack: Well, there are a couple answers and responses to that question. First of all, the structure of the Climate Smart Partnership Initiative recognized the importance of making sure that we were able to provide smaller grants to smaller farming operations, to underserved operators. And so a number of the projects within that 141 are in fact focused on small-sized operations, mid-sized operations, historically underserved producers. And the partnerships that we've formed with universities, with environmental groups, with conservation groups, food companies, with retailers, are providing additional support above and beyond what the federal government is providing, leveraging roughly 50% of additional investment. So that's one aspect. The other aspect is working with those producers to make sure that they take full advantage of the regular conservation programs that are offered. We know that it sometimes can be difficult for underserved producers to be able to access these programs. So we've entered into a number of contracts with cooperative groups, groups that have a trusted relationship with small and mid-sized operators to provide them resources to be able to expand our outreach and to provide technical assistance to those producers so they can qualify more easily for the normal conservation programs. And then, it's great that you do conservation. It's great that you are encouraging climate smart practices, but you want those folks to be able to stay in business and so it's necessary for us to develop a local and regional food system with market opportunity for those underserved producers, for those minority producers, for those small sized operators. So we are using federal procurement resources to help create that local and regional food system. We're creating resources to be able to address food deserts, particularly in areas, rural areas where local and regional food producers might be able to provide assistance. We're expanding farm to school and farm to institution programs, all designed to create market opportunities. And then as we do business with many of these producers and they go through a tough stretch as producers often do, now we are changing our attitude and our approach to debt servicing instead of focusing on trying to figure out how to collect the debt. We're in a position now where we're providing some debt forgiveness, and we're also developing a new structure to work with these producers to make it a little bit easier for them to stay on the land.

Greg Dalton: I'd like to ask about practices that are fairly well established on the margins of our industrial agricultural system in this country, and could bring climate benefits if more widely adopted. I’m talking about cover crops, regenerative agro forestry, no-till farming. We've heard from other ag experts that federal environmental incentive programs are way oversubscribed. There's more interest among farmers than there is money to give to them. So what are you doing to change that?

Tom Vilsack: Well, that was true before the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act. But as a result of the passage of that, we now see an historic investment that's being made by the Biden administration and by Congress in those very programs that as you said, were oversubscribed. The challenge will be for us to make sure that we also have the personnel and to provide the technical assistance necessary to make sure that folks take full advantage of those increased finances and financial assistance. So I think we're gonna see a tremendous expansion of interest and use of those traditional conservation programs. And we know that there are roughly 45 different practices, you mentioned several, that we are going to try to steer or target or focus the resources under the Inflation Reduction Act to be, to better encourage rotational grazing, to better encourage regenerative practices, cover crops. We also have looked at ways in which we can encourage through risk management tools through crop insurance premiums if you will, or incentives to encourage more cover crop activity, and also trying to find markets for that.

Greg Dalton: I talk to climate people of course across a range of sectors and some of the biggest optimists I talk to are the soil people who, you know, soil is sexy now and, and soil can sequester water and carbon. So speak specifically to, to soil cuz it's often urban people think soil and dirt's the same thing.

Tom Vilsack: Oh no. You know, I think it's important for people to understand that every single acre of ground, even an 80 acre, 160 acre, 640 acre farm is different. It's sort of like kids. Every acre's different. You have to understand the characteristics of every acre. Some acres need more nutrition, some acres need less, and that's why we're investing in precision agriculture, why we're making sure that as farmers are utilizing inputs that they're doing, it is in the most efficient and effective way possible. And we're making sure that those tools are not just available to commercial sized operators, but understanding the challenges that some of those small and mid-sized operators have.

We're also trying to make sure that they can take full advantage of reduced costs associated with precision agriculture. Now, we also understand and appreciate that as we do more climate smart practices, the expectation is that the productivity of soil is going to increase, it's gonna get richer, it's gonna get better, it's gonna get healthier. That's one of the principle reasons for doing climate smart practices, not just to reduce greenhouse gas emissions or to sequester more carbon, but to improve soil health. And as we improve soil health, we're also going to improve productivity. So there's multiple benefits, if you will, from Climate Smart Practices.

Greg Dalton: So does that mean less pounding it with fossil fuel-based fertilizers?

Tom Vilsack: Well, we're looking at a variety of ways in which we can look at alternatives and substitutes. We obviously know that the cost of fertilizer today is expensive, in large part because of Russia's unprovoked and ill-advised war in Ukraine. And the president has instructed us to utilize roughly a half a billion dollars to try to figure out ways in which we can be more self-reliant when it comes to fertilizer in terms of substitutes, in terms of more efficient use of fertilizer. But you know, what we're learning from our research and an understanding of precision agriculture is that some acres of ground that are currently being fertilized don't really require fertilizer at all. Or require a significantly reduced amount. So, in fact, I talked to one group of scientists at Iowa State University who suggested that maybe in the Midwest, perhaps as much as 30% of the corn acres that are currently utilizing fertilizer may not need much, if any, uh, fertilizer. That would be an enormous savings and an enormous opportunity to have a more efficient, more effective, a more soil-health focused agriculture. And this is an incredibly transformational time in American agriculture. I think there's an understanding and appreciation that for 60 years, the message that's been conveyed to farmers across the United States has been, you've gotta produce more. You've gotta produce more. And American farmers responded. American consumers have had an incredibly wide array of choice as a result. The challenge, however, is that not only have we seen some concerns about soil health, but we've also seen a growing disparity in terms of income opportunities for those who were able to get larger over time and those who decided or, or had to remain small or midsize. So our challenge, I think, is to move away from that singular model of focusing on production and looking at ways in which we can not only be product productive, but also profitable, sustainable, and resilient. And that requires, I think, a commitment to local and regional food systems. It requires a commitment to climate smart agriculture. It requires an expansion of processing capacity so there's more competition. It requires greater assistance from the government to embrace more value-added propositions, whether it's climate smart commodities, or whether it's organic. All of that is actually being done now at USDA as a result of the American Rescue Plan resources, the infrastructure law, and the Inflation Reduction Act.

Greg Dalton: You’re listening to a Climate One conversation with US Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack. Please help us get people talking more about climate by giving us a rating or review. You can do it right now on your device. You can also help by sending a link to this episode to a friend. By sharing you can help people have their own deeper climate conversations. Coming up, how the US Department of Agriculture is trying to move beyond decades of bias and discrimination against farmers of color and women:

Tom Vilsack: We are learning that we have to really think carefully about how to infuse into USDA, an understanding of the power and the benefit of diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility. The president is very, very focused on this and is expecting us to deliver on that promise.

Greg Dalton: That’s up next, when Climate One continues.

Greg Dalton: This is Climate One. I’m Greg Dalton. Let’s get back to my conversation with Tom Vilsack, US Secretary of Agriculture. The agency he leads, the USDA, controls vast tracts of forest in the American West that have been scorched by horrific wildfires in recent years. The Forest Service Climate Adaptation Plan says its ability to adapt to climate change depends on building trust and developing strong collaborations with tribal nations and other indigenous peoples. I asked Vilsack what he’s personally doing to build that trust and overcome centuries of settler colonialism.

Tom Vilsack: Well, I think one answer to that question is basically encouraging the forest service to do what it has wanted to do for some time, which is to work collaboratively with tribes in a co-stewardship. The fact is tribes understand forest health as well as anybody. They've obviously lived in those forests. They have depended on those forests for many, many, many, many years, if not centuries. And so they understand and appreciate the importance of forest health. So working in co- stewardship and co-management, that is to say working collaboratively, in a consultive way with tribes as we look at ways in which we can improve forest. We've got a crisis on our hand, no question about it. That's why we have a wildfire crisis strategy. We just recently announced an additional 11 priority landscapes where we're investing between those landscapes and the 10 that we announced last year, roughly 930 million in helping to provide treatment in those forests in a thoughtful way to reduce the risk of catastrophic wildfire. To create opportunities for healthier forests. And from that obviously come a wide variety of benefits, not the least of which is we're not seeing carbon go up into the atmosphere. We're seeing more recreational opportunities and we're seeing a better relationship with tribes and others, frankly, as we work. We listened to folks. We went out before we decided on these 11 landscapes in the 10 previous landscapes. We listened to folks in those areas and said, what do you think we need to do? What do you think we need to focus on? Where do we, where do you think the need is greatest? And by listening, we've been able to identify these priority landscapes, and the result is about 134 of the most seriously at-risk landscapes are gonna be treated, if you will, as a result of these resources, uh, which hopefully over time will reduce the risk of catastrophic wildfire.

Greg Dalton: During America's racial reckoning in the last three years, I've learned a lot about how systemic racism has shaped this country and frankly benefited me as white man. You and I have sort of wind in our back every time we walk into a situation, and I'm ashamed how inadequate my fancy private education was, and I've learned that I need to own some of my own ignorance and not lay that at the feet of others. What's been your journey in the last few years? What do you see now about race in America that you didn't see the first time you were in this position?

Tom Vilsack: Well, I'm not gonna say that I didn't see it the first time I was in this position because I spent a lot of time, uh, working to try to resolve literally thousands of claims against the Department of Agriculture for discrimination that was experienced by African American farmers, Hispanic farmers, women farmers, native American farmers. And as a result of the work of the Obama administration, we were able to resolve and at least provide some level of justice to over 20,000 of those producers. And we did have a process in which we began the process of trying to make sure that USDA embraced diversity as opposed to being opposed to it. That work continues now in the Biden administration at an accelerated level. I mentioned the debt servicing. That's a good example of work that we're doing with distressed farmers, many of whom are minority producers, basically changing the way in which we think about the relationship between us and those farmers in terms of when times are tough. I mentioned the fact that we are looking for ways in which small and mid-size producers can access additional markets and additional support from the government. We also established an equity commission, Which the Deputy Secretary and Arturo Rodriguez, former president of the United Farm Workers, are co-leading. And this equity commission is basically taking a look at the way in which we've done business in the past to try to identify places where there may be systemic issues that have created barriers, created difficulty, made it more difficult for folks to access the programs at USDA. And I think we're learning a lot from that. We are learning that we have to really think carefully about how to infuse into USDA, an understanding of the power and the benefit of diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility. The president is very, very focused on this and is expecting us to deliver on that promise. And we're taking a look at many of our programs. Give you a couple additional examples. We are focused on rural development. And the need for us to basically identify areas where there has been persistent poverty for far too long. And by persistent poverty, I'm talking about poverty rates that have exceeded 20% for 10, 15, 20, 30 years. We have established a program called the Rural Partnership Network, where we are essentially going into states where there are areas of persistent poverty and we're identifying several communities, maybe two, maybe three or four communities where this has been the case for quite some time, we've assembled a staff that will be physically located in those communities, who will work on behalf of USDA. And connect those communities to every single federal agency that does work domestically. So as these communities identify key programs and projects that are of most interest to them, to basically take the next step to get themselves in a better position, we're gonna be able to help provide the guidance, the technical assistance, the assurance of success, if you will, as they work with the federal government. Sometimes can be somewhat of a daunting activity for, especially for communities that are persistently poor. By no means do we have all the answers, but there is an aggressive effort being made.

Greg Dalton: EV sales are surging in this country and around the world. Batteries are winning the technology race over hydrogen and other alternatives to petroleum. If the federal government and California continue to subsidize biofuels made from soy and corn, as a former governor of Iowa, you’re known as a fan of blending corn with gasoline. A study last year funded in part by the US Department of Energy found that corn ethanol is likely at least 24% more carbon intensive than gasoline due to emissions resulting from land use changes to grow corn along with processing and combustion. Should the US reconsider its support for corn ethanol given that the market is clearly choosing electric vehicles with batteries?

Tom Vilsack: Well, first of all there are a number of studies that I could provide to you that would suggest that what you've suggested about biofuels is not actually environmentally correct. When you took a look at air quality, when you take a look at the increased productivity of corn production, what you'll find, I think is at the end of the day, it is significantly better to have biofuel mixed into your fuel than to basically rely on purely fossil fuels from the environment. So that's number one. Number two, you know, the reality is that as much discussion as there's been about electric vehicles the reality is that it’s going to take a considerable period of time before our vehicle fleet is totally electric. Some have suggested it may be another 20, 30 years before that happens. So in the meantime, do you want cleaner air? Do you want a fuel with lower carbon intensity? It seems to me that you do want to have that kind of fuel. And then finally, you know, it's one thing to talk about putting a battery in a car. It's another thing to put that battery in an airplane. And so that's why the aviation industry is making a concerted effort to encourage us to support an acceleration of sustainable aviation fuel, lower carbon biofuel that will fuel our planes and our ships to reduce the greenhouse gas input of that transportation system. And we are very much interested in working with the Department of Energy and the Department of Transportation to accelerate that. We've set as a goal a grand challenge of producing 3 billion gallons of that sustainable aviation fuel. So the reality here is that it's not just, it's not just fuel. There's an entire bioeconomy that can help us transition from a fossil fuel-based economy to one that is more bio-based. And as we do that, we a) produce more income for farmers. B), environmentally better products for consumers, and c) create better manufacturing jobs in rural places, all of which is, I think, very consistent with the president's design to rebuild and restructure the economy of this country from the bottom up and the middle out to strengthen the middle class. You've gotta do that in, in rural places. To do that, you've gotta bring manufacturing back and I will tell you that we are looking at ways in which you can use agricultural waste in a million different ways to produce those products. So it's an exciting future ahead of us.

Greg Dalton: And, and forest and wood and timber from forest so it doesn't burn. Yeah.

Tom Vilsack: Woody biomass basically helps to reduce that hazardous fuel buildup, which in turn reduces the risk of catastrophic fires. So a lot of benefits I think from what we're trying to do at USDA and we're excited about.

Greg Dalton: Tom Vilsack, secretary of the US Department of Agriculture. Thanks for coming on Climate One.

Tom Vilsack: Thank you.

Greg Dalton: As we just heard, Secretary Tom Vilsack justifies ethanol by saying it burns cleaner than gasoline. But I wanted to know about the full lifecycle analysis of corn ethanol and the climate impacts of biofuels if you include land use, water use, cutting forest to grow more soy. So I spoke with Jeremy Martin, senior scientist with the Union of Concerned Scientists’ Clean Transportation Program.

Jeremy Martin: Yeah, so there've been a lot of analyses of that question over the last 10 years, and they haven't reached a firm consensus. I think in some respects it's not the right question because nobody's really reconsidered the ethanol that's already blended with gasoline. Right? That decision was made. That's really part of the system now. Is corn ethanol better or worse than gasoline? My inclination is that yes, it is better than gasoline. It's cleaner today than it was 10 years ago. And there's a lot of ways it could get cleaner over time. But that's not the whole story. I mean, a lot of these scientific debates have been around what was the impact of land use change, and I think that informs how much corn should we use for fuel? How much vegetable oil can we use for fuel? How much of these other resources can we use for fuel? So getting the right answer to how much is different than, is it better or worse than gasoline? Because ultimately, we need to get to zero. So being a little better than gasoline's, not the right metric over the long term. So the way that I think about it is, what's the consequence of dramatically increasing biofuel use as we did shortly after the renewable fuel standard was passed, especially in the period between 2005 and 2010. Of course people have slightly different interpretation of it, but the lesson I take away is, you know, we shouldn't repeat that again. We shouldn't have a huge increase in biofuel production in a short period of time. that's gonna have ripple effects in the agricultural system, which could be damaging,

Greg Dalton: Right. And during that time of 2005 to 2010, there was a lot of debate and concern about food versus fuel.

Jeremy Martin: Yeah. Well, so we saw a big expansion, very rapidly of the use of corn for ethanol, which went from, you know, before 2005 it was a fairly minor use of corn, and by the time we got to 2010, it was something like a third of the corn was being sent to ethanol plants and was one of the biggest users of corn together with animal feed. And that sudden shift was quite disruptive. What's interesting to me today, is that's happening again, but not with corn. Actually corn use for ethanol has been fairly stable over the last decade now. It's actually soybean oil, which is suddenly expanding as oil refineries retrofit to process renewable diesel from soybean oil. And this is happening again in a period where food prices are high. And, and in particular, vegetable oil prices are high on the global market for a variety of reasons, not all related to biofuels, but it definitely begs the question of, you know, have we learned the lesson of 2005 and can we translate a lesson about corn to the other important global commodity crops of soybeans and vegetable oil?

Greg Dalton: And also when you mentioned soy, I think of deforesting the Amazon to grow soy to go into gas tanks and into, into feed cows. What about that part of the equation?

Jeremy Martin: Yeah, I mean, there are a lot of reasons to be worried about a big increase in the use of vegetable oil for fuels. The US is a big producer of soybeans. So what's likely to happen is, you know, more of the crop that's produced in the US will be used domestically and not exported. And then those exports that we used to send will be made up for in other places, for example from South America, or that soybean oil will be replaced with palm oil from Southeast Asia. So, yeah, there's a lot of reasons to think that's not really a great strategy to reduce US gasoline and diesel consumption. And so we should be smart about how much vegetable oil, how much corn, you know, makes sense to direct into the fuel use.

Greg Dalton: So the renewable fuel standard was created nearly 20 years ago, shortly after General Motors famously killed its first electric car. There were no EVs on the market. Today there are many, and the renewable fuel standard is up for revision or extension. What are the points of tension around updating the renewable fuel standard?

Jeremy Martin: So when the renewable fuel standard was passed and then amended in 2007, Congress set targets out through 2022. And so now it's up to EPA to set the targets going forward. And one of the big problems with the federal renewable fuel standard is that it's all about combustion fuels and really doesn't actually recognize renewable electricity and wind and solar as renewable sources of transportation fuel. So that's a huge problem. And it's a problem, you know, in the way that the law was written and can only be fixed by Congress. So, EPA’s they're setting a course, trying to adapt the standard to the current context. But it's difficult because they have to follow what's in the law.

Greg Dalton: So, what is the demand for biofuels as EVs take off? Will we wind down our use of corn or soy for cars?

Jeremy Martin: I think certainly corn ethanol for blending with gasoline is intimately linked to the amount of gasoline we use. And so as we use more electric vehicles and less gasoline, we'll see less corn ethanol being blended with gasoline. We're expecting gasoline use to fall most quickly. So, diesel fuels, which is where most of the vegetable oil-based fuels go, may take a little bit longer. But even as we look out a couple decades, you know, I think biofuels will continue to have an important role but that role will evolve. So today where most of the biofuels are blended into gasoline, you know, I think we'd anticipate 20 or 30 years from now seeing most of the biofuels for aviation fuel. And so the way that we produce biofuels to change, to get cleaner and to stop taking this benchmark of a little cleaner than gasoline as the standard. But really say like, how do we produce biofuels that are headed towards zero emissions? And how do we do it in a way that's, and at a level that's reasonable considering all the other uses of crops and of land.

Greg Dalton: Is there a lifecycle analysis of crop land for sustainable aviation fuels? And is that different than biofuels for cars?

Jeremy Martin: Yeah, and this is where it gets a little tricky because the lifecycle analysis depends a lot on what the fuel is made out of. So, today most of the biofuel blended with gasoline is corn ethanol, and most of the biofuel blended with diesel fuels are various kinds of biodiesel and renewable diesel. And the largest source of those is soybean oil. But over time, new processes, new things are coming online. And so we don't know if aviation fuel in the future is made from lipids, different kinds of fats and oils or their process to make corn into aviation fuel. And of course, ever since 2007, people have been working on how to make cellulosic fuels using agricultural residues and other kinds of materials to make biofuels. And there's not enough vegetable oil to just make a lot of sustainable aviation fuel from vegetable oil. So we really need to bring these other types of materials into that market.

Greg Dalton: What changes would you personally like to see made to the renewable fuel standard?

Jeremy Martin: Yeah. The most important change in a way is to recognize that solar energy and wind power, these are really important renewable resources, and especially as we look up to a transportation system powered mostly by electricity, we need to have a fuel policy that recognizes the central role of renewable electricity and transportation electrification.

Greg Dalton: Jeremy Martin is a senior scientist with a Union of Concerned Scientists Clean Transportation Program. Jeremy, thanks for sharing your insights with us today.

Jeremy Martin: Yeah, my pleasure. Thank you for the opportunity.

Greg Dalton: You're listening to a conversation about how changes to agriculture can cut climate emissions. This is Climate One. Coming up, a chef and restaurateur trying to encourage better climate practices on farms:

Anthony Myint: You've got great chefs supporting great farms, but I don't know any chefs or restaurateurs or you know, anybody who is like at the farmer's market saying to the good farmer or the conventional farmer, hey, let me pay an extra dollar and maybe you could use this to plant some cover crops or apply some compost instead of fertilizer.

Greg Dalton: That’s up next, when Climate One continues.

Greg Dalton: This is Climate One. I’m Greg Dalton. We’re talking about the power of agricultural practices to sequester carbon and be more climate friendly. As Executive Director of Zero Foodprint, Anthony Myint works to mobilize the restaurant industry and others to support healthy soil as a climate solution. He spoke with Ariana Brocious about those efforts and his personal journey.

Ariana Brocious: You're an accomplished chef and restaurateur in San Francisco. Tell us about your experience trying to change the food system and support regenerative practices through your restaurant.

Anthony Myint: So we first learned about regenerative agriculture in 2014 and 2015, and got really excited about it and started a restaurant called The Perennial, where we were showcasing a perennial grain called Kernza under development by the Land Institute in Kansas as well as climate beneficial beef. And so they were managing the way cattle grazed as well as applying compost to the field to expedite carbon sequestration. So we were showcasing these kinds of ingredients and trying to get consumers excited about it. And then after a couple years, we started to feel like maybe it wasn't having the biggest impact in the field.

Ariana Brocious: So why did you feel that way? I mean, you were offering these products that you were contracting, so you as a supplier were in relationship, you had some buying power, but was it just insufficient?

Anthony Myint: You know, I think the actual crystallizing moment for me was being at a happy hour with a soil scientist. And I kind of had given my rah rah regenerative a type of speech. And then we were sitting there having beers and chatting and the soil scientist kind of said, ‘Hey dude, you realize the whole organic movement is 1% of acres after 50 years, right?’ I hadn't realized that, you know, we were in San Francisco, kind of in farm to table, Alice Waters country. You would see organic on the shelf at Walmart. And so I had really started to feel like, you know, consumers making a good choice was driving change. And so just to hear that, that, you know, the consumer thinks they're voting with their dollar, but it's not actually getting the next practice onto the next acre in the field, to learn that was, was very kind of a slap in the face. And so we started to ask questions, learn more about the food system, the levers for change, and then we began collaborations with the California Department of Food and Agriculture and the California Air Resources Board to kind of start laying the groundwork for something that could create transformative change.

Ariana Brocious: Right. Sort of inverting the farm to table to make it more table to farm.

Anthony Myint: That was the goal. And to almost put it a different way, like, you know, you've got great chefs supporting great farms in the Bay Area and across the country and stuff, but I don't know any chefs or restaurateurs or you know, anybody who is like at the farmer's market saying to the good farm farmer or the conventional farmer, ‘Hey, let me pay an extra dollar and maybe you could use this to plant some cover crops or apply some compost instead of fertilizer.’ I've never heard anybody say that, you know, like that. I don't think people are thinking at that level of actually actively trying to change agriculture. They're just trying to like support a good farmer and then sort of like hope that things change someday. And so when we started to learn about just how impactful agriculture could be, like how big of a climate solution it could be, then you start to want to make that change as quickly as possible.

Ariana Brocious: Elsewhere in this episode we talk with agriculture secretary Tom Vilsack and the US Department of Agriculture is using a commodities based approach to climate smart agriculture. That's what they're calling it. So I'm curious how you define this idea of climate smart agriculture and how it is similar or different to regenerative agriculture?

Anthony Myint: I think that the practices involved with climate smart agriculture, regenerative agriculture, organic agriculture, good farming, biodynamic farming, a lot of those practices are the same. So they, it would be like reducing soil disturbance. Applying compost instead of chemical fertilizer, planting cover crops, integrating livestock and the fertility that they bring. I think those specific definitions will all kind of start to be more formalized in the coming years. But I think in the meantime, my goal is still to, to get that next practice on the next acre, regardless of what the label is on the final ingredient.

Ariana Brocious: The practices that are employed by most conventional farmers, these are really to maximize the productivity of their land and get the most crops because that's sort of the incentive system that's been built. So I wanna talk a little bit about why we need to pay farmers to do things better as you're arguing that, better in the sense of maybe better for climate, better at sequestering carbon in the soil and things like that.

Anthony Myint: I think that a lot of modern agriculture and to some extent even like corporate capitalism or whatever, has been evolving in the past few decades towards a certain amount of focus on short term yield and profitability and kind of extraction basically of human and natural resources. And so I think that there are a lot of existing federal subsidies and crop insurance and different things that sort of hold the current system in place, and sort of provide these incentives for practices that may maximize short-term yield and profit, but are definitely not optimal in the long run. And then as society is starting to run up against shrinking resources and extreme weather, the change has to happen. But how it happens and kind of how those incentives and subsidies start to shift, it's complex. And so I think while some of the subsidies, let's just say subsidies for unhealthy soil practices, start to recede, my hope is that there can also be a lot of additional subsidies, for the shift to healthy soil practices.

Ariana Brocious: When we as a nation direct a lot of the federal resources to these practices, that's kind of how we've gotten the bulk of the land in the US being given over to conventional farming, and that's growing things like corn and soybeans and, and wheat and barley. But, you know, some of these crops aren't even eaten by humans. They're eaten by animals or they're turned into fuel for our cars. So how does that affect then what we get to see when we go to the grocery store and like what we can buy and what we end up eating?

Anthony Myint: So yeah, I think basically the current federal subsidy system sort of incentivizes maximum yield and profit and enables kind of cheaper food and sort of externalizes a lot of the costs. And I think that there's some research from the Rockefeller Foundation and others that sort of show that the true cost of American food is like $3 for each dollar. And so sort of just the ideal would be in the long run that the food economy and the food system starts to internalize some of those costs. But then even that doesn't get at sort of the opportunity that the land itself presents. And so some researchers, like Project Drawdown suggest that implementing managed grazing of cattle and implementing regenerative cropping starts to provide something like $40 of benefit for each dollar of implementation costs. And that's between like environment health, et cetera, but then also like resilience and farmer prosperity.

Ariana Brocious: So I wanna get into now what Zero Food Print is doing and what it sort of aims to do, because I think that some of what you describe gives me the sense that it would make food more expensive and some of these systems that we have in place do keep cost down for an average person. And you know, we have inflation pressures going on. So could you explain why zero food print is needed?

Anthony Myint: I think the simplest version would be, imagine if you could just pay one penny more on all your purchases, you're buying a dozen eggs, it's $5. It became $5 and 5 cents or something like that. And so, that 1% at scale across the whole economy would be billions of dollars. In the restaurant industry alone, it would be like $8 billion a year. That 8 billion could essentially just be subsidies for healthy soil practices that start to be like an off ramp for federal subsidies, for unhealthy soil practices that are currently in place. And so not judging anybody and how that got to be the case, but as we're trying to make progress, then there could start to be city and county and state programs that started to kind of create transformative change in how the food has grown in the city and the county and the state. But it wouldn't rely on people paying huge premiums. And then that trickling back and sending like weak kind of pull mechanism signals to producers to maybe take out a loan and maybe start changing your practices. This, there is an opportunity to just directly get that penny directly, get that 1%. to the next practice on the next acre. And so that's what zero footprint is focused on.

Ariana Brocious: So sidestepping essentially some of the federal incentive programs and offering a different financial incentive to get farmers to adopt these practices that would help climate as well as environment.

Anthony Myint: Yeah, exactly. And to me, the best analogies are in renewable energy. And so in renewable energy you have programs where a city council might make a decision and then create an opt-in program and then citizens might start sending a dollar per month on the energy bill to the local Green Energy program, you know, and anecdotally you would refer to that as like improving the grid. And so to my understanding, like those programs didn't even exist, you know, 10, 12 years ago and they're just starting. And in California that kind of work has helped shift the grid to like 36% renewables. And so compare that to 1% after 50 years, you know, or something in the organic movement. And so if we could just essentially start improving the grid of food, there's no reason you couldn't just have a dollar per month on the trash bill, 1% at restaurants or hotels or wineries or something, you know, where it's like an affordable luxury industry just going directly to that transition.

Ariana Brocious: So you've given an example when we chatted before about a Subway franchise in Colorado, I think, that's adding 1% to the bill. So when someone comes in and buys a sandwich, they see that on their receipt. It's an opt out model. So can you explain that and why that is valuable to make it opt out?

Anthony Myint: Yeah, so that's actually drawing on this renewable energy analogy too. What's happening at Subway is the business has opted in to participate in this program, and it's basically a franchisee who cares about his community, wants to do the right thing, has always been an advocate of composting. So, he agreed to join the program. He posts on the menu and, you know, table tents and different things, just letting his customers know that Subway is participating in this program. And then at checkout, you know, if you buy a sandwich, it's $10 or something. The receipt says Restore Colorado, you know, 1% and then there's a 10 cent charge. And so that 10 cents essentially is collected by Zero Footprint. And then we aggregate that over the course of a year, which turns into like tens of thousands of dollars. And then we're giving grants to farmers in the Boulder region and across the state of Colorado to start planting cover crops, applying compost, getting the next practice on the next acre. For the consumer, you know, I think the vast majority may not be paying attention and may not notice. The ones that do, we find most consumers are excited that someone's kind of like actually taking local climate action, and then if anybody wants to opt out, I think he's got like a cup of dimes on the counter, you know, so you could just grab a dime if you don't feel like participating in the program. Anecdotally he said literally zero people have opted out in a year.

Ariana Brocious: Well, and I like the idea of the dime because it does help sort of give you a visual representation of how little it is for that particular meal. Right? How small of an amount, when we think about the costs accruing over a lot of people and a lot of time. So Zero Food Print aims to revamp our farms one meal at a time, one acre at a time. Do we have time for that approach? How do we scale this?

Anthony Myint: Yeah, that's a great question. So in Boulder, Colorado right now, there's gonna be a program launching called Cool Boulder. And so that represents a community led natural climate solutions citywide program. And so Zero Food Print has partnered with the city to kind of operate that program. And so food businesses in Boulder can start to sign up for Cool Boulder, but basically it means you are sending 1% to local regenerative ag projects. And so, you know, it may feel dire with like extreme weather every year, seeming more and more serious fire seasons and things. But 1% actually adds up to quite a lot. And so basically at the, you know, whole entire, like society level, 1% of GDP would generate a trillion dollars a year towards climate solutions. And according to Project Drawdown, you know, that 1 trillion a year between now and 2050 would actually be enough to lower global temperatures.

Ariana Brocious: So I looked at the list of participating restaurants and grocery stores and some of these other groups that you work with, and I noticed that the bulk of them for now are in Colorado and California. Not surprising, since those states are more aggressive for climate action and their populations tend to support these types of policies. But I'm wondering how long you think it'll take or how you're gonna begin to get, if the, the vast majority of our food comes from the heartland and the Midwest, at least in terms of these commodity crops, how do we get people there on board and, and get them enrolled?

Anthony Myint: We're ready to start in any region, you know, any business that wants to participate, we could start, um, working with you on that. And then I think as there starts to be critical mass in each region, tens of thousands of dollars, hundreds of thousands of dollars, then we can start to organize farm projects in that region. We haven't historically been providing this incentive for this transition in the field. Let's start. It could even be a penny. You know, just start doing it and then we'll add it up and start getting it to the next best project in each region.

Ariana Brocious: Have you encountered any resistance from consumers either at the restaurant level or the, maybe the grocery store level or something who say like, well, I don't wanna pay more to support some farmer. I don't even know who's, maybe not even in my region. You know, like I, I just wanna have food that I can afford.

Anthony Myint: You know, we talked to tons and tons of chefs and operators in the restaurant industry is a very, very low margin industry to begin with. And, you know, so 1% might be someone's whole profit or something, you know, and especially amidst covid, a lot of people are in debt and understaffed and struggling. And so it's, it's tough. But by the same token, almost every single operator who joins the program later says like, geez, I don't know why I waited. Like it was kind of all in my head. Like, customers are actually excited. And you know, when they learn about it, they're like, oh, can I give more? And we've seen like inflation raise prices 20%. And so like, does it really matter if it's 19% or 21%? You know, like maybe if you are low income and on a tight budget, I totally get that, but then that person could just opt out. And so I think where, where we see it, Society is almost like, you know, stuck between a rock and a hard place. Like our backs are against the wall. There's nothing we can do. But make these changes. And so for it to be as nominal as 1%, almost feels like a value.

Ariana Brocious: In 2020, national chains like Chipotle and Panera started to put carbon labels on their food. I'm curious what kind of an impact do you think that has?

Anthony Myint: Zero Footprint actually began with a similar mindset where we were doing life cycle assessments for businesses. And so we very much supported that in the past. I think it really helps consumers make a better choice in terms of reducing their individual impact, let's say. Where things start to feel a little bit, I guess just less productive is at the systems level. And so you can imagine a consumer has the choice of like the salad with the, you know, grilled steak or the tofu or something, and they choose the tofu because it has a lower carbon footprint. Ultimately, you know, the meat company like Cargill or JBS or something, you know, I don't think they produce one pound less as a result of that or something. They produce the same amount. Maybe they ship it to India or China or something like that. So, you know, it starts to feel a little bit like misplaced effort when that same consumer might be willing to pay 10 cents more or something. But you could start to use that 10 cents to implement climate smart agriculture practices, maybe even on that ranch where the cow, you know, came from and ended up in the feedlot. And so, the trillion dollar question or whatever for me is how can we get Chipotle and Panera to almost internalize the externalities and just start incentivizing climate smart ag and sort of like, you know, asking consumers to change, I think it comes down to more like the economic incentives to make the land management changes.

Ariana Brocious: I would push back a little and say that I do think people choosing to eat less meat, even if it means foregoing the steak on their salad, you know that those choices can add up similar to what you're describing at scale. If you know we adopt a less meat centered diet, then we would collectively, hopefully, reduce some emissions.

Anthony Myint: Yeah, totally. It's a yes and. Don't just leave the lights on at home. You know, all the things switch to more efficient appliances and let's also start improving the energy grid. Like we need both of the things. But I think that the improving the grid of food piece doesn't exist yet aside from the beginning work that Zero Footprint is doing now. I've not really heard of a lot of transition finance mechanisms basically that consumers can engage with kind of at that everyday level. I think what we're trying to offer is those two options. You can make the better choice and you can also just directly pay to have that change start occurring.

Ariana Brocious: Anthony Myint is Executive director of Zero Food Print. Anthony, thank you so much for joining us on Climate One.

Anthony Myint: Thanks so much, Ariana.

Greg Dalton: On this Climate One... We’ve been talking about climate smart agriculture and ways to incentivize those practices on the farm.

To hear more, subscribe wherever you get your pods. Talking about climate can be hard-- AND it’s critical to address the transitions we need to make in all parts of society. Please help us get people talking more about climate by giving us a rating or review. You can do it right now on your device. You can also help by sending a link to this episode to a friend. By sharing you can help people have their own deeper climate conversations.

Brad Marshland is our senior producer; Our managing director is Jenny Park. Our producers and audio editors are Ariana Brocious and Austin Colón. Megan Biscieglia is our production manager. Our team also includes Sara-Katherine Coxon and Wency Shaida. Our theme music was composed by George Young (and arranged by Matt Willcox). Gloria Duffy is CEO of The Commonwealth Club of California, the nonprofit and nonpartisan forum where our program originates. I’m Greg Dalton.

2:25 Secretary Tom Vilsack on methane reduction

6:20 Tom Vilsack on Climate-Smart Commodities and voluntary incentives

13:13 Tom Vilsack on using less fossil-based fertilizers

17:30 Tom Vilsack on working collaboratively with tribes for forest stewardship

20:00 Tom Vilsack on addressing USDA’s history of racial discrimination

27:30 Jeremy Martin on corn ethanol versus gasoline

31:20 Jeremy Martin on updates to renewable fuel standard

40:00 Anthony Myint on current agricultural subsidies and incentives

43:20 Anthony Myint on Zero Foodprint’s mission and work

Play

Digging Deep into the Next Farm Bill

Otto Pilot — Fri, 10 Jun 2022 07:01:00 +0000

Digging Deep into the Next Farm Bill

06/10/2022

Surprising Connections

Roughly every five years, the U.S. designs and implements a new farm bill, which sets federal policy on agriculture across a huge swath of programs, including subsidies, food assistance, land practices and more. As the discussion around what to include in the 2023 farm bill intensifies, many are pushing for climate mitigation and adaptation measures to be a primary focus of the legislation. These measures would include support for more environmentally-friendly practices like cover cropping — planting crops to cover the soil and not meant for harvesting — no-till farming to reduce carbon emissions, as well as agroforestry or planting trees near crops to help boost yields and sequester carbon. In February of this year, USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack announced $1 billion in funding for climate-smart agriculture pilot projects that claim to reduce emissions and sequester carbon.

Jonathan Coppess, Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois and a farm bill historian, says the crop insurance program, a significant part of the farm bill, becomes increasingly complicated when a widespread drought can wipe out an entire region:

“Where we’re gonna see climate change really the most concerns could be around the crop insurance program, because we are trying to run an insurance program that covers losses and as climate change drives more and more losses…”

Scott Faber, Senior Vice President of Government Affairs at the Environmental Working Group, argues both for safety nets for farmers and for limits on how much support wealthy farmers should receive, “ I think everyone agrees that we need a farm safety net. We need ways to help farmers weathers the ups and downs of agriculture, especially now that extreme weather is impacting farmers livelihoods. And I think also it’s the case that most farmers agree that there ought to be reasonable limits on who receives those payments and how much they receive. If you’re very, very successful you probably reach a point where you no longer need the government support.”

Chuck Conner, President and CEO of the National Council of Farmer Cooperatives, feels there is a chance to address climate issues that didn’t exist in the past, “I think there's a sentiment out there that this can be win-win. We can be pro-climate, we can be pro-farmer, pro-farm income and we weren’t there 10 years ago.”

Historically, the USDA has denied loans and subsidies for nonwhite farmers. John Boyd, president of the National Black Farmers Association, shares his personal experience trying to get a loan from the USDA:

“Trying to get a farm operating loan was just an uphill battle. This person spat on me during a loan exchange, called me racial epithets, tore my application up and tossed it in the trashcan. And when I was finally able to get someone to look into it they asked that man, ‘did you have any problems do you have any problems making loans to black farmers?’ And he said, ‘well yes, I think they’re lazy and look for a paycheck on Friday. But it doesn't have anything do with me doing my job.’ And this person after he was found guilty of discriminating against me and many others in Mecklenburg County, Virginia, he was still allowed to keep his job and moved to another county where he was allowed to retire. And that’s the whole thing with discrimination in USDA. No one was ever penalized or held accountable for the active discrimination.”

This episode is supported in part by Bank of the West.

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Guests

Jonathan Coppess

Assistant Professor, University of Illinois

John W. Boyd, Jr.

President, National Black Farmers Association

Chuck Conner

President and CEO, National Council of Farmer Cooperatives

Scott Faber

Senior VP, Government Affairs, EWG

Greg Dalton: This is Climate One. I’m Greg Dalton. How realistic is it to expect climate policy to be part of the next Farm Bill?

Jonathan Coppess: We have done big and difficult things in this country. But it is difficult. And our current political state I think you'd have to be blind to not just acknowledge that it's not getting any easier.

Greg Dalton: Since the 1930s, the Federal Government has supported farmers with subsidies, credit, and crop insurance, but historically Black, Indigenous, and other farmers of color have been excluded from these benefits.

John Boyd: We got to find a way around that circus, and circle, to really put some real hard programs into effect so that farmers of color can start receiving some benefits.

Greg Dalton: Can we make progress on equity and climate now that we couldn’t in the past?

Chuck Conner: This can be win-win. We can be pro-climate, we can be pro-farmer, pro-farm income and we weren’t there 10 years ago.

Greg Dalton: Digging Deep into the Next Farm Bill. Up ahead on Climate One.

Greg Dalton: This is Climate One. I’m Greg Dalton. Roughly every five years, the U.S. designs and implements a new farm bill, which sets federal policy on agriculture across a huge swath of programs, including subsidies, food assistance, land practices and more. As the discussion around what to include in the 2023 farm bill intensifies, many are pushing for climate mitigation and adaptation measures to be the primary focus of the legislation. These measures would include support for more environmentally-friendly practices like cover cropping — planting crops to cover the soil and not meant for harvesting — no-till farming to reduce carbon emissions, as well as agroforestry or planting trees near crops to help boost yields and sequester carbon. In February of this year, USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack announced $1 billion in funding for climate-smart agriculture pilot projects that claim to reduce emissions and sequester carbon. Today we’re exploring what the farm bill can do to further incentivize carbon management practices while helping farmers and ranchers adapt to the increasingly disruptive impacts of climate change. This episode is supported in part by Bank of the West. Jonathan Coppess is an Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois and a Farm Bill historian. Climate One’s Ariana Brocious asked him where he sees the clearest avenues for incorporating more climate policy into the next Farm Bill.

Jonathan Coppess: It is a very complex and certainly an omnibus legislative vehicle. When we think about bringing climate change into federal agricultural policy, probably the first and most direct route is through what we call the conservation programs. So, these are a series of different types of assistance that we make directly to the farmer to do things like conserve natural resources, you know, to protect against soil erosion or improve water quality maybe reduce the amount of water they use in irrigation systems all the way up to things that might help protect habitat and some of the wildlife benefits we might see out of, say, retiring acreage for a set of time or rebuilding a wetland or things like that.

Ariana Brocious: So, within those conservation programs as you mention, there's a lot of them. And even farmers who take advantage of these, it might be a pretty small percentage of their overall acreage that's actually enrolled. How much room is there to grow them or put more money in them or encourage more farmers to actually take advantage of them?

Jonathan Coppess: The tough reality with conservation programs is that they're oversubscribed. So, they have pretty vast reach. I mean there's no sort of regional or statewide or crop-based limits on this. Any farmer, any farm landowner can conceivably enroll in a conservation program. Different ones have different priorities or things they try to accomplish. Like and the difference when you say a wetlands program that tries to restore wetlands and something like the environmental quality incentives program, which pays farmers a cost to share sort of offset the cost of say putting in a grass waterway, or if it's a livestock operation to address handling the manure and storage and sort of cleaning up things like that. So, they can apply very broadly. I think our biggest problem is funding. In fact, the biggest challenge for a Farm Bill debate will be the politics around the budget. And the fact that these are kind of stuck if you will, into kind of a fit box or a fixed boxed of funding. So, there’s not a lot of additional money to move out. And so, if you’re gonna increase demand or increase usage of these dollars we’re just spreading the same amount of dollars over more and more efforts, in that case more acres, more farmers.

Ariana Brocious: So, if we were trying to encourage something that we know has climate benefits like no-till agriculture where you’re helping not release carbon emissions. Is it just about getting more funding to kind of go with the existing programs and really make those more widespread?

Jonathan Coppess: In the conservation title, yes. I mean most of that is gonna be around how do we expand the funding for you know pick your acronym, pick your program and try to get more acres more farmers enrolled but to do that you need more money? When we think about getting climate change or practices that help address climate change. So, things that may capture greenhouse gas emissions and kind of hold them in the soil. To do that we need to be on the massive land acreage footprint that is in production now. So, we’re talking somewhere between 340 to 350 million acres that are used every year to produce crops. the more traditional conservation programs aren’t gonna hit that kind of acreage. We’re gonna need something that goes in and says, let’s help farmers you know combine things like no till or cover crops and nutrient management so the fertilizers are not contributing to both water quality challenges, but also climate change. So, then we're talking about a much larger acreage footprint and we start looking elsewhere in the Farm Bill for a way particularly thinking about creative ways in which we can blend some of the other programmatic assistance to farmers with climate change goals or outcomes.

Ariana Brocious: So, another major avenue for climate policies within the Farm Bill would be subsidies or crop insurance programs, right. Can you give us a sense of how climate disruption is already impacting yields and thus some of those programs?

Jonathan Coppess: Where we’re gonna see climate change really the most concerns could be around the crop insurance program, because we are trying to run an insurance program that covers losses and as climate change drives more and more losses. One of the things I’d like to talk about crop insurance, the reason why it's so challenging and the reason why we have a lot of federal involvement and frankly federal dollars going into subsidized and help the program is we all have some familiar insurance, you know, car insurance. But it isn’t the situation where an entire region wrecks its car at the same time. You have a drought where you have a widespread prevented plant scenario in the spring. You could wipe out an entire region. 2012 for example, we took a massive hit because of the drought in the Midwest in the crop insurance program. So, to be able to sort of run that kind of actuarial science and all the rating and issues they use to try to make insurance policy and program work. It is drastically complicated by that you know not unusual or out of the complete ordinary kind of massive event, a water shortage in the West, those sorts of things. And so, people that are looking forward, and trying to sort of put these pieces together are very concerned about what climate change may mean around the crop insurance program because of the way it’s designed now and because the implications we see for a variety of production challenges.

Ariana Brocious: Right. And part of that is because we are growing so many acres of the same crops, right, where a lot of this is monocropping. We have millions of acres of corn and soy and wheat and rice and other things like that. So, what's the argument then for maybe as a way to reduce the liabilities among crop insurance and losing a given crop you know, with increased climate disruption and uncertainty, further diversifying farms then. So, you're not putting all of your yield for any given year in one crop.

Jonathan Coppess: That's a tough question. I mean part of it is we have developed this way over decades. This is not a you know we’re not gonna turn this sort of thing around very quickly. And we’ve consolidated farming and so your operations are bigger and that sort of diversification cuts against all the push that we've seen for decades to try to get better, you know, efficiencies and economies of scale and those sorts of things that the economists love to talk about. But that also we do sort of lead us down into this path and then you’ve got again layered on top of that, not just the farmer but the way the whole system sets up. So, you’ll hear time and again farmers who do try to diversify, by maybe adding a crop. So, let’s add wheat into our corn and soy rotation. Oh, I’ve got no elevator to sell it to. I can’t get a good price for it. There's no market, you know, say in Central Illinois maybe for that kind of diversification. So, there's no easy way to sort of unravel or unwind those things and look towards diversification. Again, one of the examples tying back in the climate change are some of the conservation practices that do promote diversity. So, resource conserving crop rotations where we try to work in, you a different third or fourth crop. Cover cropping, which is a conservation practice where we would go in, if you take your typical corn and soybean operation you go in harvest the corn and soybeans in the fall and then you plant in overwinter crop. Because normally they’re gonna leave that field bare fallow over the winter and into the spring. And now you're doing things that hold soil, keep nutrients from leaching into river’s waterways. And a growing green crop will pull down carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses. So, it begins to help capture that. So, that would be one way to diversify conservation that isn't just going from two commercial crops to three or four. And that could be a step along that process.

Ariana Brocious: So, let's step back and take a look at the bill kind of you know as this, large kind of behemoth puzzle that has a lot of moving parts. where have we seen past successes in introducing new component pieces to the Farm Bill or you know new programs, things that do actually change kind of how the money is spent.

Jonathan Coppess: Probably the best historical example for what you just asked is the 1985 Food Security Act. And that was landmark legislation and it’s fascinating when you look at the history because the ‘85 Act came in in the middle of it where the depths of the 1980s farm economic crisis. So, we had a lot of farmers going bankrupt and the markets had struggled and it was a mess. They had high inflation. They had high interest rates. Just a series of economic challenges. At the same time in the 70s we also vastly expanded production. then is expanding acres where erosion is a problem or they’re less productive or there's other challenges to that. So, by the 80s we've gotten not only a farm crisis we got an erosion crisis. We've got soils moving into waterways with pesticides and fertilizers in them, and things like that. So, this ’85 Act is a massive change because we created what we call the conservation reserve program and that was about 45 million acres was the goal to take land out of production for up to 10 years or 10 to 15 years, actually depending on the practice you put on it. So, the conservation reserve program is designed ‘85 to really pull back those acres that shouldn't be in production because they have some environmental sensitivity. The other big one and is in 1985. We added what we call conservation compliance to the farm subsidy programs. And this is key if you think about the politics and the economic situations. So, farmers in the depths of a crisis. And at that time because erosion problem was so significant, Congress attached conservation compliance. So, basically telling a farmer if you did not comply with the way you're supposed to treat highly erodible ground for example, so it doesn’t erode you’ll lose your farm subsidy payments. Or if you drain a wetland to farm it, you'll lose your farm payments. That’s a pretty big move. Now, we can argue about how effective it is and so forth. But in terms of the politics of getting massive change not only was it a big political step, it doesn't cost any money. It doesn't have a hit in the budget because it's not creating new program payments. It's just adding requirements onto the payments that would've been triggered anyway. And so, I think that's kind of an example where you can think about blending some outcomes, farm subsidy payments in particular, are you know taxpayer-funded direct assistance to producers. Are there arguments around that that there should be something coming back in some benefit to the general public who is helping to fund the programs that say look, we want to see better climate resiliency practices undertaken to help. Let’s look at that acre as more than just the crop you're producing but the crop you're producing and ecosystem services they can provide on top of it. The water quality improvements. The habitat improvements or pulling down carbon pulling down greenhouse gasses and storing in the soil for a stretch of time.

Ariana Brocious: I think that's a great example, and I'm wondering what you see from sort of a political standpoint as to the will to do more of that in this next round. Who's pushing for adding more compliance, more requirements, you know, bolstering some of the programs we’ve talked about, what are the sort of political factions that you see playing out.

Jonathan Coppess: Now you’re asking me very tough questions. Because the politics are very difficult around this. You do not see a lot of farm groups or interests you know wanting to expand conservation compliance or take it in a new direction because of course it’s gonna impact or could potentially impact their assistance. It certainly gets even more controversial if you try to apply it to crop insurance. I don't want to leave any impression like this is an easy thing to achieve. It is a straightforward, relatively simple kind of policy concept, but the politics were difficult because we’re impacting so many producers and potentially large amounts of funding. I don't wanna ever sound like a pessimist because we have done big and difficult things in this country and congress has found ways to do big and difficult policy achievements. But it is difficult. And our current political state I think you'd have to be blind to not just acknowledge that it's not getting any easier. And in fact,we are pretty actively making it more difficult if not kind of tearing apart some of the political muscles the things that we need to exercise and use like negotiation and compromise, like deliberation and debate. We've done a lot more damage to those in recent times, than we've improved them and things like a Farm Bill as you've mentioned and those complex and many moving pieces and parts and big federal budget numbers and things like that requires an awful lot of deliberation, good-faith negotiation and ultimately compromise. And we just have not seen much of that lately.

Ariana Brocious: Jonathan Coppess is an Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois. Jonathan, thank you so much for joining us on Climate One.

Jonathan Coppess: Ariana, thanks for having me. It’s great to talk to you.

Greg Dalton: You’re listening to a conversation about the climate implications of the Farm Bill. Our podcasts typically contain extra content beyond what’s heard on the radio. If you missed a previous episode, or want to hear more of Climate One’s empowering conversations, subscribe to our podcast wherever you get your pods. Coming up, how do subsidies in the farm bill actually affect farmers?

Scott Faber: Everyone agrees that we need a farm safety net. We need ways to help farmers weather the ups and downs of agriculture, especially now that extreme weather is impacting farmers’ livelihoods. And I think also it’s the case that most farmers agree that there ought to be reasonable limits on who receives those payments.

Greg Dalton: That’s up next, when Climate One continues.

Greg Dalton: This is Climate One. I’m Greg Dalton, and we’re talking about the climate and equity implications of the upcoming Farm Bill. Scott Faber is Senior Vice President of Government Affairs at the Environmental Working Group, and Chuck Conner is President and CEO of the National Council of Farmer Cooperatives. 10 years ago Conner said that he couldn’t talk about climate with his member farmers. I asked him what those conversations are like now.

Chuck Conner: I would go far as to say most American agriculture today when this issue came up in the 2009, 2010 period there was great fear among farmers. There was just a thought that climate debate and climate if you will, friendly policies just simply meant somebody was gonna be standing there looking over their farmer shoulders, telling them how to farm and, you know, sort of micromanage kind of situation. And I think over time we have shown them that is not the case. This is about providing the right information to them. This is about providing you know efficiency options. This is about doing it the best that you possibly can. But all in a manner that gives them complete and total control over their land and their farming operations and they're supportive of that and they’re growing stronger every day and I think there's a sentiment out there that this can be win-win. We can be pro-climate, we can be pro-farmer, pro-farm income and we weren’t there 10 years ago

Greg Dalton: Scott, the environmental working group keeps a database of farm subsidies and crop insurance payments. What is your data shown on who gets those payments? Most of those dollars have gone to complex farming operations in households. Tell us where the money goes.

Scott Faber: Yeah, I think everyone agrees that we need a farm safety net. We need ways to help farmers weather the ups and downs of agriculture, especially now that extreme weather is impacting farmers livelihoods. And I think also it’s the case that most farmers agree that there ought to be reasonable limits on who receives those payments and how much they receive. If you’re very, very successful you probably reach a point where you no longer need the government support. And unfortunately, we don't have meaningful limits on our subsidies. There have been efforts to place a real means test in place. Chuck led some of those efforts when he worked for the Department of Agriculture. And the result of those loopholes if you will, is that some very, very large operators are getting millions of dollars every year. I don’t think anyone probably, except perhaps the family members and friends of those operators think that makes much sense. And I think there's probably a consensus between environmental groups and taxpayer groups and farm groups that we need a safety net it needs to really be a strong safety net. But we also need to have reasonable limits on who can get subsidies because they’re so successful. And then the amounts that they get that I can imagine any situation or any individuals who get millions and millions of dollars from the taxpayer; that just doesn't make much sense.

Greg Dalton: Chuck, if the farm bill is written with the notion that we produce too much and need to keep the brakes on. Help me understand the role of subsidies. Are we paying farmers to not produce crops, livestock, or dairy and why?

Chuck Conner: Well, this has been a paradigm of farm policy, Greg, since the 1930s where we really began to make some large crop subsidies during the Great Depression. And, you know, I think you could make an argument in that during those early years of paying at a time that you are trying to get less production. There could be some conflicts there and for many years we had to have government-sponsored set-asides, the sort of keep that check and balance. But having said that, we’re not paying a tremendous amount in farm subsidies right now, Greg, and that's a mischaracterization by some out there. Compared to the farm bills that I worked on for the Senate ag committee in the 1980s we’re playing really a lot less in farm subsidies. So, I don't see those subsidies having the market impact, like they did 15, 20 , 30 years ago.

Greg Dalton: Scott, your colleague, Anne Schechinger found that between 2001 and 2020 farmers received 1.5 billion in crop insurance payments for planting crops in flood prone parts of the Mississippi River basin. Her analysis argued that money could have been spent to retire or restore lands for carbon sequestration benefit instead. Are we spending taxpayer money in the best way in the flood prone areas of the Mississippi?

Scott Faber: Yeah, well and let me reiterate that we need a strong farm safety net; that includes helping farmers obtain crop insurance so they can manage their risks. But there are some important lessons to be learned from the flood insurance program that property owners participate in that ought to be applied to the crop insurance program. Especially where you have folks who are getting repeatedly flooded who have or are farming very wet grounds and because of their repeat indemnities from the crop insurance program are increasing the cost of crop insurance for everyone else. So, there are probably some opportunities to adjust rates to send the right market signals to folks who are farming places that they might not otherwise farm without the government-subsidized crop insurance subsidy. There are also some opportunities to probably make better use of the conservation reserve program, the land retirement program that's been around for many decades so that we’re better targeting those acres at those frequently flooded floodplain lands partly to avoid those government payments right you know if those are lands that are hard to farm, they’re frequently flooded marginal lands. Let's use our CRP dollars our land retirement dollars to try to offer those farmers an easement in part to again avoid the taxpayer cost but also to get all the environmental benefits, especially the long-term storage of carbon in the soil and the wildlife benefits the water quality benefits that would come from restoring some of those lands.

Greg Dalton: Chuck, your thoughts on reforming that. We all know that the National Flood Insurance Program is broken. Congress has tried and failed to fix it. How about climate resilience in terms of crop insurance?

Chuck Conner: Well, crop insurance is a complicated issue, Greg. I'm not discounting any of Scott's points on their face. I think these are always things that we need to look at. There’s been a number of attempts in the past to reflect, to have rates reflect that risk in that particular region in that floodplain so that you know a farmer in McLean County, Illinois, sort of the prime farmland in the United States, is not paying the same insurance for his operation to someone who's farming in the Wabash River floodplain, sort of thing. And I think we've achieved some of that. You know would I stand up here and absolutely pound and say, we’re there, no, I wouldn’t do that at all not even close. But I do appreciate Scott's comments on the CRP conservation reserve program. And I do hope that down the road CRP continues to be a vehicle whereby we can farm as is described the most valuable land and where land is highly sensitive, be able to use programs like the CRP to take that land out of production.

Greg Dalton: Chuck, your group as part of the Food and Agriculture Climate Alliance which has expressed support for climate smart policies under the US Department of Agriculture, which are voluntary incentive-based and focused on commodity crops. Learning from other sectors where the industry of course, prefers voluntary measures first, and those only go so far. What do you expect from those policies can accomplish voluntary, incentive-based?

Chuck Conner: I think they can fully accomplish our objectives here, Greg. And I don't in any way, accept that this is a precursor to something mandatory coming down the pike. I believe we can achieve those objectives. We've done it in the past in agriculture, you know, we had the recollect back to the dust bowl years and all the problems we had with soil erosion, you know, through voluntary incentive-based programs to technical assistance from soil specialists, we have curbed a great deal I would say almost all of those kinds of conservation problems. I see no reason to believe that we can't stem this problem with climate change and the problems that we have out there using the same model.

Greg Dalton: Scott, the two biggest sectors of emissions in the US are the utilities electricity buildings and transportation mobility. Those industries have also said we got this voluntary incremental comfortable we’ll get there without government regulation. That didn't really prove the case. Is it the case in agriculture that voluntary incremental would get us to our climate goals?

Scott Faber: Well, there's no question that farmers can take steps to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and many are already doing so. The real tragedy of our policy right now is that two out of three farmers who go to USDA and ask with their own money, bringing their own money at the table and asked the government to help share the cost of practices to use their nitrogen fertilizer differently or change how they're using nitrogen fertilizer or change how they're feeding the animals or how they’re storing animal waste. Two out of three farmers who asked for government assistance are being turned away because of our misplaced spending priorities. That is ridiculous. And I think every American from across the political spectrum would agree that it should be a big priority for the government to share the cost of those practices. They’re not free, they're not free to the farmer and they work. And I think to their credit, Chuck's organization joined with groups like EWG to support a big increase in spending for this climate smart practices in the Build Back Better Bill that has passed the House and is still pending in the Senate. But we need to make better use of the $6 billion a year we already are giving farmers. We have right now that USDA is giving farmers Too little of that money is going to practices that reduce emissions and too much of it is going to practices that either don't do much to reduce emissions or in some cases even increase emission. So, we need to I think while Sec. Vilsack and his team has done a lot to make climate smart practices a priority and we need more money as has been proposed in Build Back Better. We need to make much better use of the money that Congress is already provided in the last farm bill.

Greg Dalton: Chuck, some of the biggest optimists I talked to across the climate spectrum are people who are interested in soil regeneration. The soil can capture water, carbon, all sorts of things. It's tough to scale. That's pretty upsetting to hear, Scott say that farmers go and asking for climate smart help and they’re not getting it from the federal government. What ‘sbroken? What's wrong?

Chuck Conner: Well, Greg, we’ve had too few resources. I think Scott laid out the problem and what he just answered I wholeheartedly agree with it. I would like to see us you know not only rework some of our existing programs in the farm bill to really give them a climate focus, but obviously we also, you know, part of the reason so many people are being turned away is just you know not enough resources.

Greg Dalton: Well, let's talk about the political and economic context for that. We’ve seen some really big legislation trillion dollars used to be a lot of money in Washington. Now, we’re seeing several trillion-dollar bills go through for COVID. What’s the political and economic landscape right now for a more ambitious farm bill? What do you see in there, Scott?

Scott Faber: Well, you know, I think probably as all of us are talking and your listeners are listening in. Senator Manchin and other senators are meeting to discuss the energy package that would be sort of an alternative, if you will, to the Build Back Better Bill that has passed the House. Congress still has five months they have plenty of time to pass the Build Back Better package or some version of it that includes the $27 billion that the House approved and that Senator Stabenow has so effectively championed in the Senate for these climate smart practices. So, that would be an enormous missed opportunity if we left $27 billion in funding to help farmers reduce greenhouse gas emissions on the table. What a waste that would be. And I think there's not just a really powerful environmental case, right. We know that spending $27 billion on better use of fertilizer, better use of changing what we feed animals, changing how we manage manure. We know those things will reduce nitrous oxide emissions and methane emissions. There's also a really strong business case for making these investments. And that’s because right now US agriculture accounts for at least 10% of US emissions. But every other sector, mostly because of policies we've adopted like renewable portfolio standards and CAFE standards. Every other sector of the economy is taking steps to reduce their emissions except for unfortunately our farmers. The emissions when you look at the EPA's greenhouse gas inventory over time. Those emissions are going up and that's no fault of the farmer. It’s simply because we are eating more and more meat. We are producing more and more meat for growing population around the globe. And when you fertilize animal feed and when you raise animals, you’re gonna increase nitrous oxide, and methane emissions. So, I think there's not just an obvious environmental case for helping to share the cost of these practices. I think there's a real reputational risk to our farmers if we don't help every way we can and use every tool in the toolbox to reduce emissions soon. But, you know, consumers have a big role to play here too. And again, if we double animal protein production and consumption. There's no way we’re gonna meet the goals that we set for ourselves for the climate whether it's the goals that we recently restated in Glasgow. So, we've got to make it easier for consumers to occasionally just once in a while the 94% of us like me who eat meat. I had bacon and eggs for breakfast. The 94% of us who eat meat to occasionally try and replace an animal protein with a plant-based protein to get a little bit more of our protein from plants. And that's not just good for our health or personal health or cardiovascular health. It's not just good for the planet because it would help reduce many of the emissions we talked about the emissions from fertilizing animal feed and the emissions from the animals themselves. It's also really good for farmers because it turns out that America's farmers and the companies that turned plants into a plant-based food here in America are number one in the world. We are the best in the world at producing plant-based foods. There are already 55,000 jobs across the country, mostly in rural places producing plant-based foods. That's a great opportunity for our farmers. And it's one we will lose if we aren’t smart because other countries, especially China, no surprise, are making huge bets because they see what we’re talking about. We need to make some bets in the next farm bill.

Greg Dalton: Chuck, you say the farm bill is about leveling the playing field. Does addressing systemic racism have a place in the farm bill?

Chuck Conner: I think so. Absolutely, Greg, I think we need to make sure that every farm program that we reauthorize in the farm bill, every new program we put in place, whether that's climate related or anything else there has to be a key element of that of serving the interest of the farmers of color. Having served the, you know, a stint at the Department of Agriculture this is not an idle problem. It's been a problem and it proceeded Sec. Vilsack. But I will tell you as well I think Tom Vilsack is working very, very hard to try and reverse some of these patterns at USDA that have roots going back decades and decades.

Greg Dalton: Thank you, Chuck and Scott.

Chuck Conner: Thank you, Greg. Enjoyed it.

Greg Dalton: You're listening to a conversation about the upcoming Farm Bill. This is Climate One. Coming up, historically, black farmers have been excluded from the benefits of the farm bill and faced discrimination from the USDA.

John Boyd: Many Blacks weren't even given a loan application, you know. I was given one, mine was tossed in the trashcan and all kinds of stuff that I personally faced. But the further I went south the more egregious and more blatant the discrimination was for black farmers.

Greg Dalton: That’s up next, when Climate One continues.

Greg Dalton: This is Climate One. I’m Greg Dalton. The U.S. Department of Agriculture is tasked with implementing the programs in the Farm Bill. Historically, the USDA has denied loans and subsidies for nonwhite farmers. I asked John Boyd, president of the National Black Farmers Association, to share his story.

John Boyd: Well, my personal experience with the USDA as far as it relates to discrimination goes back probably 39 years ago to 1983 a very, very long time. My dad and grandfather were totally against going to USDA and doing business with the government. And they always thought that the government and black farmers didn't go together, just never mixed. And maybe I should have listened to him, you know. That’s how I got introduced to it and it was a spiral downhill, so to speak. As far as how they treated black farmers this lender would only see black farmers on Wednesday. One day a week so we would all be in the hallway. I knew these older black farmers in the community they were leaders they were deacons. A couple even held local positions in the county. But this person didn’t waive the discrimination for any of that. He talked low to them as far as bold and downward. Called them boy and negro. All sorts of racial slurs is how it began. And then trying to get a farm operating loan was just an uphill battle. This person spat on me during a loan exchange, called like I said racial epithets tore my application up and toss it in the trashcan. And when I was finally able to get someone to look into it they asked that man. Did you have any problems do you have any problems making loans to black farmers? And he said, well yes, I think they’re lazy and look for a paycheck on Friday. But it doesn't have anything to do with me doing my job. And this person after he was found guilty of discriminating against me and many others in Mecklenburg County, Virginia. He was still allowed to keep his job and moved to another county where he was allowed to retire. And that’s the whole thing with discrimination in USDA. No one was ever penalized or held accountable for the active discrimination. Although we had two federal lawsuits one in 1999 and the other one December 8, 2010 when then former Pres. Barack Obama signed the Claims Remedy Act 2010 into law. So, we had two settlements but nobody was ever fired. No senior person at USDA or no local person for that matter was ever fired for the active discrimination. And as I organized further, I went South Mississippi, Alabama and Arkansas, Tennessee, Louisiana. The discrimination was more pervasive. And so, with many Blacks weren't even given a loan application, you know. I was given one, mine was tossed in the trashcan and all kinds of stuff that I personally faced. But the further I went south the more egregious and more blatant the discrimination was for Black farmers.

Greg Dalton: Well, you mentioned a couple of those settlements 1999 settlement in Pigford versus USDA that was an agreement of about $1 billion where government agreed to pay black farmers. Have Black farmers received what they are owed under that settlement and the other one you mentioned?

John Boyd: Yes, but it took too long. And, you know, it took me 30 years on that complaint. there was a few bills as well that went along with those settlement. So, we have all of the claims were too old, including mine when I first started suing the government. My two years of statute of limitations had expired, so I had to go to Congress and get that lifted, got that passed that allowed all of the cases to go back to 1981 to have their cases. So, any black farmer that filed a case between 1981 and 1997, would be able to participate in the first lawsuit. USDA, one on the motion that they didn't have to notify any Black farmer about the class-action. So, therefore 83,000 Black farmer families came after the filing deadline. The judge wouldn't allow them to be a part of the case. So, I went back to Congress again to have that measure included in a bill that with the help of Chuck Grassley and George Allen some Republicans heading it. And the leader at that time was Ted Kennedy and as he became ill then Sen. Barack Obama and Sen. Biden believe it or not were the lead sponsors of that bill. And they both went on to become president and I didn’t know that was gonna happen but that bill came about. And the bill only let them have those 83,000 Black farmers cases heard based on merit. They didn't divide any compensation. So, I had to go back to Congress again to get the settlement funded for $1.25 billion. And those cases were finally heard and adjudicated.

Greg Dalton: Pres. Biden has directed $4 billion in COVID relief funds toward Black, Indigenous and other farmers of color. Is that money making a difference and is USDA acting more appropriately responsibly this time around?

John Boyd: Well, there’s a few things that I would like to address there. One is then Vice President Biden in South Carolina that we desperately needed a new face at USDA to take on the bureaucracy at USDA. But instead we got Secretary Vilsack for a third term. And I did express to then then President-elect that I thought that Sec. Vilsack was the wrong man for this time in history. And he pressed for us to support Secretary Vilsack. And if things didn't work out to let him know. I don't think that things are working out in my opinion. The bill that provided the 5 billion 1 billion for to improve systems and outreach and set up all these other things at USDA. And then 4 billion for debt relief in the form of guaranteed loans and direct loans. So, 14,000 plus farmers of color were eligible to proceed there. There was no entity involved. It was a government to government transaction. So, why did it take so long? There is no need to hold listening sessions when you already knew who these persons who are eligible, the farmers of color to receive the debt relief. So, why not do it the same way you do subsidies for primarily large-scale white farmers. When the president signs it. It's in the checking accounts of those large-scale corporate farmers within weeks of it passing. So, it took almost a year and then white farmers started suing us or reverse discrimination and 12 different complaints in federal court. And the National Black Farmers Association, and the Association of American Indian Farmers really started fighting back in those federal courts. Two of the courts, Texas and Florida, issued a temporary injunction blocking the aid to the farmers of color. So, right now I'm in federal court in 12 different states. 12 different complaints in various states. Now, the white farmers were very crafty at this, I hate to use this term. They picked very conservative judges very conservative courts that they thought would look favorably upon what they were saying that it was reverse discrimination some new loan program that excluded whites. But they never said they were the ones, they, being white male farmers that were getting the debt relief. The whole 30 years I was asking for it, it was those farmers who are actually getting the debt relief. That's what I was trying to get because black farmers want it. We were getting 30-day loan acceleration our lenders which means they were foreclosing on us. And white farmers were provided with other options under the 1951-S which is the loan servicing for agriculture in this country at USDA. They were getting debt all re-amortizations debt writes down debts written off. And they were getting these options with ease. And Black farmers if where weren’t able to hustle up what we owe the government those that were lucky enough to get loans within 30 days we lost our farms.

Greg Dalton: Well, that’s quite a tale. Thank you for sharing that. Are there measures in the farm bill to address these inequities?

John Boyd: I’m glad you brought up the farm bill because it's something that I would like to see a lot of changes in how they address Black and other farmers of color. And some of the bills that recently passed it gives the secretary of agriculture full discretion to implement. I would like to see that changed. Instead of giving the secretary whoever that secretary is full discretion to implement, give them time ramifications in which to complete the task. For instance, if there was a timetable for debt relief. This should be executed within 30, 60 and 90 days. We wouldn’t be probably wouldn’t be in the boat that we’re in. And the programs that are targeted for farmers of color. We always have to have matching funds from some outside organization to participate in those federal programs. I would like to see those measures taking out of the farm bill. And what’s happened to us historically is we don't receive the checks from corporate America and the others who manage these retirement funds that quickly help other causes have been slow to help the National Black Farmers Association. And if they do, it’s very, very small monetary contributions. Not to say as the president that we’re not appreciative of that – I don't want anyone listen to this say oh my god this people don’t appreciate the help. We appreciate the help at any amount. But for us to really save our farm from foreclosure the average size of a farm mortgage is $300,000. Someone has to be able to write that in order to save that farm and get that farmer a second chance. And we need the form of more direct assistance for farmers such as infrastructure and equipment to facilitate any outside contractor. And that’s something Congress continues to turn a deaf ear to. So, they would give 40 million to food hubs and food banks and 100 million to food banks, but they won't invest in the actual farmer himself, that is the person growing the food. And I’m gonna stop talking there.

Greg Dalton: You mentioned land loss, you know, Black run farms were about 14% of the total in the US in 1920 and today down to around 2%. And small and medium-sized farms have a harder time getting access to capital and technical support. Can you explain the challenges that present to new farmers and farmers of color.

John Boyd: That’s what we’ve been fighting right there. The government needs to invest heavily in new and beginning farmers. And if we don’t, I’m telling you right now this not only will Black farmers be facing extinction but all farmers in this country will be facing extinction if we don't invest in the next generation of farmers.

Greg Dalton: And do you see change at USDA now you talked about the impunity particularly in local offices. Do you see a change now?

John Boyd: Not only local level. And that’s where the changes have to happen. And I’m gonna try to explain this quickly for, 101, for people who don't understand how the government works. You have a new administration that comes in. They have some great ideas that could help all farmers and even maybe even Black farmers and farmers of color. It takes them a year or two to get those ideas into the administration. And by the third year those persons who are career bureaucrats there who are supposed to be implementing this. So, you know, what I don’t like this and I’m gonna slow roll this and I'm going to do this the way I’ve been doing it for 30 years at USDA. Those career bureaucrats always seem to outlast the great ideas and mindstreams of the new incoming administration. And that's what's been happening to Black farmers. We got to find a way around that circle to really put some real hard programs into effect so that farmers of color can start receiving some benefits. And new and beginning farmers can receive some incentives to actually become farmers people. It’s the hardest occupation known to man. And if we don't do some things to do that to entice as my son said, daddy make farming sexy. If we don’t find a way to do this in a hurry, we’re gonna lose a generation of farmers.

Greg Dalton: What avenues do you see in the next farm bill for increasing climate resilience among all farmers, Black farmers, Indigenous white farmers.

John Boyd: Yes, well, you know, climate is a very big issue here. I think it’s an issue that should have been addressed 25 years ago. But we’re just now getting to it. It's just now front and center. When I first started farming in 1983, we were planting corn in March. Now, I’m planting corn in May and it’s all due to the changing seasons. When I first started farming, I would be finished harvesting soybeans by October 15th. Now I’m just getting in the field at November because it starts to rain and then I can’t get out there. The seasons are changing. Planting season is shorter. And the harvest season is shorter. All of those things are due to climate change. These severe summers, maximum heat, you know. As a kid you didn’t see 110, 111° days when I was a kid. You know, if you got up to 100 man, we thought all hell was breaking loose, you know. So, now you see triple digits and some of us were like, oh it’s gonna be a hundred again today. Crops can stand two days of hundred-degree heat and then you have to do something. You’re gonna have to irrigate or you begin to lose or take damage in your crops. But I'm saying that because the climate is changing. We need to address it. We need to help fix it. And it's not just a farmer thing. It's a world thing. Where the whole world is gonna have to participate in order to make our climate better. It’s something that we can’t continue to take for granted people. my grandfather said, if you don't take care of the land the land won’t take care of you.

Greg Dalton: John Boyd, Jr. is President of the National Black Farmers Association. John Boyd, thank you for sharing your story and your insights on the farm bill on Climate One

John Boyd: Thank you very much for having me.

Greg Dalton: On this Climate One... We’ve been talking about the equity and climate implications of the upcoming Farm Bill. Climate One’s empowering conversations connect all aspects of the climate emergency. To hear more, subscribe to our podcast on Apple or wherever you get your pods. Talking about climate can be hard-- but it’s critical to address the transitions we need to make in all parts of society. Please help us get people talking more about climate by giving us a rating or review if you are listening on Apple. You can do it right now on your device. You can also help by sending a link to this episode to a friend. By sharing you can help people have their own deeper climate conversations.

Greg Dalton: Brad Marshland is our senior producer; our producers and audio editors are Ariana Brocious and Austin Colón. Megan Biscieglia is our production manager. Our team also includes Steve Fox and Sara-Katherine Coxon. Our theme music was composed by George Young (and arranged by Matt Willcox). Gloria Duffy is CEO of The Commonwealth Club of California, the nonprofit and nonpartisan forum where our program originates. I’m Greg Dalton.

Play

Vandana Shiva and the Hubris of Manipulating Nature

Otto Pilot — Fri, 30 Jul 2021 08:00:00 +0000

Vandana Shiva and the Hubris of Manipulating Nature

07/30/2021

Visionary Guests

What are the limits on how much humans should meddle with the natural world?

Vandana Shiva is an eco-feminist, activist, editor, and author who has spent much of her career opposing corporate-led globalization, particularly in agriculture. She is the founder of Navdanya, a movement for biodiversity conservation and farmers’ rights.

Her activism began in college, when she volunteered with the nonviolent grassroots Chipko movement led by women aimed at stopping deforestation in Northern India.

“And the women said these forests are not timber mines. These forests are sources of solar water and oxygen and every day we realize how that is the basis of life,” Shiva says.

She studied physics as an undergraduate, and holds a PhD in philosophy from the University of Western Ontario focusing on the philosophy of physics. She’s received numerous awards for her work and has also been called “anti-science” by her detractors, which include prominent scientists.

Shiva is highly critical of how humans have changed our relationship with the land through industrial monocrop agriculture. She fiercely opposes the use of genetically modified crops, and has called seed patents “bio-piracy.”

“Because what nature created you claim as your creation, and GMO in that worldview means God Move Over, GMO,” she says. But it’s not just the technology she’s critical of.

“I’m critical of the world view of arrogance. The worldview that came with colonialism, the mechanistic mindset of the conquering man being the creator of the earth and creator of the wealth,” Shiva says.

She argues for a renewed focus on biodiversity and regenerative agriculture to help solve the climate crisis, as well as improve our nutritional health.

“Small farms produce more, biodiversity produces small because it works in cooperation...the more you intensify the flows of nutrition in the system, the soil regenerates, the plants regenerate, the pollinators come back and you actually have more nutrition per acre rather than yields per acre,” she says.

“So, this debate that's been created ‘oh, you’ll need more land’ is a false debate. It's chemical farming that needs more land. It's commodity farming that needs more land. Otherwise why would the soil lobby have invaded into the Amazon [rainforest] just to grow GMO soya? Most of it for animal feed and biofuel? The expansionism of GMO soya I should tell anyone that this is not about feeding the world, but it is feeding profits.”

Despite her criticism of the global power structures, she believes we have the power to change for the better.

“And if we are able to make that leap from monocultures to diversity, from superiority to equality, from destruction as creation to co-creation in nonviolence, then humanity has a hope,” Shiva says.

Guests

Vandana Shiva

Director of the Foundation for Science, Technology & Ecology

Greg Dalton: This is Climate One. I’m Greg Dalton. Today, Indian eco-feminist Dr. Vandana Shiva talks about her opposition to industrial agriculture and genetically modified crops. She’s called seed patents “bio-piracy”:

Vandana Shiva: So, why do I call this biopiracy? Because what nature created you claim as your creation and GMO in that worldview means God Move Over, GMO.

Greg Dalton: But it’s not just the technology she’s critical of.

Vandana Shiva: I’m critical of the world view of arrogance. The worldview that came with colonialism, the mechanistic mindset of the conquering man being the creator of the earth and creator of the wealth, that they basically stole.

Greg Dalton: Vandana Shiva on tapping biodiversity to counter the hubris of corporations manipulating nature. Up next on Climate One.

Greg Dalton: What are the limits on how much humans should meddle with the natural world? Climate One’s empowering conversations connect all aspects of the climate emergency. I’m Greg Dalton.

Greg Dalton: My guest this week is Dr. Vandana Shiva. She's an eco-feminist who has spent much of her career opposing corporate-led globalization, particularly in agriculture. She holds some controversial opinions, and has been called “anti-science” by her detractors, which include prominent scientists. Although she studied physics as an undergraduate, she holds a PhD in philosophy from the University of Western Ontario focusing on the philosophy of physics. In fact checking this interview, I found some of her numbers to be problematic. We edited the show to focus on her larger themes rather than specific figures, which lacked precision. At the same time, I found Dr. Shiva to be provocative, controversial and insightful, especially when she was questioning my own linear and western-centric thinking. During the 1970s Vandana Shiva was active in the grassroots Chipko movement led by women aimed at stopping deforestation in Northern India. I asked what drew her to that cause.

Vandana Shiva: Greg, I’ve grown up in the forests of the Himalaya. I was born in the forests of the Himalaya. My father was a forest conservator. And before leaving for Canada for my PhD in the foundations of quantum theory, I just wanted to carry a bit of my home with me so I went for a short trek. And this oak forest that I used to walk in had disappeared. And the stream that came from it, was a trickle. I was of course taking a flight the next day to Canada so I continued. But while talking to, you know, waiting on the road for the bus, chaiwala started to talk of how Chipko had started and now there’s hope. And I asked more and he knew a little bit about women’s action. But I took a pledge in my mind that every vacation I’ll come back and I’ll meet the people and volunteer for this movement. So, that's what I did. Every summer, every winter I would come back from Canada and volunteered for the Chipko Movement. So, it’s the disappearance of a forest that led me to it. And now while the forests are burning in California, in Canada, I’m thinking of the slogans of the women who never went to school. They defended the oak tree and they sang songs and said the oak gives us water. The oak leaves become the streams and they were talking about humus and they were fighting against monocultures. And the women said these forests are not timber mines. These forests are sources of solar water and oxygen and every day we realize how that is the basis of life. People died during COVID for lack of oxygen. People are dying for lack of water. A billion people and more are dying for lack of food. This is exactly the message that women simple women from the Himalaya would give me and I say they gave me; they became my professors of ecology and biodiversity. I did a PhD in Canada but a non-PhD learning that has lasted me my life from the Chipko university.

Greg Dalton: So, I wanna get back to Chipko. But you said a billion people dying from lack of food that sounds like bit of an exaggeration, a billion people dying?

Vandana Shiva: Oh, a billion, sorry, a billion people are hungry. And not just undernourished really denied. If you take the undernourishment figure, you know, there are two sources of undernourishment. One is you don't have access to food. And this is happening also to the farmers who are growing food. Half of the hungry people of the world are agricultural people who are growing rice with chemicals for which they had to borrow money so when they grow the rice they have to pay back the agent of the chemical fertilizer and the pesticide and the seed agent. So, they grew the rice but they can’t eat it. And when they sell it, it sells for very low. When they buy the same rice it’s four times more. This is the polarization of prices that globalization has created. And that means the same farmers who grow the rice starve. The second is the food itself is now nutritionally empty because the soils are depleted of nutrition. And the nutrition in our food comes from two sources. The seeds we are not breeding for nutrition we are breeding for weight. It's the ultimate Cartesian victory, you know, how big is the apple, how heavy is your soya bean, not how much nutrition is in. That’s why I shifted to nutrition per acre and we can feed two times the world if we conserve biodiversity. The third reason why people are hungry we are not eating food anymore. It's empty food. You know this junk food like stuff. So a billion people are hungry, but 2 billion are sick because of these food-like substances where the industry is growing and stuffing it down, and the American diet is now being spread and everybody have diabetes you have cancer you got metabolic disorders.

Greg Dalton: Yeah, sometimes I think about yeah there’s a food industry that gets us sick and then there's a medical industry that wants to sell us drugs after we get sick from the food that is sold to us. Much of your work has been to promote biodiversity and agriculture, just as you articulated, specifically fighting against corporate patents on seeds and the use of GMOs. You’ve called seed patents biopiracy how much of your objections of the technologies themselves versus who controls it the consolidation of power so much power in few hands.

Vandana Shiva: The technology and patenting are wedded from birth. The patenting was the aim, the technology was the means to achieve that aim. The false claim was made that by tweaking one gene or shooting one toxic gene, a bt toxin, a Roundup Ready, we are the inventors and creators of life and therefore we own the seed, this seed and its 20 generations to come. And these are cases that have gone to the Supreme Court there’s a very famous case of Monsanto versus a farmer in US where they actually ruled that the seed is a self-replicating machine. And even if you didn't buy the seed from Monsanto you bought the grain in an elevator, it is still intellectual property. Having done my doctorate work on nonseparation. Having done my doctorate work on potential. I said, but the seed is self-organized autopoiesis in making billions of years of evolutionary history in it. The farmers have bred these seeds, the qualities of the seed, the true qualities outside the toxic qualities. The aroma of our basmati, the known gluten properties of our wheats. These weren’t created by Monsanto or genetic engineering. They were bred by the farmers. So, why do I call this biopiracy? Because what nature created you claim as your creation and GMO in that worldview means God Move Over, GMO. God Move Over. Creation is us. The second is all indigenous people, the minimum we can claim is 10,000 years. 10,000 years we farmed we have bred seeds, one grass, oryza sativa became 200,000 rice varieties with the brilliance of Indian peasants. Maize, one teosinte became the thousands of maize varieties in Mexico and in Peru and in the first nations of America. That brilliance of breeding is denied and the corporations here when I shoot a gene, I create a seed. It is so ontologically wrong, but it's also ethically wrong and epistemologically wrong. So, when you asked me what I’m critical of, I’m critical of the worldview of arrogance, the worldview that came with colonialism. The mechanistic mindset of the conquering man being the creator of the earth and creator of the wealth that they basically stole. So, you know, there's a way in which in our age, the religion that was the colonizing mission. The first colonization, oh I got to be a Christian all those little kids from the indigenous peoples the first nations thrown into boarding schools. Thousands died; the graves are just being found. That is all to make them civilized through Christianity. Today’s civilizing mission use the mysterious word technology. But technology is merely a tool at any point humanity is brilliant enough to have 5, 10, 20 tools to choose from. That is technological democracy. And the minute you put technology at the level of religion with a capital T in the hands of five men, then that's when hubris substitutes democracy.

Greg Dalton: And one of the biggest seed controversies has been over golden rice, a variety genetically engineered to provide vitamin A. According to the WHO vitamin A deficiency is responsible for 1 to 2 million deaths a year plus another half million cases of blindness. This sounds like a pretty good idea to fortify rice with vitamin A.

Vandana Shiva: Well, it would be a good idea, Greg, if there was no other source of vitamin A. One, when you need vitamin A what do you eat? You eat curkman. Why is vitamin A the precursor called Beta carotene? Carrot is there --

Greg Dalton: Yeah, leafy greens, right. But if it’s so readily available then there wouldn’t be such a vitamin A deficiency.

Vandana Shiva: So, why is there a vitamin A deficiency? Let's go back to the green revolution Norman Borlaug who took mixed farming with lots of vegetables, lots of greens, lots of pulses, and lots of oilseeds. And then said, no, I want to sell my fertilizers the leftovers of the war and therefore we must have monocultures. When you have an external input system you have to have a monoculture.

Greg Dalton: Those fertilizers based on fossil fuels partly, right?

Vandana Shiva: They are based on fossil fuels 1 kg of urea fertilizer requires 2 L equivalent of diesel. The same companies made the explosives and ammunition and made the fertilizers. And, you know, it’s the same buyers and you talked earlier about some of them make us sick and then others make a profit it’s the same people who make us sick. But coming back to the issue of vitamin A deficiency. So, you create monocultures and what is Roundup, Roundup as the debates in the biodiversity convention used to show Monsanto would get up and say we prevent the weeds from stealing the sunshine. Well, the sun is so generous and it grows biodiversity. The beautiful amaranth, which is being made a superweed with Roundup resistant soy and Roundup resistant corn in the fields of America and now they’re using dicamba and more and more virulent herbicides. What was called weeds are sources of food, are sources of vitamin A. The second big reason is that when you do so-called high-yielding varieties with chemical fertilizers. First, your high-yielding variety is merely taking more out of the farm destroying the straw which would go back to the soil to make the nutrition. You've destroyed the nutrition cycle of the earth, you've destroyed the nutrients in the soil, the zinc, the iron, everything else that makes us healthy. So, you’re having nutritionally empty food. So, you have a monoculture, you have nutritionally empty food then you do milling, industrial milling is a way to take nutrition out but they’re so clever then they sell the bran as a separate product. They sell rice bran oil as another product. So, they dismember a product which you would eat in wholesome ways. So, it's a dysfunctional system to make more and more money for a few people, and we have watched how to dump GMO soy on India. The industry just ganged up and banned our edible oils. They banned our local cold pressed virgin mills, 5 million just made illegal overnight. And there’s a woman who came to me and said bring back our mustard. We cannot eat food cooked in GMO soya. And we have to do a satyagraha, satyagraha is Gandhi’s word of noncooperation. Satya, truth. Agraha, force. He told us how to throw the British out.

Greg Dalton: On GMOs. I hear your points about control and the mindset and the worldview. Though the World Health Organization, the American Medical Association, the US National Academy of Sciences, the British Royal Society have all examined the evidence and concluded that consuming foods containing ingredients derived from GM crops are no riskier than consuming the same foods containing ingredient from plants modified by conventional improvement techniques. So, acknowledging all the things you said about GMOs and control and power. Will you acknowledge that as a scientist GMOs are safe for humans to eat?

Vandana Shiva: But we never even started talking about it as food. We were talking about it in the field as a crop. And the reason I played a big role in writing, working with governments to write Article 19.3 of the Convention on Biological Diversity which led to the biosafety protocol on which I was appointed as an expert. Biosafety is about the impact on biodiversity. What does it do what does Bt toxin do to the bees and the butterflies? What does Bt toxin do to the soil organisms? So, the impact on biodiversity, the impact on public health and now added to it is the social economic impact on farmers. In India, we’ve lost 400,000 farmers to suicide. 85% of them this is from government data, you just have to do the Bt cotton map the GMO map and map the suicides. 85% are in the cotton area 95% of it Monsanto so --

Greg Dalton: I did read a Brookings Institution report that said that per capita kind of questioning with some of the trends of the Indian farmer suicide. So, there is some debate there, tragic, there are some debate about whether it's out of proportion to other countries, etc. but that is certainly something that's very serious.

Vandana Shiva: Yeah. But let me come back to the GMO question. To talk about food means it's all right if you do lose your biodiversity. I think the biosafety question is about the relationship of the crops we grow and the evidence is now so clear that GMO crops have failed to do what they were claimed to do Roundup Ready crops were introduced in order to control weeds, American farmlands are overtaken by superweeds. A plant is a self-organize complex system. And the weeds they evolved resistance just like antibiotics, resistance is growing. The more antibiotics used in the animal farms in your factory farming you’re gonna have antibiotic resistance. So, we come back again to the signs of living systems, the technology where it was applied has failed. I don’t think big scientific institutions should be looking at the wrong place. We're talking about crops and biodiversity. No one talked about food safety and in the early days of course no one died of DDT immediately. Rachel Carson was attacked because she pointed out the harm. Today we know. So, I mean neither GMOs nor chemicals have instant impact. The impact builds up over time. But on life on earth it does have impact. Poisons kill immediately and are the basis of the extinction crisis. So, anyone who cares about diversity of species should be looking at the tools that are driving species to extinction. So again, we have to think in systems ways we have to think in interconnections.

Greg Dalton: You’re listening to a Climate One conversation about the hubris of manipulating nature with Indian ecofeminist Dr. Vandana Shiva. If you missed a previous episode, or want to hear more of Climate One’s empowering conversations, subscribe to our podcast wherever you get your pods. Coming up, Shiva shares more about how she sees industrial, globalized agriculture hurting our natural systems, including those like the Amazon rainforest that are essential to the planet’s resilience:

Vandana Shiva: It's commodity farming that needs more land otherwise why would the soil lobby have invaded into the Amazon just to grow GMO soy. Most of it for animal feed and biofuel. The expansionism of GMO soya I should tell anyone that this is not about feeding the world, but it is feeding profits.

Greg Dalton: That’s up next, when Climate One continues.

Greg Dalton: This is Climate One. I’m Greg Dalton, and we’re talking with Indian ecofeminist Vandana Shiva. We pick up our discussion on industrial monocrop agriculture.

Greg Dalton: So, I certainly see the capitalism is about creating revenue streams and intellectual property helps lock up technology that secures revenue streams and therefore profits for the capitalistic system. But the system you’re describing are so entrenched and complex how do we change them? Some people would say organics are more nutritious and counter many of the things you’re talking about. Others would say organics require too much land, that organics cannot scale and feed the world.

Vandana Shiva: So, you know, that was the word when Europe was the center of the world. We used to talk about the Eurocentric worldview. And I think now that the US thinks it’s the center of the world that’s a very American centric worldview. But most of the farms of the world are not like what has been made of the American farmlands. Agribusiness has destroyed farming in America. Small farms produce more, biodiversity produces small because it works in cooperation. So, the more you intensify chemicals, you intensify commodity production which doesn't feed you. But the more you intensify biodiversity, the more you intensify the flows of nutrition in the system the soil regenerates the plants regenerate the pollinators come back and you actually have more nutrition per acre rather than yields per acre. So, this debate that's been created oh, you’ll need more land is a false debate. It's chemical farming that needs more land. It's commodity farming that needs more land otherwise why would the soil lobby have invaded into the Amazon just to grow GMO soy. Most of it for animal feed and biofuel. The expansionism of GMO soya I should tell anyone that this is not about feeding the world, but it is feeding profits.

Greg Dalton: And climate is disrupting agriculture small-scale agriculture large-scale agriculture. Lot of small-scale agriculture as you know is done by women. Is there a technology that can help provide food security and help women farmers isn’t some of that positive? What kind of technology can you see helping?

Vandana Shiva: So, Greg, I think the first issue is it's not just that agriculture is being impacted by climate change. Industrial, globalized agriculture based on fossil fuels and fossil fuel-based chemicals is 50% of the climate problem. The figures are there it just usually they look at only agricultural production. But in agriculture production itself when you see those giant machines moving, they’re all fossil fueled driven. When you see the urea applied to the fields it's emitting nitrous oxide which is 300 times more damaging to the atmosphere than carbon dioxide and it is the planetary boundary more structured. I do not know why nitrogen is not in the discussion on climate change.

Greg Dalton: In this part of our conversation, Dr. Shiva cited several figures that I thought to myself, we better check that. And we did. It is true that nitrous oxide is 300 times more damaging to the atmosphere than carbon dioxide and nitrogen is not a big part of the climate discussion. Her claim that agriculture is half of the climate problem is problematic.

Agricultural emissions have been hotly debated since a 2006 report from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization called Livestock’s Long Shadow. That report pegged agriculture at 18 percent of global emissions, and the FAO later lowered the number to 14- percent. But direct emissions from growing food and harvesting it with machinery burning fossil fuels is only part of the story. Indirect impacts - such as clearing forests to grow corn and soy to feed to cows to make burgers - is also a significant part of the equation. The math gets complicated fast. A recent Mckinsey study based on IPCC data pegs agriculture emissions at 20 percent and land use changes and forestry at 7 percent. That means the total for ag, forests and land use change is 27 percent - almost as big a source of emissions as industry.

Vandana Shiva: I think that's where people need to become a little more thinking. The third is processing why are we taking good healthy food and turning it into junk that makes us sick and destroys the planet. Ultra-processed food is the single biggest cause of chronic diseases which are making us more vulnerable to infections like COVID. So, processing we could do with much less, and more. Transport, we don’t have to move food miles we call it food miles. This shipping containers of green and vegetables across the world we need to localize more. And then retail, Mr. Jeff Bezos just went for 10 minutes into space all over the place comes down and says two things that everyone should be outraged with, all listeners of Climate One should be outraged with. The first he says, oh, now after my 10-minute ride we can put all the polluting industry into other planets. Are you crazy? Are you crazy? You've destroyed this planet and you with your shipping a one parcel for one hairpin are big polluter. No one has done the ecological footprint of Amazon distribution. But more importantly he sits there arrogantly and says, while people are fighting for day wages, workers compensation. He sits there and says; I want to thank all the customers and workers of Amazon who sent me for a 10-minute flight. That irresponsibility is the hubris.

Greg Dalton: Right. Stephen Colbert just said he wants Jeff Bezos to pay some taxes.

Vandana Shiva: But let me complete the figures of the emissions from industrial, globalized agriculture, not agriculture, but industrial globalized agriculture. 20% from turning food into rubbish that is destroying the planet and our health. And then because you're privileging long-distance movement and uniformity you have waste. If I’m growing food locally there’s no waste. I can feed my cow. I can compost it. No food goes waste. But long-distance transport makes waste. Now, when you asked me is there a technology that's where I think for the Western industrial civilization the big quantum leap in their minds has to be technology is any transformation. So, when a person breed seeds they are involved in breeding technology. Breeding doesn't begin with Monsanto poisoning the seed. When a leaf, a beautiful leaf takes the sunlight and the carbon dioxide and through photosynthesis transforms this into the oxygen that we breathe and keeps us alive, and the carbohydrates that are the basis of all the food and fiber of the world that is the most sophisticated technology for taking common dioxide out of the atmosphere, putting it into plants turning it into food, putting it back into soil, turning it into fertile soils. Our assessments the community that created the regeneration movement. We have the regeneration international all the scientists were working on the link between the biosphere and the atmosphere are showing that if we stop fossil fuels today and don't lead to new emissions and I do believe polluter should pay and not make tricks through like net zero, we can talk about that later, but we basically can if we stop the pollution in agriculture, if we stop the chemicals in a 10-year timeframe, we can feed the world, regenerate more wilderness. We can have more nourishment and the bees can come back and have the habitats, but most importantly we can do this all in 10 years, 10 tons is the amount we can add every year. The research is showing this. And on our farm at Navdanya we do these studies on how with biodiversity intensification intensifying photosynthesis biomass, biodiversity you can actually heal the cycle and regenerate rather than degenerate the planet.

Greg Dalton: Dr. Vandana Shiva is ecologist, activist, author and director of the Foundation for Science Technology and Ecology. We’re talking about the hubris of manipulating nature. I’d like to ask you Dr. Shiva, you know, I was quite relieved when I received my first and second COVID-19 vaccine. Have you been vaccinated? I know that it was quite bad in India.

Vandana Shiva: I’ve been vaccinated, but the data is not very reassuring. In England more people have died, who were vaccinated than those of who are not.

Greg Dalton: Well, that could confusing causation and correlation because someone vaccinated and died, they could've died from a heart attack or cancer or something else. It doesn't mean that the and this is I think the kind of statement that sometimes causes people to say you’re anti-science.

Vandana Shiva: But there’s multi causation in any system, and therefore we need to look at the system as a whole. And that's why people like Fritjof Capra who was also a physicist and has written amazing books and is in the Bay Area. We talk of system science and system science means all relationships must be taken into account, and Cartesian logic is what is the block to understanding both the causes of climate change and the impacts. Understanding disease multi factoral and therefore we talk of all dimensionality. The three dimensions of space, not just the two-dimension of Cartesian space and time unfolding. You know, 400 years later we’re still stuck with a linear one-dimensional mechanistic paradigm, which says the nature is dead. One thing has one impact. And we are making our body sick. We are making the planet’s body sick because of the wrong paradigm that suited colonization.

Greg Dalton: And we’re not taught that in school. But back to the COVID vaccine. The COVID vaccines are mRNA vaccines they teach our cells how to make a protein that triggers an immune response inside our bodies. You received it. I received it. Is that manipulation of cellular protein?

Vandana Shiva: No, no, no, no. Again, you are Americanizing the world. America has some vaccines. India has others. We have Covishield and we have Covaxin. So, I don’t think, you know, like the Eurocentric obsession that the whole world would be shaped by a European mind. I do think you have to learn to be earth citizens in America. There are indigenous cultures all over the world. There are sovereign countries making decisions on seed, food, agriculture, medicine, vaccines, most of the countries don't have patents on seed, I help my Parliament write laws. Seeds are not human inventions therefore they cannot be patented. So, countries like India have sovereign laws, and we are the biggest vaccine makers of the world. But we also have sovereign decisions about which vaccines we will choose.

Greg Dalton: Fair enough. And India is now the world's third largest emitter of carbon dioxide after the US and China. Granted India still living in the shadow of colonialism. There’s also a rising middle class in India and China that is aspiring to higher levels of consumption material comforts. What responsibility does India have with regard to its own emissions?

Vandana Shiva: Well, I think the first thing is we need to remember that while we are politically sovereign. Globalization made the economic system one integrated corporate production machine. Which outsourced everything at that time to China --

Greg Dalton: Emissions were exported. Manufacturing and emissions were exported.

Vandana Shiva: So, that is why it’s wrong to talk merely about consumers. We got to look at the production system. We got to look at the corporate role. It’s the industrialized countries. If you take the shared production into account. Not the geography, you know, if you followed Lawrence Summers at the Earth Summit where he said, oh, the Third World doesn't have enough pollution and we must export pollution to them and shift our polluting industry like Jeff Bezos wants to shift polluting industry to other planets. So, this idea of exporting toxics exporting pollution exporting waste is based on basically a racist divide an apartheid that you take the sickness and this is the debate of environmental justice and climate justice all over the world.

Greg Dalton: Sure. That definitely happened, exporting manufacturing, exporting the emissions and there are still rising middle class that have their own domestic emissions and that is part of it. There's 300 million people who’ve come out of poverty, into the middle class in China. I don't know how many in India and that is a real force for growing emissions. Most of the historic emissions are red, white and blue which means they’re French and British and Russian and American. But there is I’m trying to get to the point of some, there’s a lot can be blamed on colonialism. A lot can be blamed on exportation and globalization, which may be driven by the forces you cite. But what responsibility do emerging economies have, they have some don’t they?

Vandana Shiva: Yeah, Greg, so if I have a vegetable vendor outside my door and I just go step out and buy my fresh tomatoes and my fresh cucumbers. And that option is destroyed because Mr. Jeff Bezos comes and shifts everything so that during the lock down the vegetable vendor is not able to sell but Mr. Bezos continues to sell and these are debates, they are ongoing debates right now on retail, yeah, on retail issue. So, when you talk consumption, Greg, is extremely important to think about forced consumption. Forced consumption in food it is always forced. The second is, you know, we’re a land of clothing, India was colonized for its spices and textiles. But you think changing in the clothing system is not part of the fast fashion industries big propaganda machine. You know, consumers are not little atoms by themselves, they are when they are made unthinking consumers of advertising signals and options that are closed for them. They will make choices that suit the profits of the corporate world. When they are free citizens who are able to think culturally in the civilization, able to think about the footprint of their actions. That's why I talk about earth democracy. That's why I talk about earth citizenship rather than consumerism. Again, we come back to Mr. Descartes. We separate consumers from production but it's one system. We separate corporate profits from the choices consumers make. Why are the young people of the world rebelling? They’re seeing the links the fact that young people on the streets and striking is they are seeing the links.

Greg Dalton: You're listening to a conversation with Indian ecofeminist Dr. Vandana Shiva about how far we should go in manipulating nature to suit our needs--agricultural, climate, or otherwise. This is Climate One. Coming up, her belief that we can all change, for the better:

Vandana Shiva: Everyone has potential. You know it's not the fact that you're born white and you're stuck in white superiority. The potential to be earth citizens is in you.

Greg Dalton: That’s up next, when Climate One continues.

Greg Dalton: This is Climate One. I’m Greg Dalton. I’m talking with Dr. Vandana Shiva about the concentration of power by corporations. Some criticized the Trans-Pacific Partnership supported by President Barack Obama for being too all-encompassing--in one example, local regulations restricting the sale of tobacco to young people could be seen as an obstruction to trade. President Donald Trump did away with the TPP. I asked Dr. Shiva if she agreed with that move.

Vandana Shiva: Well, I basically think that globalization and free trade whether it is the World Trade Organization or the TPP or The Atlantic Treaty or the bilaterals being worked out are really corporate rule, that’s how we call it in the international forum on globalization. Now when corporations write the rules, they will write rules against democracy. They will write rules against constitutions. They will write rules against the environment. They will write rules against worker’s rights and these are rules of deregulation. So, what you've just cited is part of all the new free-trade agreements. Interstate dispute settlement mechanism and this is wonderful right just like Columbus got a charter or East India company got a charter saying go take those lands. They write their treaties and then say all of this is ours for profit. And if a government makes a decision according to its Constitution and according to its people's will. Then we will sue them for stealing our markets that don't exist, but they are our right. And I'll give you just two examples. You gave the example of tobacco. But remember after Fukushima the Germans were out on the street and they insisted that all the nuclear plants be phase out. And Germany had to take that decision under huge democratic pressure. So, the nuclear plant was shut and a Swedish company, which had a nuclear plant sued Germany billions of dollars that we have lost so much profits now you pay us. So, this industry dispute settlement clauses are basically been set at home. We write a treaty, the violation of the treaty because the Constitution doesn't allow it or the people don’t allow it will be, we will have so I’ll give you one example. I’ve been part of the movement for water as a commons and against water privatization. And we stopped the privatizing of the Gangla by Suez, the World Bank was trying to push it. Again, we did civil disobedience we marched the streets I brought water pots to the World Bank. But Bolivia, its water was privatized by the World Bank and it is given to Bechtel, which the American company. And Bechtel of course increase the price six times but when people started to harvest on their rooftops, they said even the rain you cannot harvest. When people started to dig wells so they wouldn’t have to pay huge price they said even the groundwater is ours.

Greg Dalton: Yeah, I think there’s a movie made about that one, yeah.

Vandana Shiva: And the fact that indigenous people then came into governance is because of that movement of people in Bolivia. When Bechtel was thrown out, but Bechtel is still demanding compensation. So, you know, corporate rule is the problem. Corporate rule is the problem.

Greg Dalton: They have contracts. And I may agree with you about how corporations have assumed an unhealthy amount of power or international system legal system having the rights of individuals and yet the climate emergency is urgent. It is severe. It is affecting everyone. And there are some corporations that are moving using their power to move away from fossil fuels toward cleaner energy. We may not like the system but isn’t it good that some large corporations are moving toward cleaner energy isn’t that a positive force? Are corporations always bad is everything big bad?

Vandana Shiva: Well, everything big where there is a small as an alternative is not the most desirable option. So, you know, again, sadly the energy question has been reduced to an external input system. Just like in agriculture where you give organic matter to the soil and then the soil organisms make your fertility, the soil is living, they forgot the soil is living. They forgot that the plants are living. They forgot that the earth as a whole Gaia is living.

Greg Dalton: So, you’re challenging the way I'm asking the question. Because I asked a question about shouldn’t we change the energy inputs and you’re saying that that’s the simplistic linear Cartesian way to look at the system. I should be looking more holistically, systemically, that you’re challenging my narrow question.

Vandana Shiva: No, I’m talking about we’ve been given because of corporate rule and a fossil fuel civilization, a highly centralized external input system for everything we do. We can shift to a fossil fuel free and a poison free agriculture. This is what I’ve done 37 years of my life. We produce more food we regenerate soil health we brought back biodiversity we have six times more pollinators in our farm than in the forest next door. Our water level has come up 70 feet. We don't do one thing we do many things.

Greg Dalton: And is that economically viable?

Vandana Shiva: Of course, it is. Our farmers, I’ll tell you a title of a book. We’ve done a true cost accounting book called Wealth Per Acre because we were always told farmers make more in a chemical system. We did the true cost accounting. What is a farmer growing Bt cotton earn? What is a farmer growing organic cotton earn? What is a farmer growing millets earn, what is a former growing soya bean earn? And on an average, if the farmers have their own seed if the farmers have their own ecological agriculture production with internal input systems. If the farmers have economic sovereignty to shape the market where we need the bigness of the global market to step out of this way because we have local markets. Farmers have to eat. When you shift that the farmers are earning 10 times more than those participating in the production of chemical commodities for a global supply chain. So yes, farmers earn more but you have to do a true cost accounting and you have to change your measures because the problem with globalization is it only measures trade. It doesn't measure production. The problem with the economy anyway that came out of commerce of colonial commerce is it basically says if you produce what you consume, you don't produce. And this is how nature's production was wiped out. This is how women's production was turned to zero, and this is how peasant production, which is what feeds the world was reduced to zero. So, we have too many false assumptions in our systems. And once we shift out of them and you can only shift out of them by looking at the big picture. What we find is the inevitability that the bigness of the problem requires big corporate control as a solution when the solution lies in decentralized democratization of the food system, the energy system, the mobility system, urban systems. And those are the initiatives taking place all over the world. All I'm saying is let’s not assume bigness as an inevitability. The only thing where bigness where you don't know when to stop growing that bigness the only entity that has that property outside corporations is the cancer cell. Every other cell knows how much to grow and when to die off and be replaced. So, bigness is not a virtue. Schumacher, brilliant thinker, co-worked a lot in India. Schumacher said and wrote a book called Small Is Beautiful.

Greg Dalton: Certainly, small businesses are the backbone of the US economy. And speaking of small, you said that individual should never give up their power in the face of climate change. Many people, even those with institutional power feel inadequate. So, what do you say to regular people who think they have no power to affect something so colossal as these systems you’re talking about?

Vandana Shiva: Well, I would basically say to ordinary people, but the havoc, I’ve never called it climate change because climate change makes you think in a comfortable way, you know, temperature will rise in this way. No, look at the floods in Europe.

Greg Dalton: Climate disruption, climate chaos, sure.

Vandana Shiva: I call it climate chaos from the beginning when I wrote my book, Soil Not Oil I called it climate chaos. You don’t know when the next extreme event will take place and what its form will be. There is no model, no matter how big your supercomputers be.

Greg Dalton: We’re certainly seeing that this summer with floods and fires. Yeah, it’s devastating.

Vandana Shiva: Well, the three things are I think all of us should have a deeper understanding that the disruption of the earth's climate systems comes from not just the use of fossilized material which the earth buried over 600 million years and should have been left underground. But the way it fossilized our mind to me that's the serious question. It fossilized our mind to imagine that this is the only way things can work. But once we get out of the fossil carbon idea.

Greg Dalton: How do we retrain our minds?

Vandana Shiva: We retrain our minds by moving from the mechanistic mind and the monoculture of the mind to the ecological mind and the diversity of the mind. And that is available in the science it’s available in cutting edge science and it’s available all indigenous cultures. All indigenous culture and it’s available in the will of women to sustain community in the earth in spite of patriarchy. That's why I always say, you know, women will show the way, and if there is a future it's because women are showing the way. So, women, indigenous people and Gaia herself, the earth. We’ve got to learn much more to listen to them to learn from them. The second is if you look at the images of Germany, what is happening? The floods came, and if you look at the pictures where was the worst flooding where American-style agriculture has created barren large fields and the storm and then the soil erosion takes place, we are turning the planet into a dustbowl. And when you have extreme rain events a dustbowl creates flats. When a dustbowl is dry, it creates dust storms, but it creates the kind of floods that we are seeing with mudslides. People were helping each other so we need much more solidarity, we need much more community building. And third, we need much more multilayered governance. We need to reclaim the power of community; we need to reclaim the power of the local. We need to reclaim the power of the regional governments. We definitely need to reclaim both the responsibility and the rights of our sovereign governments who cannot be prevented and should not be prevented from doing the right thing. There are false solutions coming from global corporations who say only we have the money. Only we have the money, only we can solve the problem. And they just floated this idea of net zero and Bill Gates has it in his book net zero. And they say it so clearly, we’ll continue to pollute, net zero doesn’t mean zero pollution. It doesn't mean we’ll end pollution which is the principle. Polluters should stop polluting and should pay for the damages caused by past pollution. But most importantly, this net zero is on the one hand they’re saying we won’t reduce our pollution we still have our private jets. We still fly around. We still do global production and when I want to go into space I’m still going to space. But you will adjust to be our offsets.

Greg Dalton: Do you still fly yourself?

Vandana Shiva: Well, we can’t fly anyway but I don’t think -- I think the time is over I’m anyway a very senior citizen, Greg. And I think at some point, you know, I mean it's a good moment to make a shift and I'm talking to you . And then, you know, I’m able to give much more attention to the conservation work the biodiversity work on Navdanya farm or to our colleagues I just spent a week with our colleagues from across India on how not only will we continue our biodiverse conservation we’ll continue organic farming, we’ll continue building local markets. But we are working with farmers becoming the climate gods so that the reports on the impact of the damages and the reports on the experience of resilience which seeds are resilient what organic practices are resilient that people emerge from the ground as climate experts that's our next decade of work.

Greg Dalton: And speaking of god, do you see environmental destruction as inherently patriarchal. I was a little surprised to see you praise Laudato si’ the encyclical from Pope Francis on care for our common home that urged a move away from consumerism. The Catholic Church is the pinnacle of patriarchy, so are there powerful white men you think are positive forces on climate and perhaps even have feminine sensibilities?

Vandana Shiva: I've written so much about the fact that Pope Alexander wrote the papal bull to conquer the lands. Well, the Pope before him wrote the bull to burn 9 million people as witches just because they believe we are part of nature. And, you know, being part of nature was made illegal, you are engaged in witchcraft if you thought you’re a part of nature. You had to separate yourself. So, the burning of witches, colonialism all goes hand-in-hand. I do believe very sincerely and again, I come back to my quantum training. Everyone has potential. You know it's not the fact that you're born white and you're stuck in white superiority. The potential to be earth citizens is in you. The fact that Popes and the church has been part of the crimes against humanity over history doesn't mean a current Pope doesn't have a potential to realize that he can correct the church and the encyclical is a correction. So, potential, potential, potential means all of us can be earth citizens equal but diverse. All of us can be feminist men and women, all of us can be indigenous and that's the major, major shift we need to make. And if we are able to make that leap from monocultures to diversity from superiority to equality from destruction as creation to co-creation in nonviolence then humanity has a hope.

Greg Dalton: Thank you, Dr. Shiva.

Vandana Shiva: Thank you, Greg.

Greg Dalton: On this Climate One... We’ve been talking about the hubris of manipulating nature with Indian ecofeminist and activist Dr. Vandana Shiva.

Greg Dalton: To hear more Climate One conversations, subscribe to our podcast on Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your pods. Please help us get people talking more about climate by giving us a rating or review. It really does help advance the climate conversation.

Greg Dalton: Brad Marshland is our senior producer; Ariana Brocious is our producer and audio editor. Our audio engineer is Arnav Gupta. Our team also includes Steve Fox, Kelli Pennington, and Tyler Reed. Gloria Duffy is CEO of The Commonwealth Club of California, the nonprofit and nonpartisan forum where our program originates. I’m Greg Dalton.

Play

Extreme Heat: The Silent Killer

Otto Pilot — Fri, 25 Jun 2021 08:00:00 +0000

Extreme Heat: The Silent Killer

06/25/2021

Last week’s heat wave across the western United States busted more records – a trend that doesn’t seem to be going away.

Despite the serious threats extreme heat presents to our health, livelihoods and economy, we tend to perceive intense heat events differently from other climate disasters, says Kathy Baughman-McLeod, senior vice president and director of the Adrienne Arsht-Rockefeller Foundation Resilience Center.

“[Heat events] don’t have the drama that a flood or hurricane has. It just doesn’t have the visual nature,” she says.

In 2020, the center created the Extreme Heat Resilience Alliance, which aims to build a network of city leaders and experts to tackle the growing threat of extreme urban heat around the world.

“One of the misconceptions is that it's the hot places, but really it's the places least accustomed to heat who are least prepared to withstand it,” Baughman-McLeod says. We don’t track heat-related deaths very well, nor the other associated impacts of heat, like the economic cost of a heat wave, she says.

Because heat disproportionately impacts low-income communities and communities of color, “a chief heat officer wakes up every day thinking about how to protect people and their livelihoods, especially vulnerable people,” Baughman-McLeod says. “We need to be heat risk informed: what are the risks, who is most at risk, where are they, what are the interventions that can help protect them, how much they cost, how do we pay for it, how do we coordinate and learn from other cities that are doing this?”

Miami-Dade County is one of the places that has joined the alliance. Physician Cheryl Holder is co-chair of Miami-Dade’s new Heat-Health Task Force and has spent decades working with populations more at risk for heat impacts.

“The people who are doing the work outdoors, the people who work at the service level, the people who you hear about the coronavirus who are now called the ‘frontline workers,’ that's always been my people that I’ve cared for,” Holder says.

Holder says she uses a mnemonic with her patients to understand the myriad effects of heat.

“It’s called HEAT WAVE and each of those letters stand for the main areas that this climate is impacting us,” she says, from heat illness to worsening allergies to waterborne and vector-borne disease and the exacerbation of mental health complaints.

Holder says she’s working to convince her peers, particularly older doctors, about the risk of extreme heat and climate change on their patients and practices. She also advocates for better heat warning systems and equity-driven education outreach measures.

Meanwhile, farmers in the nation’s heartland are trying to figure out what their future holds. Dennis Todey is director of the USDA Midwest Climate Hub. He says the region is experiencing more heat, especially in the form of higher overnight temperatures and higher humidity.

“That humidity actually is helpful for crops,” like corn and soybeans, he says. “But that humidity issue for humans and livestock or animals is a whole other set of problems.”

Todey says farmers are aware of the changing conditions and working to figure out how to respond to them.

“We know that there are natural variabilities and varies from year to year. So, agriculture does try to deal with those. The problem we’re having now is some of those variations and some of those changes are becoming larger and harder to deal with."

Guests

Kathy Baughman-McLeod

Director, Adrienne Arsht-Rockefeller Foundation Resilience Center; Senior VP, Atlantic Council

Cheryl Holder

Physician, Co-chair of Miami-Dade’s Heat-Health Task Force

Dennis Todey

Director, USDA Midwest Climate Hub

Greg Dalton: This is Climate One. I’m Greg Dalton. It’s the middle of summer… and it’s hot. Really hot. Last week’s heat wave across the western states busted more records--a trend that doesn’t seem to be going away. Some places are used to triple-digits, but in other places, lower temperatures can be deadly. Despite the serious threats extreme heat presents to our health and economy, we tend to perceive intense heat differently than other climate disasters.

Kathy Baughman-McLeod: They don’t have the drama that a flood or hurricane has. It just doesn’t have the visual nature.

Greg Dalton: A Miami doctor says heat impacts can be cumulative and slow-moving:

Cheryl Holder: So it’s not simply that you’re going to get a heat stroke and pass out. That’s the worst portion of heat. But it’s the earlier insults that many of our physicians are missing.

Greg Dalton: Meanwhile, farmers in the nation’s heartland are trying to figure out what their future holds.

Dennis Todey: Agriculture is not going to go away in these regions because there are good soils and they’re highly productive lands but it probably becomes we grow something else. And what that else is we don't know at this point.

Greg Dalton: Climate One’s empowering conversations connect all aspects of the climate emergency. Today, we explore the impacts of extreme heat. What does extreme heat mean for human health, our cities and our farms? Climate One’s empowering conversations connect all aspects of the climate emergency. I’m Greg Dalton.

Greg Dalton: Kathy Baughman-McLeod is Director of the Atlantic Council's Adrienne Arsht-Rockefeller Foundation Resilience Center. Last year the center created the Extreme Heat Resilience Alliance, which aims to build a network of city leaders and experts to tackle the growing threat of extreme urban heat around the world. Between 2000 and 2009, heat killed more Americans than hurricanes, but we hear a lot more about hurricanes and other dramatic climate events. Kathy Baughman-McLeod says there are several reasons for that.

Kathy Baughman-McLeod: And I think the top of the list is the fact that they are quiet they don't have the drama that a flood or hurricane has just doesn't have the visual nature. And if you think about something that rips the roof off of the house imagine the weather channel and how they're able to cover those storms and the meteorologist stand in the wind in the action and their hair is blowing sideways and it is dramatic. And if you do an aerial photograph of a place that's had a deadly heat wave from one day to the next there's not a difference. And so, it's hard to compete with that drama in terms of the visual understanding of what damages it's you know it's wreaking over a community.

Greg Dalton: Yeah, quiet, slow, kind of less visible. How are the heat impacts distributed across regions across the demographics within a region? I looked at the CDC map of regions affected by unusual heat events and it looked pretty dark red across the country except for a little piece up in Alaska.

Kathy Baughman-McLeod: Yeah, it's really far-reaching and one of the misconceptions is that it's the hot places but really it's the place least accustomed to heat who are least prepared to withstand it. And the number of days at a certain temperature threshold just continues to grow and you can look at Miami and say the number of days at what feels like 105°F is growing from I think it's 17 days to 45 days. In the climate scenarios you see those days rising to where a third of the year people are experiencing 105°. But if you live in Minnesota you are not accustomed anywhere near 105° and so a lot of heat planning and addressing extreme heat it’s about the human body. Your underlying conditions, your age, the elevation, the humidity, pollution, all sorts of things factor into the way humans experience heat.

Greg Dalton: And recent update from the U.S. EPA shows that heat waves in major cities occurred three times as often in the 2010s as they did in the 1960s and heat waves are becoming more frequent. So, it seems like anyone over 30 would be experiencing and feeling this personally. So, why does heat still not get the attention it deserves?

Kathy Baughman-McLeod: I think in part it is about the slow creep of the increase in temperature. It is dramatic, it is disrupting us now, but the biggest if you look at the deaths, a lot of times elderly people who die alone who are alone in their apartments who they may be un-air-conditioned or they may feel like they can’t afford to run the air-conditioning. We don't record heat death the way we do other things. And so, there's not a box to check. If you take yourself to the hospital, they might say oh your heat has exacerbated your condition, but the box to check is renal failure, kidney failure, heart failure. And so, we don't really know and I think one of the biggest challenges is the data.

Greg Dalton: So, you said that heat is the biggest threat that climate crisis offers and we don't have a handle on it. If the data is so clear and it happens, why don’t we have a handle on it?

Kathy Baughman-McLeod: Well, the data is clear that it's getting hotter. And the way our cities are built is not helping. So, we have the urban heat island effect we have asphalt that absorbs heat and then it emanates at night. We have the they call it the diurnal range you know the range of temperature from the daytime to the nighttime it’s shrinking. The human body rests, and cleanses the brain at night and when you have temperature still high at night we don't rest and we wake up tired and we make mistakes and hurt ourselves at work and things like that. I think we also don't have a handle on it because there is still this lack of data that I referenced just a minute ago of really understanding yes, it's hot, but then how does it play out. We've read a few stories about how the airplanes in Phoenix can't fly when it's a certain high temp and how many days do we expect that that will happen and what is that economic impact that it has. We don't really have those numbers either. So, how much is the cost to have a heat wave or to prepare for one or to respond to one. Those are all things that we need suss out.

Greg Dalton: And some cities are more prepared, you expect Houston and Miami to be really hot and you said the people there, kind of accustomed to it. What about cities that you mentioned Minnesota, that are less accustomed to heat waves and the population is less accustomed to living through them and knowing what to do and how to hydrate and when to go to a cooling center or what to do outside or not do outside.

Kathy Baughman-McLeod: You’re exactly right. And those populations, they need that education and they need to build that culture of preparation that we've built for hurricanes and fires. We think that naming and ranking heat waves is a good way to do that to trigger those behaviors and to bring in all of those interventions. When the UK last summer lost 2500 people to heat, they put out a new heat health warning system and it failed because it came out too late. And so, for certain people with certain medical conditions 16 hours or 10 hours makes all the difference. And if the warning doesn't come out in time, people die. And so, knowing that and knowing what to do and having the public officials and health department all working together to share those messages is essential.

Greg Dalton: So, what is the chief heat officer program and what do you hope with city's chief heat officer will actually be able to do?

Kathy Baughman-McLeod: A CHO, chief heat officer, wakes up every day thinking about how to protect people and their livelihoods, especially vulnerable people. And I think one thing we need to say right at the top is that heat does not affect people and communities equally and it is preying upon low-income communities and communities of color all across the world and especially in the US. And so, if you look at a map of tree cover which is one of the best ways to cool community looking at a map of tree covers like looking at a map of race in American cities.

Greg Dalton: And redlining, yeah.

Kathy Baughman-McLeod: And redlining and racist housing practices all show up in the tree cover and the leafy cool neighborhoods versus the neighborhoods that are mostly concrete without tree covering green space the temperature difference can be as much a 17° in the same city and there's a big equity issue here. But the chief heat officer will focus on those communities, but also work that’s going on already can be coordinated, new work to address heat and understand the heat risks and a lot of times this is just about not understanding what the risks are. So, we need to be heat risk informed: what are the risks, who is most at risk, where are they, what are the interventions that can help protect them, how much they cost, how do we pay for it, how do we coordinate and learn from other cities that are doing this. All of that would fall within the remit of a chief heat officer.

Greg Dalton: My guest today is Kathy Baughman-McLeod, Director of the Atlantic Council's Adrienne Arsht-Rockefeller Foundation Resilience Center. The Rockefeller Foundation previously created a program of chief resilience officers I think there was 100 cities around the world. The idea to create these positions the first time in city government and those were actual new positions within city government. And the chief heat offices are not positions funded by this new program. And I remember one of the problems of the chief resilience officers was they didn't have a budget they didn't have a bureaucratic army. There were, this one person in this government bureaucracy and it’s hard to move if you don't have that kind of muscle behind you. So, how can you expect cash-strapped cities to add more responsibility to existing staff without increased funding. What can these heat officers really get done other than kind of, I don’t know, issue press releases?

Kathy Baughman-McLeod: That's a good question. So, the first thing is to acknowledge right from the front they are cash-strapped. These cities are facing so many pressures and the economic impacts of COVID at the top of the list, but also responding to climate crises and all sorts of things, and local government’s mayors are at the tip of the spear for handling all these things that are impacting people's lives. So, our approach is to first of all acknowledge that and say where can you find the capacity that you have that can aggregate your efforts around heat. So, this person sits right next to the mayor and that's the difference between somebody that is trying to coordinate that doesn't have the power of the mayor behind them and not to say that CROs didn't because many of them sat right next to their mayors and were empowered to act. But in the partnership that we have part of our role as the Extreme Heat Resilience Alliance and we have an initiative specifically for mayors called the city champions for heat action. Specifically, we are raising money to invest in the CHOs and the work that these cities are doing. And the best approaches are coming out of the Extreme Heat Resilience Alliance with this group from around the world. And so, we expect that the mayor supports the CHO and the mayor is also actively involved and that's the deal for us is that you have that power.

Greg Dalton: And how do you decide which cities to support?

Kathy Baughman-McLeod: Well, we’re looking for places where we can be successful. So, you know, we always talk about the enabling conditions. So, where is there a climate leading mayor to start. A mayor that is already talking about climate change, acting on climate change and is facing heat risk and needs help, but is ready to spend time and effort on it. That's the first. Also, where is the heat risk and where are people most vulnerable.

Greg Dalton: I read an article once in the New York Times titled How Air-Conditioning Conquered America. It’s something we take for granted but the south would be, you know, unlivable in many ways and that really after World War II there's this big expansion of air-conditioning. It noted that now central air-conditioning is rising in new homes constructed in the West it’s already pretty much everywhere in the south but is rising in the West in places like the Bay Area where we never used to have air-conditioning before. So, as it gets hotter what are the impacts of people getting air-conditioning using it more on our national emissions of carbon pollution?

Kathy Baughman-McLeod: This is a serious concern and those are real numbers. Those numbers going up and then the key thing is, what's the source of the power that is creating the air-conditioning. And so, is it fossil fuels, and if it is, we’re increasing our emissions, period. Part of the approach of the Extreme Heat Resilience Alliance and some of our interventions, you know, there’s nature-based solutions like tree cover. They reduce your power bill. They reduce your need for air-conditioning. So, there are these passive solutions that we are promoting. And then there are the energy-based solutions. And so, that means we got to push to shift to as much renewable energy as we can to be the source of that power, but I think we also we’re facing a bigger conversation about where can people continue to live. There was an incredible work done by Abrahm Lustgarten with ProPublica and the New York Times several months back about how much of the world will be uninhabitable because of the temperatures. And we’ll be going from 2%, which is currently uninhabitable to 19% uninhabitable. So, a fifth of the world is uninhabitable. What does that mean and how do you move people and do food systems collapse or economies collapse before we move. And so, we’re not taking that on right now we're trying to protect vulnerable people. That's a, you know, that's what's in front of us right now, but those are big questions we’re gonna have to answer.

Greg Dalton: You mention the economic impact of heat. Is that economic impact of heat being recognized by governments, companies and citizens?

Kathy Baughman-McLeod: No, no, and there's another great paper that's coming out in July about workers comp data and the economic impact. So, similar economic impact of the health, the morbidity and mortality outcomes from workers who are hot and that’s both people working outside and in warehouses where they’re un-air-conditioned. So, we don't have a national heat protection standard for workers in the US and that’s something we'd like to see put in place. And so, you think about Phoenix as I was saying and the airport being shut down, you know, what are the reverberations of the airport being shut down. And you can calculate how many more days given the climate scenarios where the airplanes just can't fly. Does that mean fewer businesses come to Phoenix because there's instability in the transportation of goods and people? So, those are big questions.

Greg Dalton: How can finance and insurance be used to reduce climate and heat risk?

Kathy Baughman-McLeod: When we think about access to capital for cities how do we create affordable access, easy access and project preparation facilities and get finance moving quickly in the cities to invest in these things like changing over your pavements so that they are reflective or investing in urban forest. But then on the risk side you want to have some money before the heatwave comes just like you'd like to have money before the hurricane comes so you can get ready. And so, we're looking at risk transfer products, you know, there’s a certain type of product called the parametric insurance policy. It pays on a trigger, an event, not the damage which is the way indemnity insurance works, which is what we have in our homes. So, you have damage they assess the damage and then you have a payout. This happens when a certain thing happens. So, if the heat index is 104° for three days, money drops into the treasury of the city. But what we want to do is have the money drop on the forecast. And so, we are building forecast-based insurance and so the trigger is the forecast, the money drops, in you have generators, you have cooling centers, you have people going door-to-door to make sure folks are safe or can go someplace safe. And so, we're experimenting with all of the risk and finance tools and approaches that can help bring more protection and reduce the cost and suffering.

Greg Dalton: That’s interesting because insurance of course, is probabilistic. It's all based on math and probability and we know it’s gonna get hotter and so get the money before it happens when cities need it rather than having to wait afterwards.

Kathy Baughman-McLeod: Well, there's a great example that inspired us and that is a program called the Kenyan livestock insurance program and in short, farmers were having their cattle die and their insurance would pay out when you sent photos of the dead cattle and then money would come to the cell phone of the farmer and they would replace their cattle. And so, Swiss Re and the Kenyan government and others got together and said this doesn't make any sense there must be some way to get in front of their deaths. And so, they use remote sensing to estimate the vegetation's hydration level and when it drops to a certain point that’s dangerous for the cattle, it brings cash to the farmer to their phone beforehand and then they are able to buy water and buy what they need to keep the cattle alive. And so, the idea of moving forward in the chain of the instrument is what we're trying to do for heat.

Greg Dalton: Well, we do have some things to learn from the rest of the world. Kathy Baughman-McLeod. Thanks for coming on Climate One, I appreciate your insights today.

Kathy Baughman-McLeod: Thank you, Greg.

Greg Dalton: You’re listening to a Climate One conversation about the impacts of extreme heat. If you missed a previous episode, or want to hear more of Climate One’s empowering conversations, subscribe to our podcast wherever you get your pods. Coming up, a Miami doctor shares some of what she’s seeing in her exam room:

Cheryl Holder: I use a mnemonic with my patients and all the docs I see. And it’s called HEATWAVE. And each of those letters stand for the main areas that this climate is impacting us.

Greg Dalton: That’s up next, when Climate One continues.

Greg Dalton: This is Climate One. I’m Greg Dalton, and we’re talking about the numerous impacts of extreme heat, which is becoming more prevalent in our disrupted climate.

Dr. Cheryl Holder is very familiar with the direct and indirect impacts of heat on human health. She’s worked in Miami for 30 years, starting with the National Service Corps Payback program.

Cheryl Holder: And I was assigned to Miami working in Overtown, Little Haiti, Little Havana these are all small poor communities in Miami and eventually I worked in Opa-locka Miami Gardens, another poor black community for 20 years. Now my practice for the last 10 years has been back at the main hospital in the outpatient division and we are the only safety net hospital in the county. So, we take uninsured undocumented. So, that's my population. So, it's the people who are doing the work outdoors, the people who work at the service level, the people who you hear about the coronavirus who are now called the frontline workers. That's always been my people that I’ve cared for and I tried to serve as best as possible.

Greg Dalton: I’ve talked to various doctors over the years about climate change and they often don't see it, you know, related to their practice. They say it is something kind of far away. What are the human health impacts of extreme heat?

Cheryl Holder: Well, heat alone that’s just one aspect of the climate, the direct impact of climate change. But since you heard my population, I see people who come in because of the heat, the complaints. I just had a patient recently she works 12 hours in a very, very hot nursery. And her diabetes was uncontrolled and I kept increasing the medicines. I said you gotta get some breaks, you got to drink more fluids. And I follow her numbers and it just could not get it under control. I saw her recently. The numbers were almost, almost where I want them. I said, what happened, you're taking all your medicines? She says I quit the job. She realized that because we've been working it was just too hot. My other patients that I see come in where they feel dizzy and then they come in with a sprained ankle. They were hot, they're a little dizzy, they trip. But I was treating this for years. It wasn't like 2016 when my one patient came in and couldn't pay her light bill because she was running up the AC because it was so hot and her COPD was decompensating. And it all came together in 2016 because then all the headlines this is the hottest year hottest year and I’m like, oh my god. And so, once you become more aware you start expanding the differential we say in medicine, starting using more reasoning of their other reasons why this patient’s COPD is worse, why their sugars can’t come under control. It can all be that everybody's eating and cheating when especially I have patients who I know are adherent because I followed them for years. And my women weren't sleeping at night because it's so hot at night and they can’t afford to run ACs all night and they’re like it just doesn't get cool like it used to. And I can't really open up my windows as much because they don't live in the safest neighborhoods, then the screens aren't there because their landlords don't put screens and then you have mosquitoes. So, the constant areas that climate can impact us is that affecting this population. I use a mnemonic with my patients and with all the docs I see. And it’s called HEAT WAVE and each of those letters stand for the main areas that this climate is impacting us. And you mentioned heat, H. That is one of the biggest things that we experience in South Florida. So, it's not simply that you gonna get a heat stroke and passing out. That's the worst portion of heat, but it's the earlier insults that many of our physicians are missing.

Greg Dalton: What are the eight -- spell out heat what it stands for.

Cheryl Holder: Okay. H, for heat illness. E, exacerbation of heart and lung disease. A, worsening asthma. T, Traumatic events which comes during these extreme weather events. W, waterborne illnesses. A, the allergies worsening allergies. V, vector borne diseases. Then the last E is exacerbation of mental complaints, just worsening of mental health.

Greg Dalton: Right. So, we think about heat as direct, but it sounds like it's also very indirect. Someone who's tripping on a hot day or can't sleep at night that heat is sort of not recognized as a climate related health impact. I’m wondering if your patients make the climate connection when they come to you about these underlying affecting their sleep or their other aspects of their health you just outlined.

Cheryl Holder: No, not at all. And not in the beginning I do see more now that we're talking about climate and health more. But in general, no, in general I have to help them recognize it. It's like my patient who I told you earlier who I wanted her to keep working because she needs to work to pay all her bills but she accepted that she just couldn't tolerate the heat. And we started educating her more on ways that she could survive while she was working, taking more breaks. And that's when she started to click that it is much hotter now than even last year when she worked at the same job. So, that's when we started introducing the topic that yeah, the climate is changing.

Greg Dalton: How about your peers, your medical peers and colleagues are they seeing climate as a health concern much the way that we’ve talked about framing gun violence as a health concern. Are your peers in the medical field seeing climate as a health concern?

Cheryl Holder: The older docs not so much but I must say the younger docs that are coming out the medical students and the young docs are. And they are our biggest voice right now in pushing the curriculum, pushing the health systems to acknowledge it and then pushing for decarbonizing the health systems. So yes, there is a groundswell that is coming from the younger docs. Much of the older docs, what I’ve really tried to show them is that as these extreme weather events happen, how is your practice going to survive these extreme weather events? Because here we’re in Florida and if our hurricanes get more intense, even if they don't get more frequent that basically takes you out of practice for a while. And if your insurance rates go up so your day-to-day practice of medicine is going to be impacted. So, I am working with them on the economic side and then as they look at it, I said, think about what's happening with you. Think about your patients. The doctors who work with poorer patients are much more aware of it. The National Medical Association did a survey of its physicians and the National Medical Association physicians are African-American physicians and we serve primarily an African-American community and poorer patients. And a majority of those doctors identify climate as one of the big issues, but a lot of the African-American doctors are in the South and we have always been part of the environmental justice movement for very long because we were caring for the patients who live along the Mississippi who were exposed to all the environmental dangers. We work with patients who are in redlined areas and were presenting with the children with more asthma and the more decompensated COPD. So, we’re much more aware of it because of the population that we serve.

Greg Dalton: Yet another example of how people of color are closer to climate impacts and more on board with recognizing the risks. Dr. Cheryl Holder is a physician on the faculty of Florida International University's Herbert Wertheim College of Medicine, and cochair of Miami-Dade's new Heat Health Task Force. Dr. Holder, you've talked about climate gentrification. What do you mean by that and I think that’s happening in Miami and other coastal areas and how is that also health impact?

Cheryl Holder: Yeah, climate gentrification is the term that climate advocates have noticed that where the richer people if they're more impacted by the climate change and in our communities anything along the coast, sea level rise is causing more degradation of the coastline, the waters are rising. So, the population is going to start moving to areas that are safer. In Miami and South Florida, the safer regions are on the higher ground along our ridge. The railroad tracks were put in some of the highest areas so that might be 13 to 15 feet above sea level. You remember Miami was developed post-civil war, Jim Crow era, total segregation, poor people, Black people were left at the worst spots in the land which is by the railroad tracks. These railroad tracks are on high ground. So, when a population that cared for Liberty City, Little Haiti that have endured hurricanes and never flooded because they're higher are now unable to pay their rents. Their property values are going they can’t pay their property taxes. They’re being lured to sell if they do own and many don't own but a few that own are also lured out of these neighborhoods. But the worst part really is that as the value goes up, they can’t afford to rent and their landlords are evicting them and moving them out. So, we're having climate gentrification on land that was undesirable at the beginning but the rich folks can afford to move in. And my population is now moving unfortunately to the low-lying areas because that's now the cheaper places. And so, where I really worry about a hurricane and major flooding that this population that had been protected for so many years are now in the low-lying and I dread a Katrina happening because we do not have the road infrastructure and the public transportation infrastructure to be able to evacuate them from low-lying regions.

Greg Dalton: And a lot of those populations originally came from the Caribbean. You talked in your TED talk about emigrating from Jamaica. I’m curious on a personal level, how you came to view the climate emergencies as a health emergency?

Cheryl Holder: You know, I guess because I tell everybody hashtag not my first pandemic. I was around with HIV-AIDS in the 80s. We just had 40 years. And at that time, it was similar issues the same poor population marginalized population because many of the gay people who were infected were and may not be poor but they were the same marginalized group that we’re not recognized early enough until it became a crisis. And so, as I saw more and more my patients it became evident that this seems just the same thing that we’re experiencing what I experienced back in the 80s with HIV that these folks are going to feel the brunt of it. It's happening now. Just like when we saw my HIV patients. It was something that was happening now and we had to move the governments we have to move everyone to recognize it. And I was back then and I was a young doc with ACT UP and all the groups like we had to scream for people to say people are dying now we have to do something.

Greg Dalton: Right. And as we saw recently with the 40th anniversary of the emergence of the AIDS crisis. AIDS got to a pretty good place with a lot of pain and a lot of death but now people are living with AIDS the drugs are down to one pill per day. It's contained in most places where humanity slowly responded. How do you compare that to the climate response?

Cheryl Holder: Well, as we talk about, I said saw so much improvement but think about the time, we’re talking about 40 years. We don't have 40 years with climate. So, in the model that the HIV world showed us that we can mobilize our forces we can get political will, we can get the dollars if we combine the nonprofit organizations and nongovernmental organizations the private world and the government world. We can get them all together and we can make major changes about a disease like HIV-AIDS and it was worldwide. There was a commitment also for poor people. That took 40 years. If we use the same pace for climate change, we’re not going to do very well and the population that's most vulnerable is going to have a higher death levels than we saw with coronavirus because that is the same population worldwide.

Greg Dalton: As cochair of Miami-Dade's new Heat Health Task Force, what are your main recommendations for what regional government should do to address heat and other impacts of climate disruption?

Cheryl Holder: Well, we talk about already that the population isn't quite aware of the dangers of heat. So, I think we do have a responsibility to educate. Our current system of warning is when it's very high and we know that is just too late. So, we need to change how we warn the population about heat and then when they're warned where do they go for help. And so, the government also I see have to lead in identifying the inequities in the response because if we do not use equity, we will leave a population that's very vulnerable, which will then stress the remaining people. And so, hopefully we can do it in a strategic way that involves public, private, NGOs, everything. It cannot be one, the government answer only. So, this heat health task force is about bringing everybody included at the table from the beginning.

Greg Dalton: So, as we wrap up here, I’m curious as you're taking care of vulnerable people affected in all sorts of visible and invisible and direct and indirect ways by heat driven by the burning of fossil fuels. What do you do yourself to take care of yourself and stay healthy in the growing heat of Miami?

Cheryl Holder: Well, the beautiful thing about climate solutions and anything we do to make the climate better is a health solution. So, I tell my folks I eat even more vegetables than I ever thought possible. Because if you eat less red meat, you're already improving our climate. If I find a safe way of doing physical activity and I do it in the evening or in the day or trying to incorporate more physical activity less car. I'm already improving the climate. Most of all, I tell my patients stop buying stuff. If you can do one thing for the climate and save some money is stop buying things you don't need because you end up using too much packaging, you end up with a lot of junk in your house that you don't meet. But I also tell them don't think that's going to save us. The individual things is the beginning but we really have to push our country, push our policymakers to make the big steps because it's the big things that we do like really cutting down on fossil fuel, really finding ways to price it that we can get the benefits now and help out the poor communities, those are the thing that's going to save us in 10 years.

Greg Dalton: Yeah, well, that’s what we talk about here in Climate One is connecting the individual action with the systemic and connecting the personal and the systemic. Dr. Cheryl Holder, thanks for coming on Climate One today appreciate your insights about heat as a silent climate threat. Thank you.

Cheryl Holder: Thank you very much. It’s a pleasure.

Greg Dalton: You're listening to a conversation about the impacts of extreme heat. This is Climate One. Coming up, how are farmers and ranchers dealing with more hot days and nights?

Dennis Todey: We know that there are natural variabilities and varies from year to year. So, agriculture does try to deal with those. The problem we’re having now is some of those variations and some of those larger changes are becoming larger and harder to deal with. (:14)

Greg Dalton: That’s up next, when Climate One continues.

Greg Dalton: This is Climate One. I’m Greg Dalton. Extreme heat can have big effects on crops and livestock, and the people who produce our food. Climate One Producer Ariana Brocious spoke with Dennis Todey [toddy], director of the USDA’s Midwest Climate Hub in Iowa, about the climate changes affecting farming and ranching in the heart of the country.

Ariana Brocious: So, Dennis most of the attention on the effects of extreme heat tends to focus on people in cities. But how does heat, especially extreme heat, affect crops?

Dennis Todey: You somewhat can't separate crops from drought because extreme heat is problematic for a large number of crops. But if crops can handle some extreme heat if they have enough water available. If they don't have enough water available then even moderate heat can start stressing crops. And then it becomes another issue is to what different types of crops are you talking about and what is extreme for those crops. Like crops that are developed for the Southern Plains or the Southwest they can handle higher temperatures. But when you have some different types of food crops or specialty crops that grow in the upper Midwest or maybe around the Great Lakes area extreme heat, you know, 90s can be difficult or problematic for them based on when they grow and the kinds of conditions of those times of year.

Ariana Brocious: What about humidity. How does that factor in with heat?

Dennis Todey: That is another part of what we’re seeing more in the upper Midwest is that we're seeing not as high of temperatures high daytime temperatures as maybe we did during the 30s and 50s. But we’re seeing warmer overnight temperatures and that's because we’re more humid. The overall humidity is increased. So, even though the daytime temperatures might not be as high. The heat issue is still there and it's still extreme, especially for humans and animals. That humidity actually is helpful for crops because part of the problem you have when you have limited water and you have extreme heat is the crop is trying to grow. And as part of that growth process it's using water and transpiring water to the atmosphere. And if you have very dry air the crop will transpire or use a lot of water, but if you have higher humidity that slows that transpiration down the crop doesn't have to use as much water and therefore can handle some of those higher temperatures a little bit better. But that humidity issue for humans and livestock or animals is a whole other set of problems.

Ariana Brocious: Yeah, there was a summer I lived in Nebraska and we experienced corn sweat and I recall just never having been so uncomfortable driving around in that humid heat. I have really felt like it amplified the feeling of whatever did, you know, the thermometer was telling us but we felt a lot hotter than that. And so, is that a real phenomenon, I mean maybe it sort of it’s cast that way but is that something we’re seeing more of?

Dennis Todey: Definitely it's a bit of a media construct of calling it corn sweat. But it really is the case that when you have especially field corn or soybeans in the midst of their growth period, especially corn when that tasseling period, it is using a lot of water out of the soil, transpiring a lot of water into the atmosphere. So, it’s putting a lot more of that moisture in the atmosphere. The reason it feels so uncomfortable is that our bodies when they try to cool, they try to evaporate water. And when you have higher humidity, you're not able to evaporate as much water so it’s much more dangerous for humans to be in that kind of situation. So, it's a real thing. It's crops doing what crops do, but it's a reality of the growth process of corn and soybeans.

Ariana Brocious: And we’re talking about this in states like Nebraska and Iowa which are predominantly corn, soy, this, you know, huge fields of the same crop of one crop. Is that, I mean have we affected or influenced the climate locally in those places because we put so much land into these specific crops?

Dennis Todey: We really have, and in a couple different ways really interestingly. You mentioned Nebraska, Eastern Nebraska for example, is still mostly rain-fed. They grow most of their crops with the rain that falls naturally. As you get further out in the western part of the state they irrigate. They were able to use groundwater, they’re able to use water from river sources to be able to irrigate in that area. So, you automatically change what's going on there because you're taking water that was in the ground and putting it into the atmosphere. So, you're making it more humid that way throughout the season. Now, from a crop standpoint, how we changed what we’re growing and where we’re growing and changing some of the local atmosphere around it, yeah, we definitely have especially in that northern plains I’ll say even Northwest of Iowa, Dakotas area. Because if you think back about what grew there when we first settled, when white men first moved into the area was mainly prairie is what was growing there. And prairie would grow in the early part of the warm season to the middle part of the season and then when the rain starts to fall off the grass would stop growing as actively and it would transpire less moisture. Now, we’ve put corn and beans into a lot of northern plains and they grow throughout the whole season. They continue to transpire moisture later in the year. So, we really have affected a change in that area because we’re using water available in the soil and putting it into the atmosphere later in the season when it didn't used to happen and what was growing here before we put all these crops.

Ariana Brocious: That’s so interesting. So, what are you hearing from farmers about the changes that they may be seeing or experiencing as it pertains to heat?

Dennis Todey: When we talk to people here, heat is not the first thing they bring up. Water is the bigger one that people talk about at first. We do talk about heat because the overall warning that we are seeing means that our last freeze in the spring is getting on the average earlier and the first freeze in the fall is getting later. So, our growing season is expanding. So that's providing producers maybe an option of growing a longer season hybrid something that has a longer growing that is changing. The stress that we use to see on crops because of the extreme high temperatures doesn't happen quite as much so they are aware of that. But warm overnights the warm overnight temperatures are something that people are really becoming aware of when they’re out managing their fields.

Ariana Brocious: Are you hearing farmers be concerned about changes that they’re seeing?

Dennis Todey: They are aware of the changes and they are aware how it is impacting them. And that's part of what agriculture does to is it tries to adapt to changing conditions. We know that there are natural variabilities and varies from year to year. So, agriculture does try to deal with those. The problem we’re having now is some of those variations and some of those larger changes are becoming larger and harder to deal with. So, that's the real issue that we’re dealing with. It's not just well okay the dry this year was very dry or, you know, it was very wet this year. We had flooding and it was very difficult for us to get in the fields. So, people are aware of them they're talking about them. And there's been a lot of survey work that’s understanding that the understanding things are changing is producers definitely agree with, it’s the causes behind those there's less understanding or less agreement about those.

Ariana Brocious: Interesting, yeah. So, how are they responding then if they’re seeing these changes, are people putting things in the ground earlier? Are they looking at different seed varieties that might be better adapted to changing conditions? What are some of the specific ways that they’re responding?

Dennis Todey: Yeah, I mean those are some of them. A big push in some corn varieties for example, is to ones that are more drought tolerant that we can deal with drought issues when they do happen. When the things are excessively wet, more fields have drainage put in the drain water from the fields. You have people changing crops. This has been more so in the northern plains where the warming has been you know where they would grow those wheats, ryes what we call them small grains and have gone away from those to growing more corn and soybeans which are longer growing season. But a big back stop to all this is that they make sure they have crop insurance because crop insurance is a big coverage for some of these variations and problems that you have from year to year.

Ariana Brocious: Right, yeah. Well, there's also a lot of livestock in the Great Plains in the Midwest and I recall reading some research that was predicting as the climate warms that for example ranching and livestock production in southern Texas is going to move northward into the Great Plains, particularly because they may be depleting the Ogallala Aquifer their main water source in some places. So, have you been, I know you're more focused on crops but are you seeing changes, and similar stress is coming to the livestock industry?

Dennis Todey: Well, some of that has occurred already. Because of some drought, some longer-term drought problems in the southern Plains in about a decade ago we saw some fairly larger relocations of some livestock herds further north into parts of Iowa because drought was impacting their ability to have feed for the animals so we’re just gonna move the animals to a place where there's more feed available. But we do have some of those stressful conditions for livestock already. We talked earlier about warm overnight temperatures and more humidity. Those are real problems for livestock because livestock let’s say cattle to start off with, you know, they have an ability to handle a hot day but they need to cool down at night when you have these very warm nights you then you have this stress period that extends over several days and that can be very problematic. You can get to extreme issues where we've had several events where we lost a thousand head of livestock in an extreme event where you had warm and humid conditions, and other things that occurred. And that's an unfortunate loss of life and loss of money for these producers.

Ariana Brocious: Yeah. I’m speaking with Dennis Todey, Director of the USDA Midwest Climate Hub. So, between crops and livestock we’re talking about huge economic engines for this part of the country. So, when these extreme events occur do you hear about financial stress from farmers and ranchers, you mentioned the crop insurance which is sort of a safety net. I mean, are there people who are worried that they’re gonna have just be, especially when it comes to ranching I would think that’s your whole industry. If you lose your herd you’re in a tough spot.

Dennis Todey: You are correct and we’re seeing this right now. If you're looking at this right now in North Dakota they have very severe drought. And I just saw on Twitter a couple days ago where one livestock sale barn was, I don’t know I can’t remember the numbers, but there are huge sales of livestock because they were not going to have enough feed or water for them so they’re reducing the size of the herd to try to deal with that issue. So, you are correct, drought, particularly and heat events are very high stress time periods for producers because drought, you know, the people who deal with drought, particularly talk about it’s, you don't know when it’s going to end it just keeps going and keeps going keeps going. If you have a tornado the tornado comes through it's damage, it's bad, you pick up and you move on. Drought keeps going and keeps going and when that doesn't end that adds to the stress of people you know just getting their livestock through it worrying about the finances.

Ariana Brocious: So, I kind of want to get to like a big picture question here because as we’ve said this is basically the economic engine largely of the heart of the country farming and ranching, but we’re seeing these stresses, these big changes to what can be grown where, at what time of year, for how long. So, do you see a continued future for cropping as it's been in the Midwest as we get through as this climate crisis unfolds. Or are you gonna see, do you think we’re gonna see a reduction in the agriculture or big changes in the industry?

Dennis Todey: That's an interesting question, and if I have the answer to that one I could, you are right and it's a question that some producers are trying to ask and we’re starting to ask ourselves is where do we go from here? As the climate changes and other issues come into play, what happens next? Do we keep growing the same things that we do? And we’ll probably keep growing some of the same things that we do for a while. And I mentioned earlier we've seen the corn and soybean area shift northward as the climate has changed. We would expect as things change we will probably see the southern area of where we grow corn and soybeans, and that's, you know, Kansas, Missouri over to parts of Illinois and Indiana. Maybe those areas start to, we grow something else in those areas. Agriculture is not going to go away in these regions because there are good soils and they’re highly productive lands but it probably becomes we grow something else. And what that else is we don't know at this point. We’re actively thinking about that and talking about that looking at what comes after this.

Ariana Brocious: We’ve talked mostly about how extreme heat can impact crops and livestock but of course there’s people as well that are out there on the land. And though there's been a big transition away from more field labor into machine combines and those kinds of things in the Midwest there are still people out there. So, are you concerned or are you hearing about impacts to people who are working in the agriculture industry?

Dennis Todey: Certainly. It’s something we’re very concerned about. The unfortunate aspect is the data is not great on this. We don't have, you know, the government does collect some data on human mortality in the agricultural industry. The one fortunate advantage we have in the upper Midwest is that we don't have as many crops that need to be hand harvested. The bigger problem areas for these tend to be in the Southwest, California, particularly where you have a lot, much higher concentration of these crops and you have hotter temperatures throughout the year. So, it is a serious concern and the USDA and other federal agencies put a lot of guidance on the way of what to help workers do to be able to manage this how to adapt to it and other things they need to do to deal with this.

Ariana Brocious: Well, Dennis Todey, thank you so much for joining us on Climate One.

Dennis Todey: Thanks for having me.

Greg Dalton: On this Climate One episode... We’ve been talking about the impacts of extreme heat on our food system and on human health. To hear more Climate One empowering conversations, subscribe to our podcast on Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your pods. Please help us get people talking more about climate by giving us a rating or review. It really does help advance the climate conversation.

Brad Marshland is our senior producer; Ariana Brocious is our producer and audio editor. Our audio engineer is Arnav Gupta. Our team also includes Steve Fox, Kelli Pennington, and Tyler Reed. Gloria Duffy is CEO of The Commonwealth Club of California, the nonprofit and nonpartisan forum where our program originates. I’m Greg Dalton.

Weather Whiplash

10 Episodes

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Cropped Out: Land, Race and Climate

Otto Pilot — Thu, 12 Nov 2020 23:50:47 +0000

Cropped Out: Land, Race and Climate

11/13/2020

African-American farmers have been no strangers to land dispossession in the face of capitalism, based on extracting minerals and other resources out of the ground, and labor out of people.

“At the same time that developers are working to steal black folks land, they are both contributing to racial inequality and contributing to environmental instability,” notes Andrew Kahrl, author of This Land Was Ours: African American Beaches from Jim Crow to the Sunbelt South.

Kahrl teaches history and African-American Studies at the University of Virginia, where he studies how Black landowners have lost approximately 11 million acres of land to fraud, deceit, and outright theft. Ironically, many of those properties are now threatened by sea-level rise and coastal erosion.

“By looking at coastlines,” he says, “you really begin to see how the struggle for racial justice and for environmental sustainability are fundamentally linked.”

Black farmers work at the intersection of these challenges, as structural racism in the food system makes it increasingly difficult for non-white farmers to own and profit from land.

“The food system is not based on feeding each other,” says Chris Newman, co-founder of Sylvanaqua Farms in Virginia, “it is based on producing a product that transports well, that doesn't spoil, that can be turned into things other than food.”

The son of a Black mother and Native American father, Newman is on a mission to bring indigenous knowledge -- and people of color -- back to the practice of growing food.

“All of our foodways are based on occupying land and taking,” he says, “we don't have an indigenous mindset of relating to the natural world as family, of relating to one another as family.”

Farmer and horticulturist Amber Tamm shares a similar vision. As a Black New Yorker descended of Cherokee slaves, Tamm’s project to renew Seneca Village in Central Park connects personal trauma and climate grief with her agricultural work.

“Everything that's going on pertaining to food and soil I feel it in my own body into my own experiences,” she says, “because what is done to the earth has been done to me.”

Guests

Andrew Kahrl

Associate Professor, University of Virginia

Chris Newman

Farmer & Co-Founder, Sylvanaqua Farms

Amber Tamm

Farmer & Horticulturist

Greg Dalton: This is Climate One. I’m Greg Dalton. Black farmers have been no strangers to land dispossession in the face of capitalism, based on extracting minerals and other resources out of the ground, and labor out of people.

Andrew Kahrl: At the same time that developers are working to steal black folks land, they are both contributing to racial inequality and contributing to environmental instability.

Greg Dalton: However, Black and Indigenous people were also stewards of the land for centuries.

Chris Newman: This may be the end of extractive settler capitalism. This may be the end of a basically 5 to 600-year-old worldview that you can just take, take, take and never give back.

Amber Tamm: Everything that's going on pertaining to food and soil I feel it in my own body into my own experiences. Because what is done to the earth has been done to me.

Greg Dalton: Cropped Out: Land, Race and Climate. Up next on Climate One.

---

Greg Dalton: How have race and (in)justice shaped the American farming landscape? Climate One conversations feature all aspects of the climate emergency, the individual and the systemic, the exciting and the scary. I’m Greg Dalton.

Greg Dalton: African Americans have lost around 11 million acres of land to fraud, deceit, and outright theft. Now many of those properties are threatened by sea-level rise and coastal erosion.

Andrew Kahrl: By looking at coastlines you really begin to see how the struggle for racial justice and for environmental sustainability are fundamentally linked.

Greg Dalton: That’s Andrew Kahrl, Professor of History and African-American studies at the University of Virginia, and author of The Land Was Ours: How Black Beaches Became White Wealth In The Coastal South. He’ll join us later on today’s show. First, separating farming from bigger forces in our industrial economy.

Chris Newman: The food system is not based on feeding each other. It is based on producing a product that transports well, that doesn't spoil, that can be turned into things other than food.

Greg Dalton: Chris Newman is co-founder of Sylvanaqua Farms in Virginia. The son of a Black mother and Native American father, Newman is on a mission to bring indigenous knowledge -- and people of color -- back to the practice of growing food.

Amber Tamm: I'm pretty much like a young black woman experiment for agriculture to see how far you can go.

Greg Dalton: Amber Tamm is a farmer and horticulturist based in New York City. Her path toward working with soil began with losing her mother and father at the age of eighteen.

Amber Tamm: So I was in College of the Atlantic for maybe 4 to 6 months after graduating high school. And that was the first time I left New York City also the first time I left my parents. And then I got a phone call that my father had murdered my mom. And from that point forward, I mean I had two younger siblings that needed to be tended to and a funeral to plan and a bunch of things regarding like property and taxes. And nothing that I understood because in school I was being reared to have a perfect SAT score and like go to a good college only to be met with the realities of adulthood. So, I was left needing income, shelter and food. And my only two options are working on a cruise ship or farming. And I chose farming because I already have had an affinity for soil. And I wanted to go to Peace Corps after college, but I figured now was my time. And upon arriving to my first farm that’s when my ethos developed of -- because I put my mom’s body in the earth because she returned to where she belonged. That now in working with the earth, I'm working with my mom. And not only my mom but like my mom's mom and so on and so forth.

Greg Dalton: Chris Newman, why did you leave your job as a software engineer to decide to work the land?

Chris Newman: Yeah, I was in tech and had gotten to the kind of the pinnacle of that career path and realized I hated it. I kind of got to the top of the mountain I’m like this is it? And then there was kind of a stress related almost cancer scare. I mean it was a cancer scare that was finally the kick in the butt I needed to say, okay do with your life what you want to do with your life now and don't wait to retire. And what I wanted to do initially when I retired and was a stately gentleman with a nice fortune was to start a not exactly a hobby farm, but a farm that focused on indigenous agriculture, specifically around bison, landrace varieties of corn, all varieties of corn, I happen to just know a lot of seed keepers. So that had been the plan and because of stress and the health consequences thereof we accelerated our farming plans by 40-ish years or so.

Greg Dalton: And how did your family lineage shape your journey?

Chris Newman: Ironically enough, my family lineage pushed me hard away from farming. I told my hundred-year-old grandmother who, you know, on the black side of my family, my background is Choptico-Piscataway, I’m indigenous on my father side and African-American on my mother side. My mom’s side came from farmers in the Virginia Tidewater down at Suffolk Norfolk, that area. I told my grandmother I was farming she looked at me for like a whole minute. And grandma didn't really look at people like that but when she looks at you that long it’s like, oh, uh-oh. And she said, like to have kept your day job. And that’s all she ever said about it. Like it’s a big thing where in the consciousness of black people the arc of progress goes away from the farm away from the plantation away from the soil. There's a lot of trauma around that and a lot of impetus to not be involved with the soil. And the same to an extent on the indigenous side when it comes to farming as opposed to what indigenous people usually regard as protecting land and protecting water which are often at odds. Farming, the idea of having a piece of land that you regard as private property is often considered anathema to indigenous ideals about what land is and how it is to be stewarded. So my family legacy was very much like you should go back into software because we worked real hard not to be poor and look what you're doing.

Greg Dalton: Interesting. Amber, you recently visited the Kumeyaay nation near San Diego, it was your first time on a reservation. How did that conform your journey connecting with the land as a black farmer in Brooklyn?

Amber Tamm: This is such a crazy vital question because I think that experience enabled me to open myself up to dialogue with more indigenous people. I think as a black woman who is a descendent of Cherokee slaves which is not spoken about and the Cherokee nation not giving me my tribal card because they still have semi-racist politics pertaining to who is Cherokee and who’s not. I definitely have an identity crisis and close myself down to claiming any indigenous blood, but then I also had a lot of anger that bubbled up because there's a lot of unspoken tension between black and indigenous people at least here in my realm that is like New York City. And so, when I went to that reservation when I thought it was interesting that I had to go all the way to West Coast to be initiated into a reservation and be on sacred lands. But aside from that initiating, guiding me to other indigenous communities I really got to sit with white sage for the first time in a living format and that definitely changed my life. I definitely got lots of downloads from like sage and I literally sat in front of one white sage plant for many hours just communing with it.

Greg Dalton: I’d like to hear about your farms, Chris Newman describe your farm. What are you harvesting this year? Describe your ranch and farm for us.

Chris Newman: Yeah, so this year we’re doing forest-fed pork we’re doing pastured poultry, pastured eggs. But next year we’re really looking forward to just really blowing up what we’re going to be harvesting in addition to the products of regenerative agriculture we’re going to be doing a lot more indigenous foodways, focusing both on intensive indigenous agriculture so the stuff everybody's heard of Three Sisters, wild rice cultivation in this area. J-chokes, Jerusalem artichokes, acorn flower, cattail flower, cattail foods. And really focusing on those kinds of wild and semi-wild foods, making those available to communities. So that people who suffer on the food apartheid, which include indigenous communities and the African-American communities where I come from have access to nutritious food without it, you know, breaking the bank. And then on the flipside, continuing to do what we've always done for the last like seven, eight years already. More chicken, more beef, more pork, more eggs. We’re on a lot of land we don't own land where we are, we’re on about 1900 acres of a former plantation which is always wild. But, yeah, that’s where we’re at.

Greg Dalton: And when you say shared ownership are you creating some kind of collector of cooperative where people will have an ownership stake. You said you don't own the land, but are you – what’s the path to ownership?

Chris Newman: Yeah, that’s a complicated one. So, what we want to do is allow people to come in and form their own work around collectives where they farm the land and have access to two critical things. One being a land-based through a land trust and the other being a set of shared services that are kind of the business aspect of farming that tends to knock a lot of young new and especially farmers of color down. Stuff like accounting, insurance, markets, branding, publicity, compliance, regulatory. The stuff that nobody wants to do when they decide to go back to the land, especially for us, which tends to be a healing journey. It was for Amber it was for me as well. These business aspects of it where we have to interface food production, which for indigenous people has always been about kinship economics and about community and feeding people runs kind of into our present reality of capitalism and markets. And what we really want to do is soften that landing for people that are coming back to the landscape so that they can do what they need to do on the ground and have people like me who are privileged enough to go to college and have a good job and save a bunch of money and, you know, came from the kinds of families that were fortunate enough to put me in the position that I'm in. Let us kind of absorb that shell of end-stage capitalism and let everybody else do what they need to do in the ground.

Greg Dalton: Amber describe your farm in New York City.

Amber Tamm: My vision for Seneca Village is one to walk with the Seneca Nation of Iroquois and do not pay people into reclaiming that land. My vision for Central Park essentially is for Central Park to release that land to the people.

Greg Dalton: Why don’t you explain what Seneca Village was because I think people don’t really understand the story of what Central Park was before it was Central Park.

Amber Tamm: Sure. So specifically, by the great lawn right off the 85th St. in Central Park West. If you enter that part of Central Park you’ll immediately see plaques that say Seneca Village and basically on those plaques is an explanation that once upon a time a long time after Lenape and Iroquois were kicked off the land that there were black African-American folks who were very affluent, who occupied that land and owned it. And by way of owning it they were able to then give out other people opportunities to own land there because at that time you had to own land in order to vote. And so, Harlem which is where most affluent blacks live was getting way too crowded so there are some that moved down to 85th. The name Seneca Village actually comes from a priest and it was actually a derogatory term. It was in reference to the Seneca Iroquois and it was known to be a slur. And the Village part came as like oh it’s a brown wasteland for low whites. And that is verified by Central Park’s researcher that that's why it's called Seneca Village. And so, me as a native New Yorker and my family being here close to five generations in New York City, me wanting to reclaim those grounds is by way of just reclaiming it for the people. And so, my vision for that land is specifically to walk with Iroquois and Lenape people because that is their land first and figure out what they want to do at that land first and secondly is to be able to give native New Yorkers access to land that they feel comfortable in. I think a lot of people not from New York City don't know that Central Park is a realm in which if you are from the hood and you are brown you are not chilling in Central Park. It is not a de-stresser or safe place or a safe ground by any means. I went to Central Park maybe two times growing up because it wasn't a place for people like me and that's what I was told. And so, in reclaiming those grounds it’s important for those native brown New Yorkers to have a place and a say-so and a place to just be informed on how to grow food, diversify those soils, etc.

Greg Dalton: Amber, I heard you talk about some grief there when you talked about Seneca Village. You've also connected climate grief with your own personal grief what you talked about losing your parents. So, tell us about how you process climate grief because we’re talking about food production in the age of climate disruption.

Amber Tamm: Well, climate grief was an umbrella term that I use and I was finally having my epiphany of how agriculture doesn't work. I think for 2 1/2 years I was on a migrant farm trail along with other immigrants, only I'm not an immigrant, which caused a lot of confusion. I was basically in the middle of this like South American Caribbean realm, but only I was a Black-American young woman. And so, I think my intersection with agriculture is very different because I've been on the migrant trail. I've been paid like a migrant farmer. It's not an experience that is away from me. It is one that I lived in and it is horrendous. Having almost been raped, sexually assaulted not being given certain opportunities because those things can happen really was the onset of the climate grief and really understanding women in agriculture in the not safe way was the onset of climate grief. And even on regenerative farms I was having negative experiences. And I couldn’t understand how I just kept going from place to place to place to place. And along with like me being like wow, I’m healing from this trauma with my parents, but accumulating more trauma from each farm. That's like the birth of my climate grief. So I say that as an umbrella term to say everything that's going on pertaining to food and soil I feel it in my own body into my own experiences. Because what is done to the earth has been done to me it's a reflective matter. I think most women cis-identifying people can say that when they see things done to the earth, they can reference so many times that has been done to them.

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Greg Dalton: You’re listening to a Climate One conversation about connecting personal trauma and climate grief. Coming up, more on the complicated history of food, farming, and people of color in America.

Chris Newman: I remember people getting their gardens ripped up by HUD because it wasn’t a lawn. You plant a garden you try to feed yourself no screw you they're going to rip up your freakin’ garden and turn it back to lawn because that's what the regs say and you can take your food stamps over to the gas station and buy whatever

Greg Dalton: That’s up next, when Climate One continues.

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Greg Dalton: This is Climate One. I’m Greg Dalton, and we’re talking about race, land and climate with two farmers. Amber Tamm, a horticulturist based in New York City, and Chris Newman, co-founder of Sylvanaqua Farms in Virginia. Newman may be on a mission to reinfuse agriculture with indigenous knowledge and sustainable practices, but he’d be the first to tell you that he’s not in the business of promoting a “climate-friendly diet.”

Chris Newman: If you believe science, my people have been in the Chesapeake Bay region for somewhere between 12 to 15,000 years I’m not exactly sure. It’s not about diet. Diet has nothing to do with it. If you look around this country if you look around Turtle Island every diet you can imagine, was here. You had people that ate nothing but meat. You had people that were almost vegan and everything in between. And yet for the most part they managed to organize societies and a way of relating to the natural world that did not extract from those places. Diet has nothing to do with it. People love to think of climate diet because it's an easy thing that you can do to fix the problem right now. Nobody really wants to do the hard work of realizing that this country was founded and really all of the dominant political systems and power systems in this entire hemisphere are based on extracting from this place and it's never stopped. Only 34% of the calories that are produced in this country actually go into any food system. The rest of it go into biofuels they’re going to bio plastics. The food system is not based on feeding each other it is based on producing a product that transports well that doesn't spoil that can be turned into things other than food. So, yeah, the idea that if you eat less meat if you start eating Beyond Burger instead of the beef burger at Burger King. If you go vegan or if you only eat grass fed meat. What we really need to do is people like me, you know, I'm not rich but compared to a lot of people I have an awful lot of privilege as somebody who has access to the amount of land I do to the expertise I do to the network of people that I do. It's really up to us to show consumers which is again how we like boil down people's existence to, right, to show them what is possible. That there can be a different kind of not diet, but a way of producing food of relating to the natural world of understanding our place in nature beside nature, not separate and apart and above it. And I think until we have that kind of revolution of the mind, consumerism is not going to solve this problem because consumerism is what got us here.

Greg Dalton: Amber Tamm, I saw that you posted on social media something from Sustainable Brooklyn that said, “It’s not enough just to change the system we need to change ourselves.” I’m interested in your thoughts on that because what Climate One tries to do about changing systems by changing ourselves.

Amber Tamm: Yeah. I mean that in the sense of when I’m on Instagram I'm really talking specifically to black people from the hood because those are people who follow me. And so that is a touching component for them to say the change that needs to happen within themselves is one where they need to work on freeing up their mind to really return to a rural lifestyle. One that is all-encompassing of who we are, who we are as a people culturally and that's usually the turn off. Because within the realm of agriculture I feel that we are not talking about the cultural components. I feel like we’re spending a lot of time talking about the physical components and I recognize understanding how to run a business and the physicality of it. But when it comes down to soil like I’ve said on Instagram a million times talking about soil does not mean anything unless we’re also going to talk about land access. And that will forever be my truth so yes, I do think that there is an internal change that does need to be made. But what I know is once your hands are in the soil and once you’re communing with mama earth and the ancestors and whatever soil that you’re touching, those changes will start to generate.

Greg Dalton: A lot of people are doing that with their COVID gardens. There’s been a boom in home gardening this year while people are stuck at home. Chris Newman do you see any prospect in that the people kind of is that a small step toward people getting their hands back on the earth the soil?

Chris Newman: Yes and no. There's a part of me that loves the idea of like the victory garden concept and kind of restoring a certain sense of food sovereignty. But there is a part of me that doesn't like the idea that we think we might feed ourselves by everybody growing lettuce on their balcony or whatever. I think it’s one thing to kind of establish that connection to people that people realize that yeah food doesn't grow in the grocery store and that it does come from the ground and that it doesn't come wrapped in plastic and with rubber bands around it with branding on it. But it’s such a complicated thing, right? Because how many stories, you know, Amber has probably heard of this, people that have grown up in the projects and I grew up not in the projects but next to the projects and I remember people getting their gardens ripped up by HUD because it wasn’t a lawn. You plan a garden you try to feed yourself now screw you they're going to rip up your freedom garden and turn it back to lawn because that's what the reg say and you can take your food stamps over to the gas station and buy whatever and continue with your freaking, I don’t know chronic diabetes and everything else. That’s what the state does. I mean look I think with COVID what isn’t so much hopeful to me is kind of the gardening trend and people buying their own chickens, which made it real hard for me by the way to source my own chicks when it came time, thanks everybody. But people understanding how fragile and in some ways ridiculous our food system is, you know, everybody probably remembers how there was no meat on the shells for months when COVID hit and when everybody freaked out and when the restaurants shut down and we realize we had a supply chain that was so tight and that was so modeled after industrial manufacturing that there was no resilience in that system at all. You had meat lines it’s crazy in the richest country in the world by far you had people wonder what the heck are we gonna eat. I had people panic buying on my website. And this is going to happen again. COVID-19 is probably not the last pandemic we’re gonna see in the short term. We've heard from Fauci and from others in the CDC that this could just be the beginning of a wave of pandemics that we are dealing with for the foreseeable future. To mention nothing of you know, increasing droughts, increasing fire, increasing flood, increasing everything that makes it harder to do agriculture and feed people the way that we traditionally have. So, I think COVID has been kind of like our little test of what could come and how money can't save us and we can't eat it. We really have to reimagine what food is how we feed each other and why.

Greg Dalton: And a lot of people have taken the COVID example to critique of supply chains at the industrial model and said, small local organic. But Chris you actually say that big isn't always bad, why?

Chris Newman: Yeah, it’s really easy to beat up on the bigness of agriculture. And that’s not to say that JBS and Cargill and Tyson and all of them like deserve a pass. They do terrible, terrible things to people. But I would argue that the largeness of agriculture the scale at which it operates like the watershed level that it operates at is probably the most indigenous thing about it. The whole idea of homesteading was that the United States had all this land west of the Mississippi that it absolutely wants to conquer and occupy and they knew there was a lot of wild stuff out there and it was too big to invade with an army. So what do you do? You take your white immigrant population and you say hey look, you go out there and you deal with the wolves and the Comanche and the Sioux and like all these dangerous things that aren’t gonna exactly appreciate you traipsing on their territory and busting sod and, you know, screwing up their ecosystems. Y'all deal with that. And that whole idea that you’d get your 160 acres like that’s where the idea of homesteading comes from. It is an idea that is literally born of the violence and dispossession that got us where we are in the first place. Native people manage things as a common at scale. The Piscataway manage farmland that ranged all the way from present-day Washington DC all the way down to where I am here. It was a huge agricultural system, a gigantic agroforestry system that was so big that people like John Smith or Henry Fleet and other people that saw it firsthand did not realize that they were standing in a food forest. They thought they were standing in the garden of Eden and had no idea that this thing was absolutely anthropogenic. So, bigness is not necessarily bad, it's your motivation for your size. Why are you big? Big agribusiness is big because their margins are so small that in order to reward their shareholders in a way that they won't revolt they have to tear down the whole Amazon they have to create cattle that can hold like 18,000 head of cattle like they have to be big to extract profit from the landscape in order to make investors who have no hand in the landscaped soil or the communities they’re supposedly feeding at all. Whereas if you're like our farm and our operation we want to be big because we want to restore the whole Chesapeake Bay. We want to restore the whole Potomac River the whole Rappahannock River. And we can't do that from a 40-acre homestead as pretty and romantic as it might be. So, you know, bigness is about your motivation it’s always about your why it's never about the what.

Greg Dalton: If you're just joining us, my guests today are Chris Newman, farmer and cofounder of Sylvanaqua Farms in Virginia and Amber Tamm, farmer and horticulturist based in New York City. Amber, what’s your vision for bringing food and farms closest to the people who need it the most for changing the food system in a hot and crowded world. How do we bring it closest to people who need it most?

Amber Tamm: My vision is for food to be free. I think me being the third or fourth generation within Brooklyn to not know how to grow food to be on food stamps and be told what you can buy and what you can afford and to not be connected to food. I mean, for the longest time as a child I never knew that a chicken that was walking was it like the chicken cutlet inside of the Styrofoam like the disconnect for me was so huge until I entered a realm of diversity of white folks in elementary schools. So I think being able to give low income people, especially low income brown people autonomy to try things to figure out what they like and what they don't like, rather than us to resorting to the bacon egg and cheese from the corner store because that's all we know is two very different conversations. I also think that people deserve time to understand if they want to grow their own food and I emphasize this because there is this ideal that farming is so cool and it’s so fun and it’s so healing when in reality and I've been trying to do more awareness about this, but production farming is really, really intense and it is not calming or therapeutic. And like Chris is just saying it is very extractive and I'm coming out of five months of only being harvest crew where I'm just constantly extracting and not ever being able to give and that's a very, very exhausting process. So, I do think that low income people deserve to see if growing food as a career is something they want to do for as long as money is relevant or if it's something they just want to do for their family or if it’s something they don't want to do at all. And as Chris mentioned earlier, there is realms that I've been extending to people from my own branding where I need help, which is exactly what he said accounting which is social media management all these things where others can play a role for the sake of regenerative BIPOC agriculture. So, I think it's much bigger than just being in the dirt and being dirty. There are other ways that people can join in but those other ways have to be shown. I’m just here to facilitate those roles out as I'm learning. I'm pretty much like a young black woman experiment for agriculture to see how far you can go.

Greg Dalton: And as you look at what we know about climate disruption and Chris mentioned the heat and the droughts, etc. How does climate affect that outlook for you?

Amber Tamm: When I got my farmer certification in Hawaii and one of the first things that every farmer out there told me they were like you need to learn how to surf. And I always be like, I don't understand like the connection between me farming and me surfing. And they’d be like, oh because like climate change is real, like there's going to be one big wave that we’re all gonna ride until our death. Like that’s like indigenous Hawaiian thought where there is no fear. They’re like that's the one big wave that we will ride to our death. And then my good brother _____ [00:49:28] he always says, and he’s from the Sioux nation, but he always says you are to become one with whatever's happening that you don't see you know weather report as something against you but you are to become it. So, when you see the tornado you are to become the tornado. It is not something that is outside of you or here to harm. It is you. And so those are the lines that I think habitually, all brown people think naturally, but I think I can only talk for black community and say that I, for sure can tell you that the fear is more about the cops that are literally outside my window right now more than it is about the tornado coming.

Chris Newman: I think there's also the fact that just for people of colors, especially for black people, especially for indigenous people this is not our first glimpse at the end of the world. Our world ended when our first visitors showed up on this side of the Atlantic. Our world ended when people, you know, slave trader showed up in Africa and took us from our homelands and snatched us off the ground and we are braiding seeds out here just thinking dear god what comes next. It ended again when we got plopped down here on these shores I mean the plantation that our farm at now the history was that people were bought straight from Africa put in the pen in front of the great oval in front of the great house, and their first task was to build the damn mansion. You know, that’s the end of the world for them. It was the end of the world when the Homestead Acts were passed and people came en masse across the Mississippi river. And the thing is for people who are not people of color for white people like this might feel like the end because I think this may be one of the first ends that they've ever really had to deal with. This may be the end of extractive settler capitalism. This may be the end of a basically 5 to 600-year-old worldview that you can just take, take, take, take, take and never give back. But for us, each of these ends has been a new beginning. And they haven’t been pleasant. But on the other side there's always hope. Amber and I aren't supposed to be here doing this. We’re just not. We are the seeds that our grandparents planted. You know it’s the thing that Rowen White says, you know, “they tried to bury us but they did not realize we were seeds.” It’s okay, we’re being buried right now. And if we’re fortunate and if we’re smart, and if we can apply the ingenuity that we've always applied, well not always but, you know, since our roommates showed up apply that ingenuity and drive toward solving problems. Toward reciprocity towards indigenizing this landscape and getting away from what got us here there's nothing but hope on the other end of this tunnel, even though it will be as painful as childbirth.

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Greg Dalton: Chris Newman is a farmer and co-founder of Sylvanaqua Farms in Virginia, and Amber Tamm is a farmer and horticulturist based in New York City. This is Climate One. Coming up, how approximately 11 million acres of land have been held by -- and taken from -- Black Americans.

Andrew Kahrl: This is almost a classic example of the forces that have been arrayed against African-Americans who have strived toward opportunity within our economy in America who then find themselves singled out for the type of racist abuse and discrimination.

Greg Dalton: That’s up next, when Climate One continues.

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Greg Dalton: This is Climate One. I’m Greg Dalton. June and Angela Provost are sugarcane farmers in Western Louisiana. Their story is emblematic of how systemic racism has prevented Blacks from accumulating land and wealth, a problem that is compounded by climate disruption. Freelance producer (TKTK) Julianna Bradley filed this report.

June Provost setup piece - [3:13]

Greg Dalton: That was freelance producer Julianna Bradley. Andrew Kahrl is professor of history and African-American studies at the University of Virginia, and author of The Land Was Ours: How Black Beaches Became White Wealth in the Coastal South. I asked him how representative the story of Jim Provost is in the context of what he studies.

Andrew Kahrl: It’s very representative in the sense that here you have a family who is being singled out for racial discrimination by other farmers, as well as by federal government down through lenders and banks. I mean this is almost a classic example of the forces that have been arrayed against African-Americans who have strived toward opportunity within our economy in America that it is often those who do work to advance their own position and do so often by playing by the rules that were set out by those in power who then find themselves singled out for the type of racist abuse and discrimination. And certainly in particular with the plight of black farmers that have seen their numbers decreased dramatically over the course of the 20th century, the factors that have been aligned against this particular family within this particular sector of the agricultural economy is very representative.

Greg Dalton: Did you study the dispossession of African-American landowners and farmers. Did you expect climate to be part of that story?

Andrew Kahrl: Yeah, for me, so my work is focused in particular on coastal areas and looking at that long history of African-American land ownership within coastal real estate markets. Places that have become over the course of the 20th century, highly coveted in places that were targeted for commercial development real estate development and as a consequence, African-Americans found themselves struggling to hold on to land in the face of predatory speculators who would use the law and would use the willingness of public officials both at the federal, state and local level to look the other way when it came or to be actively complicit in actions it sought to divest communities and individuals of their property. And at the same time, and this is where climate change ties in is that the very objectives of developers in coastal areas have really run contrary to our interest in creating sustainable coastlines in the face of climate change and sea level rise. That at the same time that developers are working to steal black folks land often and in doing so with the aid and support of public officials who greenlight development projects in low-lying flood prone and very vulnerable areas. They are both contributing to racial inequality and contributing to environmental instability. And so, I think, you know, that by looking at coastlines you really begin to see how the struggle for racial justice and for environmental sustainability are fundamentally linked.

Greg Dalton: Do some of those developers or officials know the irony of the land stolen from Black Americans is now being taken back by rising seas and rising storms?

Andrew Kahrl: Well, I mean if they were interested in dwelling on those questions perhaps, but often times are too busy trying to realize a profit and trying to make a healthy return on their investment. And make no mistake, I mean real estate development coastal areas and this in part explains why it continues even as we had become well aware of the threats that these areas face. It continues because you can realize your profit so quickly. You don't need to think about what's gonna happen 20 years from now, or 30 years from now you've already cashed out at that point. So, I think that's really an alarming feature of real estate markets and development, especially in areas that are going to be affected by climate change. I mean places like say South Florida which continues to see booming development and along Miami Beach even as we know that they're facing existential threats within our lifetimes. Developers don't care because they'll have already made their money. They’ll have already gotten out. And so, I think we need to kind of recognize that and seeing what possible changes we can begin to make.

Greg Dalton: And I’ve heard some people reference bank started to go from 30-year to 15-year mortgages partly because that risk out there that they’re starting to recognize because the banks don't want to be left with a bunch of bad debt. You know, I was in Miami last year and went to Little Haiti where this the Magic City billion-dollar approved development sort of the origin of climate gentrification. And how is climate disruption impacting wealth creation and preservation of black people now? For example, in Little Haiti some people can cash out and that might be good for them, right?

Andrew Kahrl: Yeah, I mean I think again it’s, you know, there are fundamental dynamics within real estate markets. And I mean speculation is the sort of name of the game, you know, buy low, sell high. And finding where places where there's potential profits to be made because property is undervalued. And that's I think what we’re seeing here in climate gentrification is really the sort of another wrinkle on the age-old story of gentrification which is very much an unremarkable feature of how housing and real estate in America works. And so yes, certainly you will see perhaps property owners realize profits from this enhanced value, but what is lost, I mean communities are being displaced. There are things that will not be able to be retrieved from these communities that have been dismantled in the interest of profit. And I think the sorts of I think history shown continually that those displaced by gentrification losings that can’t be recovered. And in particular whatever windfall profit they might realize from their property being enhanced in value pales in comparison to both the long-term community ties that have been torn asunder, as well as the other aspects of community economies that have been also dismantled by gentrification.

Greg Dalton: Well then I should mention that Little Haiti is something like 8-feet above sea level and it’s on a hill where the white people use to occupy, well it still do, the desirable beach low-lying land and the poor people are pushed up to the hill and now the wealthy white people saying oh that hill looks pretty good, we’d like to, that might be a better place to be. You can see an inversion where all of a sudden, the black people the poor people are down on the waterfront where that’s more vulnerable, less desirable. Here this land we stole from you, you can have it back or buy it back.

Andrew Kahrl: Yeah, and again I mean that's been the story of African-American struggles to acquire and hold on to land is it often historically black communities formed and black land bases began to grow in areas that were seen as marginal or areas that were seen as not desirable for say white property owners and white developers or white dominated economy such as in farming. Many African-American farmers in the south had smaller acreage and more marginal land. And the story of say coastal areas that I write about is one in which many of these families who became farmers in these marginal areas and remote parts of the coastal south found themselves after World War II and after the federal government and the Army Corps of Engineers became really invested in shoreline protection building infrastructure that allowed for areas to become developed on a mass scale. And creating the impression that these areas were safe to build on, in turn, turned after American communities that had carved out a degree of autonomy and carved out communities and really build out property holdings. Suddenly they find themselves being targeted for displacement because now all of a sudden, their land is very valuable and they’re seen as disposable. And again, as with the case of the Provost family and African-American sugar farmers in Louisiana. When you don't have protection from the state when the state is often times working actively in the interest of your enemies, and those who are in the adversaries who are seeking to remove you. So from their vantage point, black communities are seen as an obstacle.

Greg Dalton: How has land dispossession force Blacks into redlined neighborhoods that are more vulnerable to heat, floods and other climate impacts?

Andrew Kahrl: Yeah, so the story of urban America in the 20th century was this concerted effort both on the part of federal agencies and the private real estate industry to concentrate black populations within geographically defined areas through redlining and through kind of maintaining the color line in housing markets that would prevent African-Americans from having equal access to opportunities in suburbs and outside of ghettoized areas. And as a result, these areas suffered from rampant exploitation by slumlords by predatory lenders suffered from dilapidation and housing deterioration. And also, as well lack the kind of civic infrastructure and develop in the kinds of investment that actually improve quality of life. And actually, in particular with regards to say air quality with regards to say temperatures I mean there’s numerous studies that are showing how these are areas that suffer from a lack of green space that have suffered that in many ways have higher levels of air pollution. That's a product of this long-standing disinvestment and exploitation of the housing the dire housing needs of these communities. And it manifests itself also in these environmental conditions. So, I think that’s I think one thing that we can again see as a clear example of how the need to address racial inequities cannot be separate from the need to address the problems associated with climate change and the environment.

Greg Dalton: So is there any areas where this has been remedied. We have a Community Reinvestment Act which forces banks to make certain investments as supposed to address the past problems of redlining. Are there any areas where African-Americans have change this narrative of being pushed off of land time after time again and frustrating the wealth creation?

Andrew Kahrl: Well, I think it's important and I think here’s where the job of historians like myself really are critical is that throughout this history, not just today, not just in kind of on current policy debates. But at every stage of this process, African Americans had been mobilizing organizing as communities as individuals as property owners as tenants to fight on their behalf and to call attention to these issues. And to call out those who discriminated against them or defrauded them or sought to displace them. And I think amplifying those stories, making them a part of the history that we know. I think you know one thing that I resist when I teach and write about the history of redlining is to not just simply create this impression that African-Americans were passive in the face of discrimination or that they were unaware of what was happening around them that this was sort of that white actors and white officials and white bankers were simply doing this without any kind of resistance on the part of those communities who they were exploiting and victimizing. Again, telling the stories of families like the Provost and black farmers who have fought tirelessly and heroically to hold onto their property and to gain a foothold and preserve their foothold within an economy that has been set up to benefit others at their expense. Telling those stories, I think is so important to both not just to kind of fill out the picture, but also to learn from the wisdom and the insights and the efforts that average folks and people who have experienced these forms of discrimination what they’ve learn from it how they've mobilized against it. So, I can't say that, I’m not gonna point to a particular sort of policy or program that is just you know the silver bullet because I don't think there is one. But there's a struggle and the struggle is where we learn the lessons that can help guide us toward a better future.

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Greg Dalton: Andrew Kahrl is Professor of History and African-American studies at the University of Virginia, and author of The Land Was Ours: How Black Beaches Became White Wealth in the Coastal South.

Greg Dalton: To hear more Climate One conversations, subscribe to our podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your pods. Please help us get people talking more about climate by giving us a rating or review. It really does help advance the climate conversation.

Greg Dalton: Kelli Pennington directs our audience engagement. Tyler Reed is our producer. Sara-Katherine Coxon is the strategy and content manager. Steve Fox is director of advancement. Devon Strolovitch edited the program. Our audio team is Mark Kirchner, Arnav Gupta, and Andrew Stelzer. Dr. Gloria Duffy is CEO of The Commonwealth Club of California, where our program originates. [pause] I’m Greg Dalton.

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REWIND: Fate of Food / Plate to Planet

Otto Pilot — Fri, 29 May 2020 07:43:21 +0000

REWIND: Fate of Food / Plate to Planet

05/29/2020

How will we feed a planet that’s hotter, drier, and more crowded than ever? Much of it starts with innovators who are trying to re-invent the global food system to be more productive and nutritious. Vanderbilt University Journalism professor Amanda Little chronicles some of these efforts in her most recent book, The Fate of Food: What We'll Eat in a Bigger, Hotter, Smarter World.

“We see disruption in the auto industry, we see disruption in tobacco – disruption is coming in the meat industry,” says Little, noting how conventional meat companies have been investing in technologies to produce cell-based meat without animals.

Other technological innovations, such as robots that can deploy herbicide with sniper-like precision, can help push agriculture toward more sustainable practices. But she also notes the difficulties that food startups face in getting their products to scale – which often means selling to large, industrial producers.

Twilight Greenaway, a contributing editor with Civil Eats, amplifies these concerns about tech disruption in the food space. “Will there be some [technology] that really can feed into a more democratic food system that allows for different types of ownership less concentrated ownership,” she asks.

Growing, packaging, producing and disposing of the food we eat makes up a big part of our climate footprint. And it’s easy to send blame down the supply chain. Can environmentalists, farmers and ranchers all get along?

Anna Lappé’s research into global food production has convinced her that they can -- if everyone works together toward the shared goal of fixing the climate. “A lot of environmentalists are starting to realize that farmers really are both on the front lines of the climate impacts, but also they’re on the front lines of the climate solutions,” Lappé says.

Author Mark Kurlansky agrees that we should be looking for solutions -- not pointing fingers. “Most farmers and most ranchers and most fishermen do not want to do harm,” says Kurlansky. “They do want to earn a living. And if their ways of earning a living are doing harm, you know, you have to convince them that there's a better way to do it.”

Guests

Twilight Greenaway

Contributing Editor, Civil Eats

Amanda Little

Professor of Journalism, Vanderbilt University; Author, The Fate of Food

Mark Kurlansky

Author, MILK! A 10,000-Year Food Fracas

Anna Lappé

Executive Director, Global Alliance for the Future of Food

Announcer: This is Climate One, changing the conversation about energy, economy and the environment.

On today’s program, we go from plate to planet. Food writer Anna Lappé remembers reading a United Nations report that made the connection between climate change and livestock production.

Anna Lappé: At the time it was about 18% of all global greenhouse gas emissions, which was more than every single train, plane and automobile. And I remember thinking, why isn’t everybody talking about this?

Producing the food we eat makes up a big part of our climate footprint. But Mark Kurlansky says we should be looking for solutions - not pointing fingers.

Announcer: Mark Kurlansky and Anna Lappé: Plate to planet. Up next on Climate One.

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Announcer: Is the solution to climate change at the end of your fork?

Welcome to Climate One, hosted by Greg Dalton.

The connection between global warming and the dinner table isn’t always obvious when we go to the grocery store. But our choices about how we put food on our plates, and what we do with the waste, contribute to as much as one third of total greenhouse-gas emissions. How can we continue to feed a crowded planet without destroying it in the process?

Today, Greg talks food with two of the country’s most influential writers on the topic. Anna Lappé examines the climate crisis within our food system in her book “Diet for a Hot Planet: The Climate Crisis at the End of Your Fork and What You Can Do About It.” A generation ago, her mother Frances Moore Lappé published the revolutionary “Diet for a Small Planet.”

Mark Kurlansky has explored global food history in his best-selling books “Cod” and “Salt.” His latest is “Milk: A 10,0000 Year Food Fracas.”

Here’s their conversation.

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PROGRAM PART 1

Greg Dalton: Anna Lappé, in 2006, you read a famous report called Livestock's Long Shadow. How did that set you on the course that you've been writing about, you come from a food family but how did that – yeah.

Anna Lappé: I do. Yeah, so it’s not the most dramatic story to tell about how you get sparked about an idea. I was sitting in my Brooklyn brownstone apartment reading a study from the United Nations. But it was really striking to me. It was a report that for the first time experts really tried to piece together the full climate story of livestock and really try to determine if we look at the whole picture, not just the food they’re eating and not just the methane they’re emitting and not just the transport but all of it together, what do we get? And what they found is that livestock as a whole sector emitted about at the time it was about 18% of all global greenhouse gas emissions, which was more than every single train, plane and automobile at the time. And I remember thinking, why isn’t everybody talking about this? And then of course you start peeling the layers even more. We don't just eat meat and dairy, we consume a lot of other things and you look at the whole story of food related, food sector related emissions. And today that figure is about 30% so you heard in your intro you said 14% is agriculture, well that’s direct agricultural emissions. But put it all together all of the aspects of food production from seed to plate to landfill. And you’re talking about a third of the crisis. So I got really inspired to dig in and I ended up writing a book about it and to this day continue to explore these questions of how food connects to climate.

Greg Dalton: And we’ll talk about that at this hour. Mark Kurlansky, you write that milk is the most argued over food in human history and also the most regulated. So how is it the most argued over? That surprised me.

Mark Kurlansky: Well, it’s always been argued over for like 10,000 years. And it’s not surprising if you think about it. I mean what is milk; it’s this bodily fluid that we’re supposed to feed to our babies. And, you know, nobody knows when this moment was, I would have loved to have been there when, you know, either the mother couldn't produce enough milk or the mother had died and somebody said, oh, look at that goat over there. Maybe we can use that. So always tremendous arguments about mother's milk versus animal milk and many other things. The thing about milk arguments is that they don't go away because they don't get resolved. They just get more and more, we keep adding to them. So there's newer milk arguments and there’s really old arguments. I guess the oldest one is whether you should use animals and then after that, which animals you should use, which hasn't been resolved. The arguments about raw milk versus pasteurization which came about in the 19th century haven’t been resolved and, you know, we have newer ones about GMO crops for food, for feed and –

Greg Dalton: I’ve read about donkey milk and camel milk in your book. Those were new to me. I haven't heard those before and we had people here recently with pea milk where you can make bathroom jokes about that. But it’s like milk from peas so there's lots of milk substitutes out there.

Mark Kurlansky: Well, milk substitutes aren’t new. The Catholic Church, there was this belief in the Middle Ages that milk was blood. And so it was a kind of blood, a white blood. And the church did not allow the consumption of blood or red meat on holy days which were about half the days of the calendar.

So that meant that you couldn't use milk on holy days. So what they did is they use almond milk. They use lots of almond milk in the Middle Ages and if you look at medieval recipes they’ll say, you know, take a cup of milk or almond milk meaning, you know, depending on which day on the calendar it is.

Greg Dalton: We wanted to talk to an actual dairy farmer as we’re talking about milking cows and methane. So we talked with the CEO of Saint Benoit Creamery he’s talking about some of his company’s business decisions.

[Start Clip]

Eric Batum: I’m Eric Batum, I’m the CEO of Saint Benoit Creamery. We are a small creamery in Sonoma, California. And our milk is very little processed; it’s low pasteurized and it cannot travel much. We are completely non GMO and organic. So we know the animals are well-treated this is very important to us.

The second thing is that we get milk from Jersey cows and Jersey cows like to go on pasture. So they’re not cows that like to sit on the farm like Holsteins could be. They’re on pasture all year long. Of course one of the sacrifice is that when you go with this kind of breed the productivity or the amount of milk that’s produced by cow in a day is certainly less than it can be with a lazy Holstein. The costs or the price that we paid the farmer for the milk is much more, way more almost three times the price of a regular Holstein cow. So our products are not cheap, our products are I would say expensive in the markets, but it's also for a clientele that is caring about the environment, caring about the animals and caring about having good food for themselves or for their families.

[End Clip]

Greg Dalton: That’s the CEO of the Saint Benoit Creamery, Eric Batum. So Anna Lappé, there's a lot in there, a poke at Holstein cows, we’ll get Mark Kurlansky on that. But the idea that wholesomeness and economic value, environmental concern costs more, is that elitist, is that true?

Anna Lappé: Well, is it true and is it elitist are different questions I think. I would say that, you know, if you wanna talk about elitism I would think the entire way our current food system is structured is inherently elitist where the worst paid folks in our economy are in the food sector, you know, where you have an entire concentration of wealth where some of the best paid CEOs are in the food sector and at the same time you have farmworkers barely able to feed themselves. You know that to me is the elitist dynamic of our food system.

To the cost question, you know, does it cost more to say support, you know, I don’t know how many of you have had that product. I have, it’s quite delicious, and it is quite expensive. It can certainly cost more to say the individual consumer in the marketplace and part of that is because we are paying the true cost of our food when you’re paying more and you're actually giving more of your dollar to the farmer. But what is exciting to me when we start looking at these sustainability solutions is that actually I like to tell the story that ultimately they are going to cost us a whole lot less.

Because the kinds of practices that sustainable farmers are using on their land don't incur the cost that you and I all incur in our taxpayer dollars when we have to spend money to pay for the pollution that's caused by agriculture or pay for all the other externalities as economists like to call it about our current industrial system.

So to me the real story is this way of farming that's going to be more in concert with nature is ultimately going to save us a lot of money particularly when it comes to how we can harness sustainable food to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and help fix the climate.

Greg Dalton: And a lot of people look for that grass fed, grass finished. Mark Kurlansky, grass-feeding is actually cheaper than grain. So why don’t more farmers do the ranchers did?

Mark Kurlansky: Well it’s like all of these things, you know, they come with a catch. It is cheap if you have the right kind of climate, you know, Ireland –

Greg Dalton: And enough grass.

Mark Kurlansky: Well, because you have the right climate, yeah. But on the other hand grass fed produces less. So there's always, you know, an economic, I find having talked to a lot of farmers all over the world. One thing I consistently find is that these farmers are looking for a formula that works. Rarely do you find somebody saying, well you can find people sometimes saying, you know, I want to be organic. I've talked to a lot of people said they wanted to be organic and they couldn’t make it work. But basically they're looking for a formula that works. If you don’t do anything if you just do all the things that you’re supposed to do, which evolving devise to try to make milk cheap. I mean cows probably aren't the best milk but they’re the best milkers, you know, and Holsteins have been bred to be the best producing cow. It’s not necessary the best milk but the most productive. And not terrible milk necessarily, you know. But if you do all that stuff like you're supposed to do then you're kind of stuck with the milk price the U.S. government’s milk price in this country or, you know, in Australia it’s the supermarkets that determine the milk price there. Somebody is always setting a low milk price. And if you charge more than that price people won’t buy your milk because it's more expensive unless you do something special. So that's why farmers are always thinking well maybe if I’m organic, maybe if I’m GMO free.

Greg Dalton: So you say that farmers, ranchers do that because of the price premium not because of some environmental ethic it's really –

Mark Kurlansky: Well sometimes but often not, you know. I talked to this guy he produces this very popular milk in the Hudson Valley which is near New York City and he sells his stuff in the green markets in New York for a good price and it’s a really nice milk. And it’s GMO free and it says on the bottle GMO free and I said to him, I said, “So do you think that GMO feed is bad?” And he said, “No, I don’t think so but, you know, people really like it when you say GMO free.”

Greg Dalton: And they’ll pay more. Anna Lappé.

Anna Lappé: I would say that when I’ve talked to farmers around the country and around the world. One of the most interesting I think farmers to talk to are farmers who have shifted to organic and asking them why, why did they make the choice. And one of the things that I feel like I’ve heard more than any other answer to that question is that they made the shift because they had experienced either in their own families or in their own communities they’d experienced the health impacts of growing food or raising, you know, raising crops with pesticides.

And one of my favorite farmers of all time John Kinsman, a dairy farmer in Wisconsin. He said he’d been a conventional dairy farmer multiple generations in Wisconsin the moment that everything change for him is when he woke up in the hospital and he realized he was there because the chemicals he was using on his farm. And he totally shifted his production.

Mark Kurlansky: Organic is a complicated thing. I mean I've talked to farmers who wanted to be organic because, you know, they actually feed organic food to their families and they believe in organic and so they want to do it. And in some cases, you know, organic is no longer an ecological term or something it’s a bureaucratic term; the U.S. government defines organic. And it's very difficult to do. It’s very expensive and extremely difficult to do. And I've talked to many people who wanted to be organic and just couldn't get ahead doing it.

Greg Dalton: And some of them think that organic is inhumane, Mark Kurlansky, tell us about that.

Mark Kurlansky: Yes. Yes, I’ve talked to many farmers who didn't want to be organic because they thought it was cruel to cows to not to give them medicine when they’re sick. You can give them medicine but then you can’t use them in the organic herd which is one of the many examples of how organic favors large-scale farming. Because in large-scale farming you give them the medicine and then you move it to the other herd because they maintain an organic herd, and non-organic herd. But if your family farm with 100 or 200 cows you can't really do that.

And I’ve talked to many farmers who are just really bothered by this whole idea and didn't want to do it. And in fact, there is an organization that certifies farms as animal friendly and they won't certify organic farms.

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Announcer: You’re listening to a Climate One conversation about growing and eating the foods we love. Coming up, how farmers and environmentalists can work together.

Anna Lappé: This food sector is a place where we’re seeing real climate solutions and a lot of environmentalists are starting to realize that farmers who really are both on the front lines of the climate impacts but also they’re on the front lines of the climate solutions.

Announcer: That’s up next, when Climate One continues.

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Announcer: We continue now with Climate One. Greg Dalton is exploring the climate consequences of food production, and possible solutions, with writers Anna Lappé and Mark Kurlansky. Lappé is the author of “Diet for a Hot Planet,” and Kurlansky’s newest book is “Milk: A 10,0000 Year Food Fracas.”

Let’s continue with their conversation.

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PROGRAM PART 2

Greg Dalton: Anna Lappé, one of the other critiques of organic is that it doesn't scale. Can't feed the world organically because it takes so much land, et cetera. Do you agree with that or do you challenge that?

Anna Lappé: Well, I definitely challenge that. I challenge that on lots of different counts. First of all, I challenge that on the fundamental frame of this question of how do we feed the world and fundamentally I think it's always important to remind ourselves that fundamentally the root causes of hunger currently today and has been for decades and decades. It's not because we aren’t producing enough food, it’s because of what food we’re producing, who has access to it, it has to do with the politics of food.

You mentioned I come from a food family so my mother Frances Moore Lappé, some of you may know, she’s been drumming home this message for decades now, which is that the root cause of hunger is scarcity of democracy and not the scarcity of food. So in other words, we could today we’re producing 2,900 calories for every man, woman and child and yet a billion people are still going hungry. So I always think it's important that we're not just having this debate about what production method is going to be best but also how do we put that into a bigger context. With that said, what thrills me about the story of organic farming or as folks especially internationally call it agroecology, agroecological farming. That’s a word I think that doesn't go over so well in English language but the principles of it are fabulous.

And what we're finding is study after study showing that actually when you're applying these agroecological principles really bringing knowledge to farming, and what I would call knowledge intensive farming versus input intensive farming, that actually yields are often comparable with say the chemical counterpart without any of the cost, the health costs and frankly the cost to the farmer of having to spend money on these inputs. We’re seeing in many places around the world, a whole movement of farmers embracing these practices, finding their farms do better. Talk about good news for climate that these agro-ecological farms studies are showing they do much better during moments of climate extremes. They do much better during times of drought, they’re better at retaining water in the soil because they’re building healthy soil. All the things that we know we’re going to need in a climate unstable future, these farms are doing well for us, you know, compared to the chemical farms that are not.

Greg Dalton: So another term that I've heard related to that which is more memorable perhaps is climate smart agriculture and yet there's some big companies that are trying to perhaps support that you might say co-op that. But what’s wrong with climate smart ag?

Anna Lappé: So yeah, so when I was researching and writing this book Diet for a Hot Planet, I used the term climate smart and climate friendly and then the book came out and I noticed some of our biggest agribusiness companies starting to use the term. And what we're finding that in this decade that we've gone from food being totally off the radar in terms of the climate conversation to being part of the climate conversation is a lot of the companies the food companies that are now part of the climate conversation in a way they don't want to be where they realize actually we’re a key driver here. You're starting to see false solutions being presented by some of these companies saying well we can, you know, one example is there’s been a lot of conversation about how we need to use our soils to get carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and bring it back into the soils; what’s called carbon sequestration.

We’re starting to see a move by some of the biggest food companies and biggest investors in the world to do what some people are calling land grabs, basically buying up a huge swath of land to do these short-term big large-scale carbon sequestration projects that have dubious carbon sequestration benefits but are profiting some of the biggest companies in the world. So and I think it's important that we bring our critical mind to any kind of silver bullet solution that's coming from the very companies that have gotten us really into this mess.

Greg Dalton: Mark Kurlansky, is big always bad?

Mark Kurlansky: [Laughs]. I think big is not necessarily always bad. But, you know, small is usually good, you know.

[Laughter]

Greg Dalton: Is small efficient, you know, one of the classic economics is big helps drive down the cost. I guess I’m thinking of –

Mark Kurlansky: One thing I learned in spending a lot of years in studying fisheries is that efficiency is not always a good thing. It's actually sometimes a thing you want to avoid.

Greg Dalton: We have a cult of efficiency sometimes, yeah. I’m thinking of a scene very memorable scene in Food, Inc. the documentary where the Walmart guys go to the farm at I’m not sure if Gary Hirschberg is there, and Walmart banned the growth hormone in milk that changed that market overnight. And probably think that's a good thing, I don't know but that's an example of a big company. When a big company makes a change it can have quite a profound impact.

Mark Kurlansky: Yeah. And I don't think you should ever have that attitude, you know. I think you should always have the attitude that you should try to work with people, you know. I do a lot of talk radio interviews and I get these people who call in environmental people and different causes that they're pushing and they talk about farmers like they’re the enemy. And I tell them, you know, you want to change things, the first thing you have to do is understand farmers and learn how to talk to them. Because the way you're talking, there isn’t gonna be any kind of communication.

Greg Dalton: Yeah. How about that Anna, we don’t, you know, talk to people who disagree with as much in this country anymore, and certainly a lot of people maybe if you go to farmers’ market you talk to people who produce food. But for a lot of environmentalists, ranchers and farmers are the villains. Anna Lappé.

Anna Lappé: Well I’m just gonna say I mean I think that story is changing too a little bit. And just to correct the historical record on the Walmart and banning that growth hormone. Really what pushed that movement away from this artificial growth hormone or VGH where as far as I know no dairy farmers are using it today, was dairy farmers and consumers together really putting a stand up against you know saying –

Mark Kurlansky: They didn’t like the results.

Anna Lappé: But on this question about, you know, these farmers and ranchers and environmentalists, you know, can we all be friends. What has been encouraging to me again over the past real decade of this conversation about climate and food is that we’re seeing I think new alliances and a deepening of understanding of how it’s certainly not helpful to pit ourselves as opponents if we have the shared goal of fixing the climate. And to me again, this food sector is a place where we’re seeing real climate solutions and a lot of environmentalists are starting to realize that farmers who really are both on the front lines of the climate impacts but also they’re on the front lines of the climate solutions. They are the ones who are really the stewards of our soils which again is one of the biggest carbon sinks on the planet.

And that when you bring this ecological practices to the farm, you're seeing a real power for biodiversity to go up, you’re seeing a huge push toward agroforestry bringing trees onto farms and that has incredible environmental benefits. So to me I think there is more of an understanding of how there's more ways we can work together.

Mark Kurlansky: Most farmers and most ranchers and most fishermen do not want to do harm. They do want to earn a living. And if their ways of earning a living are doing harm, you know, you have to convince them that there's a better way to do it. They really by and large are not evil people, you know. I've seen with fish farming, you know, salmon farming was started by Norwegians. And they never wanted to be the bad guys, you know, they didn't foresee that. So they have gotten concerned about how bad their image is and have recognized not all of them but some of them the Norwegians who started it actually that they’re creating problems and they're doing some things wrong and they're trying to find solutions and they will talk to people. You know, as a journalist I can sit down with them and they will say yes, X, Y and Z these things are really bad we’ve got to figure out some way to change it. That’s the kind of dialogues that have to happen.

Greg Dalton: And another thing Mark Kurlansky, you write about the shortage of workers in dairy. And there's robots coming, there’s already –

Mark Kurlansky: Yeah, there’s gonna be more and more because, you know, every farmer I talked to can't get, he can’t get help. I mean it’s a really hard job and there’s no money in it, you know, some young guy starting off usually doesn't want to do that unless, you know, the ones that do do it come from a five generation farming family or something.

Greg Dalton: The robots coming there too?

Mark Kurlansky: Robots are gonna be more and more in farming especially dairy.

Greg Dalton: Anna Lappé, are food miles overstated, exaggerated, you know, Michael Pollan educated a lot of people about food miles. Look where your food comes from. And yet some people think that food miles have been kind of overblown.

Anna Lappé: Yeah. That is one of the things I was really curious about. And actually if you look at the science around and what percentage of your, of the greenhouse gas emissions associated with the transport of your food you know what percentage of your food that is, it’s actually a relatively small percentage. But what I would sort of caution folks to do though is not say, okay then we can, you know, get this food from halfway around the world and get this food from the other half way around the world. Local is often proxy actually for a whole suite of other benefits of your food. So, you know, when a Michael Pollan is talking about supporting and buying local food, I'm pretty sure Michael is not meaning, you know, if you live near a Twinkie factory go buy the Twinkie, right.

He really means support your regional food shed. He means, you know, go to the farmers that are promoting biodiversity that are keeping your land protected from sprawl that are, you know, tending to your watershed the kind of things –

Mark Kurlansky: You don’t think the local Twinkies are better.

Anna Lappé: I don’t know. I don’t live near a Twinkie factory as far as I know.

Mark Kurlansky: You know, I -- you'd mentioned this book I’ve done, Food of a Younger Land, which was food writing that was done for the WPA in the 1930s. And the food was all local and, you know, one of the results of that that you could see was that in most places people ate really badly in the wintertime. If you read this book, you're going to think twice about being a locavore.

Greg Dalton: Well it’s a luxury that certain people in Mediterranean climates have.

Anna Lappé: Right.

Mark Kurlansky: Yes.

Anna Lappé: And, you know, I think to me what is important to realize when you bring up this food miles question and start thinking about it. It really starts drilling you down into this question of well then what is the most important thing if you care about the environmental impact of your food, or you want to eat a more climate friendly diet. It's really a question of what are you eating, how was it grown, where was it grown and because most of the percentage of greenhouse gas emissions associated with your food come from that agricultural production slice it’s about 80% to 85%. So that brings us into, you know, what have the most impact.

Greg Dalton: What is food and Anna Lappé, you have a TEDx talk about empathy for both for workers. And so talk about the collective empathy of food.

Anna Lappé: Yeah. So I was talking in that speech this idea this way that food can actually listen our innate sense of empathy. I started thinking about it as I started reflecting on the farmers and farmworkers I'd met. And started realizing that, you know, when I make food choices for myself and my family, you know, I do really think about how does this food choice not just feed my two daughters the healthiest food for them but it really does create this sense of empathy in me where I think about was there a farmworker mother living in Salinas Valley who had to be exposed to chlorpyrifos a toxic insecticide to grow the lettuce that I'm giving my kids for dinner.

And realizing that for me for instance choosing food that isn't grown with toxic pesticides, is an empathetic choice that is both really about my care for myself and really my kids but really it’s about caring for people all across the food chain. And how I think food can be this act of expression of that collective empathy for the farmer you're never going to meet, the farmworker you’re never going to meet, the butterfly and bee you’re never gonna see buzz by but you know was saved because you didn't purchase the food that was grown with the neonicotinoids that killed those bees and butterflies. So I think there is a way that it can tap us into I think a really beautiful part of human nature, which is our capacity to feel empathy.

Mark Kurlansky: Can I just talk a minute about pesticides because it’s an interesting example. You know, DDT was developed during World War II because American troops in the Pacific were getting a lot of malaria. And before DDT came along basically what farmers did was what is called biological control. Which is you bring in the bug that eats the bug that you want to get rid of. And it's a very difficult and complicated things because you're talking about, you know, invasive species, bringing in things that weren’t supposed to be there and, you know, in nature, there's always -- biologists call it the law of unintended consequences.

But research on this science just sort of went away when DDT came along and all the research went into coming up with more and more kinds of chemicals to kill them. And it’s an example of how corporations took over science and really pointed it in a wrong direction.

Anna Lappé: Yeah. I mean the figure is about 1% maybe 2% of all research dollars is going to exploring these biological control methods and the rest of it is going to this chemical model of agriculture which we’re seeing creates these pesticide treadmills.

Mark Kurlansky: Was it Dow? Who was it better living with chemicals?

Anna Lappé: Du Pont maybe yeah. They’re now one company so.

Mark Kurlansky: Right.

Greg Dalton: We’re talking about food and climate change at Climate One. I’m Greg Dalton. My guests are Mark Kurlansky, best-selling author and Anna Lappé, a food advocate and also best-selling author.

We’re gonna go to our lightning round and ask some quick questions of our guests today. First section is association. I’ll mention a noun and you mention the first thing that –

Anna Lappé: Oh this is kind of scary.

Greg Dalton: So the first thing that comes to your mind Anna Lappé if I say chocolate.

Anna Lappé: Mmm, delicious.

Greg Dalton: Mark Kurlansky. Kale.

Mark Kurlansky: Green was the first thing that came to my mind.

Greg Dalton: Anna Lappé. Quinoa.

Anna Lappé: Questions.

Greg Dalton: True or false. Anna Lappé. You have met foodies who care more about the temperature of their goat cheese than the homeless people outside their grocery store?

Anna Lappé: Have I met them? I’m not sure so.

Greg Dalton: You heard about them?

Anna Lappé: I’ve heard about them, yes.

Greg Dalton: Okay. True or false. Mark Kurlansky. 60% of people in the world are lactose intolerant?

Mark Kurlansky: That is correct.

Greg Dalton: Last question in our lightning round. True or false for Anna Lappé. You secretly dream of watching Three’s Company and eating Cheetos?

Anna Lappé: [Laughs]. You’re quoting me so I guess sometimes – in this TEDx talk I confessed that as a child we had to keep our television locked in the closet it would only come out occasionally. And, you know, the closest thing I got to junk food in the kitchen was, you know, I think a rice cracker and maybe some honey on top of it. So I said, you know, secretly sometimes I would dream of eating Cheetos and watching Three’s Company.

Greg Dalton: Alright, let’s give them a round for getting through that gauntlet of lightning round here at Climate One.

[Applause]

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Announcer: You're listening to a conversation about changing our diet to save the planet. This is Climate One. Coming up – making hard choices at the meat counter.

Mark Kurlansky: And the guy in this heavy New York accent said, “Make up your mind lady. You wanna be a locavore or you wanna be a grass fed?”

Announcer: That’s up next, when Climate One continues.

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Let’s get back to their discussion. Here’s Greg.

PROGRAM PART 3

Greg Dalton: So Anna Lappé, someone who wants to eat a climate friendly diet. What should they eat, what should they not do?

Anna Lappé: Well, yeah, that’s a good question. And kind of depends what your starting point is what you might need to shift off and on your plate. For the average American who is consuming about twice as much protein as their bodies can use and if you over consume protein you don't store it for later it's essentially wasted calories. I would say a really good place to start for the average American is removing some meat off that plate. We know that currently the way we’re producing our beef cattle in particular, have a really high climate footprint. And so in particular looking at shifting away from the beef you find in the supermarket. I have been digging into the evidence about, you know, is it possible that a 100% grass fed beef managed on pastures using, you know, really, really complex systems to make sure that the cattle are helping build up the soil carbon content. I think there's some really interesting science around that. Can the typical consumer find that in the supermarket, probably not. So I don’t think it’s a very helpful message.

But the good news around what does a climate friendly diet look like it's all the things that you’ve probably been hearing lots of other people talk about in terms of what’s good for your health and good for water, good for all kinds of things. It's eating more organically grown food, organic agriculture has a much lower carbon footprint uses much less energy. And again has all of those resiliency benefits. It means eating less packaged food. It means eating more in season. All these things that, you know, those are the lessons we’re learning about what a healthy diet looks like. So there's a good, a nice synergy between what’s good for the climate and good for you.

And then the final thing I would say is to not waste your food. We in the U.S. are wasting about 40% of all food that we could eat. Globally it ranges but that's about on par with the global figures. And so just food waste alone we could significantly reduce the climate impact over our food and feed more people if we weren't wasting so much food.

Greg Dalton: Mark Kurlansky, your next book is on salmon. You’re quite concerned about the fate of the oceans that's a big source of protein for people around the world. Tell us a glimpse on to your next book on salmon. How they’re doing?

Mark Kurlansky: Well, salmon which is a really remarkable animal. I mean an animal that can jump 10 feet in the air and just has this incredible life cycle and gives up its life to spawn. The problem with salmon is just about everything that we’re doing wrong. I mean it's really remarkable. Salmon are in trouble because of bad fishery management, because of bad farming practices, because of deforestation, because of irrigation because of climate change. I mean really I want people to save the salmon because all you have to do to save the salmon is save the earth.

Anna Lappé: Right.

Greg Dalton: We talked a little bit about aquaculture is that inevitable can aquaculture be done sustainably? A lot of times restaurants will say, oh this is sustainably farmed.

Mark Kurlansky: No, the problem with aquaculture is that it doesn't address the issue. And people embrace it as though it does. It addresses the issue of how can I get some fish but it doesn't, you know, these animals are dying out because of what we are doing to the planet. And the fact that we can create a few fake ones doesn't in any way address the problem we’re doing to the planet.

Greg Dalton: Anna Lappé, there’s some companies that are doing what's called clean meat which is, you know, meat or beef, burger without the cow, you know, tuna fish sandwich without the tuna. Is that perhaps a solution that doesn't have the environmental impacts to create meat in the laboratory?

Anna Lappé: Well, I would say there’s really two different categories that are getting lumped together by the industry gave themselves this nice sounding term, clean meat. You have really I think it’s important for us to understand there’s really two different paths of essentially alternatives to what we think of, you know, animal-based proteins. One path is these plant-based proteins that are actually based on plant. So its products that are trying to create alternative to dairy using say legumes grown in France to make product called Ripple that’s alternative to milk. On the other hand, you have these companies that are creating meat products in a lab and they are cultured they have starter cultures that tend to come from crops that are not so good for the environment like sugarcane, they require a lot of energy. I remember going to a clean meat conference and during the breakout session at lunch time there was an entire corner of the room piled with a pyramid of plastic Petri dishes and then in front was a little sample of a burger and they were saying, “Well we’re still trying to figure out how to scale this, but that’s how many Petri dishes we need to make this burger here.” There’s a ton of questions I and a lot of other folks that are more expert in this than I are asking about these companies and you have a lot of investor dollars are going in. I think for, you know, these reasons that we understand that, you know, when beef cattle uses 3/5 of the world's land but is only giving us 5% of our protein calories, we should be rethinking meat. I think doing it this way to me raises a lot more questions than our answered so far in what I've seen from what these companies are putting out about what they’re doing.

Mark Kurlansky: And the thing is that we’re kind of in our attempt to help people we’re making life really difficult for people because they’re just inundated with all of these choices. And, you know, I was recently at a Whole Foods at the meat counter and they had these New York steaks, not New York cut but, you know, from New York. And this woman said, “Well do you have anything that is grass fed?” And they said, “Yeah, these over here are grass fed.” And she said, “But that says Australia.” And he said, “Yeah, they’re from Australia.” And she said, “Can I get something local that’s grass fed?” And the guy in this heavy New York accent said, “Make up your mind lady. You wanna be a locavore or you wanna be a grass fed?”

[Laughter]

Greg Dalton: Which gets to the point of like how much time people spend at the grocery store. Anna Lappé, I have this image of you spending five hours in the grocery store because you’re like analyzing and looking on the Internet, you know, because it's complex.

Anna Lappé: Right.

Greg Dalton: You go to Marine Stewardship Council, all these different labels. Is it easier than that?

Anna Lappé: It’s really, I mean we’re lucky in that we have a grocery store that's locally owned and does a lot of my sort of thinking for me and having great products on the shelves. But actually, I really push back around the like “it’s too confusing” messaging because actually eating this sort of climate friendly diet if you want to call that you actually erase a lot of the questions that you have. I mean when I look in our kitchen we don't have that many brands, we don't have that much packaged food. So we don’t have to go in to, you know, what’s the latest labor atrocity of this company, is it okay to buy it, you know. Because we’re eating mostly whole foods not from the Whole Foods grocery store, but whole foods like real food that then we have to cook.

What I would say though, to this like it’s complicated is, and we haven’t really touch on this yet together is that to me then the story needs to wrap into what are the policy changes we need to make. So that we as individual consumers don't have to, it’s all on us, right. We don’t have to be constantly bombarded with, you know, is this label telling us the right thing, does this have some toxic pesticide? We should have a set of policies that raises the floor so that when you go into the grocery store, you don't have to worry does that can have a lining that might make your kids sick. Does that company produce palm oil in Indonesia that’s going to worsen climate change? We should be setting policies in place so that floor gets raised so we as individuals don't have to be doing that thinking.

Greg Dalton: Mark Kurlansky, some of the things that people are concerned about in the fish for example, there’s some myths about safety and there's one about people have probably all heard about salmon that's died with, you know, the same things that the Shirley Temple cherries are something like that. Is that true?

Mark Kurlansky: No. You know, when they first started farming salmon. When you farm salmon it doesn't have the kind of crustacean diet that it has at sea. And so the flesh doesn't turn that pink color, it’s white, which they were fine with but nobody bought it. And for a while they tried to market it as white salmon but nobody wanted it. So they got the stuff from the crustaceans to feed to the farmed salmon so that they would have that color. And a lot of people, you know, they think they're giving them red dye number 2 or something, it's not, they’re just sort of re-creating what would happen at sea. I mean there's a lot of issues with farmed salmon but that really isn’t one of them.

Greg Dalton: Before we go to audience questions I wanna ask each of you, you’ve done some interesting travels, Mark virtually and Anna actually with your mother. You visited five continents to write the book Hope’s Edge. So tell us about that journey and kind of, you know, five continents in one minute, you know.

Anna Lappé: Okay. So yes, my mother and I wrote a book together which when I tell that to people sometimes they’re shocked, you could write a book with your mother. But we looked at examples around the world where people were developing this really creative solutions to make food systems work for health and climate. And to me I think one of the most inspiring experiences was going to one of the largest cities in Brazil, a city called Belo Horizonte or beautiful horizon. And seeing what a city government could do if they started looking at food differently, not just as another commodity to be sold at the marketplace but as a basic human right. And if food becomes a human right then all of a sudden these elected officials in the city had a whole different frame of mind about policymaking about well then it's our responsibility as the elected officials here to ensure that everybody has a right to access good healthy food.

And what we saw was within a decade they had innovated all these incredible policies, which in one minute I won’t have time to go into. But they had decreased infant mortality by something like 73%, they had decreased hunger by some huge margin. They had helped all the regional farmers by connecting them to urban consumers and they had really I would not say solved hunger but as one of my friends put who wrote a whole book about this, they had begun to end hunger. And that was to see that on a scale you asked about the scale, to see that on a scale of a huge city really doing this incredible work through again really creative policies was really inspiring. And some of those policies that we witnessed there in Belo now I’ve seen spreading all around the world.

Greg Dalton: Let’s go to our audience questions. Welcome to Climate One.

Male Participant: Oh thank you very good program. My name is Tom McCollum. There’s growing bipartisan interest in a tax or a fee with dividend on carbon in the energy sector. How will that play out on the carbon footprint in the food sector, make it better, make it worse, impact health or improve health?

Anna Lappé: I think how would I answer that actually to give an example of what we’re seeing here in the state of California that I think is really exciting and I think most people don't know about which is how can we look at the revenues from cap-and-trade policies like we have here in California. How can we ensure that some of those revenues are going into agricultural systems that will be good for the climate? So they’ll be benefiting farmers and also helping farmers develop the kinds of practices on their land that are going to reduce the emissions from the ag sector in California. And there is a network in California called The California Agriculture and Climate Action Network or CalCAN that actually developed this really creative policy and amazingly so got it passed and now there is revenue coming into California farmers to look at how can they bring these conservation practices to their farms. And so it is policies like this that can help farmers do what is complicated stuff on the farm, do it more, do it better and get some compensation for it.

Greg Dalton: Let’s go to our next question. Welcome.

Female Participant: Hi, my name is Hope Soranski and I work for an environmental nonprofit. And my question to you all is how do you believe we can pay the true cost of food while also taking into consideration equity, traditional cultures and socioeconomic status?

Greg Dalton: Anna Lappé.

Anna Lappé: Yeah, that’s a great question. And it gets back to this both the human rights to food and also the right of people to – indigenous people to their land. And one of the facts that I heard recently is 75% of the world’s biodiversity is on the land held by indigenous peoples around the world.

And so we really want to be thinking about how do we protect that land. How do we protect those people and the rights to land and, you know, not to keep coming back to policy. But, you know, I think it does, it comes back to where, how are we regulating our agricultural system and how are we forcing those that are really the drivers of these costs, paying those costs.

So right now for instance, I was just looking at how much the factory farm industry in this country, how much antibiotics are used. You mentioned this is an issue in dairy. Well antibiotics are used rampantly in our industrial agricultural system about three quarters or more of all antibiotics used in this country it's not used in hospitals, but it's used in factory farms. And only a tiny, tiny bit of that is actually around animal health. The largest reason why we’re feeding animals antibiotics is actually to promote growth because it promotes growth really fast. And if you look at the cost, the healthcare costs, we’re experiencing of antibiotic resistance that’s a huge cost. Now is the pharmaceutical company that's providing those antibiotics to that factory farm paying any of that cost, is the producer that’s feeding the animal, you know, that product is paying any of it, no. So to me, it's a complicated question of how do we get some of these costs revealed and how do we get regulations and policies in place so that those that are really causing this impacts of carrying some of the burden, or regulation place that say in the case of antibiotics there's been work going on for decades to try to force companies to disallow companies to use subtherapeutic levels of antibiotics.

Greg Dalton: Anna Lappé is a food advocate and author. We’re talking about food and climate change at Climate One. Let’s go to our next question.

Male Participant: I’m Dan Warren, an old football coach. My question is this. Just over the last 200 years the increase in population. Does that affect climate change more than a lot of things and the multiple is keep on going? Thank you.

Greg Dalton: Anna Lappé, a lot of the environmentalists don’t like to talk about population. It's a messy social issue that they don't like to go there.

Anna Lappé: Yeah, well, you know, I see it as not so much a messy social issue as, actually a really important conversation about women's rights and also a conversation that totally connects to the food conversation. Because all around the world the majority of farmers are women and part of the reason why we have population growth is that women aren’t empowered to get an education. They aren’t empowered to they don’t have the resources to feed their families. And so when you start looking at how do you create a farming system that actually does help those small-scale farmers be able to stay in the land and thrive, does support women and girls education, you start changing the entire story of population growth.

One of the books that has come out recently about climate change I think is really important to read is Drawdown. You might have had Paul Hawken on your program. But one of the biggest areas for how we address climate change that he talks about on that book and many other folks have said is women’s rights, education for girls and actually that, you know, you hear demographers say we’re going to double the world’s population by whatever year they like to say. And those demographic changes are not set in stone. And actually they can when you invest in women's education and when you invest in supporting girls, that entire story changes.

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Announcer: Greg Dalton has been talking how the food we eat helps heat up our planet – and some possible solutions. His guests were Anna Lappé, author of “Diet for a Hot Planet: The Climate Crisis at the End of Your Fork and What You Can Do About It.” And Mark Kurlansky, who has written the best-sellers “Cod” and “Salt.” His latest book is “Milk: A 10,0000 Year Food Fracas.”

To hear all our Climate One conversations, subscribe to our podcast at our website: climateone.org, where you’ll also find photos, video clips and more. If you like the program, please let us know by writing a review on iTunes, or wherever you get your podcasts. And join us next time for another conversation about America’s energy, economy, and environment.

[Applause]

Greg Dalton: Climate One is a special project of The Commonwealth Club of California. Kelli Pennington directs our audience engagement. Carlos Manuel and Tyler Reed are the producers. The audio engineer is Mark Kirschner. Anny Celsi and Devon Strolovitch edit the show The Commonwealth Club CEO is Dr. Gloria Duffy.

Climate One is presented in association with KQED Public Radio.

Play

Libation Migration: Beer, Wine and Climate Change

Otto Pilot — Fri, 01 Nov 2019 00:09:40 +0000

Libation Migration: Beer, Wine and Climate Change

11/01/2019

Americans 21 and older drank 26 gallons of beer and cider per person in 2018. But extreme weather due to climate change has started to disrupt the business of brewing.

“Beer is over 90% water and being headquartered here in Colorado we are very prone to drought and forest fires,” says Katie Wallace, director of social & environmental impact at New Belgium Brewing, a craft brewer in Fort Collins. “Whether we’re dealing with invasive algae in the east or forest fires in the west, water quality can be affected any time.”

Beyond water, Wallace notes that as certain ingredients become more volatile due to disrupted weather patterns, “it really reduces the amount that we have to play with, and that’s kind of the keystone of the craft beer movement is that we have all of these fun ingredients to play with.”

The prognosis for wine is somewhat different – or, as Esther Mobley, wine critic at the San Francisco Chronicle, puts it, “in the short term it’s kind of a lot of good news among some not so good news.”

Warming temperatures have resulted in an expanded global map of wine growing regions, she explains, adding that “regions that have produced wine for a long time like Burgundy in France or Oregon … can now count on kind of consistently having a warm enough, ripe enough vintage to have a great, great crop every year.”

For Dan Petroski, a winemaker at Larkmead Vineyards in the Napa Valley north of San Francisco, it's never been a better time to be a wine drinker. But he is anticipating more change.

“When we start talking about wine and climate change we’re talking about the agricultural impacts of climate change,” he says, “and we’re gonna be thinking about other grape varieties because our region of choice may not be precisely proper for those grapes that we've been historically and traditionally planting.”

Guests

Esther Mobley

Wine Critic, The San Francisco Chronicle

Dan Petroski

Winemaker, Larkmead Vineyards

Katie Wallace

Director of Social & Environmental Impact, New Belgium Brewing

Greg Dalton: This is Climate One, changing the conversation about energy, the economy, and the environment.

Greg Dalton: America’s most popular alcoholic drinks are taking a hit from climate.

Esther Mobley: It's too bad that people aren’t just motivated thinking about the problems in the abstract before we get to talking about IPAs and Cabernet.

Greg Dalton: Disruptions from drought, fires, and rising temperatures have brewers and winemakers scrambling to deal with the new normal.

Dan Petroski: When we start talking about wine and climate change we’re talking about the agricultural impacts of climate change.

Greg Dalton: Can beer and wine drinkers help convince people of the need for climate action?

Kaite Wallace: I do have a lot of hope that if we’re eyes wide open about what we’re facing that can really come up with the number of solutions to address it preemptively.

Greg Dalton: Beer and wine in a disrupted climate. Up next on Climate One.

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Greg Dalton: How will beer and wine taste different in a warmer world? Climate One conversations feature oil companies and environmentalists, Republicans and Democrats, the exciting and the scary aspects of the climate challenge. I’m Greg Dalton.

Greg Dalton: Americans 21 and older drank 26 gallons of beer and cider per person in 2018. But extreme weather due to climate change has started to disrupt the business of brewing.

Kaite Wallace: Beer is over 90% water and being headquartered here in Colorado we are very prone to drought and forest fires.

Greg Dalton: Katie Wallace is director of social and environmental impact at New Belgium Brewing, maker of Fat Tire and other craft beers. Beyond water, a hallmark of the craft beer movement has been the variety of creative ingredients used in the brewing process – ingredients whose availability has become more volatile due to disrupted weather patterns.

Esther Mobley: One of the crazy things about climate change for wine is that in the short term it’s kind of a lot of good news among some not so good news.

Greg Dalton: Esther Mobley is the wine critic at the San Francisco Chronicle, where she writes about California wine, along with beer, spirits, and drinking culture more generally. Americans drank nearly one billion gallons of wine in 2018, thanks in part to an expanding global map of wine-growing regions.

Dan Petroski: You get to see more consistency and more quality throughout the world. So it's never been a better time to be a wine drinker.

Greg Dalton: Dan Petroski is a winemaker at Larkmead Vineyards in the Napa Valley north of San Francisco. I began our conversation asking him for the big-picture impact of climate change on wine.

Dan Petroski: It’s an agricultural product. When we start talking about wine and climate change we’re talking about the agricultural impacts of climate change. So that's first and foremost in my mind. It's not about our beverage that we drink together at night at home and over the dinner. It’s more about being an agricultural product.

Greg Dalton: So it’s grape production. How is climate affecting grapes? We tend to think of them as kind of delicate and tender.

Dan Petroski: From an insider’s point of view we also think of grapevines as being very resilient. They could handle stress and it's often said that the best wines of the world are grown in some of the most stressful conditions. Whether it be soil conditions or weather conditions. Napa Valley, where I live and work happens to be one of those areas where it can be quite stressful due to heat. A grapevine unto itself like most fruiting plants is a perennial so it happens it does the same thing every year. So we can actually track the impact of climate or the impact of decisions made or farming practices on how it impacts the perennial aspect of the vine’s growing season.

Greg Dalton: Katie Wallace, water is the number one input into beer. Water is one way that I think people may feel climate more directly and locally. So how is climate affecting water and therefore beer?

Katie Wallace: Sure. Beer is over 90% water and being headquartered here in Colorado we are very prone to drought and forest fires. In 2012, we actually had the second largest forest fire in Colorado, which scared the use of our river here. And we had to fall back on contingency plans that we’re also quite vulnerable to fire that year as well. So we’ve nearly escape the perfect storm that would cost us to lose access to significant amount of water in our watershed. You also see brewers in California that received during the seven-year drought there, received water reduction mandates in how to understand how to manage production and employment through those times as well.

Greg Dalton: Right. That was a big concern for Sierra Nevada Brewery when there was the multi-year California drought. And Katie Wallace, there’s also some divisions between the eastern part of the country for water therefore brewing then there was in the western part. What's the east-west divide on water and climate?

Katie Wallace: Sure. In the east, brewers have more issues with contamination and growing of invasive species and algae. Our brewery in North Carolina is actually higher up in the mountains but we are aware of some water quality issues that are becoming more problematic as temperatures rise and there are fewer deep freezes and cold days.

Greg Dalton: So it’s not only a matter of the volume of water. It's the quality as well as access to it, Katie?

Katie Wallace: Absolutely. And we see that here in the west too. So when our water systems are more stressed and whether we’re dealing with algae, invasive algae on the east or forest fires in the west, water quality can be affected any time. And the water actually lends flavor attributes to the beer itself. So as those changed then we’re having to adjust for that in the operations.

Greg Dalton: Esther Mobley, what is smoke taint?

Esther Mobley: Smoke taint refers to when there's wildfire as there frequently is in the west. Certain molecular compounds can take hold in grapes. And depending on when it happens during the growing season the grapes can become more susceptible to taking on certain compounds in a way that ultimately will impact the wine that’s made from them. The main culprit is something called guaiacol that actually occurs naturally in grapes in smaller concentrations. It's what gives Serra [ph] that smoky delicious taste. But when you have this really extreme high levels of it, the grapes can kind of taste like an ash tray. Smoke taint has become a major issue in California wine over the last couple of years. It’s certainly not new, just as wildfires aren’t new. And wineries here have been dealing with those for quite some time. But the last couple of years there's been as wildfires in Northern California have happened right in the midst of different points during the growing season, especially in the kind of late summer period. It's really becoming, people don't know how to deal with it. Are the growers responsible are the winemakers responsible? What happens if you can’t make the wine? The science about how to maybe mitigate the effects of smoke taint isn’t really as advanced as it should be. So that's certainly a big question for wineries going forward. And given that wines are on a kind of delayed release cycle the 2017 wildfires which really severely affected Napa and Sonoma counties. Those wines are kind of only now just getting out into the world. So we have yet to see whether a lot of wineries don’t sell wine from that vintage or if we can taste some smokiness from them or maybe not at all.

Greg Dalton: Do we know, Esther Mobley, if those fires had an economic impact on the industry?

Esther Mobley: Certainly. And a lot of that was related to tourism. I mean where Dan lives and works depends so heavily on tourists. Any of you here in San Francisco know that within a few months it was really life kind of back to normal for some people up there and certainly for the kind of main wineries. But the lingering perception of the whole area being ravaged seems to have affected a couple businesses that we spoke with at the Chronicle cited their closure as due to that.

Greg Dalton: So people think, oh it's bad up there so I don't want to go there. It might be uncomfortable to see or unhealthy to go there. Do we know, Dan Petroski, if these climate impacts are having a price impact in the inputs and therefore the final product. Are we seeing, is the price of wine going up because of these things?

Dan Petroski: The price of wine and profit margins do get impacted across the board with regards to climate activity. Whether be a drought conditions or heat waves or extended heat waves or floods because it's all about the major part of the price is built into the cost of the grapes. And so if your great yield is lowered by half, that means you've done the same amount of energy and effort and work and financial inputs into the farming practice but you received half of the raw material. So you have two choices. To take a hit in your economics or to raise your price to kind of normalize your business line.

Greg Dalton: Katie Wallace, there was a report a couple years ago that grabbed headlines about the impact on beer supply and therefore the prices that would be from heat and other impacts got headlines around the world. But the biggest impacts were I think in Europe. Are we seeing that yet the impact of higher beer prices because climate is hitting the supply chain?

Katie Wallace: Not quite yet. I think we’re kind of the phase of the canary in the coal mine. That study actually illustrated the worst case scenario which we hope to ultimately avoid. But it’s certainly is something that we’re looking at and already if you’re looking at the leading indicators you are seeing changes to quality that we have to adjust for and near misses on impacts to availability. And those two things as they progress as they have been are going to lead to price impacts. I imagine brewers will try much like the wineries will try to absorb some of those increases in their cost for some time and then eventually we’ll see if that is passed on to the customer. But of course we're really hoping to push forward and be proactive and try to avoid the worst of the worst.

Greg Dalton: The growing regions for some of these things are expanding. Katie Wallace, you know, most of the hops most of the hops are grown in Idaho and Washington. Is beer gonna migrate north or cannot migrate further north?

Katie Wallace: Yeah, hops, about 95% of the hops in the United States are grown in Washington, Oregon and Idaho because of the optimal climate there. And also because of the long daylight the extended daylight hours that they have in the north there that help to increase the yields per acre. And so moving further north you’re getting into colder temperatures. Moving any further south, you get into lower levels of light in the growing season which will impact the hops. They don’t have a lot of room to move around. And then barley is grown in northern latitudes of Montana, Alberta, Canada and a bit of Colorado. And so as other crops need to push north due to pest invasions or other climate change induced causes. We really don't have much further to go before we hit the tar sands up there in Canada. So barley is one of those crops that is not a primary crop for a lot of farmers and it's oftentimes a rotation crop. And so that's an easy one to squeeze out as we push more crops further north.

Greg Dalton: Yeah, wine from the tar sands doesn’t sound very appealing. Esther Mobley, people don't think of Canada wine doesn't come to mind. But wine is starting to move up there. So are we gonna start seeing some Canadian wines is that an opportunity there's some real short term positives here for some people and regions.

Esther Mobley: Certainly. And Canada does have a major wine industry and the rise of wines, especially from British Columbia over the last decade has been undoubtedly partly due to climate change, as well as to their own talent and hard work. But yeah, that's one of the crazy things about climate change for wine is that in the short term it’s kind of a lot of good news among some not so good news. But thanks to warming temperatures, sparkling wine production is now possible in England a place that would have always been considered way too cold to grow wine successfully, same with parts of Canada. And we're seeing the global map expanding as you're alluding to where it’s possible to make wine. That's true also at higher altitudes. And it’s also true in regions that have produced wine for a long time like Burgundy in France or Oregon but if it always have kind of variable growing conditions, it might be too cold, it might be too rainy to have a great vintage. They can now count on kind of consistently having a warm enough, ripe enough vintage to have a great, great crop every year.

Greg Dalton: The New York Times did a recent piece on kind of the effect on the wine industry. They talked about the elevation expanding map. Dan Petroski, what are some other impacts that are happening because of climate?

Dan Petroski: There's more economic impacts with regards to workforce labor impacts. I'd like this conversation about the shifting of climate throughout the globe in the wine industry because you get to see, as Esther alluded to, you get to see more consistency and more quality throughout the world. So it's never been a better time to be a wine drinker. But that shift is still continuing and we’re gonna have to be worrying about that 2 to 3 decades from now. And we’re gonna be thinking about other grape varieties because our region of choice may not be precisely proper for those grapes that we've been historically and traditionally planting. And again the example of England and being able to grow grapes today so that’s shifting in California as well. So Cabernet may not be the great variety of Napa Valley, 20 years from now.

Esther Mobley: And it's just worth noting for those who don't live and breathe wine. Every grape variety has a kind of sweet spot temperature and climate-wise and even sometimes soil-wise. So you can grow riesling really successfully in chilly, Germany, but you can grow a great like Tempranillo in kind of desert like hot Spain. So when we’re talking about can Napa continue to grow Cabernet we're looking at Cabernet wants this kind of certain band of temperature, we see that Napa Valley's temperature is consistently rising over time. Theoretically there it really is a point where it's too hot for that grape variety but not too hot for some others. And so thinking about other parts of the world, Mediterranean climates that grow other grapes really well despite a lot of heat is I think what a lot of winemakers like Dan are looking to.

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Greg Dalton: You’re listening to a Climate One conversation about beer and wine in a warmer world. Coming up, we’ll look at the impacts of climate change on the people who work in beer and winemaking.

Esther Mobley: It’s making the issue of figuring out mechanization and vineyards even more pressing because there's just not as many people to do this work. And those who are doing the work it's becoming more difficult all the time.

Greg Dalton: That’s up next, when Climate One continues.

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Greg Dalton: This is Climate One. I’m Greg Dalton, and we’re talking about the impacts of climate change on beer and wine with Esther Mobley, wine reporter at the San Francisco Chronicle; Dan Petroski, a winemaker at Larkmead Vineyards in Napa Valley, California; and Katie Wallace, director of social and environmental impact at New Belgium Brewing in Fort Collins, Colorado. As Katie mentioned earlier, craft brewers have gotten creative with a whole variety of flavors in their beers. She explains how less predictable weather is making companies scramble to sustain that special taste.

Katie Wallace: A couple of years ago when the hurricanes went to the South in the United States here, a lot of the orange crop was decimated. And so it took us just over a month to scrap together a couple of orders that equal the amount of orange peel we needed to make our Fat Tire Belgian White. So it certainly makes it a little bit more of a roller coaster to possibly secure some of those ingredients. I think barley has to produce a certain amount of starch that become sugar eventually once it’s melted which is our extract. And that actually needs a really specific growing environment for that. So we had an occasion a few years ago where barley sprouted across most of the barley growing regions in North America because of a warm and wet harvest season. And so we’re actually not necessarily at that stage able to switch to a different ingredients it's something that we had to dip into reserves for and if that were to happen multiple years in a row, we’re starting to get into just availability issue overall. But yeah I think that as certain ingredients become more volatile that it really reduces the amount that we have to play with. And that’s kind of the keystone of the craft beer movement is that we have all of these fun ingredients to play with. You can really put all kinds of fruits and spices and hops into beers. And if anything I think you’ll just narrow the availability of that but crop growers are creative I’m sure come up with some new flavors for sure.

Greg Dalton: So we’re talking about some of the grand picture of climate conversations. We’re talking about some inconveniences and some high-class problems here. I do want to bring in the workers and people who are often not part of the conversation and overlooked. And as temperatures rise and wildfires become more common, conditions for farmworkers are getting more dangerous. Armando Elenes is a secretary treasurer of the United Farm Workers. He was an immigrant farmworker himself as a teenager. We asked him how workers in the legendary Napa and Sonoma wine country have been faring and how the wine industry can get better help them stay healthy.

[Start Playback]

Armando Elenes: We represent almost a thousand farmworkers up in the Napa Valley that work in the vineyards. When the fire hit up in that region workers were unprepared. The employers were unprepared. You know, when you don’t work in a heat as much such as in the Napa Valley where it doesn’t get as hot, but then, all of a sudden it does get hot. It's something that takes people by surprise because they’re not acclimated they're not used to working those type of extreme temperatures. So sometimes that’s actually even worse versus somebody let’s just say in the south working valley that gets acclimated and is more used to working in those temperatures. You know, most of the workers done piece rates. Most workers get paid by, you know, how much they pick. And so that puts a lot more stress in the body especially the heat and temperature is climbing. It puts a lot of pressure for the grower to also get that crop off the ground and get it harvested or lose money. And same thing for the employee they’re worried about losing income. As these temperatures increase, as the fires are more exposed. I would really urge the wine industry so that okay what can they do proactively to not give that worker that incentive to continue working and or provide them an incentive to be safer. And provide them with safety nets so they can stop working because obviously that could have a much bigger impact on their brand and worker lives.

[End Playback]

Greg Dalton: That was Armando Elenes, secretary-treasurer of the United Farm Workers. Dan Petroski, your response there. A lot in there about worker vulnerability working conditions pressure is on them. And also the Central Valley where most wine is made it is really, really hot.

Dan Petroski: Very hot. We do most of the picking 24 hours a day. So a lot of it happens when the sun goes down, especially during harvest time it’s the most stressful time when you’re actually moving 40-pound lug boxes around. A single farmworker could move a couple of thousand pounds a day by themselves. And then they’ll move from one site to another site usually in the dark. And we’re doing that for reasons of heat because we don't want the -- we have rules and regulations to support our farmworkers to keep them out of the inclement weather. So once it hits a certain degree we stop work. But most work started at day break during the non-harvest season we do our best in order to support the efforts they do. Because the romance behind the hand work that is done by our farm workers and our laborers is second, you know, the romance lifts the industry but the work that they do is second to none with regards to energy, effort and they need to be supported as much as we possibly can.

Greg Dalton: Esther, your thoughts on worker vulnerability.

Esther Mobley: We’ve written a lot extensively about this. And what's happening is for the reasons where you are describing is that fewer and fewer people want to be farmworkers in California. And wineries throughout California are having a lot of trouble finding workers to do this work. And at the highest then wineries they're paying quite a bit to highly skilled workers. I spoke with one vineyard management company last year that was saying at the peak of harvest, their farmworkers were earning $45 an hour. And so I think it’s making the issue of figuring out mechanization and vineyards even more pressing because there's just not as many people to do this work. And those who are doing the work it's becoming more difficult all the time.

Greg Dalton: Katie, are robots coming into beer?

Katie Wallace: We have a robot at our brewery it palletizes our beer it’s pretty mesmerizing to watch. But yes, I think automation is one of those things that, you know, we are subject to as well and probably most impacted. I would say coming up, the biggest impact might be over with our truck divers that distribute beer across the country with over the road trucks where we’re looking at driverless vehicles. But I think it’s really fun there’s one job here that technology can't seem to infiltrate and that is our sensory lab. So far technology hasn't been able to replicate the human nose and mouth and sensory organs to be able to test the quality of our beer and the tastiness of it. But to some degree we are impacted and at the warehouse level and the driver level you’ll see more of that.

Greg Dalton: We’re talking about warm beer and hot wine. My guests are Esther Mobley, reporter with the San Francisco Chronicle. Dan Petroski, is a winemaker at Larkmead Vineyards in California's Napa Valley. And Katie Wallace, director of social and environmental impacts for New Belgium Brewing in Colorado. Dan, Katie mentioned distribution. Let's talk about some of the economics the business model of moving around heavy liquids around the country and heavy glass on trucks running on diesel. So operational impact of this industry.

Dan Petroski: The glass which seems wonderful because it’s recyclable it's not plastic. But the downside of that is it's about 40% to 45% of the greenhouse gas emissions in the process. So what it mean by that is you have to think about the start of it. Glass becoming, you know, being made from sand and how hot you have to use fossil fuels and how hot you have to get it in order to create that bottle. Most of those glass bottles for the wine industry are created in California, Mexico, Dubai, France, Spain, and it get shipped over in a container to America then redistributed into a warehouse which is temperature controlled and then sent to the winery and then filled with wine. And now you're talking about a 40-pound case of a wine that goes to another warehouse truck to another warehouse that’s temperature controlled and then sent on a truck across the country to the East Coast. So you start adding all that up and it is become it is 40% to 45% of the industry’s greenhouse gas emissions. So not only the supply chain, but the distribution network. So from the start to the finish to the bottle ending up in your home on your table. It’s something we need to be thinking about as an industry, if we are gonna have an impact on slowing things down with regards to the changing of the climate.

Greg Dalton: So what's the alternative to all that, just hearing all that from the making of the -- fossil fuels, making the bottle all the way, all the trucks, all the way to a refrigerator. What's the alternative what’s the solution?

Dan Petroski: I do think that, you know, we all know change is hard, especially in an industry like wine. We’re still struggling through whether we can put screw caps on a wine bottle instead of a cork because cork is traditional. And making that change and us having to go through that psychoses of change it’s very difficult for us and taking wine out of a bottle putting it in a can putting it in a single serving. You're just doubling the footprint at that point. Not saying that that's the answer, I don't really have an answer to glass. Lighter weight glass is definitely an answer closer to home businesses like Gallo which produces one of every five bottles of wine consumed in America. They have their own glass factories. So they’re bringing a lot of that manufacturing in-house and keeping it local. Reducing the weight of those glass bottles. So they’re doing a lot and to benefit their own supply chain as well as their distribution networks and the weight of all their --

Greg Dalton: But they're doing that for cost reasons. Gallo is not really on the sustainability edge of this, right?

Dan Petroski: They’re not. But at the same time they're doing a better job than the majority of the industry because of the localization and because of their focus towards lighter weight glass which cost less money to produce and therefore can keep their bottle cost price down.

Greg Dalton: Katie Wallace, same problem for beer. The glass is the biggest part of the greenhouse gas footprint of a bottle of beer. What are the solutions what are the options, I mean plastic bottles?

Katie Wallace: Well, you know, cans are ever more popular especially in craft beer right now. But we did a carbon footprint study to compare that are light weighted bottles with our cans and it turns out they’re roughly similar. The beginning of the lifecycle of cans is pretty destructive and smelting aluminum oxide into aluminum is also pretty energy intensive. And so increasing recycle content improving collection systems across the nation is an opportunity for improvement. The recycled content melts at a lower temperature and therefore requires less energy than diverging materials for glass and for cans. And then returnable bottles just a really interesting thing. If you live in Oregon and you have access to the BottleDrop program or in parts of California. Moving to returnable actually decreases the emissions by about 80%. And much like the wine industry our containers contribute about almost 45% of our total emissions. And so that’s something that I see really the main way that we can drop greenhouse gas emissions across our lifecycle would be going to refillable bottles at some point.

Greg Dalton: It’s been a long time since the Bottle Bill was passed in this country. Katie Wallace, you’ve done some research, looked into some research by others in Florida, Maryland and Massachusetts about industry saying that basically deposits will hurt sales. Is that actually the case economically?

Katie Wallace: Yeah, the data suggest that it's not actually the case. Only 10 states in the U.S. have a Bottle Bill and the majority of all of the recycled content that you have actually comes from those 10 states. So in Colorado for example, our bottles have less than 15% recycled content. But we could collect at least five times that amount if we had a Bottle Bill in our state. And so that is an issue that I think there's a lot of opposition because of fears that are ungrounded in data. And there's an additional cost to sometimes the retailers or the distributors that have to collect the bottles as well. But there are some deposit programs that work better than others, more business friendly. And the Oregon model again, I keep talking about Oregon, but that model is also much more business friendly and successful in actually redeeming the containers increasing the recycle content.

Greg Dalton: We’re talking about beer and wine and climate change with Esther Mobley, Dan Petroski and Katie Wallace. I got some quick questions for you. True or false. Dan Petroski, you have drunk wine out of the box?

Dan Petroski: True.

Greg Dalton: Esther Mobley. True or false, you think wine bottles with screw tops are legit?

Esther Mobley: True.

Greg Dalton: True or false. Katie Wallace, wine drinkers are smarter than beer drinkers?

Katie Wallace: Oh come on.

Greg Dalton: True or false. Dan Petroski, consumers are willing to pay $100 to drink wine out of a tin can?

Dan Petroski: False.

Greg Dalton: Katie Wallace. True or false, beer giants are moving to lock up supplies of ingredients and lock out small brewers?

Katie Wallace: Inherently that is happening.

Greg Dalton: Esther Mobley. Your favorite varietal of wine?

Esther Mobley: Oh no. No, no. That’s like asking if you had a favorite child. If you'd multiple children. I love it all.

Greg Dalton: Okay, I guess we’ll accept that. Dan Petroski, your favorite beer?

Dan Petroski: A craft brew out of my hometown, Brooklyn, New York called Other Half.

Greg Dalton: Alright, last one. Katie Wallace, a flavor of craft beer that you can't stand?

Katie Wallace: There’s none, I don’t think I had a beer. I would say an expired oxidized beer.

Greg Dalton: Yesterday’s beer you mean.

Katie Wallace: Stale beer.

Greg Dalton: Okay. Alright, let’s give them a round of applause for getting through the lightning round.

[Applause]

The more about I talk about and think about climate change it kind of, it ultimately gets down to power, Dan Petroski. So how do you think about climate kind of impacting hurting the big players in the wine industry there’s been a lot of consolidation like all industries. And they’ll be able to move things around and there’s not much middle left in America middle size companies, middle class. So think about power and climate and wine what’s that look like in the future?

Dan Petroski: Oh, I'm excited about it there’s never been a better time for leadership in our industry, the wine industry. And I do think there are two families that are generational families, not public companies but large multinational companies. One out of Spain the Torres family which has holdings in South America and in California. And then also Kendall-Jackson the Jackson family which is a multinational with Australia, South Africa, Italy and their most famous vintners reserve Chardonnay in California. These are two families that have taken such strides to set a program in place that's gonna be releasing soon about greenhouse gas emissions and thinking about their wine production from raw material to your home into the restaurant table. And they’re taking it backwards and they're looking at all the aspects of we talked about earlier from the supply chain the raw material distribution networks, trucking weight of bottles. And they're doing things that I think are admirable and that are leadership. And I think at that level we are gonna be very fortunate that we’ll hopefully have a nice tail of a small businesses that can kind of glom onto their successes what’s working for them. So I'm really excited.

Greg Dalton: Katie Wallace, what are you seeing in the beer industry in terms of was a big companies leading or is it small companies leading. We hear about family companies leading for their own preservation and sustainability.

Katie Wallace: Yeah, I think there are a lot of medium size companies that have been leading for quite a while. Hearing the craft beer ethos that are, you know, really grounded in community and a healthy ecosystem. And the good news is that we see the bigger companies and even some that are publicly traded that are right now in the last several years investing quite a bit in some sustainability initiatives. I know that they are starting to analyze the risk and realizing that this is actually the cheaper way to go about it is investing sooner than later and reducing their own emissions and their exposure to risk. And I think the bad news is when like as we talked about earlier, our supply chains are going to be more volatile and problematic. They already are starting to become that way. And the smaller companies, your neighborhood brewery that’s just the taproom, those are the companies that have a harder time getting contracts because of their scale. And as the supply chain becomes more volatile in quality and availability the people the companies that don't have those contacts are gonna be more subject to the shortages and the reduced quality. So that's something that we see as a little unfortunate, that’s the American dream, you know, that craft beer around the corner and the entrepreneurs that run that. And unfortunately, you think that those are gonna be the ones that are at greater risk down the road.

---

Greg Dalton: You're listening to a conversation about beer, wine, and climate disruption. This is Climate One. Coming up, does talking about climate’s impact on alcoholic drinks make it easier or harder to discuss climate change?

Esther Mobley: When we say the beer is going away that’s what really gets people to listen. I mean, is it more important to get people to listen at any cost?

Greg Dalton: That’s up next, when Climate One continues.

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Greg Dalton: This is Climate One. I’m Greg Dalton. We’re talking about warm beer and hot wine with Katie Wallace, director of social and environmental impact at New Belgium Brewing in Fort Collins, Colorado; Esther Mobley, wine reporter at the San Francisco Chronicle; and Dan Petroski, a winemaker at Larkmead Vineyards in Napa Valley, California. Dan explains how extreme weather is making climate less of a dirty word on the agricultural side of winemaking.

Dan Petroski: We are small family businesses up and down the coast of California. And these small family businesses deal with everything from the agricultural raw material to manufacturing of their product. Then to the hospitality of bringing people into their spaces and serving them a glass of wine to the sales and marketing and knocking on doors and restaurants and retailers in the state of California to dealing with national wholesale distributors and moving their products nationwide. So it is one of the most integrated businesses so I think one of the five of them is in their face every day with maybe if, you know, for lack of a term, a small fire that they have to put out. And so I think the agricultural side of it is just it's that perennial crop that keeps coming. And if it's a good year, it’s a good year. If it’s a great year, it’s a great year. If there’s a low yield, it's a bad year financially. So I think that's been the approach towards farming and our product but I think that is now changing because it’s the forest from the trees conversation. How much can you actually see when you're a business that deals with five channels of activity from the raw material to manufacturing to distribution to hospitality wholesale national sales. I mean it is a big endeavor for a single company. Most places don't do all those things.

Greg Dalton: Esther Mobley, does climate come up in the wine conversations you have if you don't bring it up?

Esther Mobley: It frequently does come up in my conversations in my reporting even when I'm not writing a climate change story per se. But I mean, I cover California wine at large, and so it's really hard to have a conversation with winemakers when you don't talk about the weather that's all they really want to talk about. Wildfires, all the other things throughout the year that might be threatening their crop. And their sustainability practices whether they farm organically, etc. So it comes up a lot and when it doesn't, I often bring it up even when that's not the main subject at hand.

Greg Dalton: You mention organic farming there’s also dry farming. We’ve mentioned a little bit of mechanization, other technological solutions. We haven't touched on GMOs yet, you know, some agencies are looking for America they kind of look for that tech fix like what can be the tech fix, engineer our way out of this?

Esther Mobley: Well, there's ways to kind of potentially enhanced drought tolerance without doing genetic modification for grapevine. Simply planting the scion of the plant onto a different kind of rootstock that's where a lot of the research is happening. Certainly what a lot of people drink that’s in the grocery store shelves is not the kind of wine that Dan is making that's really the crème de la crème of what California can produce. But even when you're buying your boxed wine at the grocery store it still says California. And wine is really inextricable from place. So it's not just a matter of if it gets too hot here can we start growing these grapes over there where it’s maybe a little cooler. It would really be a kind of existential shift away from thinking of Napa Valley wine, Sonoma wine, these places that are just completely tied up in the character of the wine the quality of the wine real and perceived. And so I think it's gonna be harder to engineer our way out of this one than some other agricultural products.

Greg Dalton: I’ve lived in California since the 1960s and I just noticed the expansion of, you know, vineyards taking over places. South of King City a place 100 and 200 miles south of San Francisco is now there’s grapes everywhere. Esther Mobley, are we gonna see fallow land are we gonna see that go back to what it was before because wine is no longer sustainable or are we just gonna see a stylistic shift?

Esther Mobley: Hard to know. I think certainly in Monterey County where King City is there's a lot of other crops that are profitable compete with wine are easier for laborers maybe aren’t as volatile to, you know, those little cuties things the tiny little --

Greg Dalton: Oranges.

Esther Mobley: --citruses, oranges. Some growers the great growers in Monterey County have been like those are taking away all night labor. So and that may happen and the other crop that may take away some of wine’s land share is cannabis. But wine grapes as far as an agricultural product go are a pretty lucrative one. So that should insulate them to some degree.

Greg Dalton: Katie Wallace, what's your biggest concern when you think about climate change, you look ahead. You know, if it’s not orange peels, what’s the biggest concern when you think about?

Katie Wallace: It’s more broadly the volatility. If there is a big shift the market can and the job workers can typically adjust to a shift. But when there’s multiple shifts coming from multiple different directions that dynamic volatility is just something that is gonna be harder to respond to. As a business, I don't think that, you know, our communities and destination and our businesses are just equipped well enough to respond quickly continuously. But I have a lot of hope in the ability for humans to come together and be resourceful and inventive in times of need. I hope it doesn't have to get to a place of extreme hardship before we do that in our businesses or in our communities and lives. But I do have a lot of hope that if we -- eyes wide open about what we’re facing that can really come up with the number of solutions to address it preemptively.

Greg Dalton: And we’re gonna go to audience questions. I want to get bright spots before -- Dan, you’ve already said that it’s a great time to be a wine drinker. And you said Esther, that it’s a good time for short term. What are some other bright spots, Dan’s smiling, so he must have a good one.

Dan Petroski: No. I come at it from a wine drinker’s perspective first and the winemakers perspective second. And it's just truly we can drink a great wine throughout the world due to the lack of variability over the last two or three decades to the ability for grapevines to ripened more effectively and yield larger crops due to consistency. But I echo Katie’s hopes and fears about the future variability. So the bright spots right now are just if we can ride this way, I do think we will have a nice runway to continue to drink well, eat well in an agricultural world that we live in. But, yeah, the wine industry right now is it's better than it's ever been. So as long as we can kind of take that and take that momentum and you ask about what the future looks like take that momentum and try to protect and preserve that momentum, I think we’re gonna be in a really good spot for a decade or two to come.

Greg Dalton: Esther.

Esther Mobley: Yeah. In addition to the obvious that there's more great wine available from more parts of the world than there’ll ever were. To me, one of the great bright spots is that it's hopefully gonna be a catalyst for different parts of the wine industry coming together to solve the problem collaboratively. I mean if there ever was one that really was clearly gonna impact everyone and demanded everyone's attention this is it. And so I'm looking forward to that.

Katie Wallace: Can I offer a bright spot too?

Greg Dalton: Sure. We won’t leave you in darkness, yes.

Katie Wallace: Okay. Thanks. I think a couple of things that are really exciting right now more people are talking about regenerative agriculture, soil health and carbon sequestration throughout the farming practice. So I haven’t seen that level of momentum over the last 10, 15 years that I've seen just in the last two. So I think what is now one of our greatest impacts could eventually become a part of the solution which is really exciting for agricultural based products. I’m also really encouraged to see more businesses and policymakers on both sides of the aisle looking at federal carbon limits and making commitments towards hundred percent renewables. Because I do think that this isn’t something that any of our companies can solve alone and it’s going to take a systemic shift and that’s the only thing that’s gonna get us there quick enough. And so it’s really great now that there’s people across the aisle and across corporations that are seeing the value in that these days.

Greg Dalton: Soil is sexy and may save us. There’s a lot to that. We’re talking about warm beer and hot wine with Esther Mobley, reporter with the San Francisco Chronicle. Dan Petroski, with Larkmead Vineyards in Napa Valley. And Katie Wallace, with New Belgium Brewing. We’re gonna go to audience questions I invite you to join us. So please with the microphone back there if you have a quick comment or question. You don't need to be 21 to ask a question, looking out at the audience here. So just please go up and briefly identify yourself. If you need help keeping it short, I'm here for you.

Female Participant: Hi, I’m Annie, I’m a brewer 21st Amendment. I was just wondering if one of you would like to talk on using the decline of a luxury good to motivate people into action over climate change whether that’s really a responsible thing to do.

Greg Dalton: Fair question. We’re kind of in elitist bubble up here talking about these things. Sometimes luxury brands lead, Tesla being an example. Who’d like to tackle that?

Esther Mobley: I was rereading material about the beer study that you all were citing earlier. And the authors of that study who are researchers who have obviously been doggedly researching climate change. One of them tweeted this is the only thing that was garnering attention. We’ve been talking about all sorts of things related to climate but when we say the beer is going away that’s what really gets people to listen. I mean, I guess, you know, is it more important to get people to listen at any cost. Maybe we have to find some way to kind of make these things sexy if we’re gonna somehow convey them to a really, really large audience. But I share your cynicism that it's too bad that people aren’t just motivated thinking about the problems in the abstractbefore we get to talking about IPAs and Cabernet.

Greg Dalton: Chocolate, I would add in there. We did a program on chocolate once and that got people’s attention. Chocolate. Let’s go to our next question. Welcome.

Male Participant: My name is Lee, I work at Flatiron Wines and Spirits here in the city. There’s two, three a lot of organizations that sort of help maintain the status quo, Dan specifically, have you or anybody of you spoken to in the wine industry thought about creating an organization that would support kind of a clearing house for these ideas and these efforts?

Dan Petroski: I echo a little bit what Esther said earlier about different organizations and there's not a lot of clarity to what some of them are doing and why. I don’t think there is one right now in the wine industry that is speaking out perfectly on the subject matter. There is the Porto Protocol, which came from a family of winegrowers in Portugal who’s family businesses rely on making and growing wine grapes and making port wine. And that's a very important movement going forward. There is another organization that is coming down the pipe that I mentioned earlier about the Torres family and the Jackson family, two multinational some two confidence coming together to bring a few good wineries together and hopefully support, you know, lowering their greenhouse gas emissions by up to 80% by 2040. So the conversation is starting at major levels. It have to kind of have a trickle-down effect and get everyone involved. Again, hopefully we can all work within our own framework and our capabilities whether we’re doing a little or a great deal to have an impact. But the organizations we’ll see more of it and more clarity coming through the pipeline in the next 12 to 18 months.

Greg Dalton: Does seem to be less visible in these beverages than it is and say clothing or some other electronics or other consumer products, even seafood that sort of thing, paper Forerst Stewardship Council labels that sort of thing. Let’s go to our next question. Welcome.

Male Participant: Hi. My name is Taylor I work in clean energy. So naturally I was wondering if you could talk a bit about the move for beverage companies to focus on energy emissions whether it's vineyards putting solar on their roofs to get the harvest or breweries going hundred percent clean energy.

Greg Dalton: Dan Petroski, I’ll put you on the spot. When we talked on the phone because of the power outages and fires recently, there’s been a lot of dirty diesel backup generators being purchase and the Chronicle has written about this. So tell us about the energy input.

Dan Petroski: I think there’s this balance in life you can have a diesel energy backup source like a generator to control all the good things you do. Whether it be, you know, solar power or organic farming or Bay Area green business and all of the certifications that we have that have anointed us as one of the leaders in sustainability and energy efficiency. But we still have a business to run in order to do that and to employ people and to move forward and hopefully have a healthy crop and bring our product forward. We have to purchase a generator and we did this past year and we bought one of the cleanest, most efficient generators we could find on the market and we’re happy to have that. This is the third year in a row where power was lost during the harvest season and it’s one of our toughest time of the year to go down and power. So we were out for four days and we had that backup generator running the winery at that point.

Greg Dalton: Katie Wallace, Budweiser ran an advertisement during the Super Bowl with amber waves of grain and course and it pulled back to windmills. And windmills were very much the center of that. I understand that clean energy is not really active among craft brewers because they’re may be in a mall somewhere and not directly source their energy. But can you speak to renewable energy at the larger companies, whether that's important to them and, you know, why is Budweiser doing that?

Katie Wallace: I think it’s really wonderful like I said before that the larger companies are starting to season business value in this through a combination of their risk assessments and also now for affordability of renewables as that increases and also the state and federal level incentives. And there are also many crop breweries that are purchasing solar power or wind power. We have wind power that comes from Wyoming just up the road. We have biogas the results out of our process water treatment plant, we make electricity with it. We also have solar on-site and dozens of breweries that are moving in the same direction. I would say for the smaller companies though that probably one of our best opportunities to secure renewables would be getting our utilities and our municipalities to commit to hundred percent renewables. We lobbied our local government here to adopt hundred percent renewable electricity by 2030 and they voted that in last year in 2018 which is going to be the most efficient and effective way for us as a smaller to medium-sized company to secure our renewables.

Greg Dalton: You’ve been listening to a conversation about beer, wine and climate change, with Katie Wallace, director of social and environmental impact at New Belgium Brewing in Fort Collins, Colorado; Esther Mobley, wine critic at the San Francisco Chronicle; and Dan Petroski, a winemaker at Larkmead Vineyards in Napa Valley, California.

Greg Dalton: To hear more Climate One conversations, subscribe to our podcast at our website: climateone.org, where you’ll also find photos, video clips and more. Please help us get people to talk more about climate by giving us a review wherever you get your podcasts.

Greg Dalton: Kelli Pennington directs our audience engagement. Tyler Reed is our producer. Sara-Katherine Coxon is the strategy and content manager. The audio engineers are Mark Kirchner, Justin Norton, and Arnav Gupta. Devon Strolovitch edited the program. Dr. Gloria Duffy is CEO of The Commonwealth Club of California, where our program originates. [pause] I’m Greg Dalton.

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The Fate of Food

Otto Pilot — Thu, 18 Jul 2019 19:44:51 +0000

The Fate of Food

07/19/2019

How will we feed a planet that’s hotter, drier, and more crowded than ever? Much of it starts with innovators who are trying to re-invent the global food system to be more productive and nutritious. Vanderbilt University Journalism professor Amanda Little chronicles some of these efforts in her new book, The Fate of Food: What We'll Eat in a Bigger, Hotter, Smarter World.

“We see disruption in the auto industry, we see disruption in tobacco – disruption is coming in the meat industry,” says Little, noting how conventional meat companies have been investing in technologies to produce cell-based meat without animals.

Other technological innovations, such as robots that can deploy herbicide with sniper-like precision, can help push agriculture toward more sustainable practices. But she also notes the difficulties that food startups face in getting their products to scale – which often means selling to large, industrial producers.

“We need the sort of good guys and bad guys to collaborate,” she says. “It doesn't mean that that is disrupting the, you know, the rise of local food webs and farmers markets and CSAs and locally sourced foods. It means maybe this is a way of bringing more intelligent practices to industrial ag.”

Twilight Greenaway, a contributing editor with Civil Eats, amplifies these concerns about tech disruption in the food space. “Will there be some [technology] that really can feed into a more democratic food system that allows for different types of ownership less concentrated ownership,” she asks, noting that some startups start out with the goal of selling to a large company.

She likens the current conversation to earlier discussions about the organic farming movement leading to little more than an organic Twinkie. “There’s a lot to say about changing practices on the land and what organic means in terms of pesticides and other environmental benefits,” she cautions, “but on the other hand, you’ll still end up with the Twinkie.”

Related links:

The Fate of Food: What We'll Eat in a Bigger, Hotter, Smarter World
Climate Change-Fueled Valley Fever is Hitting Farmworkers Hard
Memphis Meats
Blue River Technology
Chow from a 3-D printer? Natick researchers are working on it

Guests

Twilight Greenaway

Contributing Editor, Civil Eats

Amanda Little

Professor of Journalism, Vanderbilt University; Author, The Fate of Food

Greg Dalton: This is Climate One, changing the conversation about energy, the economy, and the environment.

Greg Dalton: How will climate disruption impact the food we eat in a hot and crowded world?

Amanda Little: We see disruption in the auto industry, we see disruption in tobacco, you know, disruption is coming in the meat industry.

Greg Dalton: But lab-grown meat and other innovations may not address the social impacts of the food industry.

Twilight Greenaway: Will there be technology that really can feed into a more democratic food system that allows for different types of ownership less concentrated ownership.

Greg Dalton: Can cutting-edge technologies and traditional agriculture (together) create a climate-smart food system?

Amanda Little: We need the scale, we need the sort of good guys and bad guys to collaborate, right. Maybe this is a way of bringing more intelligent practices to industrial ag.

Greg Dalton: The Fate of Food. Up next on Climate One.

Greg Dalton: How will we feed a planet that’s hotter, drier, and more crowded than ever? Climate One conversations feature oil companies and environmentalists, Republicans and Democrats, the exciting and the scary aspects of the climate challenge. I’m Greg Dalton

Greg Dalton: Technology is changing how we produce food – and what we eat. Innovators are trying to re-invent the global food system to be more productive and nutritious.

Twilight Greenaway: There are very clear benefits. I'm really interested in who’s producing the food and how.

Greg Dalton: Twilight Greenaway is a contributing editor with Civil Eats, an online source of news about food, health and environment. With a world population pushing 9.5 billion by mid-century, U.N. climate experts predict a 2% to 6% decline in global crop yields every decade going forward because of climate pressures.

Amanda Little: That paradox of increasing demand and declining supply presents a real problem.

Greg Dalton: Amanda Little is a journalism professor at Vanderbilt University who also writes for the New Yorker and Bloomberg about energy, food, and climate. Her new book is called The Fate of Food: What We’ll Eat in a Bigger, Hotter, Smarter World. I began our conversation on the future of food by asking Amanda about Memphis Meats, a company in Berkeley, California, that she writes about in her book.

Amanda Little: Memphis Meats is producing what are called cell-based meats which are meats that are grown from cells taken from animals but grown outside the animal. And the cells are given sort of a very comfortable environment in which to grow in a bioreactor which in lay terms is this very sophisticated crockpot essentially and then grow and grow and grow until they form muscle mass and are blended with connective tissues and fats. And essentially a meat product that is meat just grown as separate from the animal. And I tested a cell-based duck breast about nine months ago or so in the Memphis Meats laboratory. But that interested me as part of this growing industry in alternative meats.

Greg Dalton: Because much of the climate conversation really gets down to meat and protein. Lot of it is animal protein and this lab meat, you know, is one way to kind of in theory reduce the environmental greenhouse gas impacts of factory farms the intensive impacts of industrial production of animal protein, right. So there’s a lot of big companies, Tyson, invested in Memphis, Cargill, even Hormel, maker of spam is looking at this kind of thing. Is this where meat is going away from the pasture to the lab?

Amanda Little: Yeah, actually I got interested in the story in part because I was writing about Tyson for Bloomberg and I found that they were investing in Memphis Meats. Cargill Meats had come in I think first and then brought, you know, Tyson came in thereafter. A number of, you know, sort of more predictable investors had also come in, Bill Gates, and Richard Branson so on. But I thought this was fascinating that the conventional meat industry was investing in sort of disruptive technologies and asked Tom Hayes who was then the CEO of Tyson, why are you going into cultured meats or, you know, a.k.a. cell-based meats or lab meats. And they said, well, or he said, if you can grow the meat without the animal why wouldn't we do that. There's a huge, you know, resource advantage for us and obviously ethical advantages to growing the meat without the animal. And he said we see disruption in the auto industry we see disruption in tobacco, you know, disruption is coming in the meat industry. That fascinated me that this was something that conventional meats were investing. Now granted, it's a small fraction of what they're investing in conventional production methods, but the conversation is starting.

Greg Dalton: A lot of that is driven by the ability to lock up intellectual property which businesses like investors like to kind of put a moat around their investments so new competitors can’t come in. Twilight Greenaway, does this idea of lab meat or industrial does that fascinate or horrify you?

Twilight Greenaway: A little bit of both I think like a lot of Americans. I recently was thinking about this issue actually when the announcement was made, Tyson decided to do an end run it looked like they were gonna be in, you know, really for the most part putting their money into existing companies and then they kind of decided to put their own products out. At the time I was thinking about a conversation that had happened years ago about this idea of an organic Twinkie and I don’t know if you remember that --

Greg Dalton: Wait. Organic Twinkie.

Twilight Greenaway: Yeah. So there was a discussion of now that organic is having this groundswell what will it mean when there’s organic junk food basically. There will be the benefit on the one end there’ll be the, you know, there’s a lot to say about changing practices on the land and what organic means in terms of pesticides and other environmental benefits. But on the other hand, you’ll still end up with the Twinkie and I think that that discussion felt very apt when I started to think about cell based meat because -- well, cell based meat, plant based meat and the investment in the huge kind of groundswell around, seeing it as the solution. And I think there are obvious benefits there are also some downsides. So for me it feels very similar. One of the main questions I have is about the ingredients that go into that, particularly the plant-based meat. How will it be raised will it be regenerative on a large scale. I think was it impossible they just came out declaring their pride at using American genetically modified soy. So I do think that it's very complicated and I'm curious to see how it plays out.

Greg Dalton: So Amanda, your response, I mean, you know, GMOs, people on the left are rabidly against them. Other people say, well, you know, there’s cell editing or there's all sorts of techniques here. But really what we’re talking about is the kind of the role of innovation and technology in food whether food ought to kind of be like our grandparents or a product that’s engineered and designed to address the hunger and climate challenges we’re facing.

Amanda Little: Yeah. I’m interested to get to the GMO topic. With the lab based, the cell-based meats it’s interesting because some of the claims I mean the potential is so exciting that there are actually could be health benefits. Memphis, there are many of these cell-based companies that are merging and so Memphis is only one of them. But the founder who is a cardiologist by training was interested in potentially, you know, the human health benefits of, you know, bringing in healthy fats also addressing some of the contamination problems in meats that this would actually do more than sort of what an organic Twinkie would do. It could create a lot more safety for the years of the meats and certainly offset of course the impacts on the animals themselves. So in theory it's really exciting certainly, what is the, you know, medium in which the cells are grown what is the cost of this from an energy standpoint, how great are the, you know, potential climate benefits a lot of that, you know, we don't yet know but in concept it’s exciting. And this is what’s so interesting about a lot of these areas of food tech or what they call climate smart agriculture that are emerging. You know, the risks the benefits seem to outweigh the risks by a longshot, but it’s still so early in the phases of a lot of these technologies that it's really hard to say for sure, you know, this is a slamdunk.

Twilight Greenaway: And I think it depends a lot on who we’re talking about as benefitting grade. I mean I think there are very clear benefits. I'm really interested in who’s producing the food and how. And I think a lot about rural communities, I think a lot about small-scale small and medium scale producers. And I feel like that I would like to see that piece of the conversation integrated into the discussion around cellular meat more than it has been.

Amanda Little: One of the people that got me interested in this was not just Tom Hayes, the Tyson CEO, but a farmer who produces meats on a small farm. He uses, you know, managed grazing, rotational grazing and he basically said the challenge is that what I produce on a small scale is not affordable for my neighbors. So who am I to begrudge some of these sustainable approaches that can produce cheap meat sustainably, you know, with better human health and environmental impacts. If we can't all necessarily go to craft meats, what is the solution for middle and low income meat eater? And he’s interested in this as a potential solution for sort of the mass-produced meats not necessarily as an alternative to craft meats but, you know --

Twilight Greenaway: Yeah, I think that’s my prediction is that ultimately this is gonna be what’s in our fast food. It’s not necessarily gonna be the -- I think there will always be a grass fed steak available to the elites.

Amanda Little: And that's what I think the folks who are in this area are saying too. I mean they don't see this completely offsetting. I think actually Pat Brown of Impossible Foods has said there will be no animal derived meat by 2035 or something he’s made some pretty dramatic claims that I don’t --

Greg Dalton: That’s his wish.

Amanda Little: That’s right. I don’t know that that is shared by everyone in the alternative meat industry but it is pretty extraordinary how far things have come. I mean to see the Impossible Foods product now adopted in Burger Kings and White Castles and Shake Shacks and so on when three, four years ago people are saying, will mainstream consumers go for the veggie burger that bleeds with synthetic animal blood this seems so far-fetched. The fact that we’re seeing these ideas that had seemed far-fetched, you know, get embraced and adopted pretty rapidly is surprising to me. Again, exactly what the benefits are and how these industries are managed is another question.

Greg Dalton: Amanda Little, you mentioned kind of the small iconic American rancher. If meat is produced in a laboratory owned by a large corporation that is serving institutional shareholders, doesn’t that just wipe out the, you know, small-scale cattle rancher. Consolidate power, economic power in the industry.

Amanda Little: I don’t think so. I think as Twilight was saying they’re different products. And so what is --

Greg Dalton: But if this is aimed towards the mass-market fast food and yes the people on the coast can have their grass fed burgers, grass fed beef, if they just continue to eat meat which is questionable in a hot world. But isn’t that just gonna consolidate power when cargo can have its own factories they don't need ranchers when they own the factories producing this meat.

Amanda Little: Yeah, and I think it’s creating a lot of concern for stakeholders in those conventional meat industries. I will say that a month after I reported in Bloomberg on Tyson's decision to get into alternative meats, Tom Hayes, the CEO resigned. And I'm not saying that it was because of that piece but, you know, it’s a tough time the meat industry has been going through all kinds of price instability related to tariffs and other things. But it’s a tough time to be talking about self-disruption in an industry that's been sort of bit volatile. So, yeah and I think that there's a lot of concern about how it's managed and what it means to control the, you know, have ownership over cells that are grown and all the stuff. I mean it’s if there are many, many unanswered questions and risks and, you know, the way that the oversight and the way in which you know, environmental activists and policymakers, you know, shepherd the growth of these industries and make sure that we do this in the right way is essential. But, yeah, there are big questions.

Greg Dalton: And Twilight Greenaway, do we even know the lifecycle analysis of lab meat? Is it really less greenhouse gases to produce, you know, fake meat than real meat?

Twilight Greenaway: Great question. I haven't seen that yet and I don't think it’s out. I mean we do have some lifecycle analysis for plant-based meat. There’s been a lot of discussion around that lately. There's also been some new lifecycle analysis around pasture that's come out in the last few weeks. They’re both from the same third-party organization, Kwantas [ph], I think it's called, neither are peer-reviewed. So there's a lot of fast talk at this moment but I’m glad you brought up ownership because I feel like, you know, there are a lot of great things about your book and one of the questions that kept coming up for me was about the role of technology and what that technology ultimately does. Is it gonna feed the system that we have which is very top-down, you know, a few companies own the bulk of it, you know, whether we’re talking seeds whether we’re talking pesticides, whether we’re talking meat. And so many of these startups their goal is to sell to these big companies as you mentioned with Blue River for instance. But I think it's fairly common that that's the business model. So are they feeding into the system that is extremely top-down or will there be technology that comes along. And I do think there probably is some now, but will there be some that really can feed into a more democratic food system that allows for different types of ownership less concentrated ownership that's my big question.

Greg Dalton: You’re listening to a Climate One conversation about the future of food in a hotter, drier, more crowded world. Coming up, we’ll hear about expanding the meaning of agriculture and farming.

Amanda Little: A lot of the people working in the ag space are not hands in the dirt people, you know, there are IT folks, there are mechanical engineers, electrical engineers. There’s a much broader definition and that's both exciting and concerning.

Greg Dalton: That’s up next, when Climate One continues.

Greg Dalton: You’re listening to Climate One. I’m Greg Dalton, and we’re talking about feeding a hot, dry, and crowded planet with Amanda Little, professor of journalism at Vanderbilt University and author of the new book, The Fate of Food. And Twilight Greenaway, contributing editor with Civil Eats. I asked Amanda to follow up on what Twilight had mentioned about Blue River Technology.

Amanda Little: Okay. Blue River Technology is a company based in Sunnyvale, California and it’s, you know, a block from Yahoo. It’s an AI robotic company that has developed a way of deploying herbicide with sniper-like precision so that this sort of system of cameras attached to the back of a tractor can identify and distinguish between crops and weeds. When the weeds are very young can deploy a concentrated fertilizer or herbicide kill the weed, protect the crop keep the chemicals off the crop as an alternative to broadcast spraying which we’ve seen with roundup ready and so on. There’s huge amounts of herbicides that are saturating crops and creating all kinds of concern about the public health impacts of those chemicals. It's a really exciting technology in part because, you know, this maiden voyage of the early tests of these robots they’ve seen 90% reduction in herbicide applications on the fields in which they are used. They also hope to apply this to fungicide, insecticides and eventually fertilizers. And what it means is plant by plant farming rather than field by field farming. So, potentially bringing in, you know, intercropping and more diversity into fields when the intelligent machines can manage the, you know, the plants individually, you can potentially move beyond monocropping. So all this is great, it’s elevating the principles of sustainable farming and bringing them into, you know, a large-scale food production it would all be great. I think it was last September, Blue River I think three or four years into its existence and was sold to John Deere for 305 million. And the CEO, I remember was in the midst of reporting the story and I talked to Jorge Heraud who’s the CEO and I said, what you’re selling to John Deere, you know, one of the oldest brands in ag, this is, you know, part of this trend that’s so concerning to so many of us. And he basically said we need to scale we need to get these machines into the field we need to produce them and not really, you know, sound and reliable way. This can get, you know, our robots into 10,000 distributors globally like this needs to happen. And the result is disruption of ag chemicals and the ag chemical industries. And so we need the scale we need the sort of good guys and bad guys to collaborate, right. It doesn't mean that that is disrupting the, you know, the rise of local food webs and farmers markets and CSAs and locally sourced foods. It means maybe this is a way of bringing more intelligent practices to industrial ag. So I don't know that they're necessarily at odds with each other that improving practices in industrial agriculture inherently threatens the growth, you know, the diversity the diversification that’s happening in local food webs. But it’s again really concerning because if you have very expensive intelligent robots on farms that farmers don’t know how to fix that, you know, can breakdown that can be hacked --

Twilight Greenaway: Or aren’t allowed to fix.

Amanda Little: And maybe aren’t allowed to fix, right. So yeah, it’s again this interesting challenge of sort of risk benefit risk benefit but certainly, you know, the potential benefit of bringing inter-cropping to in a large scale agriculture is I think important enough that for me was exciting to get inside there, see how it worked what, you know, what it could become. Again, it has to be tightly, you know, regulated and observed and that's, you know, a discussion that needs to happen.

Greg Dalton: And you write about See & Spray and other robotic weedkiller, potato which is thinning lettuce to allow certain, the stronger lettuce thrive and survive and killing the weaker lettuce. In your chapter called Robo-crop, Twilight, let’s have your take on robots on the farm whether that's going, you know, kind of robots are gonna kill monoculture or they’re gonna do something else?

Twilight Greenaway: Well, I mean we’re moving towards automation in so many ways culturally. And I do think that it’s happening in food, absolutely. I mean, I’m seeing it, we’re seeing it and it’s really right there on the horizon. But I mean it’s already the $250,000 John Deere that I wrote in a combine a year and a half ago I got to sit there in an air-conditioned space and the farmer let me drive it just around the corner and into the this giant parking space he built in a barn and, you know, he could watch a sitcom while he runs through the field and it’s a very different experience I think than what most people will think of as farming. So I do think there’s already been a fair amount of technology, you know, in play.

Greg Dalton: Is that sad, is that a loss for you?

Twilight Greenaway: I think it’s complicated. I mean I don’t think that I’m as diametrically opposed to Amanda’s take as it may seem. I think that I mean you brought up diversity and I think. So rural communities are already emptying out they've already been emptying out. And that technology has played a serious role in that and will continue to and that has been a big focus of mine recently is trying to figure out like what would it take to bring more people back to these places. And when I went to Iowa and spent time with a really wonderful innovator named Sarah Carlson who’s working with farmers conventional and organic all across the Iowa landscape to bring about diversity as she put it, just to give people permission to plant other things. Because in this part of the country as I'm sure you know corn and soy is it. And there are a lot of farms that are corn and corn and corn they’ve even cut out the idea of a two crop rotation. And so spending time with her was very enlightening for me as a Bay Area, you know, food world person. And she at one point when we met the first time she really leaned over and was like this is really about bringing people back like this is my community. She talked to me about how her high school had consolidated with another high school when she was younger and how the hospitals in her area had consolidated or shut down. How there is this whole world there that's changed for the worse for the most part. And diversity as she sees that and I was pretty convinced by the end of my time with her bringing back diversity to crops and bringing animals onto farms and bringing cover crops and small grains and essentially shifting the marketplace so that we don't just get corn from one place, oats from -- now oats are in Canada, if we can bring oats back to Iowa for instance, it would be huge because you could get a three crop rotation going. It would actually require a little more labor which might bring back a second generation of farmers. So I’m interested in solutions like that as much as I am interested in technology.

Greg Dalton: And Amanda Little, you write in there with 2% of people in America are involved in producing food from land there needs to be more, you know, is the industrialization and introduction of robots gonna bring more people back to producing food or is that gonna reduce the number of people producing food?

Amanda Little: Well, great question. I mean the definition of farmer is definitely expanding. A lot of the people working in the ag space are not hands in the dirt people, you know, there are IT folks there are mechanical engineers, electrical engineers. There’s a much broader definition and that's both exciting and concerning it certainly exciting to a lot of young people that I interviewed who are coming into the ag space because they're interested in, you know, engineering and whatever it is, drone, sensors, smart farms all these things that are, you know, post organic or have great potential benefits to human health and the environment, but it's not hands in the dirt. I don't think though, I think that there's going to be so much demand from all of us who continue to want to support local farms who continue to want to, you know, see diversity in farm scape that were not going to all go to this sci-fi future of robots farming food. I think that there is a double whammy challenge. One is to address and redress all the problems of existing industrial agriculture and there are so many. The second challenge is to begin to prepare for and maybe even preempt, a lot of the population and environmental pressures that are coming down the line. So, you know, the IPCC, the International Panel on Climate Change has predicted that we’ll see a 2% to 6% decline in global crop yields every decade going forward because of climate pressures. We also hear from, you know, the U.N. that we’re going to 9.5 billion people by midcentury, right. So that paradox of increasing demand and declining supply presents a real problem. Some of these solutions can potentially do both can help, you know, redress the existing problems of industrial agriculture make it smarter and better and more nimble and while also sort of beginning to sort of prepare for some of these increasing climate pressures. But I don't think that it’s sort of one or the other it’s like, are we gonna do sustainable local organic small-scale agriculture or are we gonna do is it all gonna be robots and, you know, industrial food production. It’s got to be both and to present it as sort of one of the other I think is misleading and I think we totally agree on that.

Greg Dalton: If you’re just joining us we’re talking about the future of food with two authors Amanda Little and Twilight Greenaway from Civil Eats. I'm Greg Dalton. About a decade ago, fruit breeders in Florida noticed that the state’s peach crops were not on schedule. They looked into historical data since the 1970s and founded some peach varieties were blooming earlier and earlier others later and later. The culprit, climate change, Jose Chaparro is a professor of Horticultural Sciences at the University of Florida in Gainesville he’s in charge of their fruit tree breeding program. We spoke to him about the approach they took to hedge their bets against future climate fluctuations.

Jose Chaparro: What we have noticed is that our highest chill peaches the varieties that require in excess of 350 chill hours were blooming later and that we were having problems having a consistent yields. And that the lower chill varieties, varieties that only required 150 chill hours what would be considered to be a subtropical peach were actually blooming earlier and earlier. In terms of breeding what we have decided to do is that we've decided to straddle the chilling requirement of North Central Florida. And we've established two satellite programs one in Attapulgus, Georgia three hours northwest in Gainesville. And then we've established a satellite program in Fort Pierce where we barely get 75 chill hours with the idea that regardless of where the trends had long term we’re selecting germplasm that's divergent and capable of adaptation to different zones. Maybe the optimal location will no longer be in Florida it’ll be in Georgia or maybe the coastal plain of North Carolina. But there would be other crops like citrus that will expand north maybe avocado production in Florida. So there will be opportunities other people in other regions of the world are gonna need improved high-yielding varieties in order to have viable agriculture. We have to focus we have to select for adaptation we have to take advantage of the genetic diversity that exists in nature and just forge ahead.

Greg Dalton: That's Jose Chaparro professor of Horticultural Sciences at the University of Florida in Gainesville. Twilight Greenaway, there's a couple of things in there. One is hedging bets, you know, may be Florida may be Georgia maybe North Carolina, which again gets the kind of the scale you have to have some scale and money to do that. And the other part of that is just the adaptation well, if we can’t grow this, we can’t grow oranges we’ll grow avocados. So talk to me about the resilience and adaptation part that that professor is getting to.

Twilight Greenaway: Well, I think I mentioned to you when we spoke earlier that I grew up on a farm and my mother who still farms in Hawaii is seeing a lot of what he's talking about there.

Greg Dalton: It’s a coffee farm.

Twilight Greenaway: It’s a coffee farm but she's also seen all kinds of fruit trees that she planted when she first moved to the property 25 years ago, making fruit that like mangoes and coconuts that were coastal much lower elevation fruit suddenly it's showing up. She sort of planted them on the wind and now they’re fruiting. So that’s happened within my lifetime and I feel like it's a pretty clear message that things are moving fast.

Amanda Little: Yeah some of what Chaparro and other agronomists are looking at is how you think about reading plants with resilience so they can continue to grow in the regions where they have grown for so long, right. So, some of his researches adapting peach and citrus plants to survive the new normal as he said, right. So can we continue having the same peaches we know and love but with, you know, new properties like drought tolerance, you know, insect resistance for migrating insect populations. Heat tolerance, frost tolerance and you know, and this is one of the areas of focus on breeding. I interviewed a farmer in a very different region, Wisconsin actually, cherry farmers and apple farmers in the Midwest have been dealing with seasonal shifts that have been causing all kinds of premature blooming and then what they called total kill events where a frost will come in April or May at a normal time the tree will have fully fruited. And then in this case of this one farmer who has about 300 acres of apple trees he had total kill. So he lost more than a million dollars in harvest in two hours of freeze over one night in early May. And he had then began to install frost fans which are these fans that bring warm layers of air down into, you know, from above into the sort of lower areas where the trees are growing which was, you know, many tens of thousands of dollars of investment. There were some farmers who are bringing in helicopters to push down this layer of warm air to try to protect these trees from freeze.

Greg Dalton: What’s the carbon impact of all that.

Amanda Little: Exactly, right I know. It's like we’re trying to mix up this atmosphere in order to deal with these major atmospheric shifts. And it was, you know, totally chilling, pun intended, to see what is happening on the ground, you know, these adaptation efforts. You can't pick up and move a tree that's been in the ground for 10, 20 years you know it's very hard to say let's just shift north or, you know, shift the region. I mean it’s hanging on to this multigenerational farm and don't want to start growing avocados or whatever. So part of it is how do you sort of address the breeding challenges of building resilience into the plants and part of it is do we see the regions where plants are grown shifting. And this is particularly true, I mean I researched this in areas of Western Africa where they’re you know, having really serious difficulty growing some indigenous crops because of climate environmental pressures and again some of the scientists there are basically saying we want to continue growing heirloom and indigenous crops, but we have to use modern technologies to find ways to build resilience into these crops. So again, it was sort of confounding some of these questions about what's local and traditional and indigenous and what's survivable in that climate era.

Greg Dalton: You're listening to a Climate One conversation about food and agriculture technology in a warmer world. Coming up, we’ll hear more about the people working in the fields.

Twilight Greenaway: It’s a deep irony that the folks who are growing our food face some of the biggest risks related to climate change, you know, heat stress and other illnesses caused by long-term exposure to heat.

Greg Dalton: That’s up next, when Climate One continues.

Greg Dalton: This is Climate One. I’m Greg Dalton. We’re talking about the future of food with Amanda Little, professor of journalism at Vanderbilt University and author of the new book, The Fate of Food. And Twilight Greenaway, contributing editor with Civil Eats. Amidst the stories about the technology and business of food, Twilight writes about the people who produce it – including Victor Gutierrez, a 30-year-old farmworker in the Central Valley of California.

Twilight Greenaway: I worked on an unfortunate story recently about soil borne illness called Valley fever that's been around in California and in the Southwest for over hundred years. But the increase in dust storms climate field dust storms it's gone up something like 240% in the Southwest. And what that means is everyone in the Southwest is at increased risk for this soil borne, it’s a fungus that once it gets into your lungs if you have a really healthy immune system, most people can fight it off or it might turn into a cold or a flu. But anyone who’s all immune compromised is at risk really. And in fact sometimes people who aren't even particularly immune compromised seem to get it. So I wrote about Victor Gutierrez and a few other farmworkers and farmworker advocates who are really facing the problem head-on because they face all different kinds of other challenges that can impact the immune system from living. And food deserts, ironically, the Central Valley is really significant food desert to lack of clean water, but also very tight agriculture due to nitrogen use and stress and other factors essentially as I came to see it over the course of researching this piece. Put farmworkers at greater risk as do the fact that they have less access to healthcare the fact that they’re often living in poverty. So it’s a deep irony that the folks who are growing our food face some of the biggest risks related to climate change, not just Valley fever but also heat stress and other illnesses caused by like long-term exposure to heat.

Greg Dalton: It’s a big deal. Back in 2011, you wrote that the estimated health costs in California have more than $2 billion to treat Valley fever. So this is big money and something that is climate related and often not recognizes the climate impact but that's a lot of money. Want to talk also about carbon farming. We’d be remiss, we haven’t talked a lot about soil yet so far carbon farming the idea that they’re gonna put carbon back in the soil we basically last couple hundred years we've taken carbon out of the ground, burned it, smoked it, put it up in the air. Now the idea is to put it back in the form of plants and roots, stored it in the soil. So either one of you can tell me about carbon farming as one of the real bright spots potentially if it can scale in the climate equation. Amanda Little.

Amanda Little: One of the many areas of carbon farming that I looked at or I’m particularly interested in is no telling how --

Greg Dalton: No-till agriculture.

Amanda Little: No-till agriculture. So the idea is that instead of plowing up the soil every season you're leaving the crops in the ground you're actually letting the agricultural remnants of that crop decompose back into the soil creates sort of a carpet on top of the soil. Planting right into that carpet of old, you know, crop matter and keeping the soil intact. And all of the wonderful the microbiome in that soil and the insects and so forth in that soil intact. The challenge has been that it’s very herbicide intensive because you get a lot weeds that like to grow up in the no-till zone. And actually this is one of the interests for the AI robotics folks that if we can be very targeted in the way that herbicides are used to address the weed problems and no-till farming it could really dramatically expand the use of no-till across the board. It's pretty amazing how little expansion there has been of no-till given how much of an advantage it is from a carbon sequestration sampling but also irrigation. Because the tilling brings so much moisture out of the soil it's really more and more costly for farmers to replenish that moisture so it saves quite a bit of money from a water standpoint, irrigation standpoint and again from a soil health standpoint and, you know, fertilizer input standpoint. But it's not growing very quickly because it doesn't, you know, the look is nice it’s just a departure from for a lot of farmers from the way they’ve been doing things. But to find ways of incentivizing no-till of helping to grow that particular practice among other carbon sequestration practices is a hugely important area of focus. And if we can do it in ways that are much less herbicide intensive then it's a no-brainer.

Greg Dalton: Twilight Greenaway, North Face has sold like Cali wool beanie that they said was climate beneficial. So the idea that this can actually help the climate. So tell us about some of the, you know, climate beneficial or carbon farming as well as efforts in California on healthy soils.

Twilight Greenaway: Sure. I mean I also spent some time with some no-till guys. I went to a conference where there were hundreds of no-till guys. And when they do it concert with other practices, I do think they are often able to bring down the pesticide use as well when they do it in this kind of regenerative way that brings animals and that brings cover crops. But California has definitely been a leader and it's exciting because there are 39 other states, California has a healthy soil initiative. They've recently just stop the funding for fairly dramatically and there are 39 other states where there are healthy soil initiatives coming up. So that is for me a really significant positive step. In terms of the beanie the wool, I worked on a story about an effort to recognize certain practices on farms in California. And there's an effort to bring particularly people who are doing fiber related farming and in livestock that way, but also meat and dairy. And to really reward them and fund certain efforts like for instance, I know you've had the Marin Carbon Project as well but bring compost a thin layer across some of this agricultural land whether it's for grazing or otherwise has been shown to be able to really make a significant difference in terms of carbon drawdown into the soil. So that's encouraging but there really hasn’t been enough money put into it yet and that is what I found when I wrote about it. They keep bumping it up, Gavin Newsom, I think the most recent number I saw might have been 24 million, don’t quote me on that, but it’s --

Greg Dalton: Lot of money but still small potatoes.

Twilight Greenaway: It’s a drop in the bucket because, you know, that’s a few farms a few loads of compost like it goes really fast. So what really in theory what needs to happen is a much larger scale.

Greg Dalton: Amanda Little, I wanna ask about some foods that we don't hear a lot about that we may be learning more about in the future as we go into a world of, you know, hot world of 9 billion people. So Kernza, you’ve written about is it moringa which can, you know, sometimes called famine food. There’s cassava perennials that have all sorts of attributes that can be good sources of carbohydrates. I think most people haven't heard about cassava, moringa or Kernza. So tell us about some of these foods that might be coming, a bigger role in the future.

Amanda Little: Yeah. So the book is a sort of five-year adventure into the lands and mines and machines working on the future of food. Some of that is very high-tech and some of it is, you know, some of those efforts are really focused on restoring ancient practices and traditional practices of farming. And I looked at edible insects which are consumed in many cultures today and have been for thousands of years. And ancient plants and what we can learn from them and the research that’s going into bringing some very nutrient dense ancient plants back online. That chapter starts out in Mexico with a farmer who is researching moringa you probably have heard about moringa because it has a lot of traction in health-food circles and has incredible nutrient properties and it's very drought resilient. The tree is almost sort of Dr. Seussian in its many, you know, benefits and sort of capabilities both nutritionally and environmentally. But it hasn’t really been picked up in sort of modern food circles beyond in a very kind of specific niche area. So this scientist is working on making it easier to grow this food making it easier to harvest it and sort of expanding the access to moringa particularly in dry tropical regions where the plant, you know, was native to equatorial nations. And so it's an interesting area of focus. Kernza is another area where a plant that has very, very deep roots that's able to has inherent drought resilience because it’s able to top water supply very deep in the soil. Again, it's not as productive as modern wheat by a longshot so a lot of the breeding research is going into how can we bring sort of the drought resilience properties of this plant, you know, online in a bigger way by making it easier to produce. I think it’s a quarter or a third of the actual sort of productivity of modern wheat. But again has so many useful and important sort of attributes that it's very relevant to the discussion of climate resilient food sources. Quinoa is another ancient plant that’s there’s a lot of interesting research around how to make that adaptable to new environments for farming. But, you know, even the algae and duckweeds they’re all these kinds of interesting areas of focus right now. How much of it will really become accessible to, you know, broader populations. Will we be able to feed more people with less food because it's more nutrient dense? Really interesting and important questions. Again, it's really sort of research stage right now but helps sort of inform the bigger conversation.

Greg Dalton: Want to go to our lightning round and ask you some quick questions. I’m gonna mention a food and ask you, say the first thing that comes to your mind with -- unfiltered, the first thing that comes to your mind. So Twilight Greenaway. Tofu.

Twilight Greenaway: I mean tofu has had this kind of interesting history. I think people have really strong feelings about it either way.

Greg Dalton: One word or phrase. Okay. Amanda Little. GMO corn.

Amanda Little: Yes. It is necessary on some level if it has the right genes.

Greg Dalton: Twilight Greenaway. Almond milk.

Twilight Greenaway: Water intensive but not as much as dairy.

Greg Dalton: Amanda Little. Your favorite food cooked by your mother or father.

Amanda Little: Four-cheese lasagna.

Greg Dalton: Twilight Greenaway. Your least favorite food cooked by your mother or father.

Twilight Greenaway: Steamed vegetables and brown rice.

Greg Dalton: Also Twilight Greenaway. Your guilty food pleasure.

Twilight Greenaway: Lamb. I love it. I eat it about once a month because I know the carbon impact.

Greg Dalton: Amanda Little. Your least favorite cuisine.

Amanda Little: I love it all. I really don't -- there’s no food I don’t love.

Greg Dalton: The answer of a food writer. Twilight Greenaway. Your favorite cuisine.

Twilight Greenaway: California.

Greg Dalton: Amanda Little. Your food habit you'd most like to change.

Amanda Little: Meat consumption. I have a very fraught love affair with meat. I have tried to be a vegan and a vegetarian in every version of that and I keep going back to the barbecue.

Greg Dalton: Confessions of a barbecue lover. Okay. Twilight Greenaway. Your food habit you'd most like to change.

Twilight Greenaway: Going to Costco.

Greg Dalton: Alright let’s give them a round of applause for getting through the big --

[Applause]

Amanda Little, before we wrap up I wanna mention 3D printing of food, perhaps for military rations. I mean just explain to us is this where we’re going, you know, 3D printing of food?

Amanda Little: The short version is at the Natick Research Laboratory in Massachusetts there are researchers developing or adapting 3D printers to deposit pastes of food, food paste it could be chickpea paste or an avocado paste or sort of nut butter or something else into a nugget or a bar that is also mixed with specialized nutrients that can be, you know, specific to the needs of a particular soldier. And this they know from sensors that are testing the sweat and blood of the soldiers sending this information wirelessly to the 3D printer which then makes the bar or nugget of food with that certain cocktail concoction of nutrients that the soldier needs. That is printed out, it’s given to, you know, a drone and then it’s delivered into the field of combat and there is the personalized food nugget. And so that seem to me to be in sort of the category of like post food future that was very hard for me to imagine in happening again I’m a nostalgic eater, you know, like I have done tried out soylentand tried my hand at adult baby formulas that are available on the market. But I much prefer my mom’s rib sticking four-cheese lasagna. Food is a proxy for love, for a lot of us. This is how, you know, I relate to this topic I'm not a great cook, I'm not a farmer but I care about this issue as we all do. And we don’t want to see our traditions and our sort of the rituals around food destroyed and something like 3D printing, you know, sort of like, etc., feels like a threat to that. The argument from many of the soldiers and scientists at the research laboratory was hey, this is a lot better than an MRE, you know, this is actually much, it’s fresher it’s more nutrient dense, and it's gonna be preferable to most of the soldiers in the field. And it was interesting watching this 3D printer named Foodini try to print out a hummus flatbread with an avocado army star squirted on top of it. And the thing kept sort of malfunctioning and getting like clogs and trying to sort of purge the clogs and I mean it was like watching a toddler learn how to, you know, how to make sense of anything really there’s like learning along the way. And you know, again it feels very strange, and impossible to imagine that this is all a reality. It is, you know, at least in the laboratories in the case of the 3D printed food. But what I would like to say with that question about, you know, history and sort of the context is it technology or not technology when we think about the future of food. You know, historically over millennia since essentially the first, you know, farms, you know came to be what was it 10,000 BC something around there. And the first plow was developed in, you know, roughly 6000 or 7000 BC. This has been a story of, you know, tools and techniques and new, you know, implemented technologies along the way. This is not a new story it’s an old story. We have been, you know, the narrative of running out of food, we can't feed humanity, is thousands of years old. And in part the way we’ve moved through that story, and moved through that process is by applying new tools and techniques and good judgment. So as we move through this phase I think, you know, this notion that it's either we reinvent food or we de-invent food that we, you know, restore the past or we hurdle into the future is sort of a story of false opposite. It’s gonna be both, you know, we have to move forward seeing how we’ve misapply technology in the past. And you know, that may or may not involve 3D printed avocado flatbread, I hope not, but I know that a lot of what I end up eating out of a plastic clamshell is not very high nutrient or good for me or the environment. So there's a lot to fix, but for the most part I'm very hopeful.

Greg Dalton: We’ve been talking about the future of food in a hot and crowded world with Twilight Greenaway, contributing editor with Civil Eats, an online source of news about food, health and environment. And Amanda Little, professor of journalism at Vanderbilt University and author of The Fate of Food: What We’ll Eat in a Bigger, Hotter, Smarter World.

Greg Dalton: To hear more Climate One conversations, subscribe to our podcast at our website: climateone.org, where you’ll also find photos, video clips and more. Please help us get people talking more about climate by giving us a review wherever you get your podcasts

Greg Dalton: Kelli Pennington directs our audience engagement. Tyler Reed is our producer. Sara-Katherine Coxon is the strategy and content manager. The audio engineers are Mark Kirchner, Justin Norton, and Arnav Gupta. Devon Strolovitch edited the program. Dr. Gloria Duffy is CEO of The Commonwealth Club of California, where our program originates. [pause] I’m Greg Dalton.

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Chasing the Harvest in the Heat

Otto Pilot — Fri, 20 Oct 2017 00:01:00 +0000

Chasing the Harvest in the Heat

09/20/2017

Rising temperatures are making hard outdoor jobs even harder. It is the kind of heat that will ground airplanes and melt rail lines, and health experts say agricultural workers are especially vulnerable, as they are already one of the most economically disadvantaged groups.

This is a conversation on how rising temperatures are changing the way our food is grown and the choices we have at the grocery store.

Blanca Banuelos, Co-Director, Migrant Unit, California Rural Legal Assistance, Inc.
Gabriel Thompson, Freelance Journalist and Author
L. Ann Thrupp, executive Director, Berkeley Food Institute
Dolores Huerta, Worker's Rights Activist

This program was recorded in front of a live audience at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, CA on September 19, 2017.

Guests

Blanca A. Bañuelos

Co-Director, Migrant Unit, California Rural Legal Assistance, Inc.

Gabriel Thompson

Freelance Journalist and Author

L. Ann Thrupp

Executive Director, Berkeley Food Institute

Announcer: This is Climate One, changing the conversation about energy, economy and the environment. Rising temperatures are making hard outdoor jobs even harder, and agricultural workers are especially vulnerable.

Blanca Bañuelos: They’re low-wage workers who are living in rural communities where there’s much less resources for assistance and they may talk about how it's 112 degrees today but I have to get the work done.

Announcer: Which can lead to life and death situations.

Gabriel Thompson: You tend to think sort that the supervisors have your back, and then when you realize quickly that sometimes they don't and that they almost killed your son, you can really transform into someone who's gonna not let that happen anywhere else.

Announcer: But it often takes great courage to make that difference.

Dolores Huerta: It’s a hardship on both the workers and also for the employers. For the workers it’s always a health issue, for the employers it’s an economic issue.

Announcer: Chasing the Harvest in the Heat. Up next on Climate One.

Announcer: How are rising temperatures affecting agriculture and the farmworkers out in the fields? Welcome to Climate One – changing the conversation about America’s energy, economy and environment. I’m Devon Strolovitch. Climate One conversations – with oil companies and environmentalists, Republicans and Democrats – are recorded before a live audience, and hosted by Greg Dalton.

Climate change is altering weather all over, in some cases with surprising results. In the summer of 2017, for example, the South and Midwest were cooler than average. But the western third of the United States was hotter than usual, and California and Nevada saw record high temperatures. That matters if you like to eat fruits and vegetables grown in California, which has the largest farm economy in dollar terms. But it may matter most to the farmworkers who harvest and pick them.

Later in the program we’ll hear from Dolores Huerta, the Labor and Civil Rights advocate who co-founded what is now the United Farm Workers Union. First we hear from three guests on stage. Gabriel Thompson is author of Chasing the Harvest: Migrant Workers in California Agriculture. Blanca Bañuelos is co-director of the Migrant Unit for California Rural Legal Assistance. And Ann Thrupp is Director of the Food Institute at the University of California at Berkeley.

Here’s our conversation about chasing the harvest in the heat.

[Applause]

Greg Dalton: Blanca Bañuelos, let’s begin with you. You have two parents who were farmworkers and tell us what it was like growing up with parents who were working in the fields.

Blanca Bañuelos: So both of my parents came from Jalisco, Mexico and they migrated to California and migrated throughout the states depending on the crop. And they migrated from California to Oregon and Washington, ultimately settling in Stockton, California which is where I was born and raised. And my parents would take me to the fields with them. I have lots of photos of myself in the field sitting there on a blanket as they were working. And they said other farmworkers would sit there and take turns babysitting me because that's the way they worked with each other. And they all, you know, help each other out because it was a community. And then I saw a lot of injustices as a young girl, seeing that my parents didn’t speak English, they were treated differently. And so since I was young I wanted to be an attorney. So I decided to go to law school, went to law school in L.A. and then I became an attorney, returned back to Stockton on a two-year fellowship to work representing farmworkers and now I'm at CRLA and it’s 13 and a half years later.

Greg Dalton: And when you drive around with your parents and they look at the conditions now on the farms, what do they say?

Blanca Bañuelos: They’re surprised by the improvement, you know, my mother frequently comments how back when I was working in the fields there was no shade, no one put up shade, nobody cared about giving us water. And so she's happy to see that. She's not working in the fields anymore, but she's happy to see some changes. Although she has friends who are still working in the fields and they continue to talk about issues, they’re different issues now than they were back then.

Greg Dalton: Ann Thrupp, tell us about your grandfather's garden and how that pointed to where you are today.

Ann Thrupp: Yes, when I was very young I was exposed at an early age to my grandfather's interest in growing food. And I have both sides of my family, my mother and my father have parents who are gardeners and always grow their own food. So I got very interested for a very early age and my parents also followed in that tradition. So my earliest memories are of my grandfather in our garden. I also had a very early interest in international issues and global issues and the livelihoods of people from a very early time. So by the time I was in junior high school I actually wrote a report on the world food problems. And I had a very strong interest and I think that again was shaped by my parents and grandparents who are very concerned about the livelihoods of people and had strong moral values about other people. And I actually wanna start my comments today by thanking the farmworkers throughout the United States and the world who are contributing to the welfare of so many people. I think very often farmworkers are completely invisible when we eat our meals on a daily basis, we’re in a privileged, I’m in a privileged situation and I feel very fortunate to be able to appreciate that. And so I feel that, you know, a lot of my work has been on this intersection with social agriculture and environmental issues but fundamentally people are what make the difference.

Greg Dalton: I grew up in Monterey County which is about 100 miles south of San Francisco. Big agricultural county, artichokes a lot of strawberries come from there and I always tell my kids as we’re driving through going to visit grandparents, you see those people out there bending over, you know, they’re picking the strawberries that you put on your breakfast cereal in the morning and doesn’t it look like really hard work and so thanks for that. Gabriel Thompson, tell us how you came to write the book “Chasing the Harvest” where you followed migrant workers who put the food on our tables across the country.

Gabriel Thompson: Yeah, in 2006, 2007 there was a really big backlash against immigrants. And one of the real gaps I kind of felt reading articles about this was that the people writing the articles are who are criticizing the immigrants had never stepped foot inside a chicken processing plant or a lettuce field. And so that one thing I thought was important to do is to go out there and, to the extent that I could and it turns out I got jobs, work in those industries. Not to so much make a political point, but instead to just for all these English-speaking U.S. citizens who talk so much about what immigrants do here. If you’ve never been in those workplaces you’re very ignorant about that. And so I thought one thing I would like to do is go in and do that work just to sort of describe the workers that I met. What the work was like, how quickly it destroyed me, you know. I had this idea before when I did work two months in the lettuce fields of Yuma Arizona for a couple weeks beforehand I had this plan of doing pushups and situps. And then I get out there and I’m just like and within five minutes I'm wearing like a T-shirt and I'm sweating profusely and my coworkers are bundled up in pants and hooded sweatshirts and they’re looking at me and they're kind of shivering and they're also going way faster than me. And I realized, like okay, I have a lot to learn here. And those push-ups is not the way to become a farmworker. So that, the other thing I think that really struck that was important for me in doing that is that I had an impression of farmworkers before I actually went out on the fields and met with them and hung out with them for two months the same crew. So you’re eating meals each time, you’re telling jokes, you’re sort of a family for a couple months. The work was hard it was low-paid, but what I really could never have gotten from reading articles about farmworkers was that there was a real sense of community there and solidarity and also pride and they enjoyed the work. And so they would go from crew to crew sometimes a relative would die that they need one they will send back the grandma to Mexico and then they have the money for it. And so they would go from crew to crew in the morning and asked for people to open their wallets. And these are people they really didn't know much about. And every time folks would put out their wallets and give what they could. And so there is a real sense I think for me of not just the hardships but the joys of farmworkers. So segueing into this new book, which is this oral history collection of 17 farmworkers across the state of California I think of it as a chance for you to, for the reader to invite 17 people into your living room. And have them talk about what matters for them in their lives both the challenges the joys. And so that they emerge as people that are just the sort of complicated, and the relationships of work as any of us are. And when you make that move then you, for me at least, it makes me really see them in ways that are much less exotic and much more able to be identified with.

Greg Dalton: One of the workers that you write about his name is Roberto. So tell us his story and particularly what happened to his son.

Gabriel Thompson: Roberto lives in, at this point in 2005 he’s living in Bakersfield, he had come from Mexico. He had been fired from a job because he’d been disrespected from a boss. It was a great job but he couldn't handle being disrespected this is a theme that goes throughout his life. And so he's fired and he decides to take his family up to work in the great fields of Bakersfield. And his son, Angel starts working with him at the age of 13. And at the age of 15 in 2005 they’re harvesting grapes in Bakersfield. And 2005 is a really important year to look at California's response to farmworkers dying from heat because in that summer four farmworkers died, 12 workers across the state of California died from heat exposure not just in the fields but also maybe roofing. And it was in that summer that Roberto is working next to his son and it was a 106 degree day in Bakersfield. And he was working for a company at that point who was one of the few that refused to provide canopies for shade. They also, if you're packing grapes, they refuse to have tables so you kind of stand and do it. So you had to kneel on a desert floor in the sun, and pack the grapes. The idea was somehow because your nose is right up against the grapes, you’re on your knees, you’re gonna pack the product better. His son starts feeling ill. He tells Roberto he’s not feeling well. Roberto goes to tell him, go relax, have some water. The foreman comes over and says I’m not paying for you to relax and have water. So he starts working again, very quickly gets ill. Apparently, he’s not brought to a hospital and for two days, he's sort of suffering at home the sun at this primitive labor camp that they’re living in. At some point the United Farm Workers realized that Roberto's son is really ill. They knock on his door. They see his son, and they say you need to get this guy to the hospital in Bakersfield. So they rushed him there. He very quickly is diagnosed with extreme heat exhaustion and also that had led to a compromised immune system, and he had meningitis and he went into a coma and he nearly died. That was the tragic part. What came out of that was Roberto becoming someone who was a fearless advocate for protecting farmworkers in the state and went and testified, he's undocumented. Went and testified in Sacramento, was a key person in terms of the state passing the most stringent heat protection regulations. And so I think for him it was a real and looking at his story, a real example of how both you tend to think sort that the supervisors have your back in some way, and then when you realize quickly that sometimes they don't and that they almost killed your son. That you can really transform into someone who's gonna make sure that to the best of his ability he’s gonna not let that happen anywhere else and he continues his activism to the day. So right now he works at Coachella Valley. He lives in a community called Thermal which as you can guess is extremely hot. This year they broke records for 122 degree day but that takes his cell phone out to the fields and records surreptitiously abuses in the fields and put them on Facebook and social media. And so he’s really been sort of a guy who is kind of a farmworker journalist who feels like there are all these great stories out there in the field, but there aren’t journalists there. And so he's gonna be sort of a citizen farmworker journalist to try to depict the abuses going on. So I found his story, you know, really inspiring and also sort of the way evidence in ways you can dramatically change over the way you think about who you are and the role you play.

Announcer: You’re listening to a Climate One conversation about chasing the harvest in the heat. You can subscribe to our podcast at our website: climateone.org. Greg Dalton will continue his conversation in just a moment.

Announcer: We continue now with Climate One. Greg Dalton is talking about farmworkers and rising temperatures with Blanca Bañuelos, co-director of the Migrant Unit for California Rural Legal Assistance. Gabriel Thompson, author of Chasing the Harvest: Migrant Workers in California Agriculture. And Ann Thrupp, Director of the Food Institute at the University of California at Berkeley.

Here’s your host, Greg Dalton.

Greg Dalton: Blanca Bañuelos, heat is rising, searing heat in the American West, Southwest. What protections farmers required to offer to workers who are working in this increasing heat?

Blanca Bañuelos: So employers have a long list of responsibilities when it comes to protecting workers from heat stress. Some of those include having shade up once the temperature is 80 degrees. So as soon as they know that the temperature is going to be 80 degrees, the shade has to be up and ready and it has to be set up. It cannot be in the truck. For example, it cannot be a mile away. It has to be set up. And the shade has to cover at least 25% of the workforce. Workers are entitled to take a recovery rest period if they need one, if they’re feeling nauseous or feeling sick in any way. Employers have to provide cool and fresh water and they have to provide approximately 2 quarts of water per worker for every eight hours and it has to be replenished. Other responsibilities include making sure that the employees have access to restrooms as well. And then the other thing I would add about the shade is the shade has to be sufficient. So we have had some employers for example, argue the grapevines are shade, are sufficient shade, and they're not, right. And so we have had to work with Cal/OSHA which is the California State Agency that is charged with overseeing health and safety in the workplace. Other protections also include, there has to be safety protection program in place. And the employer also has to have a program in place when they have to call the paramedics for example. And so we do community outreach and education on these issues that way workers understand their rights. One thing we also like to, you know, highlight to workers is try to have a sense of where you're at, right. Because once you're out on the field, if you call the paramedics and you just say I'm in the middle of, you know, Modesto, California which is about an hour and a half away east of San Francisco. That may not mean anything to a paramedic, right. And so we tell workers try to have a sense of, you know, what is the nearest cross-streets, right. And so those are all employer responsibilities. And so in the case that Gabriel was talking about with the worker’s son that is something we continue to hear today. That although employers have the responsibility to take employees to the doctor, they don’t. They frequently tell workers go home. You’re fine just go walk it, you know, walk it off. This is something we continue to see. We have seen a decrease though and reported deaths from heat stress. So in the last three years from 2014 to 2016 there have only been three deaths that have been confirmed. This year there hasn’t been any so that's good news. However, we continue to see a problem with other heat illness that doesn't result in death. So from 2014 to 2016 there were over 160 reported incidents. And there's many more that aren’t reported because farmworkers are fearful of coming forward, especially in today's political climate. They think they have to hide and keep to themselves.

Greg Dalton: And tell us about how some crops are being harvested at night increasingly, onions and other ones.

Blanca Bañuelos: So some employers have taken it upon themselves to switch the workday from day to night, that way workers aren’t working under the hot sun. And so we’ve seen it in the onion industry, we’ve seen it in the strawberries. We’ve seen it in wine grapes and we’ve also seen it with raisins. We’ve also seen that with celery and we’ve seen this in the Central Valley of California and in the Coachella Valley.

Greg Dalton: Gabriel Thompson, Jim Cochran is an organic strawberry farmer who’s in your book. So tell us the story of Jim Cochran what makes him unique?

Gabriel Thompson: Yeah, I mean I would say he's just completely one-of-a-kind. He started in the 70s just north of Santa Cruz. He came out of a cooperative movement that he’d worked in many years in Salinas. Liked the idea of cooperative farmers but also had some characters in his groups who when he said something in the cooperative meetings that they didn't agree with afterwards they would pull a gun and so, you know, just maybe tone it down a little bit what you're saying, he’s like okay, you know, I’m gonna, you know, cooperatives can be pretty quirky and they’re interesting. But when you’re trying to do like you have a mission driven thing you don't necessarily want to have someone pull a gun on you after a meeting. But he sort of and when I think about him he’s a guy who spent much of his life trying to figure out how to make agricultural work for both the environment, but especially for the workers. And so he was the first strawberry grower I think in the state who went organic. He had actually been pesticide poisoned many times as a grower. He was the first one who really tried to create systems in which the workers had a real say in the work that they're doing. And that in fact invited the United Farm Workers to come down and had to be neutral about it because of labor laws, but said, if you want to come and speak to my workers and present maybe the benefits as you see them for being a union, I'm gonna step back and I’m gonna be as neutral as you’re supposed to be in the law which is much less neutral than anyone else ever is. And so his operation is small but he's proved that he can grow strawberries organically. He proved he can grow strawberries with a union force. And he also for many years is a giant threat to the industry. So when the workers joined UFW, one of the biggest lawyers, pro-employer lawyer in Ventura filed a lawsuit saying that Jim Cochran had violated some laws. He didn’t know anybody, never been up there but they saw that this might be a watershed moment. And so I think what Jim’s when I interviewed him and talked about his work was that he feels like they’ve come a long way on the organic vision that he had. But they hadn’t come a long way in terms of the economic justice, fair wages movement that he had. And he saw that as the next big challenge.

Greg Dalton: Blanca Bañuelos, for workers we’re talking about who are just trying to get through the day, barely make ends meet, they're very vulnerable. Is climate change even on their radar or is that something like outer space?

Blanca Bañuelos: I would say that they’re probably not really thinking about it because they have to support their families. They’re low-wage workers who are living in rural communities where there isn’t a lot of options for jobs and they may talk about how yeah the sky looks darker today, it's polluted or it's 112 degrees today but I have to get the work done. I have a family to support and I don't want my children to have to work this in the future. And so I think they think about it, but it's not something they can seriously consider and say I’m gonna set this aside and find something else to do.

Greg Dalton: Ann Thrupp, the farming community in the United States has been on the fringe of the climate conversation. It really started with tailpipes and smokestacks. Large corporations producing carbon pollution and the food industry didn't want to be part of it, but it has come particularly since the Paris climate agreement come more to the center. Tell us how that has happened.

Ann Thrupp: Yeah, definitely I think there is growing awareness among agriculture producers and food businesses about the very significant impact. I mean agriculture is natural resource-based and it's both affected by and it affects climate change. So it's a big contributor –

Greg Dalton: Some would say it’s bigger than electricity and –

Ann Thrupp: Right. Yeah, estimated anywhere between 20% to 30% of all global climate change is attributable to food and agriculture depending on how you place your boundaries. But it's very significant so agriculture is a contributor at the same time agriculture can be a solution. Having better soils can help to absorb carbon and create what's called a carbon sink, not just release carbon. I mean agriculture is very heavily dependent on fossil fuels and industrial agriculture system. There are lots of pesticides and fertilizers, lots and lots of transport, tillage and water use, all that contributes to climate change. But it also has the potential to absorb more carbon in the soil to offset or adapt to that climate change through good practices and good soil management practices. So it’s something that more and more agricultural producers are aware of. They may not always talk about it that way but, you know, good soil management and good water management can be win-win solutions. I'd also like to say in reference to your previous question that you were asking Blanca about community awareness. I totally agree with what she’s saying at the same time I think that this recent drought has brought more attention to the severe water shortages that have affected thousands of farmworkers in California and other regions of the United States too. And literally there were thousands of people that without water supplies. And that was partly related to the drought what I mean very much related to the drought. But in addition, I think people saw that begin to see the connection more broadly to climate change, not just drought as an independent variable. I mean the drought is related to climate change. So there are really great organizing groups like the Community Water Center and others who are working on understanding water as a right for farmworker families, for rural communities. When they have been heavily affected by the lack of water literally basic drinking water and supplies for showering and for dishwashing and handwashing was missing as a result of the drought. So unfortunately, the drought brought this into more visibility and has resulted in a lot of awareness at different levels.

Greg Dalton: There’s a compelling episode in the Years of Living Dangerously, which was a series on Showtime where Don Cheadle the actor goes to a family in the farming area of California. And they're very worried about the water situation and it’s very real, it’s a real biography of the water stress of that particular family is experiencing.

Ann Thrupp: Yes, it’s really known worldwide, in fact, that climate change affects the most vulnerable communities. Disadvantaged, poor and low-income communities have been most deleteriously affected by climate change. So and the Central Valley is an illustration of that. Some people would say this is also a very clear illustration of what's referred to as environmental injustice. So, you know, it's really manifested in the agriculture sector. I mean the good news is that there's some measure that’s being taken to address these matters, but, you know, attention on the human dimension as well as environmental dimension there’s a long way to go to address these inequities that are borne. I mean basically the impacts are borne inequitably against the most vulnerable population.

Greg Dalton: Well Blanca let’s pick up on that in terms of environmental inequity. Lot of people think of the environmental movement as being a white male hiker in some beautiful mountain somewhere, wearing Patagonia clothing. And that is, you know, part of the environmental movement, do you think that there is a division that often the people you represent, or overlooked by people who care about the food they put in their body, but not so much about the people who picked it?

Blanca Bañuelos: I think there can be a division but I think, you know, there are programs where people are working together, right. So California Rural Legal Assistance, which is where I work, does have the Community Equity Initiative program. And so that's where we do try to work together in these rural communities to address some of the issues that Ann was talking about. So there could be a division but I don't think it’s completely divided, you know, I think that, you know, again the promise sometimes workers have to think, you know, do I have time to go and organize or do I have to go and work, right. And some workers can do both and can become organizers for their community, can become leaders and many just do not have that, you know, time and opportunity to do that.

Greg Dalton: Ann Thrupp, people go to the grocery store they have an opportunity lots of information about what's organic what's toxic, what's non-GMO. Marine Stewardship Council, the Monterey Bay Aquarium certification of what fish you should eat or not but there is very little information about the labor that goes into the fruits or vegetables. If I go to the store and care about who picked that tomato, there’s no information.

Ann Thrupp: Yes, that's a real problem. I think it's a huge oversight to not recognize that through certification programs. Once again, though there have been efforts to address this issue. Some people heard of fair trade that's mostly associated with overseas imports of things like coffee and cocoa and bananas that have fair trade labels. That often has to do with the amount of value that's going to small farmers, not necessarily the workers themselves. But more recently there've been some initiatives largely undertaken by farmworker groups but also in collaboration with other organizations to develop certification programs. We need the legal processes as Blanca was talking about. But in addition, there can be market-driven efforts that consumers can actually ask for better healthy and fair conditions for farmworkers. And there are two major programs that have helped to lead the way and one of them is called the Fair Food Program. It emerged out of Florida, out of a group of farmworkers it's called the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, have any of you even heard of that? It’s a group of former –

Greg Dalton: These are people who were picking tomatoes and took on Taco Bell, big fast food and they won better conditions.

Ann Thrupp: Organized, yes. And instead of going to their own employers alone they also, you know, made a case to get a small increase in their wages for major businesses, retail businesses like Taco Bell and others. So that resulted in a real success and a slight increase, it was a small increase but successes in getting more possibilities for farmworkers. And a similar initiative is happening in California and Mexico called the Equitable Food Initiative.

Greg Dalton: And that's where Costco, Whole Foods and other retailers have joined similar plans to try to think more, apply fair trade to other types of food.

Ann Thrupp: Yes, it's not exactly fair trade per se. But so the partnership has work together to engage workers and farmers the farm businesses and the retail organizations to develop better standards. And that's now labeled called the EFI, Equitable Food Initiative. And you can find that mainly through strawberries in Costco and in, you know, like some Whole Foods markets but it’s very small right now. So if all of you any consumers care about this issue, it's great to go to your grocers and say have you ever heard of the Equitable Food Initiative with a Fair Food Program. We would love to have you carry strawberries or grapes or fruit or vegetables that are labeled in that way because that gives value to the important improvement of the health and the fairness of working conditions for farmworkers.

Greg Dalton: We’re talking about the production of food in the era of climate change at Climate One. We’re gonna go to our lightning round and ask each of you to respond. I’m gonna mention a noun and you’re gonna tell me the first thing that pops into your mind. Starting with Gabriel Thompson, DACA, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. First thing that comes to your mind.

Gabriel Thompson: Necessary.

Greg Dalton: Blanca Bañuelos, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue.

Blanca Bañuelos: A little bit scary.

Greg Dalton: A farmer from Georgia. Ann Thrupp, GMOs.

Ann Thrupp: A hot topic.

Greg Dalton: Blanca Bañuelos, kale?

Blanca Bañuelos: Not something I eat.

Greg Dalton: Is that a nice way of saying yuck?

[Laughs]

Pretty much. Gabriel Thompson, Amazon's acquisition of Whole Foods?

Gabriel Thompson: I am totally uninterested in it.

Greg Dalton: Ann Thrupp, Roundup?

Ann Thrupp: Resistance. GMOs.

Greg Dalton: Blanca Bañuelos, your favorite food?

Blanca Bañuelos: Tacos.

Greg Dalton: Ann Thrupp, your least favorite food?

Ann Thrupp: Aha, we just had a conversation about that. Okra.

Greg Dalton: Probably have a lot of company there. Gabriel Thompson, last question in our lightning round. The best dish your mother or father cooked at home?

Gabriel Thompson: My dad would make just cheap cuts of cheddar cheese in a hardshell that we probably buy in bulk. And he would put them in a little toaster oven and then crack them and I'll just eat them. I remember one time I ate like eight or nine. And so that for me is like that was probably one of the most delicious meals. And if I eat it today, I’d probably think like, yuck.

[Laughs]

Greg Dalton: That qualifies. Okay let’s give them a round for getting through the lightning round.

Announcer: You're listening to a conversation about the food system in a hotter world. This is Climate One. You can check out our podcast at our website: climate one dot org. Greg Dalton will be back with his guests in just a moment.

Announcer: You’re listening to Climate One. Greg Dalton is talking about food, farmworkers, and climte change with Blanca Bañuelos, co-director of the Migrant Unit for California Rural Legal Assistance. Gabriel Thompson, author of Chasing the Harvest: Migrant Workers in California Agriculture. And Ann Thrupp, Director of the Food Institute at the University of California at Berkeley. Here’s Greg.

Greg Dalton: Ann Thrupp, organic food is a growing part of American agriculture. The high margins still, you know, less than what 5% or something but growing. Does that money that we pay extra for organics get to the workers?

Ann Thrupp: You know it's variable about the profit margins and how they are distributed. There is some evidence at least based on some California studies that the wages for inorganic farms are slightly higher than the wages for non-organic farms. This is a study from about 10 years ago, which was published by the California Institute for Rural Studies. And one of my colleagues Kristi Goetz was one of the co-authors. As far as we know that study has not been done nationwide, so it’d be great information to have. One of the things that is clear though about the organic standard is that it is regulated by law, but it does not require increase in wages. So it's not categorically like with the organic you don't necessarily have to adopt by the labor standards. I had the opportunity to work with for many years with Bonterra Vineyards, which is the largest grower of organic grapes in California and actually in the nation. And that company, you know, took this very seriously wage issues, the social sustainability, the social equity issues were very key to their bottom line as well as the environmental and economic. So I think people recognize that treating their labor well is a win-win opportunity and organic growers, you know, are often cognizant of the social as well as environmental but it's not always the case.

Greg Dalton: And there are more jobs on organic farm. So tell us why is that?

Ann Thrupp: Yeah, organic tends to be more labor-intensive and that hire more people per farm or per unit production. And that’s largely related to weed control. In nonorganic farms you use chemical control and in an organic it needs to be mechanical or else by hand. So there's lot more handwork. So of course that has trade-offs. It’s more difficult work but it does employ more people.

Greg Dalton: Gabriel Thompson, among all the farmworkers that you profiled was organic farm, something that they would prefer to go to because there's fewer pesticides or was it just kind of a niche thing that there weren’t enough jobs that it was a remote option for the workers you wrote about.

Gabriel Thompson: I did not see that. And I think one thing that’s worth thinking about in the context of trying to make things better now is just how few farmworkers in California are unionized. And so whatever you're trying to do, if you’re trying to make it more environmentally sustainable, you’re trying to make the wages rise, you’re trying to make it safer work conditions. This is not the 1960s and 1970s, in which the UFW was ascending and had a real power to really reshape the industry. At one point we had 17 million Americans that were boycotting grapes. That's the biggest consumer boycott in history. Right now, it’s very hard to find farmworkers who are members of unions. So I think that's also so when you think about the one of the real challenges is now looking at trying to improve the conditions of workers is that union density has dropped so dramatically. And so what we have are these really important networks of organizations like CRLA that are on the front line to make sure people aren't getting totally abused but that what you don't have as much as workers in collective action. And that was really what scared growers, you know. They stopped cutting lettuce in Salinas. Growers in the 70s said oh we’ll bring in some high school students they can do it, no they couldn’t. The lettuce rotted. And so they won contracts that dramatically increased their wages, gave them new protections for pesticides. And so I think that's another big challenge to think about now is that the union landscape has changed.

Blanca Bañuelos: And if I could just add to that.

Greg Dalton: Sure.

Blanca Bañuelos: I mean I think the other thing to consider is that because farmworkers are in rural communities there's much less resources, you know, to get assistance, right. So if someone for example, living in the Bay Area of California or Los Angeles or New York, there’s gonna be worker centers, there’s gonna be unions, there’s gonna be, you know, different ways to organize. In rural communities, there aren't any worker centers. There aren't unions, there isn't anywhere for them to go which is what makes it even more difficult for them to stand up and ask for, you know, an increase in wages or ask for better working conditions when they have nobody to really go to. And CRLA I think does, you know, we attempt to do what we can. We have 20 offices statewide in rural communities, but again we might be the only ones out there in those communities.

Greg Dalton: We’re gonna go to audience questions and invite you to join us. Welcome to Climate One.

Male Participant: Thank you. I’m wondering what your panelists think about the effects of the increasing mechanization of agriculture will be on farmworkers.

Ann Thrupp: Yeah, the observation of course is that it is happening now already that there’s increasing automation, increasing mechanization. And it can substitute for labor in some certain types of industries, certain types of crops. There are also a lot of crops that don't enable that to permit easily to happen when they’re highly perishable types of products. I mean, I think that what's really an interesting opportunity now is that as there is more and more mechanization and computerization of agriculture systems that allows potential for job, improve job training skills for workers that have been currently doing backbreaking work can now be engaged in computer programming, running, operating equipment that has computer sensors and maintaining it. So it actually is an interesting ironic situation that the future of jobs in agriculture could enable more skillful opportunities. I mean, I actually think a lot of farmworkers are highly skilled in a particular way. But there may be new types of skills, new training opportunities as we go into the more of the technological dependencies. So I mean I think that it is happening but hopefully there will still be attention given to the incredibly important needs for job equity and fairness and healthy conditions in the current jobs that are there.

Gabriel Thompson: And I would just say that when UFW is really pushing for higher wages for grape workers, the common refrain was that that would lead to mechanization of the work. That was in the mid-60s, and right now, you know, there've been companies that invested tens of million dollars to create a lettuce harvesting machine that wouldn’t need human labor. It has come to naught to date and there are actually more farmworkers in California than there have ever been. And so the last 50 years of that, I mean every now and then there’s these articles in the packer press about like this new way in which we could like save all these labor. And then a couple years later you go back oh in fact like the strawberries that they harvested were smushed and either overripe or green. And so I think it's a lot more complicated than that and at least for the history that we see now it’s proven to be a much more difficult endeavor than.

Greg Dalton: Let’s go to our next question. Welcome to Climate One.

Female Participant: So how do farmworkers learn about protecting themselves from heat stress?

Greg Dalton: Blanca Bañuelos.

Blanca Bañuelos: So at CRLA we have a grant from the Department of Labor and we actually go out and do presentations on heat stress. And we try to make these presentations interactive where we will have hypotheticals, right. And we’ll say, hey, you know, your co-worker is passing out, what do you do? So we try to make it as interactive as possible. Our presentations are conducted usually in Spanish. We also have an indigenous program because we’re seeing a higher population of indigenous workers who do not speak Spanish or English. And so at CRLA we have community workers who speak additional languages to help us conduct that outreach. Our materials have a lot of photos of examples of what the employer's responsibilities are. I would also add that Cal/OSHA which is the state agency I mentioned earlier from California that is charged with health and safety also after 2005 began a big campaign about heat stress. And so we started hearing radio ads in different languages. There's actually DVDs put out in different languages. We've seen the DVDs in Spanish, English, Punjabi and in indigenous languages like Mixteco. And we have also seen them come up with a lot of materials and if you actually drive down the Central Valley in California, you will see a lot of the billboards that say, you know, heat kills, drink water. So there's a lot of ways that, you know, we try to educate workers.

Gabriel Thompson: There’s an interesting program at UC Davis in which they've the last year or two they've equipped farmworkers with monitors to check on their pulse rates, on their dehydration. They take blood from them before and after. They haven’t compiled the numbers yet but they’re trying to figure out how it actually affects them. Because most of the heat research looks at things like firefighters or folks in the military but they haven't done much about like how it actually affects them physiologically the farmworkers. And I'm really interested in seeing that because it's actually cataloging how their body is dealing with the fact of being, you know, 10, 11, 12 hours out in the heat. And at what point are they in danger zones and what ways in which maybe the clothing they wear might be able to help. And so that's sort of the cutting edge right now in terms of what steps could you take to really help them cool down a bit more.

Announcer: Greg Dalton has been talking with Gabriel Thompson, author of Chasing the Harvest: Migrant Workers in California Agriculture. Blanca Bañuelos, co-director of the Migrant Unit for California Rural Legal Assistance. And Ann Thrupp, Director of the Food Institute at the University of California at Berkeley.

We turn now to a conversation with Dolores Huerta, who was on the front lines of the labor movement in the 1960’s, working alongside Cesar Chavez. A new movie, directed by Peter Bratt, chronicles the life of the legendary activist from her early days to her continued fight for workers’ rights. Greg sat down with the duo to discuss the issues that workers in the fields still face today.

Greg Dalton: How do you see the warming temperatures affecting the cause you've worked on so long, those people working bent over backwards all day in that increasingly hot sun?

Dolores Huerta: Well it affects them in many ways. Not only when we’re talking about health but it also, you know, the potential they possibly might die in this heat. And it’s very expensive for the growers also because one of the things that well, when I was with the United Farm Workers as you know I'm not there anymore. But when I would sign my contracts I would make sure that the workers were out of the fields by noon. They will start early, they would get out early that meant that the growers had to pay them more money because they were working shorter hours, but the thing is that nobody died. We had 100,000 farmworkers under contract and nobody died. And now they have settled, okay well you can put shade but in some of the places that’s very difficult to do because you have these huge, huge acres of land and it’s very difficult to get the workers under shade, you know. And so it’s very difficult and I know for the growers it’s also more expensive for them. And the other thing it really cuts the harvest time down. We have to have a shorter harvest and so you got to have more workers, more equipment, more packaging everything. So it just raises the amount of money that the growers have to pay to get their stuff harvested, picked and shipped, you know. So it’s a hardship on both the workers and also for the employers. And of course with the workers it’s always a health issue whether they can survive the heat. And for the employers it’s an economic issue.

Greg Dalton: So the film recognizes you as one of the first environmental justice advocates and now we have climate justice. So how are those two related, climate justice and a traditional environmental justice?

Dolores Huerta: Well in some respects you might say the climate justice is one of the most important issues because it affects everybody, it affects the world. And if we don’t take care of our planet, you know, we’re all going to be destroyed. So if you think in terms of priorities and things that we need to pay attention to, this is one of the major issues that are affecting all of our lives throughout the world.

Peter Bratt: And to think that one of the things the film points out and as we’ve been learning recently from the headlines, you know, that race is still an issue in the United States. And there’s a growing food justice movement that also looks at race, how race informs the distribution of food and its availability and communities of color. So if you go to the ghettos or the reservations or the barrios, you know, you see agribusiness and corporations, you know, stocking stores with Gatorades and sodas and high-fructose corn syrup and deep-fried foods. The things that lead to, you know, second stage diabetes which is an epidemic in our communities. And at the same time, the organic foods that you're talking about they’re available in more upscale neighborhoods, white neighborhoods like whole foods and specialty stores. So again the food justice movement is something that grows out of the environmental justice movement. But again it's the elephant in the room, race that nobody wants to talk about. That kind of shows the impact it has on the various things in society.

Dolores Huerta: And the marketing that goes into the communities of color, you know. When you think of the marketing of Coca-Cola, for instance, and the harm that it causes to our community and their political activism in California they were trying to put a tax on sodas. And here you had Pepsi that was, you know, fighting that. They just defeated an initiative in New Mexico where they were trying to again put a tax on sodas because if you did put a tax on sodas it diminish the consumption of those sweet beverages. And that's one of the things that we do on my foundation. We actually work to get all of these sugar-sweet beverages out of the schools and we’ve been very, very successful, even chocolate milk because it has so much sugar in it. But we have to, first of all educate the parents and make them understand and then get our parents to serve on the wellness committees in the different school system to make sure that they have better lunches and definitely take all the sugar-sweet beverages out.

Greg Dalton: There’s been a big deal made of organic food recently and people pay more for those at the grocery store. But do those benefits trickle down to the people who... to the workers in the fields?

Dolores Huerta: I would say they don’t because they, number one, they don't have access oftentimes to fresh fruits and vegetables. They live kind of in the jungle, like in, you know, the Central Valley around Delano it’s a grape jungle. And, you know, this is what it is, you keep the stock of tomato maybe an asparagus jungle. And so people often do not have access to fresh fruits and vegetables, even where they live but the other thing, and by the way it’s one of the things that my foundation is working on, is trying to get the farm to the table kind of getting small farms to provide the fresh fruits and vegetables to the community. But the other thing is they don’t have the money. They don’t have the money to be able to buy organic food because organically grown food, fruits and vegetables are more expensive than regular. And then there are things that our government we subsidize meat and we subsidize poultry, but we don't subsidize vegetables. And the Department of Agriculture happens to be one of the richest agencies in our government and they give a lot of money in subsidies to the growers but they don't subsidize fruits and vegetables.

Greg Dalton: And then climate often is thought of as a future problem. We know that it’s actually here now with Harvey and Irma and everything else. So how do you think climate is gonna affect your 11 children and the children of the farmworkers that you advocate for?

Dolores Huerta: Well we can say how they’re gonna affect all of the children of the world because this is something that affects everybody in our world. And the one thing I think that is hopeful is that the young children they are more aware of what's going on. And I think they are sometimes, they have to put pressure on their parents and grandparents saying we have to change our behaviors that contribute to warming of our planet. (And I think that, you know, on a national level when we have these deniers and when we have subsidies going to the fossil fuels and that we don't have enough acceleration to try to get alternative energy. And you know maybe what's happening right now, today with, you know, the hurricanes and the floods and the forest fires that people will realize that, you know, we don't have a minute to spare. It's got to be right now. And we’ve got to subsidize electric cars and all of these other kinds of alternative energies that we have to start implementing like immediately. We don't have time, you know, the clock is ticking. What’s gonna happen to our planet, you know, indigenous people. Peter here is very active in the indigenous movement, you know, you took care of Mother Earth, you know, because this is where you got your life from and we’re not doing that.

Peter Bratt: One of the most important things I think I would like to see happen is by looking at Dolores’ life and work, you can see that all of these issues are interconnected, they’re interrelated just like the biosphere it's all related. So you can’t just address racial problems or climate problems or, you know, problems that affect women or the LGBT community, they’re all interrelated. And so we need to kind of step back and see that and then form an action plan that addresses all at once. And I think you can -- Dolores for me lives at that intersection. And I think we kind of need that insight right now as where we’re at because as we could see everything is clashing in coming together. And we can’t have silo thinking or silo activism anymore. So I hope people who see this get inspired by her example and get engaged.

Greg Dalton: A lot of people don’t like to talk about this. It’s so --

Peter Bratt: I mean with the resistance to climate change right now with this current administration is how it’s gonna affect the economy, you know. They don’t wanna stop or slow growth and if you put these regulations in place to combat climate change, you know, it’s gonna tank the economy. So again it's economic that is trumping everything else.

Dolores Huerta: And materialism. When we think of all of the energy that it is to create stuff that's junk in our society and things that we don’t need, and we have to kind of remember Gandhi's quote. “You have to live simply so that others can simply live.”

Announcer: Greg Dalton has been talking with labor leader and civil rights activist Dolores Huerta, co-founder of what later became the United Farm Workers Union. And Peter Bratt, co-writer and director of Dolores, a feature documentary about the life of Dolores Huerta.

To hear all our Climate One conversations, subscribe to our podcast at our website: climateone.org, where you’ll also find photos, video clips and more.

Please join us next time for another conversation about America’s energy, economy, and environment.

[Applause]

Greg Dalton: Climate One is a special project of The Commonwealth Club of California. Jane Ann Chien is the producer. Kelli Pennington directs our audience engagement. Carlos Manuel is our booker and associate producer. The audio engineer is William Blum. Anny Celsi and Devon Strolovitch are the editors. I’m Greg Dalton the Executive Producer and Host. The Commonwealth Club CEO is Dr. Gloria Duffy.

Climate One is presented in association with KQED Public Radio.

Labor and the Climate Crisis

6 Episodes

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Extreme Heat: The Silent Killer

June 25, 2021
Last week’s heat wave across the western United States busted more records – a trend that doesn’t seem to be going away.  Despite the...

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Indigenous Perspectives: What Makes a Just Transition?

January 26, 2024
We often talk about a “just transition” from dirty to clean energy as if the term means the same thing to everyone. Indigenous people have...

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Cory Booker: Taking on Big Ag & Going Big on Climate

June 23, 2023
Our food and agricultural systems are helping fuel the climate emergency. But climate isn’t the only harm; these systems also impact local...

Visionary Guests

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Killer Heat: Confronting Disproportionate Impacts on Women and Girls

June 9, 2023
Extreme heat kills more people per year than any other climate disaster. It preys on the poor, exacerbates racial inequalities, and there is a...

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What’s in My Air?

December 2, 2022
Key to addressing the climate crisis is having an accurate picture of greenhouse gas emissions. Over a 20-year period, methane is 80 times more...

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Digging Deep into the Next Farm Bill

June 10, 2022
Roughly every five years, the U.S. designs and implements a new farm bill, which sets federal policy on agriculture across a huge swath of...

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Killer Combination: Climate, Health and Poverty

February 12, 2021
What happens when climate, public health and poverty converge?
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Podcast

Breaking Through: A Year of Climate Conversations

December 4, 2020
In this special episode we look back at the climate stories of 2020 by listening to excerpts from a year of climate conversations, beginning with...

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agriculture

Cory Booker: Taking on Big Ag & Going Big on Climate

Cory Booker: Taking on Big Ag & Going Big on Climate

Guests

Cory Booker

Digging Deep into the Next Farm Bill

Cow Poop and Compost: Digesting the Methane Menace

Reporting from COP28: The People at the Heart of It All

Rethinking Economic Growth, Wealth, and Health

The Fate of Food

This Year in Climate: 2023

Nearly 2 Years In… Is the Inflation Reduction Act Delivering Yet?

Rising Temperatures, Rising Prices: How Climate Drives Inflation

Indigenous Perspectives: What Makes a Just Transition?

Climate Smart Agriculture with Secretary Tom Vilsack

Climate Smart Agriculture with Secretary Tom Vilsack

Guests

Tom Vilsack

Anthony Myint

Jeremy Martin

Digging Deep into the Next Farm Bill

Farm to Table 2.0: Chefs Cutting Carbon

Ag and Trade

Cory Booker: Taking on Big Ag & Going Big on Climate

Libation Migration: Beer, Wine and Climate Change

The Fate of Food

Rounding up the Facts on GMOs

Bread, Wine and Chocolate in a Warming World

Cowspiracy

Digging Deep into the Next Farm Bill

Digging Deep into the Next Farm Bill

Guests

Jonathan Coppess

John W. Boyd, Jr.

Chuck Conner

Scott Faber

Cory Booker: Taking on Big Ag & Going Big on Climate

Cropped Out: Land, Race and Climate

The Fate of Food

Chasing the Harvest in the Heat

Distorted Democracy and the “Zero-Sum Game”

How Activism Can Win Bigger and Faster with Kumi Naidoo

Let’s Talk Dirty to Clean Energy

Indigenous Perspectives: What Makes a Just Transition?

Vandana Shiva and the Hubris of Manipulating Nature

Vandana Shiva and the Hubris of Manipulating Nature

Guests

Vandana Shiva

Climate One in Paris

Grazing, Grass and Gas

Rebecca Solnit on Why It’s Not Too Late

Jane Fonda: A Lifetime of Activism

Cory Booker: Taking on Big Ag & Going Big on Climate

Erin Brockovich: Superman’s Not Coming

Talk Isn’t Cheap: The Power of Conversation

How Activism Can Win Bigger and Faster with Kumi Naidoo

Extreme Heat: The Silent Killer

Extreme Heat: The Silent Killer

Guests

Kathy Baughman-McLeod

Cheryl Holder

Dennis Todey

Weather Whiplash

Weather Whiplash

Chasing the Harvest in the Heat

Killer Heat: Confronting Disproportionate Impacts on Women and Girls

The Hidden Health Hazards of Climate Change

C1 Revue: Surviving a Megadrought

After El Niño Now What?

This Year in Climate: 2023

2021: This Year in Climate

Cory Booker: Taking on Big Ag & Going Big on Climate

Cropped Out: Land, Race and Climate

Cropped Out: Land, Race and Climate

Guests

Andrew Kahrl

Chris Newman

Amber Tamm

Climate Justice

Climate Justice