Down to Earth: The Planet to Plate Podcast

  Traditional pastoral cultures have been living in harmony with animals and land for millennia––and they persist to this day, though with serious challenges. Ilse Köhler-Rollefson's new book, Hoofprints on the Land: How Traditional Herding and Grazing Can Restore the Soil and Bring Animal Agriculture Back in Balance with the Earth, shines a light on what they can teach us.

Hydroponic agriculture systems use water––not soil––to grow crops, and yet they use water with exceptional efficiency and can produce abundantly all year round. When coupled with fish farming, the result is a nearly closed-loop system––aquaponics––in which the plants filter the water for the fish, and the fish provide fertilizer for the plants.  

Many federal, state, and local agencies, as well as non-profits and community groups, carry the responsibility of helping people and fixing infrastructure after a disaster, and some of them also work to try to prevent or mitigate disasters before they happen. But how to they coordinate with each other, and how do they really meet the needs on the ground...and what are the sticky points?

Industrial agriculture imposes a simplified production model onto complex ecosystems––with dire consequences. In the new book, The Great Regeneration: Ecological Agriculture, Open-Source Technology, and a Radical Vision of Hope, co-authors Dorn Cox and Courtney White explore the place where complex technologies and complex ecosystems meet. With today's digital networks, sensors, and computational power, agrarians and land managers can now engage with a far larger community than ever before, and improve their productive capacity and the health of land, water, and wildlife––allowing agrarians to grow food both more ecologically and more profitably. 

After being driven almost to extinction, wolves are back in some of their natural habitat. A new podcast, Working Wild University, explores how ranchers, conservationists, and others are coming together to find paths toward peaceful co-habitation. We talk to podcast co-host, Jared Beaver, about the presence of wolves on Western landscapes, and explore the economics of ranching, the importance of working lands for wildlife, the conflicts of values at the working land/wild land interface, and much more.

The price of land keeps going up across the country as wealthy investors buy farmland and people move out of cities. This puts untenable pressure on farmers and land stewards who are producing healthy food and maintaining biodiversity,  land health, and water cycles. But what can be done against the seemingly intractable laws of supply and demand? Neil Thapar, co-director of Minnow,and Mariela Cedeño, partner at Manzanita Capital, are working to de-commodify land, and they're using a lot of different tools to do it––so that land ends up owned and managed by Native American tribes and people of color. They're also educating investors who want to contribute to a healthy food/land system not to expect high returns on their investment, but rather to use their wealth to shift land and power back to its original inhabitants and to food producers practicing good land stewardship.

Liz Carlisle's new book, Healing Grounds: Climate, Justice, and the Deep Roots of Regenerative Farming, is a fascinating exploration of food, agriculture, and cultural traditions of the North American, Mesoamerican, African, and Asian diasporas that have survived against all odds in the United States. Despite brutal social and political oppression, these communities have preserved soil-friendly polyculture techniques and cultural practices, like reciprocity and community participation, which point toward more sustainable and regenerative ways of producing food and of living with one another.  

TomKat Ranch manager Mark Biaggi talks about dealing with winter floods, summer droughts, and degraded landscapes––and the process of continual experimentation that leads to dramatic regeneration of damaged land.

66 million years ago an asteroid struck earth, causing the fifth mass extinction of species on earth. With the dinosaurs gone, new species proliferated all over the planet. Now we're in the sixth extinction––this time caused by people. But when did it start? And what happened on on this continent in particular? Dan Flores' new book, Wild New World: The Epic Story of Animals & People in America, explores the deep history of the North American continent, which was once populated by giant bison and mammoths, massive eagles and condors, ground sloths and dire wolves––all of whom were here when human beings first arrived tens of thousands of years ago––and how people affected their environment and its animals, from the first migrating bands to the wildly destructive European colonizers.

Brando Crespi has devoted decades to sustainable development as co-founder and Executive Chair at Pro Natura International and Global Biochar. His holistic approach to sustainable development could be called regenerative––instead of telling poor and exploited people what they should do, it's about recognizing and cultivating local leadership, helping them form a community vision for their future, providing the assistance necessary to achieve that vision, and then getting out of the way. Along the way, Crespi and his colleagues came across biochar, a substance made from burning bio waste (like sawdust and crop husks) and that has been used in the Amazon for millennia. As a soil amendment, biochar can bring dead soil back to life, improve crop yields, and decrease water use. It can also be used in industrial products and plastics. And its production can provide an energy source in communities looking to develop clean energy and regenerative agriculture.