The Dr. Hyman Show - How To Support The Next Generation Of Farmers

Episode Date: August 21, 2020

How To Support The Next Generation Of Farmers | This episode is brought to you by Four Sigmatic The average age of a farmer in the United States today is 58 years old. And it’s been projected that about 40% of the continental United States’ farm and ranch acreage will have changed hands between 2015 and 2035. However, young people who are looking to get into farming are unfortunately faced with a number of barriers to entry, including difficulty accessing land, education, and financing. This is why it is so important that we begin to spur business innovation and create policy supports to bring in the next generation of farmers, and innovators in the food system. Dr. Hyman explored these topics in three conversations he had last year with guests Kimbal Musk, Tobias Peggs, and Danielle Nierenberg. Kimbal Musk is a chef, restaurateur, and philanthropist. His personal mission is to pursue an America where everyone has access to real food. He’s been named a Global Social Entrepreneur by the World Economic Forum and is the co-founder and Executive Chairman of three businesses—The Kitchen Restaurant Group, Big Green, and Square Roots—with real food missions that are rapidly growing across the US. The Kitchen Restaurant Group (with its three concepts Next Door, Hedge Row, and The Kitchen) serves real food at every price point and has created over a thousand mission-driven jobs. The restaurants source sustainably grown food from American farmers, stimulating the local farm economy to the tune of millions of dollars a year. Kimbal’s nonprofit organization, Big Green, builds permanent, outdoor Learning Garden classrooms in hundreds of underserved schools across America reaching over 350,000 students every day. His tech-enabled food company, Square Roots, builds urban farms in climate-controlled shipping containers with the mission to bring real food to people in cities around the world by empowering next-gen farmers.  Tobias Peggs is co-founder and CEO of Square Roots, the Brooklyn-based urban farming company known for changing the way people think about growing local food and training the country’s future generations of farmers. Previously, he led Aviary, a mobile photo editing company as its CEO until its acquisition by Adobe, and was also CEO at OneRiot, a social media analytics company, acquired by Walmart. Tobias grew up in England and has a PhD in Artificial Intelligence from Cardiff University.  Danielle Nierenberg co-founded the non-profit Food Tank in 2013 as an organization focused on building a global community for safe, healthy, nourished eaters. Prior to starting Food Tank, Danielle spent two years traveling to more than 60 countries across sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, and Latin America, meeting with farmers and farmers’ groups, scientists and researchers, policymakers and government leaders, students and academics, along with journalists, documenting what’s working to help alleviate hunger and poverty, while protecting the environment at the same time. Find Dr. Hyman’s full-length conversation with Kimbal Musk, “How To Fix Nutrition In Schools,” here:  https://DrMarkHyman.lnk.to/KimbalMusk Find Dr. Hyman’s full-length conversation with Tobias Peggs, “What Is Hyper-Local Food?” here: https://DrMarkHyman.lnk.to/TobiasPeggs Find Dr. Hyman’s full-length conversation with Danielle Nierenberg, “How One Woman is Transforming the Food System,” here: https://DrMarkHyman.lnk.to/DanielleNierenberg This episode is brought to you by Four Sigmatic. Four Sigmatic is now providing an exclusive offer for Doctor’s Farmacy listeners. Receive up to 39% off on their best selling Lion’s Mane Coffee bundles. To get this deal, just go to foursigmatic.com/hyman. This is a really incredible deal so it’s the perfect time to branch out from your regular morning cup of coffee and try Four Sigmatic’s mushroom blends to enhance your brain-power, energy, and immunity throughout the day. 

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Dr. Hyman explored these questions with several guests on the podcast last year. Here he is with chef, restaurateur, and philanthropist, Kimball Musk. Can you talk about what's happening in the farm landscape in America and why we need to bring new farmers into the landscape? Yeah, sure. No, I spent years working on this problem. What I would do is there's a farmer's conference in Iowa where you can actually go and meet with farmers who own most of the, Iowa is mostly smallhold farmers. So average farm size is 160 acres. So you can kind of imagine, it's all sort of, but you could imagine kind of going in and talking to farmers directly and maybe there's a way to get

into the business. The average farm size in Iowa is 160 acres? I believe so, yeah. That's the homestead size. Well, there is a rule in Iowa, you're not allowed to own, no corporations are allowed to own farms in Iowa. So even if you wanted to create a conglomerate of farms, you'd have to do it by yourself, not as part of a company. Wow.

Yeah, so it's a couple of rules like that that keep the farms, on average, well, there are plenty of big farms in Iowa, but they are owned by one person or one family. And I think it's that you're allowed to have only up to 40 family members or even allowed to own it. So if you have a big family, eventually you've got to figure out what to do with your farmland. Wow.

Yeah, so a lot of rules in place that actually make it possible for people to get into farming. And also to protect it to be a small family business idea. So it all sounds good, but the problem what I found was you go to the conference and the average age was not 58 or 59, which is what people say is the average. The average was more like 82. Really?

You're not just being facetious? I'm not being facetious. The actual, in Iowa, 60% of the, sorry, let me, yeah, 60% of the farmland is owned by people over the age of 79. What? So if you go to Iowa to actually purchase land or get into the business, you're negotiating with an octogenarian.

And what I discovered was, I'm an immigrant, South African, maverick, whatever you want to call it, with a cowboy hat coming into, you know, chat with these farmers. And I'm negotiating with an 85 year old late grandma. And, and she, she, it was, it just didn't go well. Let's just put it that way.

And what I found was that they have this enormous emotional attachment to their land. What they want is their kids to farm it. And they want is their grandkids to farm it. But they're not doing farm it but they're not doing it and they're not doing it because the business sucks what the average income of a farmer is well if you have a hundred acre farm in iowa in a good year which we haven't had a good year for a few years you'd make twenty two thousand dollars so if you imagine you're a young young farmer and the average income of most farmers is negative 1500. This past two years, two years in a row,

it's been negative $1800 for a 100 acre farm. So it's just been a disaster. In fact, we have the worst year for bankruptcies in a generation this year amongst farmers. Almost 600 farmers went bankrupt and it's just awful. And so the reason is because they're so emotionally attached to their land. They want their kids to farm it.

And as a result, the kids don't take it over and most farms are bought through estate sales. So someone passes away and then the family doesn't want it. That's how you can acquire land and go into farming. And man, that's just too depressing for me to yeah well you said you wanted to go outside of chicago and buy 10 000 yeah the idea was i'd get 10 000 acres the problem is you have to buy 160 acre piece of land from a farmer when they

pass away and then you have to wait for all of your neighbors to pass away to get you'll be 82 years old exactly so that you just look at you and you're like, this is not going to work. And of course that's why there's no innovation in this space because farmers are aging. Bless their heart. They're not doing anything wrong. They're doing what the government is telling them to do.

It's just that what the government is telling them to do is kind of stuck in the past. Young people who do want to become farmers are typically faced with a number of barriers to entry. However, there is innovation happening in this space. Dr. Hyman also spoke with Tobias Peggs, who co-founded a Brooklyn-based urban farming company with Kimball Musk called Square Roots. Square Roots is known for changing the way people think about growing local food and training the country's future generations of farmers. You're raising up a new generation of farmers that is absolutely essential

because in this country, the average age of farmers is 58 to 60. People are aging out of farming. There are really very few supports for young farmers to enter the marketplace. The land acquisition costs are so high. The land has become financialized because corporations have bottled it up because it's actually got more land value than agricultural value. So we're really in a situation where young farmers have a real barrier to entry in the market, but you've created a whole program that's called Next Gen Farmer Training Program that allows you to bring in people who want to be part of the solution and create a career out of it.

You're right. At the beginning of the pod, you were articulating the issues with the industrial food system, right? Chronic waste, terrible for the planet, all of these things, pollution, diabetes, 70% of our food has got pesticides in it. This is all horrific. And then this extra topic that doesn't get as much airtime as it should is this demographic time bomb that's about to go off, right? If the average age of a farmer today is 58, like who's going to grow the food in five or six years time when they retire? It's like

frightening. But to your point, very, very hard then for young people to start a career in farming. Our fundamental thought though, belief really was that it's the farmer that's at the center of the system, right? The person that's willing this plant to come to life that just makes it taste better, right? It's like when you're cooking, right? You put the love- Vitamin L. Vitamin L. Exactly. Exactly. So we had to figure out how do we provide a pathway for, you know, young people to come in and learn how to be farmers, right? Provide that love in the system. But we also wanted to do that in a way that was creating a positive social impact on the world, right? How can we empower and educate and inspire and get more young people into this local food movement. They can spend, you know, 12 months with us, 24 months with us. And then when they graduate and they leave Square Roots, you know, are they now inspired and do they have the tools

and are they ready to set up their own local food companies, right? Because the more of us working on this local food revolution, the better, right? So that was kind of the genesis of, okay, what can we do here to bring more young people into the industry. So great. It's so important because we do have a crisis in farming and agriculture. And we're trying to shift. And there's so many movements.

There's regenerative agriculture that is really defining a whole new way of thinking about growing food that restores the soil, that reduces carbon in the environment, that preserves water, that reduce chemical inputs and fertilizers. These are all really essential activities. In addition to business innovation, policy supports are also needed to bring in the next generation of farmers and beyond. Danielle Nirenberg, co-founder of the nonprofit Food Tank, spoke about this in her conversation with Dr. Hyman. One of the things I'm so excited about is that, you know, since I was in graduate school, there's this whole generation of young people who want to be in farming and the food system in some way. So you

mentioned the challenges they face. It's really hard for new farmers or young farmers to get into farming. They lack access to land. They have they're coming burdened with a lot of student loan debt. They don't have things like insurance. If we can create, you know, policies and programs that help mentor those young farmers, give them business skills, forgive some of their debt, help provide them with, you know, insurance and give them the resources they can to succeed. I think that would be really exciting. in states like Minnesota, where land is being transferred from farmers who, you know, want to retire to younger farmers so that they can start on the right foot and get the mentoring and business and education, business skills and education that they need to do better. And I think, you know, this is not just about creating more farmers. This is about creating

businesses and programs that will support young people and make them feel really excited about agriculture. In his most recent book, Food Fix, Dr. Hyman proposes creating a federal farmer corp to enlisting new generation of regenerative farmers. This program would help them overcome financial and education barriers and provide training and funding to access land. If you'd like to learn more about these topics, I'd encourage you to check out Dr. Hyman's full-length conversations with Kimball Musk, Tobias Peggs, and Daniel Nirenberg. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider sharing it on social media

or sending it to a friend. Thanks for tuning in. Hey everybody, it's Dr. Hyman. Thanks for tuning into The Doctor's Pharmacy. I hope you're loving this podcast. It's one of my favorite things to do and introducing you all the experts that I know and I love and that I've learned so much from. And I want to tell you about something else I'm doing, which is called Mark's Picks. It's my weekly newsletter. And in it, I share my favorite stuff from foods to supplements, to gadgets, to tools to enhance your health. It's all the cool stuff that I use and that my team uses to optimize and enhance our health. And I'd love you to sign up for the weekly newsletter. I'll only send it to you once a

week on Fridays, nothing else, I promise. And all you do is go to drhyman.com forward slash pics to sign up. That's drhyman.com forward slash pics, P-I-C-K-S, and sign up for the newsletter and I'll share with you my favorite stuff that I use to enhance my health and get healthier and better and live younger longer. Now back to this week's episode. Hi everyone. I hope you enjoyed this week's episode. Just a reminder that this podcast is for educational purposes only. This podcast is not a substitute for professional care by a doctor or other qualified medical professional. This podcast is provided on the understanding that it does not constitute medical or other professional advice or services. If you're looking for help in your journey, seek out a qualified medical practitioner. If you're looking for a functional medicine practitioner, you can visit ifm.org and

search their find a practitioner database. It's important that you have someone in your corner who's trained, who's a licensed healthcare practitioner, and can help you make changes, especially when it comes to your health.