Hope Is A Verb - The Future of Farming: Healthy Soil, AI and Food Security

Episode Date: August 5, 2026

The story of farming has always been one of adaptation. The next chapter may be its most one important yet.In this special episode of Fix The News, we bring together two conversations exploring one of the defining questions of our time: how do we feed a growing world without destroying the planet that we depend on?Meet Professor Rattan Lal, one of the world's leading soil scientists and a World Food Prize laureate, whose life's work has transformed our understanding of the living world beneath our feet. Then meet Alesha Miller, Chief Strategy Officer at Digital Green, who's helping smallholder farmers across Africa and Asia combine generations of local knowledge with artificial intelligence to build more resilient food systems.Together, they help us unpack that that the future of agriculture isn't about choosing between nature and technology, tradition and innovation, or human and artificial intelligence. It's about strengthening both.  In this episode:Why healthy soil is the foundation of healthy food systemsHow our lifestyle choices today will help shape the futureThe importance of the world's 500 million smallholder farmersHow AI can amplify rather than replace human knowledgeWhy trust matters as much as technologyWhy the future of farming may depend on combining old wisdom with new ideasTimestamps:00:13 The most common occupation on earth03:45 Meet Professor Rattan Lal04:54 Why soil is a living entity08:37 What does Regenerative Agriculture actually mean?12:05 The Law of Return20:53 Midpoint Reflections22:47 Meet Alesha Miller25:47 What is Digital Green?30:14 Can weather predictions save AI?37:21 Technology and Trust43:04 Closing Reflections: Choose BothDig Deeper:👉Professor Rattan Lal 👉 Digital GreenAbout Fix The News:Fix The News is a solutions-focused media platform sharing stories from the frontlines of progress - exploring what’s working in the world and the people making it happen.Subscribe & follow:If you enjoyed this episode, follow the podcast and leave a review - it helps more people find these stories.Production credits:Hosted by Angus Hervey and Amy Davoren-RoseProduced by Fix The NewsAudio production: Anthony Badolato, Hear That! This episode was produced in Australia on the lands of the Gadigal, Wurundjeri and Woi Wurrung peoples.

Welcome to Fix the News. I'm Amy. I'm Gus, and these are stories from the front lines of progress. Okay, Amy, pop quiz. Oh, no. What is the most common occupation on Earth? The job that more people have by far than any other job on Earth. Okay, I feel like I'm cheating because I know where this episode is going, so I'm going to say farmer.

It is farmer. Or more broadly, agricultural worker. And I think that is a very interesting thing to remember in a time and in a world where everyone is saying, our AI is going to take all the jobs that actually there is a huge segment of jobs that is nowhere close to being automated. And those jobs are the jobs of smallholder farmers in particular. People who farm a small plot of land often either at a subsistence level or with a little bit extra, a little bit of surplus to feed their neighbouring region or they take it down to the market. And I think what is amazing is that there are about half a billion people on planet Earth,

100 million people who fall into this category. The reason that I think a lot of us don't understand this is that in high-income countries, only 3% of people are employed as agricultural workers. But in low to middle-income countries, that is up to 25, 30, sometimes 40 or 50%. And so if you look at the world as a whole, around a quarter of the world is employed as agriculture, workers, but in high-income countries it's only 3%. And so we get this real mismatch where we think that everyone has a job that looks like us. But actually, the majority of people in the world work with the land, they're on the land,

they're making food, they're growing food. And that means that how we produce food and make food in a way that creates both abundance for people but also is done in a way that is sustainable and that doesn't destroy the earth, turns out to be one of the most important questions that exists. So I think that today's episode is a really interesting way to look at that question, to say, how do we answer it? Do we go back in time? Do we go forward in time? What are the different ways we can look at it?

And the answer to that is hashtag choose both, which is why we're bringing together two different conversations that explore the future of farming from these two very, different perspectives. We've got Professor Ratan Lau, who is one of the world's leading soil scientists. He's a World Food Prize laureate. He has spent more than six decades helping people understand the extraordinary world beneath our feet. And the second is Alicia Miller. So she's the chief strategy officer at Digital Green. And this is an organization that's helping farmers across Africa and Asia combine all that local knowledge with AI. This is such a big

episode and it's really interesting to me because I think that when we think about the future of food, the first thing we jump to are the really big global challenges. So we've got climate change, we've got population growth, we've got water shortages. Yes. But today's conversation begins something much simpler and that is with a handful of soil. I grew up in a very small farm. Even now, there are 550 million farmers in the world which cultivate less than 10 acres, less than 4 hectare.

So that's the majority. And I grew up in one of those farms. Everything that people do, their life depends on little piece of land they work on. Everything. If they have a drought, drought, it's going to have a very serious consequences. To them, soil was really a mother who got angry and punishing the children because they

did something wrong. There was a strong connection between human and nature, especially soil. If you look at the all religion, whether it's Christianity or Judaism, Hinduism, this concept of interconnectivity is there. We just lost it. Most of us walk across the ground each day without giving it a second thought. What are we all missing?

We have been taking soil as a kind of a medium of plant growth and an inert mixture of sand, sirt and clay or organic matter. But we now think that soil is a living entity. It's an organism. Wow. There was a woman from England, her name was Eva Balfour.

And she wrote a book called Living Soil, that was in 1920. And at the same time, I do not know whether they were connected or related or not. The chairman, president of the India National Science Academy was Sir Albert Howard. And his presidential address to the Indian National Congress was One Health. One Health, health of soil, plants, animal, and people is interconnected. And that came from his observations working with farmers in Central India that when the farmers are poor, their crops are poor, their soil health was poor and they were not very healthy. And these days, One Health concept has emerged as one of the very, very important part

that we should be planning and thinking. What you're saying here, it really does require a dramatic perception shift. Is this something that you believe and you've obviously shifted your perception about? Of course, I believe in it. There's no question about that. I believe in it. I support it. I advocate it.

And it's based on a concept called the Gaia hypothesis. Yeah. G-A-I-A. The word Gaia is a Greek word for Mother Earth. So Earth has a blood system similar to rivers, which carry away the waste. It breathes just like we do, oxygen, and it respires carbon dioxide. Earth is one large living organism. If that is the case, which I think it is, then like any other living organism,

even like monarch butterfly or panda or bald eagle or whatever you call earth soil should also have rights rights to be protected rights to be used judiciously rights to flourish and rights to be treated with respect and dignity so if that's the case then soil itself cannot gain rights unless that is something that humans decide that they want to do.

There's more about the relationship, I guess, between people and soil, because ultimately this is what we are talking about here. Contrary to what generally is believe that we have lost connection, respect for soil, there are people farmers, especially the farming community, who really take soil seriously. They are not obsessed with the yield.

They are obsessed with optimum production while also restoring soil health. There are many of the world. Another example where soil mistreatment has created a lot of problems of contamination, of pollution, greenhouse gas emission. 30% of all human-related emissions are due to food systems. So humans have played a role that we dominate nature. And there is nothing wrong with it, but we should live in harmony with nature.

that would be a win-win for nature as well as humanity. Obviously, the corollary to this or the polar opposite of the approach that you just described there is regenerative agriculture, which has become a huge buzzword in recent years. I mean, no one was speaking about this 10 or 15 years ago and now it just seems to be everywhere. What is the difference between regenerative agriculture as a buzzword and regenerative agriculture as it actually should be practiced? You know, we go through this buzzword. In 70s, when I was working in Africa, it was sustainable agriculture.

Then came no tail farming, reduced tail farming, mulch farming, conservation agriculture, and now regenerative agriculture. Now, what is regenerative agriculture if you ask somebody? It's an agriculture which produces food required, but at the same time restore the soil quality. But the key philosophy is to produce food while not degrading the soil, not degrading, polluting the water, and not destroying the wildlife habitat. And the only way to really regenerative agriculture can help is if we, the human, can return some land back to nature. We have 5.2 billion hectare of land under agriculture. That's 40% of all land.

We are only one of several hundred million other species on the earth. That 5.2 billion hectare of land should be no more than 2 billion hectare of land. And return remaining 3 billion back to nature. It will mitigate climate change, it will improve water quality. This is where it can only have. If we change our lifestyle and we say we are going to respect nature, even though the population doesn't come down until probably end of this century, but our lifestyle changes. Having meat, yes, very good idea. Fish, chicken more than red meat. Okay, no, red meat, yes, possible.

But have more plant-based diet. If we did all those changes and we did not have wasted, we could return half of the land back to nature. Wow. Wow. And that will be harmony with nature. And we say, Mother Nature, sorry, we took too much away from you. We are giving you back what it belonged to you. That is the attitude we really have to have.

That is the most compelling argument I have ever heard for changing lifestyle, for eating a little less meat, making a bit more plant-based. Thank you so much for that. That is the planet healthy diet. I love that. As well as human healthy diet. I really love that. A planet healthy diet.

This subject should be taught in medical colleges. And I've been recommending that at Ohio State, soil scientists, veterinarian, plant pathologists, medical scientists, get together and teach classes jointly on human health, not just on aspirin and penicillin and all other antibiotics. how to maintain human health by proper diet using food as a medicine. And good food will come from healthy soil. So when you look at around the world, are there any countries or communities that are really

getting this right? There are some. They have adopted a complete regenerative agriculture. Sri Lanka also adopted it. But they were simply banning chemical fertilizers and pesticides completely. But what they forgot was a very basic concept, and that basic concept is law of return. And the law of return says anything you take from nature,

you must put it back in one farm or the other to the same place. If you take nitrogen, fossil, potassium, from the soil, and do not replace it by any means neither chemical fertilizer nor maniore, then land will rebel. Land did not get what it gave you. That the law of return. And that is failed.

So we have to make sure that people who adopt so-called regional native agriculture must follow the law of return and must follow the principle of agroecology. principle of agroecology are four number one everything is connected to everything else number two

mother nature knows no mercy you make one mistake mother nature will be very angry number three there is no way to throw away when you say throw it away throw it away where you can't recycle it

And number four, there is no such thing as a free lunch. Everything at a price. So when you say, I am going to not add anything, nature agriculture, think again, return what you take. But the major problem is still obsession with high yield. How about giving attention to not only just calories, but the nutritional quality of the food. Micronutrients, rise money at 3 billion children under five

nursing mothers in developing countries, elderly people, suffering from micronutrient and protein deficiency. Why? Swans are poor. When swans are degraded, the quality of the food is degraded and adding more nitrosin or urea, ammonia, sulfate and are not going to help that. So our focus should be on more on quality, nutritional quality, protein content, vitamin, micronutrient content, fiber content in the food, and pay even the price to farmers

how they grew it and whether the nutrition quality is optimal. Professor Lel, when you teach young people, young farmers, young agriculture engineers, soil scientists, when you describe these principles to them, and you share these approaches with them, what is their reaction? What is the gap between, you know, youthful idealism and then the realities of what it's actually like when you get out there?

As we are speaking, we have a visiting family from Argentina. They're visiting forums and my experiment. And I asked them, why did you want to see me? So, well, you have been reading about this concept, and he said, I am following what you are suggesting. So then I asked him, what are you doing?

You said, no plowing. We are not plowing. Said we are leaving the crop residue. We are growing good forages and cover crops. I said, well, that's very nice. How much fertilizer do you use? He said, 300 kilograms per hectare. That is when I told him you killed it, the whole thing.

Because average in the world is 130. Average in the United States is 100. So he was telling I have 4,000 cows. How much fertilizer should I put? I said, how much do you harvest? He said, each cow has 500 pounds of beef. Well, find out on 500 pounds of beef. How much nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, calcium, magnesium.

Did you remove from the land? Put that back one way or the other. I don't care how you put it. I would better see it recycled organically, that some chemical judicious use as a supplement is acceptable. So I'm not hung up on organic. I think integrated everything together is a good option. You have spent your life researching soil,

advocating for healthy soil, changing the mindset of how we look at it. What has soil taught you about the world? That's a very good question. has taught me be patient. Things change in soil very slowly. When you want to begin restoring soil, it happens on a generational scale.

So don't give up. Eventually, soil will recover. But I think that's one part. The second part, soil says, forgive them. Like Gandhi said, please God, they are ignorant. and forgive them. I think the same thing. Soil is telling us,

some of those who are poisoning me, they will learn their lesson. And the other thing is that if we live in harmony with soil and nature, that is the best way to reach peace in the world. I've been writing and talking about soil for peace. Probably to people who are sending troops everywhere doesn't make any sense.

When people are fighting on, land, there are three parties, not two. Two parties are the people fighting with one another. And third part of the land far which are on which they fight. And the biggest sufferer and loser is that third party that nobody cares of. Let's say people really start taking this on board. These practices start getting adopted across wide swathes of India and China and Southeast Asia. We start seeing an implemented increasingly across Africa.

and elsewhere down in South America. What happens? What does the world look like in 2050 if these things happen? I think the ultimate solution is education and lower population. If we come down to $4 billion, let's say in the middle of $21.50

or something around that, it will be planet-healthy population also. That's the future I would like to see. Planet Healthy Diet and Planet Healthy population. The most recent things are coming up, AI, digital agriculture, remote sensing of monitoring soil properties rather than going out of the field and digging pits. I think some of those things are very useful. But one thing I should caution that people think artificial intelligence can replace human intelligence? I don't think so.

Our human brain observation of soil and nature under real world condition is very critical to validate what the AI will tell us. I would like to see optimism in the discussion. I'd like to see that things will change. For younger generation, there's a bright future ahead. But we must be friendly with nature. We must consider nature something to worship, something to work with, something to research. restore, rejuvenate. When we try to be greedy, try to produce more, have obsession with a higher yield or higher output all the time, eventually Earth cannot keep on doing that every

year after year after year. So proper management is very critical. I think that that's really what I'd like to see. And it's happening. It's happening. Slowly, but definitely happening. respect nature, respect water. Everything will be all right. Easy. Easy. That's easy. So I love here that he finishes, not with soil,

but with what we're actually talking about here, which is with people. The conversation we are having around soil and the conversation we are having around food more generally is a conversation that we specifically as human beings are really concerned with and really care about. And as a little side note, I also love that Professor Lau is often referred to as the Gandhi of Soil. So, you know, he has this ability to humanize something.

And it just reminded me that so often when we're having these big conversations, we forget about the most important starting point that we all take for granted. And I feel like our next guest picks up on this thread, but in a really different way. So as we set up the top of the episode, we're chatting with Alicia Miller. She is the chief strategy officer at Digital Green. They're an organization that's using artificial intelligence to help smallholder farmers across Africa and Asia

access a lot of this agricultural knowledge. Because the big question is, how do you make it accessible for the people who need it most? How do you get it to those millions and millions of smallholder of farmers in rural and remote areas whose livelihoods literally depend on it. I think this was a really interesting take on AI and is something that I think, if you are one of those people that has a bit of an aversion to artificial intelligence, or you hear those words and you think, oh, it gives you a strange feeling, take a listen because maybe

after this conversation you might have a slightly different feeling about it. I spent a lot of time specifically thinking about how rural families can get access to knowledge. And when you think about the world's farmers, there's somewhere between 500 and 600 million farmers in the world. Most of those are small holder farmers. And if you extrapolate that with the average household number, you're looking at 2 billion people that are living in these rural areas who are not accessing the information that they need or want. And when you think about the upside of them getting the information that they need or want at the right moment, it's a pretty transformative proposition. You know, if I have a farm where that is the majority of my income or even half of my income and I face even one or two pests and diseases a year that I don't know what they are, don't know how to deal with them, getting the right information at the right time changes the entirety of my year. And so I think that's a phenomenal and specific problem that people have been.

frankly trying to solve in the space of agriculture for 150 years that we can look at. But we haven't had something that offered a step change in how to fix that in the last 50 to 70. And so now we're in a moment where we can maybe change this. So Holden just paint me a picture here of what life is like. I know you can't paint broad breaststrokes because everyone's different and context is different in every country. But why can't they just kind of, can't you just Google like what I should be doing this week? Why is it so difficult?

Most of the people I do know who happen to have a smartphone do Google, or they do go to YouTube, or they're a member of multiple Facebook farmer groups. So that is an option, which I think probably we could say has offered some benefits. But even in the last couple weeks, I've actually been trying to update my own knowledge of, is it good enough? If you're just in a farmer organization group on WhatsApp or you're on a Facebook group that speaks your own language, is that actually good enough to address the problem I just told you a second ago.

There was a study that showed that it did have a small income boost, which would make sense to me because you're at least in a group of savvy farmers looking for information and willing to share information, right? But then there was another study I read that was looking at a farm organization chat group in Malawi. And it was looking at information that was circulating in the group about poultry and about care for your chickens. And what it found was that there was a lot of knowledge that no one in the group had, which

meant that you were asking questions and they were circulating ideas and advice, but it actually wasn't the right information. And so what you need is locally relevant, delivered in your own language in a way that you can consume, and that means voice, video in cases where you're semi-literate or you're not so confident typing. And it needs to be actionable. And Google can be a really powerful thing, but it's not going to be those things all the time. And so yeah, so I think probably a lot of good has been done by just getting more access to the internet, but not enough still. Alicia, I would love to chat about Digital Green because, as you've just outlined, there are barriers that a lot of small farmers are facing in terms of accessing the information and they

don't know what they don't know. How is Digital Green solving that problem? And what does that actually look like in practice? So Digital Green's been working on this problem of localized cheaper advice for 20 years. And our founder was at Microsoft as a computer scientist. And so he never kind of stopped thinking about that question. What can technology and specifically kind of digital technology do for farmers? And we've had different eras of maybe new opportunity. And when COVID hit, we had been experimenting already with chatbots.

We had been building what they called deterministic chatbots, which basically means building decision trees. you know, does your leaf have spots? Yes or no? If yes, are they orange or are they black? And then kind of following that decision tree until you get to an answer. Turns out that building something for smallholder farmers is incredibly tough. It's a non-everist kind of thing when you're doing decision trees because the average smallholder farmer has anywhere between seven and 12, sometimes more, different crops and maybe livestock in their portfolio. So let's just say you had 10 crops and you had three livestock. You had some chickens,

a goat and two cows. The amount of variability in those 10 crops by soil type, by weather, by pest and disease, by region is already mind-boggling. Then you add on to that animal health, animal feed, all of the things that go with that. And we basically found that building a WhatsApp based decision tree, even for one region, like we were trying to do it in one sub-region, basically broke everyone, right? The farmers were perpetually unhappy. It never had enough detail, and the engineers were pulling their hair out

as we kept adding additional layers of decision. And so we stopped, and then post-COVID, what we realized is the internet in India had gotten drastically cheaper. So there was this boom in mobile data and in phones, and so all these people came online, mostly in rural areas. And that was our realization that even though India was on the vanguard,

rural communities worldwide were going to come online. with smartphones at some pace over the next few years. So flash forward to chat chippy T coming out in November of 22. And basically our team within the day that it came out was like, aha, this is how we can try the chatbot again. And so we rebuilt the chatbot using more of a generative AI engine and had a beta version infield with farmers by, I think, around May of 2023. And even though it was woefully incomplete, because so many of the answer,

that people were asking, we would tell them we didn't have enough information to answer. The reaction from farmers between that experience and the chatbot that we had been building two years before was so different. They thought it was the best thing they'd ever seen. And that was with 50% of answers being returned, I don't know. And we decided, wow, okay, this is a really different reaction. We're able to offer a multimodal experience. We were able to move to offering text, voice, and a photo-based diagnosis within, I think, another six months of that. And that the reaction was even stronger,

because now I can take a picture of my diseased plant, and I can get an answer, and I can get an answer back in my local voice or in a local voice. And so we basically have, since then, almost dropped everything else we were doing, which we had a lot of other digital innovations trying to address different problems. And we ran headlong into trying to just maximize

this opportunity the AI is presenting us to really get to this hyper-local advisory at the right time in the right way. You have had an incredibly busy last five years. Oh my goodness. I'd love to hone in on the kinds of information that a lot of these farmers are wanting to access. I mean, there's a lot of changing conditions for farmers around the world. They are now dealing with the very real impact of climate change. How is digital green working in that space? Yeah, great question. One of the top categories of queries is weather, which you could say is both related to kind of day-to-day decision-making, but also climate change. And unfortunately, this is one of the areas where we really need to do a lot of improvement and where we're doing

a lot of collaboration with meteorological researchers because weather models were not built on tropical zones. So there's a lot of incredible weather researchers, both within geographies, kind of setting up weather stations and trying to get ground truth data and also trying to figure out how to work across the world to share data and improve weather models for different types of forecasts, right? There's forecasts for the onset of the monsoon and there's forecasts for the next three hours. And those are very different kind of use cases of weather. So farmers ask a lot of weather questions. And they are looking for, I always try to tell people when they say farmers are asking for weather. It's weather for what. I think you can see weather for what is a few different

things. One, they're doing what I said. They're trying to get a handle on, for instance, in India, it's been late. And so farmers have been trying to figure out when I should plant because you don't want to have what's called seed germination failure, which is I put the seed in the ground, not enough water comes, and I've lost all the money on my seed if I bought seed. And even if I save seed, I've lost my save seed, which is a huge loss as well. So farmers are trying to get weather related to planting decision timing. Another kind of decision around weather is they are often trying to figure out, should I apply fertilizer or spray something,

whether it's a chemical or a biopesticide. The last thing you want to do if you're having some sort of pest pressure is apply something you spent money on or spent time making at home, only to have it wash off two hours later, right? So they're trying to kind of use weather for these key decision moments. Same thing with when should I harvest. They're trying to make sure something is dry enough to take it off the field. So weather is a huge category, but it's weather with specific intent.

I have been following the whole story of AI and weather prediction. And the monsoon on the subcontinent, I'd say inarguably is the most important annual weather event in the world, because that is an annual weather event that is responsible ultimately for feeding 2 billion people. They've been trying to predict the weather for the Indian monsoon for 10,000 years. And they got really good at short-term forecasts and they got really good at long-term forecasts, but that kind of medium range of 10 to 30 days,

they've just never really been able to kind of predict it. But now they're using AI. The weather predictions have gotten really good for that time gap. I think last year was the first time that they were able to really kind of say, okay, we think we've nailed it now. And then this year, Indian Meteorological Service rolled that capability out into its forefirm.

normal forecast. Now, suddenly in 2006, for the first time, in 10,000 years, humanity now has the ability to accurately predict the most important annual weather event on Earth. Now, I think that single story alone makes AI worth it. All the other stuff that is coming with AI and the data centers and the tech lords and everything else that you talk about. Whatever, I don't mind if we have all that stuff, if we can suddenly now change the ability to forecast the weather that is going to affect the lives of 2 billion people, is that potentially worth it? And I think the bigger question I have here, or maybe observation is in the West, we talk about digital and internet and AI as this wrong turn that humanity took. It's affecting our children and that we're all addicted

and that can we please all just go back to the 90s when the kids were broke free and, you know, we all loved each other. But when I hear you talking about digital green and talking, talking in Mark, this incredible capacity of AI to SNAR suddenly make this information available to people, and then you think about all the other capabilities we get to develop, like weather prediction and all the rest. Yeah. I just think that is absolutely extraordinary. So I'm interested to hear your thoughts on this.

For those who aren't familiar, yeah, last year, PXD, which is another kind of peer of ours in the space, they worked on sending out monsoon alerts, and they published a peer-reviewed RCT actually on that and found that it was incredibly accurate. It was just one year. And as you said, it's being rolled out. I am so curious to see what's happening this year, right? Because I know it's being rolled out, but also the monsoon is quite late. So I'm curious how that's going to show up, how good did the weather model actually do on a year when it was late.

And also did farmers use it? Did they, like, act on it or did they go back to gut instinct reading of the weather? Because it's hard to trust it after just one year. So anyway, I think I agree with you if we start getting to way more accurate weather prediction, farmers will trust it. I'm a Luddite by nature. I felt actually quite anxious when Digital Green jumped two feet first into the AI deep end because I have all the A anxieties everyone else has. But also, to your point, agriculture is one of these areas where when you think about

all the rightful debates happening about intellectual property and sort of ownership of ideas and art and all these things that AI has confused for all of us and thrown everything in, agriculture is not that right people for that same 10,000 year period have been sharing best practices for how to produce enough good food including in the modern age there's been tons of agricultural research exchanges and collaborations to prevent catastrophic wheat rust disease for instance or pests and disease on animals because failures in the food system affect all of us and also because we tend to think that agricultural knowledge should be the commons. What's interesting to me is that AI, even though it has massive gaps, like the out-of-the-box LLMs have massive gaps around smallholder agriculture because they are understudied, because there has not been data coming from those areas. So it's not perfect out of the box. But it's really remarkable how much it does solve for. The promise of AI to all of us, the AI compact, the social

compact is we will make the world a better place. We will make it, we will solve the challenges of human disease. We'll accelerate the solution to cancer. And when I think about it, I think if we don't collectively see an end to modern food insecurity and nutrition insecurity and frankly, poverty that is undignified and unreasonable in the era, it's a lie. It has to actually solve those fundamental scourges on humanity or it's not setting the social compact on the right foot. But because we've got bigger problems to solve, but those are the ones that have been with us for the entirety of human history. So I think it's a tremendous opportunity and moment. There is so much possibility here, but so much of it depends on the word that you've brought up quite a bit, and that is trust.

Yeah. Especially when a lot of farmers have been farming a certain way in their community for generations, and that can look different in different in different parts of the, world. How do you build that trust? Trust is always going to be strongest when it's human to human. One farmer telling another farmer about a practice, always going to be a better adoption rate, especially if you say, I tried this and it worked, you should try it. Just like all of us, if you were given a new device with information that you could access, you wouldn't trust it or you shouldn't trust it out of hand, right? And so we see kind of this trust ladder that farmers will build.

They will often at first ask a question that they absolutely know the answer to. And if it fails, we're done. I'm not talking to you again. If it passes, then I might ask you another question I know. And then eventually I might ask a question that I don't really know, but I know who I could call to double check you. And eventually I will apply a practice that you recommended. Now if that works, now I have a lot more trust in moving forward.

But the other part of it is I just want to say, I think we have not yet figured out how to systematically include informal farmer knowledge that merits inclusion in a knowledge platform like this. There's a lot of indigenous knowledge out there that is not only not known to AI, it's not actually known to the agricultural researchers. And when you talk to agricultural researchers, you'll often hear them say they will get ideas about what to study and what to actually do more examination on from watching farm. directly. Farmers will pick up on or innovate on a practice earlier sometimes. And so how do you include traditional knowledge in a way that is respectful and not extractive? I think we're still figuring out how to do that. And Digital Green has a long history of working on concepts like natural farming, for example, in Andra Pradesh, which has a 40-year legacy of working on that whole concept of farming. So I think there are types of practices that are

are locally recorded. And I think figuring out how to include those is going to be an important part of the sort of building of these knowledge platforms. Do you have a story of one farmer that you could share with this? That kind of really illustrates the power of this. I have many, but I will pick one because it's seared in my brain because it was such a powerful experience for me. A farmer named Cecilia from Kenya, who is this woman probably in her 60s? And again, we'd asked what they use it for. She used it for maize. She had some dairy cows and vegetables. We asked, has anyone here used the camera function? Has anyone taken a picture of a diseased plant, pester disease? And she raised her hands and she said she had spring onions that started to brown.

And so she said she took a picture and she asked what was wrong. And she said, it told me what was wrong. It had some sort of disease. And she said that it recommended two, two options for two different medicines. She applied it to her spring onions. And she tells me the story, she's like, and then I applied to the spring onions. And a few days later, they turned green again. And they grew normally. And I had a great harvest of spring onions. And the face she's making is this. And I realize at a certain point, it's both shock and being a little bit upset. and being amazed, right? And then she says,

I have been farming for 40 years and I could have had solutions like that. Someone knew that all I needed to do for my spring onions was spray this thing and it would come back. And I just now learned that. I get that is an injustice. When you have that realization

that this knowledge existed, the thing existed in your area, and you've been farming for 40 years and just nobody told you that, these are brilliant, hardworking people who will use every available piece of help that they can find, I think about that all the time, that there is incredible power and wisdom in these farming communities, and you don't know what you don't know. And if you just knew it, you would do it.

Alicia, let's say we get this right, okay? And digital green scales, but it's part of a much bigger ecosystem of other apps and people that are bringing these solutions to the rest of the world and eventually we have 200 million small-scale farmers around the world using these apps with gender of AI built into them. Paint us a picture of what the world looks like in 2040. Yeah, so I think about this all the time. I get excited when I think about what could be different in this era of food system transformation. So, you know, I think a lot of the monoculture agriculture in kind of high-income countries developed around needing uniformity and needing volume that was incredibly uniform in order to inform the food processing development. What if we could actually build

robust food systems that still were able to deliver convenience to urban consumers through basic processing or food packaging, but somehow were built for a more kind of local or regional food system? What if we didn't have to build supply chains that were like across the entire world, but we actually built these sort of ecosystems more regionally? And maybe we don't have to give up smallholder diversity or farm diversity in order to have efficiency and enough food. Maybe agriculture becomes this more efficient, creative local expression that also the market rewards, that the market rewards biodiversity and diversity in general. One of the things I love most about this podcast is unpacking this idea that progress rarely comes from these single silver

bullet solutions it's generally forged through two very different ideas knocking up against each other and if if these two conversations have one thing in common it's that the future of farming and the future of food, it doesn't have to be either ancient wisdom or technology. It's both. Yeah. I think that's such an important point. I think that is something important to keep in mind when it comes to progress more generally. There is this idea that maybe we need to be dogmatic about the way that something should be done. It's either organic or it's high-tech. And if it's not one of those things, then we're not going to be paying it any attention. But the answers that work are answers that combine elements, all the best elements of all of that.

And in this case, it's both. You know, healthy soil, human knowledge, better tools, advanced technology. All of those things can exist side by side. Professor Lyle reminds us that nature still has lessons to teach us. Alicia shows us that when technology gets built to actually listen to the lessons that nature has to teach us, it can become something far more powerful, that technology becomes a partner. becomes a trusted partner for millions, perhaps hundreds of millions of people eventually. You know what I've been thinking about since we have these two conversations?

So Professor Lal grew up as one of these small holder farmers. He knew what it was like to have this very small patch of land responsible for your entire livelihood. And I do wonder if he had a grown up with technology like Digital Green, how things might have played out. There is that real kind of sliding doors in this episode. I think that it's all too easy to think that the future is something that is just always something that is over the horizon or something that's still coming,

but it's something that we are cultivating actively right now. Every time we hear a story about someone who's restoring a patch of land or someone who's restoring soil, they're cultivating the future. When a farmer is sharing knowledge with a neighbor, that's cultivating the future as well. Technology that helps community rather than the technology that speaks over a community. This stuff adds up. It's cumulative, right? I love that.

It's cumulative cultivation. We know there are a lot of podcasts out there. It means a lot to us that you chose this one. It's made possible by our paying subscribers. So if you're one of them, a big thank you. And if you want to support what we do, you can find us at fixthenews.com. This show was produced by Amy Rose

with audio by Anthony Badalato from Here That. It was made in Australia on the lands of the Gadigal, Wurundry and Waiwerong peoples. If you liked it, hit subscribe, leave a review or send it to someone you love who needs to hear it. Thanks for listening.

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