What Doesn't Kill You

Schweid & Sons has focused on making great ground beef, and finding the best possible sources for it. As a result, their sales are up by about 12%, while sales of conventional ground beef have only risen by 2%. Why that is and how consumers are voting with their forks is the subject of this conversation.

Land Grabbing is a strategy being deployed by many countries to boost their food production, grow crops for manufacturing purposes, or just to hold for investment. Anuradha Mittal explains how this predatory behavior plays out for indigenous populations, their ability to grow food, and the environmental impacts of the practice on its unwitting victims.

Jeff Tripician, general manager of Niman Ranch, gives a tour of their new line of charcuterie, a natural extension of the Niman commitment to sustainable farming. Along with the new line, Niman is working hard to bring new farmers along for next generation farming with programs that help new farmers get financial and legal assistance as well as mentoring and a new series of how-to videos!

Executive Director of the National Young Farmers Coalition, Lindsay Lusher Shute explains the impact on young and beginning farmers should the Trump budget prevail. The barriers to entry in farming are formidable, and discretionary spending from the USDA helps fund a multitude of programs that encourage and assist people who are looking to get into farming. Losing that money could mean a lot of younger farms wither on the vine. This has major implications for the future of our food supply as our older farmers literally die off. Advancing the cause of young farmers is an imperative in a profession where the average age is over fifty. We could easily lose some of our most vital intellectual capital if we fail to invest in young farmers as they carry on the work of the previous generations.

Join Scott Nichols, founder of Food's Future and an expert in aquaculture as he explains the new technologies that will make aquaculture a more environmentally friendly, cost effective source of protein for the future population.

This week on What Doesn't Kill You, host Katy Keiffer is joined by Will Carey and Lesha Pierson, volunteers for the 2017 Panhandle Fire Relief organization. On March 6, wildfires swept through an estimated 1.5 million acres in Texas, Kansas, Oklahoma and Colorado. Thousands of cattle were lost, and homes were destroyed, yet this story remains largely underreported in the mainstream news media.

On this week's What Doesn't Kill You, host Katy Keiffer is joined by Joe Fassler and Sally Lee. Joe Fassler is Senior Editor for New Food Economy, where he covers the politics, economics, and culture of the changing food system His food reporting for TheAtlantic.com has been a finalist for the James Beard Foundation Award in Journalism. Sally Lee works directly with poultry farmers and manages Rural Advancement Foundation International’s Contract Ag Reform program. She has a background in social justice, including working at RAFI previously for four years with the Agricultural Justice Project, a social justice certification program for farms and businesses. She also worked as the Social Justice Consultant for Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) in contributing to the development of the Sustainability Assessments for Food and Agriculture Systems (SAFA) indicators, which are used globally as a framework for policy development and business assessment.

This week on What Doesn't Kill You, host Katy Keiffer is joined by Bill Stowe, CEO of Des Moines Water Works, to discuss an Iowa Supreme Court ruling that the utility cannot win damage payments from drainage districts accused of sending fertilizers and other pollution unchecked into the Raccoon River. The utility hoped to recover damages in its lawsuit to make up for the costs of running its nitrate removal facility. But the court upheld nearly a century of precedent that drainage districts are immune to lawsuits.

This week on What Doesn't Kill You, Tom Philpott joins us to talk about the new regime for our agricultural sector: no more earthy crunchy stuff like supporting Know your Farmer, Know your Food. Who is Sonny Perdue and what can the AG sector and the food movement expect from his office in the coming four years? Hint: bye bye to any regs around food safety, pollution, consolidation etc. Whoopee!

This week on What Doesn't Kill You, host Katy Keiffer is joined by Mike Callicrate, a native of Evergreen, Colorado, who has spent his career as a farmer-rancher, business entrepreneur, and family farm advocate. Frustrated by the monopoly control corporations were exerting over the markets and the “bigger is better” mentality common to agriculture, he began to forge a new path, forming a pasture-to-plate marketing company in 2000 named Ranch Foods Direct. He chose to locate his processing and retail facility in Colorado Springs, where it has become an integral part of the community’s shift toward healthier, fresher, more locally grown food. In recent years, he instigated an ongoing campaign to establish a public market and a food hub to benefit local food growers and processors and to help relocalize the food system. He also pioneered the capacity to do on-farm USDA-inspected slaughter at his ranch, where he is also developing a multi-species regenerative agricultural production model. Considered the “go-to expert” on the negative consequences of highly concentrated, industrial meat production, he has served as an advisor for the films Food Inc. and FRESH, and for several best-selling books including Fast Food Nation and The Omnivore’s Dilemma.