Advocacy and Empowerment in the Farming Community

As we see a rise in the hyperlocal movement, urban farming, school gardening programs, and farm to table restaurants it’s clear there are some really exciting solutions in the works for a cleaner, healthier, more sustainable food system. We just need to embrace them and keep the innovations coming. When it comes to innovative ideas that support a more sustainable, nutritious, and beneficial food system, there’s no better person to talk to than Kimbal Musk. I was thrilled to sit down with him for this week’s episode of The Doctor’s Farmacy to dig into our changing landscape of food and how he’s managed to scale sustainable eating and education as part of his model. 

Kimbal is a chef, restaurateur, and philanthropist. His personal mission is to pursue an America where everyone has access to real food. He’s been named a Global Social Entrepreneur by the World Economic Forum and is the co-founder and Executive Chairman of three businesses—The Kitchen Restaurant Group, Big Green, and Square Roots—with real food missions that are rapidly growing across the US. The Kitchen Restaurant Group sources sustainably grown food from American farmers, stimulating the local farm economy to the tune of millions of dollars a year. Kimbal’s nonprofit organization, Big Green, builds permanent, outdoor Learning Garden classrooms in hundreds of underserved schools across America reaching over 350,000 students every day. His tech-enabled food company, Square Roots, builds urban farms in climate-controlled shipping containers with the mission to bring real food to people in cities around the world by empowering next-gen farmers. 

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Here are more of the details from our interview: 

-The development of Kimbal’s love of cooking (4:27)

-Kimbal’s decision to leave Silicon Valley, move to New York and go to cooking school, and his experience cooking for firefighters after September 11th (10:27)

-Community restaurants and Kimbal’s move to Boulder, CO to open The Kitchen restaurant (15:53)

-Scaling the industrial food system to provide local produce to more areas (19:36)

-America’s aging farmer population, the average income of farmers, and why it’s so difficult to bring innovation into farming (21:27)

-How the ethanol mandate is keeping young farmers from gaining access to land, and how this lead Kimbal to start Square Roots urban farming company (25:45)

-Ecosystem services and the challenges that farmers face in efforts to break away from the monocrop system  (39:47)

-Kimbal’s experience breaking his spine and how it led him to dedicate his life to scale bringing learning gardens to schools through his organization Big Green (47:16)

-National Young Farmers Coalition and its efforts to get young people into farming  (56:57)

-Scaling regenerative farming (1:01:50)

Learn more about Kimbal at kimbalmusk.com and follow him on Facebook @kimbalmuskofficial, on Instagram @kimbalmusk, and on Twitter @kimbal.