Down to Earth: The Planet to Plate Podcast

We all know the term carbon "footprint." Well, Foodprint takes this idea and broadens it to apply to our food system; they explore how the foods we eat affect not only carbon emissions, but a whole range of things, like livestock and wildlife, soils and water, communities and human health. Foodprint is a project of the GRACE Communications Foundation, and in today's episode we talk to its director Jerusha Klemperer, who is also producer and host of their podcast, "What You're Eating," and Urvashi Rangan, Chief Resident Scientist at GRACE and co-chair of Funders for Regenerative Agriculture.

Ryland Engelhart came from a family of vegans and vegetarians and knew early on that he wanted to devote his life to the health of the planet. Once he began to see that there is no food –– no life at all –– without the death of animals, he revised his perspective and at 35 ate his first hamburger. (It went well.) This perspective grew into a deeper understanding of the role of soil as the source of all life, and as the best answer to the question of how to reverse climate change, and he started the non-profit Kiss the Ground and set out to make a film by the same name. Seven years later, the film broke all records for movies about soil; seen by over six million people and translated into 26 languages, it has helped catalyze the regenerative agriculture movement.

Most of the American Midwest was once a vast savanna, an open grassland with abundant trees and wildlife. As the land was converted to agriculture many of the trees were lost, and with them went countless benefits to the landscape, to air and water, soil health, and wildlife. The practice of agroforestry allows farmers to return those benefits to their land –– and provides profit opportunities and increased carbon sequestration. We talk to Keefe Keeley, executive director of the Savanna Institute about how farmers can get started using trees to their advantage.

In New Mexico and across the West wildfires are burning through wildlands, farms, ranches, and communities. Lesli Allison, executive director of the Western Landowners Alliance, has many years of experience in prescribed burn management—and like many New Mexcians she's directly affected by the fires. She helps us to understand how we got to  the volatile situation we're in, where "controlled" fires so easily go out of control, and the critical importance of prioritizing good land management if we want to keep our ecosystems and our communities safe and in balance.  

Aria McLauchlan and Harley Cross, co-founders of Land Core, have been working for years on food and farming policy that promotes regenerative practices. In this podcast we talk about the Farm Bill––a trillion dollar piece of legislation which most people know little about, but which deeply affects all of our lives. It plays a huge role in how farming is done––and could help to make a shift toward regenerative practices and the many benefits that flow from them.  

Jessica Chiartas is a PhD soil bio-geochemist who's working to catalyze the transition from "conventional" to regenerative agriculture. She’s a postdoctoral researcher at the Innovation Institute for Food and Health at UC Davis and fellow with Food Shot Global, and is UC Davis partner for the California Farm Demonstration Network. She’s lead Soil Scientist at Kiss the Ground, and the founder of Soil Life Services and a new project called Soil Life. On this podcast we talk about her work with Regen1, a California-based organization whose goal is to "transition one million acres in northern California to regenerative by 2025 and build an adaptive framework that scales worldwide." Jessica explains the complexity and challenges of doing this work.

Amanita Thorp Berto is owner of Horned Locust Remediation, and she uses a flock of goats and sheep to do landscaping projects. In gardens, parks, photovoltaic installations, and many other places, goats take the place of toxic herbicides and pesticides and of course machines like lawnmowers. They love to eat plants that cause allergies in people––even poison ivy––and they easily go to places machines can't reach. And in the process, they leave the land more fertile and resilient, as they mimic the natural processes of animal/land interaction.

In the late 1990s, members of Santa Ana Pueblo embarked on a long-term project to restore their land, which had been damaged over the last century by multiple forces, including overgrazing, hunting, logging, and habitat fragmentation. Glenn Tenorio is former governor of Santa Ana Pueblo; he currently works with the pueblos’s Department of Natural Resources as a water resources specialist, and he’s also a farmer. He talks about the decisions the pueblo made to bring in outsiders like conservation scientist Dan Ginter, who for over a decade has been the range program manager. They talk about the goals and methods of the program––especially finding not only balance but synergy between wild land and agriculture––and the deep satisfaction in seeing the revival of pronghorn antelope, mountain lions, wild turkeys, deer, and elk populations, as well as native landscapes and watersheds.

Karl Thidemann is co-founder of Soil4Climate, a non-profit that advocates for regenerative agriculture, with a focus on grazing and the restoration of grasslands. In this podcast he makes the case, supported by extensive scientific research, that the restoration of grasslands can provide a multi win-win––for the climate, biodiversity, soil health, good nutrition, farmer profitability, the water cycle, rural communities, anti-desertification, and maintaining traditional agrarian practices worldwide. He also challenges vegan narratives about food and climate, and, with a poem and a song, reminds us that the arts are an important part of the change toward a greener, healthier world.

Zach Weiss has seen land so degraded that even weeds couldn't grow...and helped transform it into healthy, living landscapes by changing the flow of water and letting nature do most of the work. Protégé of Austrian farmer Sepp Holzer, he works all over the world helping agrarians to restore natural flows on their land, increasing water for crops and livestock, but also for wildlife and downstream water users. The implications for agriculture, wildlife, and climate are huge.