Down to Earth: The Planet to Plate Podcast

The title of Pamela Tanner Boll's new film, To Which We Belong, comes from a quotation by the author Aldo Leopold, early 20th conservationist and environmentalist whose work has inspired generations of ecologists, agrarians, and nature lovers. Leopold wrote, "We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect."In the film Boll features nine agricultural projects in the US and abroad that are using regenerative techniques to restore soil, water, wildlife, families, and communities––and to bring about a paradigm shift from an extractive/industrial mindset to a more nature-based approach.   

Eva Stricker is director of the Carbon Ranch Initiative for the Quivira coalition and a Research Assistant Professor at the University of New Mexico Department of Biology. One of her projects is the scientific study of compost––with the goals of helping farmers and ranchers heal and improve their land, increase their profitability, and sequester carbon. Emily Cornell, owner/manager of Sol Ranch, a cow-calf and grassfed beef operation in northeastern New Mexico, is a participant in the program, and talks about how targeted applications of compost can help larger landscapes. And Zach Withers, co-owner and operator at Polk's Folly Farm near Albuquerque is the compost-maker; he shares his experience of restoring a highly degraded piece of land, using hogs, food waste, and wood mulch. Together they're developing a greater understanding of how compost can be used most efficiently and effectively.

Matt Draper and Minor Morgan started North Valley Organics on two plots of land in Albuquerque, and have made a commitment to the People-Planet-Profit model for their business. Working with diversity and resilience as core principles, they want farm work to be something that not only produces healthy, nutrient-dense food, but also provides a long term sustainable and joyful living for the people doing it—and the communities around them.

About a decade ago Tijinder and Juliana Ciano took over Reunity Resources' land from a centenarian veteran, and they've continued to honor his mission of feeding the community. Their work includes vegetable farming and a farm stand and food truck, soil and compost programs, the founding of a biodiesel program, educational programs, food donations, and community organizing. They're part of the Quivira Coalition's Carbon Ranch Initiative and have been working together on developing a model for rural communities in New Mexico to create compost systems to reduce landfill waste and to produce high qu Reunity Resources,compost,food waste,community agriculture,vegetable farming,regenerative agriculture,Ten Who Made A Difference, ality soil amendments for agriculture.  This week Juliana and Tijinder were honored with an award from the Santa Fe New Mexican as one of the "Ten Who Made a Difference."

In today's podcast we look at the synergistic collaboration between a soil scientist and a pecan farmer. Southern New Mexico is not an ideal landscape for pecans, which grow best in warm, wet climates. But the industry is here, and Josh Bowman has determined to grow a healthy and abundant crop by focusing on the soil. Using cover crops and grazing animals, he's been able to increase the life and organic matter in the soil, and to produce a greater yield and a higher quality nut—while using less water. David Johnson was a contractor who at mid-life decided to change careers and became a microbiologist, specializing in the soil microbiome. He collaborates with farmers like Bowman to increase the quality—and quantity—of the soil with an eye not only to improved health and profits for the farmer, but also to climate change mitigation as carbon is sequestered in ever-healthier soils. Johnson and his wife Hui-Chun Su developed the Johnson-Su bioreactor, a composting system that yields a potent, microbe-rich compost that is a soil-friendly and cost-effective alternative to synthetic fertilizers.

Renard Turner and his wife Chinette founded the Vanguard Ranch Natural Gourmet in Gordonsville, Virginia, 25 years ago, and through creative entrepreneurship and wise land management and animal husbandry practices have built a value-added business model that works on a relatively small scale. Their ideas about sustainability and regeneration on a global scale inform their daily practices. And they are also encouraging African American people of the next generation to think about leaving the big cities and buy land for farming and homesteading.

Latashia Redhouse is director of the American Indian Foods program at the Intertribal Agriculture Council, where she supports food producers across the country to get their food to consumers in the US and beyond—while encouraging traditional and regenerative agriculture practices.

William deBuys is a prolific author of books documenting people's relationship to the earth—which is too often destructive. In his new book, The Trail to Kanjiroba: Rediscovering Earth in an Age of Loss, he writes of an expedition to Nepal that he made with a group of doctors and other medical professionals, led by American Zen Buddhist Roshi Joan Halifax, and reflects on what it means to care for an ailing earth as doctors care for patients. 

James Rebanks is the author of the newly-released book Pastoral Song: A Farmer’s Journey, which recently won the 2021 Wainwright prize for UK Nature writing, and best-seller The Shepherd's Life: Modern Dispatches from an Ancient Landscape. His books explore the experience of being a farmer from a millennia-old farming tradition that was almost lost to "improvement." Wonderfully written and highly readable, these accounts of his life in the Lake District of Cumbria, England, give us a lived sense of the promise of industrialism, the genuine short-term gains, the nuances of what went wrong and why...and the reality that there are no clear heroes and villains, but rather it's a truly complex system that has to be managed for land and human health if we want to survive.

Sandra Postel has devoted her life to studying the world's freshwater systems, and they're not looking so great right now. Through a combination of over-allocation, over-engineering, over-use, and climate change, we'll be in trouble if we don't address the problem soon—in fact, we're in trouble now. But the solutions are there, and already in place on a small scale, and they involve working with nature rather than against it to restore the natural flows and stay in balance.