The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens - Anne Biklé & David Montgomery: "Nourishing the Land and Ourselves"

Episode Date: July 12, 2023

On this episode, Nate is joined by "free range biologist" Anne Biklé and "broad-minded geologist" David Montgomery - a married duo who have been educating about the link between soil and human health for nearly a decade. As we continue to strip the land and soil of its life supporting capacity, our food has become less nutritious, even as we've received more calories. Has the age of 'The Green Revolution' - accredited with preventing millions from famine - led us to a new epidemic of starvation in the form of micronutrients? How do our modern systems degrade the land, leaving us with lifeless dirt even more dependent on fossil inputs? Can we implement better agricultural practices that lead to lively and fertile soils, better health, and a reconnection with the land that feeds us? About Anne Biklé & David R. Montgomery Anne Biklé is a science writer and public speaker drawing on her background in biology and environmental planning to explore humanity's tangled relationship with nature through the lens of agriculture, soil, and food. She is particularly enthralled with the botanical world and its influence on humanity throughout history. Her writing has appeared in digital and print magazines, newspapers, and her work has been featured in radio and independent documentary films. David R. Montgomery is a MacArthur Fellow and professor of geomorphology at the University of Washington. He is an internationally recognized geologist who studies the effects of geological processes on ecological systems and human societies. He is the author of several textbooks in his field and his work has been featured in documentary films, network and cable news, TV, and radio. Anne and David are married and live in Seattle, WA. In 2023, they published What Your Food Ate: How to Heal Our Land and Reclaim Our Health, which builds on their trilogy of books about soil health, microbiomes, and farming—Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations, The Hidden Half of Nature, and Growing a Revolution. Social Media & Contact for David and Anne web: www.Dig2Grow.com || twitter: @Dig2Grow || email: [e-mail] For Show Notes and More visit: https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/episode/79-anne-bikl-david-montgomery

You're listening to The Great Simplification with Nate Higgins. That's me. On this show, we try to explore and simplify what's happening with energy, the economy, the environment, and our society. Together with scientists, experts, and leaders, this show is about understanding the bird's eye view of how everything fits together, where we go from here and what we can do about it as a society and as individuals. There is a saying that two heads are better than one, and I couldn't agree more on this episode of The Great Simplification. I welcome geologists David Montgomery and biologists and Beaclay to discuss soil life interactions, the microbiomes of our gut, nutrient deficiencies in our diets, and the key pillars of regenerative agriculture. David Montgomery is a professor

of Earth Sciences at the University of Washington and Seattle, where he's a key pillars of regenerative agriculture. he researches the evolution of topography and the influence of geomorphological processes on ecosystems and on human societies. Anne Beaclay is a biologist and landscaped architect who has worked in field biology, watershed restoration, and environmental planning and public health. In addition to David's popular and award-winning book, Dirt, the Erosion of Civilizations, David and Anne have co-authored the hidden half of nature, the microbial roots of life and health,

as well as a recent book published last year, What Your Food ate, How to Heal Our Land and Reclaim Our Health. Please welcome husband and wife's soil biome experts, David Montgomery and Anne Beaclay. Welcome, David and Anne. Well, thank you. Yep, thank you, Nate.

A biologist and a geologist combining forces in life and in literature to write about a very important topic, which is soil, regenerative agricultural, and our food system. I really look forward to unpacking this with you both today. Well, thank you. It's happening. We're glad to be here talking with you. Yeah. Did you guys know that this was your ultimate path when you met these topics?

or did you fall in love and get married and then decide to study soil and food and such? Well, ironically, the one class that we had together in graduate school was a soil science class. Now, whether that was a premonition of things to come or not, I don't know, but it certainly wasn't planned. There's a long story behind how Anne and I got into thinking and writing about soils and their connection to the longevity of civilizations and our individual health and so on. but I think I can say with some confidence, it was not planned. No, definitely not. I taught a class for eight years, I haven't taught in the last two years, called Reality 101,

a survey of the human predicament, and it was intense. Climate change, oil depletion, all the things that are ahead. And the students that took it were speaking the same language, right? they went through emotionally and intellectually this experience. And so I do think it sets you apart from your peers. So the fact that you two met in a soil science class kind of ultimately makes sense looking back. Well, it wasn't actually how we met, but it was the one class we did have together. Yeah.

And kind of oddly enough, I'm not sure. I can't recall exactly why we thought that class at that time. for both of us when we were in graduate school, but we did. And it was a good class. I liked it. Yeah, well, I know why I took it. It was at the end of my PhD experience, and I decided I needed to know more about soils

as a geomorphologist who was studying the evolution of the surface of the earth. So it was sort of my last shot at getting a little bit of solid grounding in that area. I had no intention of sharing this story, But there were a couple classes in college where I looked up who was taking this class. And if there was a woman that I wanted to get to know better was on the registrar list, I signed up for that class. Not saying that was a case in yours. So getting to your soil question.

So my work is about energy and how our society is energy blind. We don't understand the importance of energy to our lives, the fact that we're all alive during the carbon pulse. But really, you could make the same arguments about soil and food. We are soil and ecology blind. So maybe we could start out, David, the first book, I think your first book, it's certainly the first of your books that I've read. Dirt, the erosion of civilization. Maybe you could unpack that a little bit as a foundation for the rest of our conversation. Can you explain briefly the connection between agricultural productivity, soil degradation,

and as you just mentioned, the decline of civilizations? Sure. I mean, one of the things they should point out at the start of this is foundational to sort of all discussions about the past and the future of soil is it's basically where our food comes from, something like 97% of our food directly or indirectly comes from the soil, sort of filtered through plants and then livestock into us. depending on what we choose to eat. So the way the soil works to help us grow crops is really fundamental and foundational

to supporting agricultural societies, which most societies at post-ice age have been. So when we look at soils, it's sort of a foundational deal. And I started writing about the erosion problem after I'd been working around the world as a geomorphologist, the kind of geologist who studies what shapes the surface form of Earth's topography. So studying erosion was kind of my bread and butter, but natural systems. And what I realized working all over

the globe is I was starting to see patterns where societies where the land had been degraded, where the soil was degraded, where it had been eroded off, or it lost a lot of its organic matter, lost its fertility, that the populations were relatively impoverished and that could actually have been a long, that the soil degradation that led to that

could have happened a long time ago in places that we know today is like Syria and Libya. for example. And so I started putting together the idea to be fun to research and think about what the role that soil erosion had played in human history. And the farther I got into it, the more I realized I was actually writing a history of farming because that was the mechanism through which land degradation had played out. And the one sentence summary of the dirt book is that societies that don't take care of their land that don't take care of their soil don't last. It's a recurring pattern and theme in human societies and civilizations. And we have a pretty bad track record, frankly, at a planetary scale in preventing soil loss and degradation as a result of agriculture. And the Dirt Book was really an attempt to pull that history together and to look at possible lessons for the future because we don't really have anywhere else to go to farm new, fresh, unfarmed soils these days. We have to figure out how to make agriculture sustainable and not just sustainable in an economic sense, but in an environmental

sense relative to the ability of the land to actually keep producing food for the future. And that's what really got Anne and I onto this path of thinking and writing about both the backstory of problems of soils in past societies, but also what we can do about it today. And that led to some much more optimistic books that have come out a little more recently than the dirt book, where we've learned of the stories of farmers who have been really turning around the problem of land degradation and rebuilding healthy fertile soils at a G.L. astrologically astounding pace, but that's getting sort of further ahead of the narrative. So the dirt book was really a look back at what's gone wrong in the past.

So let me ask a couple questions about that. First of all, for new listeners that haven't learned much about this topic, what is your definition of the difference between soil and dirt? That's a great question. And I did take a little bit of heat from some soil scientist colleagues for calling a book about the history of soil erosion dirt because the one thing you're never supposed to call soil in soil science is dirt. It's not a respectful term. So you can think of dirt as soil where you don't want it. It's on your shoes. It's tracked into your house. It's on the

car mat in your car when you get into it afterwards, stomping about in the mud. That's one way to think about dirt. A soil where you don't want it. Another different way to think about it is that soil is much more than just the mineral components than just the geological part of it. It's really the merging the marriage of geology and biology. And so you can think of soils as having both a living component, the organisms that are living within it and helping to cycle nutrients and keep things moving and getting those minerals out of the geological realm and into the biological world. But it's also a place where it wants living things, what we know of as organic matter, is actually quite important as well because it helps to provide the fuel

that drives that underground economy that differentiates soil from dirt. So that living half is what I think is so fascinating about soil to me these days. And it's partly why Ann, who's a biologist and I got sort of thinking about and working on this together, is that when you think about soil as an ecosystem as opposed to an object, you really start to think about it differently. And the way that it gets influenced by our agricultural practices, by our cultural practices, really start to come into a different framing in a different light. when we think about it as another ecosystem we need to worry about our impact on.

So dirt is the inert component, and it could have zero percent organic matter, or it could have 3 percent or 5 percent or 10 percent. But once we add the mycelium and the small insects and the microorganisms, then dirt can be labeled soil, yes? Yeah, I would say that the real different. is life. The impact of life on the soil and the life in the soil that really comes together to make it something very different than just a pile of minerals. And are there lots of places in the world that don't have life in the soils now? Yeah. And one of the prominent places that has

less life in the soil or a different mix of life and communities of life in the soil, which matters as much as whether there's any life at all, are agricultural fields. the places that we rely on to feed ourselves. Globally, we've lost roughly about 50% of the organic matter in most agricultural soils, on average. Results on your farm will vary. It's highly variable, depending on context, of course, as most things are in geology and geomorphology. But we've done a real number on degrading the soils that we really depend on to feed ourselves. And that has been of concern in the past, and we're not the first people by any stretch to write it and think about this.

But it is one of the fundamental problems facing humanity today. It's kind of on par with the climate problem, the freshwater problem, and the population issue. They're all intertwined and they're interrelated. But of those, I actually think the soil one might be the most solvable because we already know how to do it. But that's, again, getting a bit ahead of ourselves in this saga. So one more question about your first book, and then I will switch to your co-author and wife to ask about your recent book. You said it was

unexpectedly a history of farming, the erosion and the impact of loss of soil in prior civilizations. But what would happen like in Pakistan or in Australia a couple years ago, they got two feet of rain in one day. Is that enough to erode the topsoil and change things from a non-anthropocentric sort of way?

Yeah, I mean, erosion is a natural process. If erosion wasn't happening to reshape the surface of the earth, we'd eventually not just, we wouldn't run out of soil, but we'd run out of nutrients in the soil, because we need to basically keep cycling nutrients out of fresh rocks into weathered rocks into soil to replace things like zinc or iron, that plants need for their health, we need for our bodies. So that some erosion is happening is a very natural thing. With that example of that, you know, just, you know, Noah's flood kind of rainfall that you're talking about from those examples, there's going to be erosion even in natural systems. The real issue is how much erosion, how often. And so when you get a large rainstorm event like that, let's say on a freshly plowed field where there's no roots holding the surface together, you're going to get an enormous amount of erosion. But you can also get it in a very average rainfall when you have a freshly plowed field.

Nature is pretty good about clothing herself in plants, and that's a very effective way to shut down erosion to very low rates, not to turn it off because life itself depends on erosion for refreshing the elements that make us all up. But vegetation helps to limit that process to a background rate that is sustainable. And when we have bare, freshly plowed fields, and we get even modest rain on them, you can erode off a centuries worth of soil formation in an afternoon,

but when you get two feet of rain in a day or something like you were talking about, that's just off the charts. And so one worry is that if those kind of events become more common, we might want to rethink the way that we lay the land out in advance of those kind of events. Last question for you, I recall reading your book like 10 years ago, and in the early chapters you talked about Charles Darwin's fascination

with earthworms, and I don't remember the math, but you speculated how long it would take with no humans around for the soil to be regenerated naturally with worms and biogeochemical cycles. Like, how long does it take to grow an inch of topsoil without interventions? I actually did a review of that in the proceedings of National Academy of Sciences that summarized the data that I was looking at when I was writing dirt on that very issue. And if you look globally, the average pace of natural soil building is about 2% of a millimeter a year, two-hundredths of a millimeter per year. Your fingernails grow faster than that. I mean, that's a slow rate in terms of nature building soils. If we look at the other thing I looked at in that same study was the

average road of top soil erosion today off of conventionally managed agricultural fields. And the average rate there was about a millimeter and a half a year globally. And there was a recent study that just came out from Evan Thaler and Isaac Larson at UMass Amherst that basically found a similar rate, 1.8 millimeters a year as an average erosion rate across the American Midwest for the last century and a half. So the numbers are pretty robust that that pays it takes only about two decades, 20 years, to lose an inch of top soil. And at 2% of a millimeter a year as a natural soil building rate, it takes 500 to 1,000 years to replace that inch of top soil. that's the problem. That's one of the problems right there. The other problem, of course, is the loss of soil organic matter and thereby soil fertility. But if you lose the soil itself, which can happen in just a few centuries of farming at that kind of a pace, that's a very effective way to impoverish societies well into the future. But you can come into problems with soil fertility much faster than that by degrading soil organic matter as well, which modern farming practices do. So I'm very worried about oil depletion the next 10 or 20 years because we've built our lifestyles around it, but the next couple centuries, soil depletion could arguably be much more impactful to the generations that follow us.

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. And it could have impacts this century as well. I mean, it's one of these things that, you know, we're not actually going to run out of soil, but we may run out of enough fertile land with healthy enough soil to feed everybody if our population keeps going up and we keep degrading the land that we are growing our food on. And an open question, and a very fair question, I think, is whether we want to place blind faith in technology to solve the problem or do we want to take advantage of ecological knowledge

we already have in hand about better ways to farm that could actually solve that problem for not only humanity over the long run, but for those of us who are alive in the 21st century, we've got a few decades to really fix this problem. And we could do it, but we're not yet on track to do so. I have lots of questions there, but I want to give your co-author and a chance to say hello and give us a summary of your latest book, the two of you wrote together. I believe it's your latest called What's Your Food, How to Heal, How to Heel Our Land and Re-Cate, reclaim our health. It focuses on nutrients in our food and how industrial inputs have been

undercutting the nutrient density in our food. So Ann, for the average person watching this program, can you outline for us what their food likely ate? Yeah, well, nice to be here, Nate. Thanks for having us. And And as far as that question goes, for listeners and viewers, it all depends. What is in your food, maybe that you had for breakfast or lunch or dinner, that all depends on the practices that the farmers used to raise those, grow those crops and raise animals. And what David and I uncovered in the latest book is that all of this gets kicked off by this. series of relationships that are nested in the soil.

And so as a biologist, I'm really interested in all of this soil life and in their interactions with one another as a community. So there's a ton of research out there that goes back decades and some of it is also very recent. And kind of the bottom line on all that research. Nate, is that the organisms that are indigenous to the soil that live in the soil play a huge role in how crops take up mineral elements is one example. And so David had been talking about the importance of erosion and, you know, we need to get zinc out of rocks and iron out of rocks

and so on. And it's the microorganisms in the soil that help shuttle those mineral nutrients out of these broken up rocks into the roots of a plant. And then from there, the plant can take over and send that zinc or iron or whatever the mineral is to wherever it needs to go. How do they shuttle the minerals from the rocks to the plants? Well, there's some very helpful fungi that primarily. participate in this process. The large group, there's different groups of fungi. Those that are

the transporters, sort of David and I call them the truckers and the miners of this mineral world in the soil. They are mycorrhizal fungi. So these are not the kind of fungi that are breaking down organic matter. They have these long thread-like structures that are a part of their fungal bodies that run all throughout the soil, in a healthy soil, I should say. And it is through those fungal hyphi that iron, zinc, phosphorus, even other kinds of compounds of, you know, for which we don't have a full and complete list, they're running back, they're running from some distant location in the soil through these heifie all the way to the roots of the plant. So you can sort of think like once, once these microisal fungi

enter the root zone of a plant, it's sort of like the doorstep, you know, they've kind of knocked on the door and let the plant know, hey, I got that stuff. And there's symbiotic relationships. So these are relationships that benefit plant and microbe alike, because fungi aren't doing this for free. They are getting nutrition that their bodies need from the plant when they drop the goods off at the doorstep. So zinc, iron, phosphorus, other compounds get dropped off. The plant has been manufacturing an array of sugars, proteins, fats, and that picnic basket of goods is left at the doorstep doorstep for the mycorrhizal fungi to take up. So this exchange is going on just ceaselessly and endlessly in the soil.

And so that's how at least the microbial world is interacting with our crops to suffuse them with nutrients. How long have we known this, what you just described? Well, in the book we write a bit about some of the early organic agriculture pioneers in the UK. So this is Sir Albert Howard and Eve Balfour. Now, back at that time, of course, they didn't have, you know, all this DNA analysis and super-duper microscopes, but they were some very observant farmers. And they could see that when they increased organic matter on the fields, that their crops would do better. When they paid closer attention to how they were grazing their animals and what those plant communities,

what kind of condition the plant communities were in that the animals were eating, that animal health was better. And so they surmised that organic matter played a role in this. And Balfour and Howard in particular thought that the key lay with fungi. They didn't know about microasal fungi. They knew fungi, you know, decomposed things. So, you know, at least, you know, I want to say, you know, for the last 50 or 100 years, people have been thinking about these kinds of relationships.

And it probably goes back a lot further because you start to look into people like Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch, the French and German microbiologists, respectively. So these were the folks that were on pathogens and human disease. And so they knew the microbial world was capable of a lot from fermentation, to disease. So it's not like you can pinpoint one time to say, aha, we didn't know anything, but then overnight we knew. It's been a process, you know, like all of science, things sort of accrete and accumulate,

and the picture becomes clearer about what is happening. And this is certainly the story with respect to soil health and its role in agriculture. So I want to let you finish giving an overview of your book. But as usual, when I am really interested in a topic, I come up with like 10 intervening questions. So what you're kind of describing is I've read a lot about the human gut microbiome, which we can talk about and how important that is. But it sounds like the soil in my backyard also has a microbiome, which is changing depending on what I do or don't

do, et cetera. Is that an apt analogy? Yes. That's a totally apt analogy. What we know about microbiomes in the human gut, in the soil, in the whale, in the cow, wherever these microbiomes are, they have co-evolved with their host organisms. So normally we think of co-evolution, or maybe that's, you know, maybe a better way to say that is pollinators and flowers are one of the most common ways that we think, oh, look at that, the hummingbird beak slipping down into that tubular shaped throat of a flower to get food. That's co-evolution. What we know about microbiomes and their host organisms is that they are just as co-evolved and that these co-evolutionary relations,

relationships go back a very long time. I mean, for example, with the human microbiome, if we didn't have the microbes in our gut and on our skin and everywhere else that they are on and in us, we wouldn't be able to digest our food. Our health would not, we would not have a robust enough immune systems to survive for very long. So it's been going on a long time, Nate. And if these relationships, you know, evolution works in a way that if something's not working out, that relationship kind of dies off. And the relationship that organisms have with their microbiomes are constantly changing depending on the diet that say I eat or you eat or in the book, we kind of refer to the soil as having a diet. And so that diet for the soil, that can either be things like a lot of synthetic inputs, nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, or the three big fertilizers, or it can be a diet of organic matter.

And when the diet is organic matter, there's not only that nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium coming through to the plant. there is a vast array of other compounds and molecules that are also made available to the plant. So the plant and its microbiome, we're communicating about, you know, the plant needs more of compound X. The microbiome hears that, so to speak. There's a lot of chemical signaling going on. Can fetch that. You know, we call these fungi, we call them the fetching fungi. certain bacteria, I call them nitrogen nabbers.

So these microbes are acquiring things, delivering them. And then as I had described before, they're getting these compounds from the plant. These compounds have a great name, Nate. They're called exudates, right? Just think exuding, flowing out of the plant into the microbe. So that's kind of an overview of how some of these basic mechanisms work. and when you begin to study this and go more deeply into it, it becomes quite apparent why ag practices affect these relationships.

You have tillage and plows and various farm implements and even gardening tools for that matter. And they're slicing and dicing up the soil physically, or a lot of chemical inputs are scrambling the words and the language and the conversation. and it becomes very difficult for a host to communicate robustly, accurately, and to the benefit of both itself and its microbiome, if communication is messed up.

I have so many questions. So let's just use rough ballpark. The majority of our food in the grocery stores in the United States, we can focus on the U.S. or North America for now. is was produced somewhere for industrial agricultural system. Yes, there are farmers markets and there's some niche systems where we're doing things more no-till, more locally grown, etc. But so you could make a case that what our food ate

mostly is nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium without all of these other actors in the mix, right? Yes. I'm afraid to say yes. And just, and what does that mean for their role in exuding nutrients to us and passing, leaving nutrients at our doorstep in the food? What are we lacking? Yeah. As a on account of this. Yeah.

So plants are not just these sort of brainless sitting ducks out there in the soil. When they are given, you know, piles and piles of synthetic inputs, they, they respond by, well, let's see, I've got this particular, and nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium, they are the sort of the, you can think of them as the macronutrients that are needed for plant growth, somewhat of the equivalent of, you know, proteins, fats, and carbohydrates in the human diet. those are the three things we need, the macronutrients. Plants get the NP and K, and they're like, wow, let's see, I could put more energy into growth, you know, big leaves, big fruit, big vegetables. But in order to do that, I'm going to cut back on my exudates because I've gotten all this nitrogen from this other source. I don't really need to make exudates. I can put the energy I would have put into making exudates into bigger plants.

bigger growth. So when a plant starts making these exchanges, sort of these trade, they're really sort of tradeoffs, making fewer exudates to be able to take advantage of the big pile of nutrients right in front of them, it shorts the soil microbiome of nutrients and of the things that it needs. So what these fetching fungi do and the nitrogen nabbers do and these whole communities of microorganisms, they kind of get starved. They're malnourished when crops are primarily fed a diet of N-P-N-K because the plant's not providing as much in the way of exudates. And what this means then is with these microorganisms being malnourished and lower in numbers and community structure is perturbed, the plant's not getting all of these other compounds that are also important for its health.

In the case of the botanical world, there's a certain thing to think about here, and that is that plants we know themselves make a huge variety of what are called phytochemicals. So all that means is plant-made chemical. It's everything from, say, beta-carotin to in our squashes, antithycinins in our, berries. There are thousands, if not tens of thousands of phytochemicals. This is how plants survive their sitting duck kind of lifestyle. Insect herbivores, mammalian herbivores, come at these plants. They consume a little bit of it in a robust, healthy plant that is having a great conversation with its microbiome. The microbiome can help the plant interpret signals for making more

phytochemicals that push back on pathogens, that push back on herbivores. And these phytochemicals that are important for plant health, they are in our diet. But these crops need to have, you know, a certain level of challenge, if you will. Like, we don't want couch potato crops. Okay, that's really bad. It's bad because they then don't have a good defensive system. And that defensive system in part consists of a lot of phytochemicals and they benefit our health as well. Speaking about co-evolution, this is almost human-based selection that we are having plant biologists and plant breeders working for big corporations that are optimizing for plant growth and yield, which indirectly is causing a shrinkage, of these micronutrients, these phytochemicals you're referring to. But it's still, they're succeeding because if there's enough NPK, we get the plant growth, but the micronutrients are maybe missing.

And can you give us some data on the micronutrients missing in the average diet and why that's important? And is that what I just described? Is that what's happening? Yeah, that pretty much is what is happening. Although there's a, there's a, there's a, couple other things to consider here. So when we breed for yield and when we we breed crops in which their sort of genomic expression is really matched up with acquisition of NP and K, it's a really different kind of a crop than one that has a genome that is more geared toward communication with soil life and the microbiome. And when you have that, you can grow a lot of that particular plant, but it comes at a cost.

First of all, you've got to buy all these inputs, the actual nutrients. What it also means is that the plant, if it's making, if it's putting more of its energy into growth and not so much into phytochemicals, somehow you have to compensate for the defensive function of all of those phytochemicals in a plant if you've skewed it toward yield. And the compensation for all those defensive phytochemicals is pesticides. So you have sort of two really big groups of inputs in ag. You have the stuff that makes plants grow, crops grow, and then you have the inputs that are necessary to compensate for plant defense against pathogens and herbivores. So you, there's something

called a dilution effect. You grow all of this biomass on a plant, a bigger potato, a bigger corn cob, a bigger bean, whatever it is. And because the plant has put so much energy into, you know, growing its macronutrients, it tends to have less in the way of phytochemical diversity and phytochemical abundance. So that's kind of the basic problem with a practice of growing our crops heavy on inputs, the growth ones and the pesticides that compensate for defense. The other thing about that is plants are not having as robust a conversation with their microbiome, say these fetching fungi.

The fungi are sort of, you know, you can maybe picture them a little bit. they're a little bit lost themselves in the soil if they're not communicating with their plant. And if there's not a call for zinc or iron, which are, you know, two really important micronutrients, then that, the levels of those micronutrients and others, you know, manganese, selenium, boron, these micronutrients are really a good example of something that you need a little bit in the human diet, but that little bit has an, outsized effect on the health of the person, the plant, or the animal. And so that's why these, that's why it's thought that you're skewing crop growth toward yield, and that is having an

effect on micronutrient phytochemical. And as we write about in the book, there's a few other important compounds that are either making their way into the plant body or not as a result of agricultural practices. So the soil story that you two are unpacking here is in many ways a microcosm of our economic system is that our macroeconomic system is focused on GDP and profits, but we're really not looking at the micro well-being of our citizenry and, you know, our health and our security. And it's all focused on the bling and the high-level shopping. shopping centers and GDP and things like that just came to mind. Question, do we have evidence that the average person has less zinc, manganese, selenium

versus 50, 70 years ago? Have we studied that? Yeah. We go over some research in the book that dates from some research. that was done in the UK that was looking at average declines across a series of crops and also looking at animals. And that research was looking at, I can't recall exactly, looking at an array of micronutrients from iron was one of them because I remember the declines in iron in beef were quite high.

There was also calcium was in there. Dave, I don't know if that's on the top of your head, perhaps. Yeah, there was, this is a couple studies out of the UK looking at declines, historic declines in the mineral density in particular fruits and vegetables in the UK. And there were 25 to 50% kind of range losses. There were some that were even higher. There's been other studies in wheat, in particular in terms of iron and zinc, contents in wheat and zinc deficiency is actually a huge problem in the global south

in the areas where people have been dependent on green revolution varieties of wheat, for example. So there are studies that have looked at that. There have been fewer studies that have tried to actually connect that to direct human health outcomes. There's a lot of things in between sort of the health of the soil and the health of an individual person, let alone the health of the aggregate public health of a whole society. But so what we tried to do in what's your food ate is break it down into the little links sort of between how farming practices affect how micronutrients get into crops, how then they get from the crops into our bodies. And then in the medical literature, what do those

things, the antioxidants and anti-inflammatory compounds that phytochemicals become in our bodies or the roles they serve in our bodies, the medical literature is full of evidence that that's affecting human health. So when you put all those sort of little connections together from different disciplines, you can trace the path right from soil health to impacts on human health. But the number of studies that have tried to demonstrate it directly are fairly small. So we tried to court and try to bring all that info together. So I'll ask you to just speculate on this, but if someone is hungry and they eat a pizza or some nachos or something and then they're still hungry and they keep eating, is that possibly

because they got the macronutrients. They got the carbohydrates, the protein, and the fat. But in their diet, somehow like in the soil is missing these micronutrients that our bodies are craving somehow manganese or selenium or or something that we're missing. What do you think about that, either of you? It's not really speculation, Nate. There's a ton of research and evidence that. That's a good point.

Yeah, there's a ton of, there's a good deal of research and evidence out there that there are, just as I talked about all of this chemical signaling that goes on between a plant and its microbiome in the soil, that very thing is happening within our bodies. So you take in that pizza and, okay, you've met your sodium intake within about two bites. Okay, so the body is not hankering. for any more sodium. You probably get a pretty decent amount of fat, so don't really need any more fat. All the sausage and pepperoni, yeah, met the protein. So the body's not really hankering for that. But the body might be hankering for, let's say, let's say this was a type of pizza that didn't have

tomato sauce. So the body's like, well, I could really use some lycopene. That's one of the main phytochemicals in tomatoes. So this is all happening, I need to say, on an unconscious level, right? I mean, we joked about having voices in our head at the beginning of the show, but think about this. There are voices in our bodies that are at an unconscious level, so to speak, and they, our cells are communicating with our nervous system, with our brain to influence our behavior to keep reaching for pizza. Because we think that, wow, if I keep eating more pizza, somehow maybe down the road, be getting enough lycopene, enough manganese, enough of anthocyanins. And of course, you're never going to. All that's going to happen is you're going to keep taking in more calories, but the calories are not going to have the full complement of nutrients that the body is hankering and calling for. So using that logic, if I ate a pizza in this example and took a daily multivitamin, might I crave that third slice a little bit less, or do the multivitamins not

really solve the problem you're talking about? Now, the multivitamins don't solve that problem, in part because they're not coming. Those vitamins, were they embedded in the pizza somehow, like in the actual foods that the pizza is made of? Then that the body's hankering for, say, vitamin C or the suite of B vitamins or whatever, it might have been met, but sort of these things in isolation, it's just not how biology works. It's not really how an omnivorous diet works. So we're omnivorous. And part of the beauty of this flavor feedback system, I mean, that's what this is all called, Nate. It's these feedbacks between flavor. Our body takes that in and goes, oh, you know what, you're still missing, you know, X, Y, and Z, head out to the buffet and try again because you need

where, you know, the cells need more of this or that. So the multivitamin thing, unless there's, vitamins are great if there's an acute deficiency. This is what scurvy was all about. This was a sort of one-to-one core, you know, correspondence between vitamin C, here's scurvy. So then we thought, oh, well, maybe we can apply vitamins, other vitamins in that way, but it doesn't, not all vitamins work that way, nor do they work with human biology that way. But if you have an acute deficiency and you know exactly what it is, yeah, a vitamin could probably take care of that. So in your book, you wrote, one of you wrote, once we realize our bodies themselves are ecosystems, it changes how we consider health and wellness. Can you explain what you mean by that? So ecosystems are complicated places, whether in the ocean or the soil or a forest or a meadow. And when you, if you study biology, ecology, anything, you can go out there and you can try and study these bits of the ecosystem.

But sooner or later, you come away with the realization that it's not any one part of this ecosystem that, you can, you can try and study these bits of the ecosystem. that is really the takeaway. The upshot on ecosystems is it's all of the processes and the organisms and the players that are in relationship together that are really determining whether or not that ecosystem is functioning normally. And we don't need super function out of an ecosystem.

We just need normal function. Like the way, say, you know, a wetland can capture pollutants and help control erosion. And so the body ecosystem, we just need a normal omnivorous diet, free of, say, residues left over from conventional agriculture. We need our plant, animal foods to be suffused with the nutrients and compounds that crops need for robust growth, but also defensed. we need our animals to be on diets that suffuse them with a balance of fats and an array of other nutrients. So this is all normal, all of this flavor feedback between plant and soil, between

animal and plant communities that they're eating, you roll that up into the human diet, and our flavor feedback system is working normally on an omnivorous diet. So that's eating eating a lot of different foods. So this is going to be a six-hour podcast. I hope you guys don't have dinner plans. Let me ask you this. Have you, since you wrote these last two books, have you changed your own diets based on what you learned and researched and wrote about?

And what is your, do you grow any of your own food or do you shop at farmer's markets? Or can you speak to that briefly? Take it away, Dave. Yeah, we sort of changed our diet really as a result of the series of books in two steps. When we wrote The Hidden Half of Nature, which was the book that was looking at the relationship between microbiomes and their host organisms and laid out the parallel between what goes on around the roots of a plant, what goes on in the human gut, and sort of cast the root system of a plant as an external digestive system, that related to sort of, well, that reframed our thinking around seeing our bodies as an ecosystem. And that led us to think about, oh, how do we feed our microbiome? And we had thought that we had a really good diet.

But we were probably eating, you know, not enough plant matter, eating too much bread and cheese, which I love and still love, but don't eat quite as much of as anymore. So we essentially started trying to eat more with the idea that sort of, you know, filling half of a plate with greens or vegetables as a routine matter during dinner. Anne and I are omnivores as she mentioned will eat almost anything but we changed the proportions and the sourcing of what we were doing in that as a result of writing that book in terms of realizing that we're not just eating to feed ourselves but we're eating to support a microbiome that really wants all that fiber that my doctor was always telling me to eat and that I was wondering why you know that once you understand that that's what actually makes your microbiome healthy so it can help make you healthy I started. going, oh, it's kind of like, you know, when we have a dog, you need to feed the dog food that's appropriate for the dog. Well, your microbiome needs appropriate food for it as well. And so the care and feeding of that internal menagerie turned out to be something that's structured

how we thought about eating. And we also, in terms of thinking about knowing how farmers actually raised the food that gets into us, lettuce, and particularly Anne, to do more of our shopping at farmers markets where you could ask, well, what are you doing? What is the soil like on your farm? And so she has her favorite farmers that she likes to get stuff from the farmer's market. And then as a result of writing what your food ate, we took another sort of leap in changing because we started looking at what the diet of livestock matters, not only to sort of the energy costs of animal agriculture, but actually what gets into our food and the balance of fats in our meat and dairy products are very much dependent, it turns out,

on whether those animals were eating grain-derived feeds, things like, you know, corn-derived feeds, seed-oil-derived things, the kind of things they get in the feed lot. That tends to enrich meat and dairy with omega-6 fats, which, roughly speaking, are pro-inflammatory. And livestock that was eating dominantly or 100% grass-fed sources, sort of that pastured and not living in a feedlot, they tend to have meat and dairy products that are rich in omega-3 fats, which tend to be anti-inflammatory. Now, to be fair, you need both omega-6s and threes in your diets, but you don't want an overload of omega-6s, which is what we get with a diet full of seed oils and conventionally raised feedlot-fed livestock, whether you're eating

meat or dairy. So we went to buying 100% grass-fed meat and dairy where we can get it as well. And we did notice health benefits that flowed from all these dietary changes over a number of years. Of course, it doesn't help that we're getting older either, but we're sort of fighting an uphill battle here. You both look great. So I've had many guests on. I had Robert Lustig on recently about the ills of processed food. And so it sounds like what I'm hearing from you is there's at least a two-step process. One that I'm getting more comfortable with is to have more vegetables, more plants.

Broccoli, Dick Gephard is a friend of mine. He has intermittent fasting and he breaks his fast at 11 in the morning with vegetables in cold water that he has in his fridge like cauliflower, broccoli, radishes. And he's done it for years. And now he like really looks forward to it. That's hard for me. But I understand the logic of having a lot of roughage fiber plants. But you're suggesting there's a second.

step in addition to changing the proportion of you mentioned bread and cheese to more vegetables. The second step is finding out where those vegetables came from because at a normal grocery store, the broccoli and the cabbage and other things that I'm buying were made with, were grown with conventional agricultural processes. So the soil and the micronutrients might be different than what you said that Anne goes to the farmer's market and asks, what were the processes? of the soil. Am I right? There's two different steps. Yes, that's a very clean way to think about it. There's basically the choice of what you eat,

and then there's the choice of what your food ate, which is the whole point of the title of the new book, is to encourage people to think about that second step. Right, because say Dick Gepard's, radishes, cauliflower, and other things that he's eating to break that fast, he could eat all of those, quantities and those particular vegetables that he wants, but what if the farm that produced those has soil with, you know, inadequate levels of mycorrhizal fungi so that all the things that he thinks are in those vegetables are really not at the levels that, you know, are really good for his body. Okay. Okay. So this opens up a ton of question. So let's just say that everyone knew and everyone read your book and everyone understood this,

we don't have the amount of vegetables and fruits grown with the right micorazole relationships in the soil microbiome to serve that demand yet, correct? So there would be a scale problem. It's actually worse than that. We don't have enough fruits and vegetables grown in any way to actually provide the minimum daily recommendations in the for the human diet in the U.S.

We don't grow enough in this country to actually feed that. And that's before you get to the question of how they were grown. But your point is right. We do want to think about how they were grown and get more fruits and vegetables into our diets. But it's a real challenge for agriculture to meet with our focus on commodity crop production, focused primarily on grains. We need to diversify what we're encouraging. people to grow and you know farmers need to be able to sell what they raise so if we're thinking about

that we all ought to be thinking about you know taking steps to maybe diversify our diets a bit and your point about processed foods is a big one that we go into and what your food ate in some um some detail um but you know that in terms of the what would be the healthiest prescription for a modern diet in the way that anne i see it would be a diet that's rich in fruits and vegetables grown in soils from healthy fertile soils. So fresh whole foods grown in healthy fertile soils and livestock that have been actually grazing rather than eating corn-derived feedlot rations would be a very solid recommendation for healthy eating. So this is going very well.

I'm learning a lot. It's very interesting. I'm very confident. My listeners are also learning a lot. And now is the point where I'm to ask. you about agricultural regeneration practices, but before I do that, I'm going to go down a rabbit hole because I'm curious. So you've heard about like fecal transplants where someone is missing something and they like share the poop of someone in their family or something and it,

it injects something that affects the microbiome. It's why my coach from India says that we're supposed to commune with a lot of other people and chanting and cooking together because we indirectly share our microbiome and people living by themselves most of the time their their immune system starts to not function well because they're not sharing the microbiome of others. So question number one is how true is all that? Can we can we interact with others in our own microbiome? But my ultimate question is can we do the same with? soil, can I take a cubic yard of amazing, fertile, rich, live soil with mycorazole fungi and all the things you were talking about and dump it in a field that isn't poisoned or anything, but there's

very little, there's organic matter, but not a lot of life in it. And does that act like the soil equivalent of a fecal transplant or what can you say about all that? Yeah. Okay, I love it. You're picking up on the root, the root gut epiphany. And so, yeah, that's a good example. So we have this, you know, wonderful soil, chalk full of life, communities, microbial communities are functioning. And we've got some soil, you know, in a nearby field that's struggling. You know, we need to get it back up on its proverbial feet. So, yeah, you can inoculate, you can get a sample of this fantastic. soil, inoculate the other soil with it. And so it's sort of the equivalent of a little bit like probiotics. So we're taking one, it's a culturing process, right? So it's sort of like the way you leave vegetable, you might make sauerkraut. You leave it exposed to the air.

Microorganisms get in and they're being a culture thing. So you're moving it from one field to another. What's key here is you can't just do that and walk away. those organisms that are in the good soil that you've just transferred, they're used to a certain kind of lifestyle. And that lifestyle is one in which farming practices supply an abundance of organic matter, hopefully minimal chemical and physical disruption. And hopefully, you know, also that great soil came about in part because cash crops as well as cover crops were grown year-round, so exudates are flowing. So that microbial community that you've just transplanted, you've got to

feed it, and you've got to care for it. So that's how you can inoculate soil, but it's kind of like planting a tree. You don't just plant the tree and walk away. There's care and there's feeding. And it goes the same with fecal microbiota transplants in humans. Initially, research has shown that you can get rid of really nasty pathogens with a fecal microbiota transplant. But if you want the microbial community that you transplanted to stick around and continue providing those benefits, you've got to nurture and care for it. In other words, all life, no matter what, needs to be nourished, and that nourishment is related to sort of a specific diet given that organism,

you know, whether plant, animal, or person. Excellent. Thank you. Okay. So this has been a great intro. Now, moving on to the what to do about it part. can you explain the pillars, the three pillars of agricultural regeneration, which you cover in your book? Yeah, basically, after I wrote dirt, we were less sort of wondering, you know, can you actually rebuild fertile soils on active farms?

And we wrote a lot about our experience at our home garden, where Anne did that to our soils in the hidden half of nature, where we started thinking, about microbiomes and all these connections between microbiomes and host organisms and the parallels between the human body and plant roots and all that. And at the end of writing that book, we're left at the question of, well, how can we do this on real farms, on profitable farms around the world? And that led to writing Growing a Revolution, which set the foundation for what your food ate by looking at what are the practices that farmers who had done to their farms, what Anne did to our yard who had taken degraded thoroughly worn out soils and brought them back to a high

state of fertility, mostly by reintroducing biology along the lines of either inoculation but dominantly practice change. So I visited farmers in Ghana and Central America and across North America who had already done that and basically asked the question of, well, what did they do and what were the commonalities. And it turns out that the common elements across all those farms were that they were minimizing disturbance of the soil. So they were either going no-till or very minimal tillage and minimizing chemical disturbance. So minimizing the physical and chemical disturbance, they don't disturb the life, in other words. They were planting cover crops, keeping living roots in the soil at all times to help promote that exudate production, but also to shut

down erosion because a shield of plants is the best way to fence against erosion. And they were also growing a diversity of crops. They weren't just growing one or two crops. So they weren't doing monocultures. And some of them had very diverse fields. Some of them had kind of sort of diverse fields, but none of them had monocultures that were just growing one or two crops. What does the diverse crop contribute to the biology that Anne was talking about earlier

as opposed to a monocrop? So what happens when you have a diversity of plants in a field? is that that soil is receiving a diversity of exudates, a diversity of those compounds that plants are leaking into the soil to help recruit their microbial partners. And the trick is that each plant will be releasing a different exudate cocktail. So you get a very diverse set of exudates, which recruits a diverse set of microbes,

which if you think about a, like a baseball team, if everybody on the baseball team was a catcher, you'd never make the World Series, right? There's an advantage to having specializations when you work in teams, and microbiomecology is pretty much a team sport. Pathogens tend to be sort of single organisms that do single things. The beneficial organisms tend to work in communities. And so you can think of them as a team, and a team needs different players to play different positions, to provide different functionality. And that's what the diversity gets you.

So the minimal disturbance is kind of like, you know, you're not disturbing their house. the cover crops is you're helping to build organic matter to feed them. So you've got food and housing. The third piece is partners and collaborators. And that's how you can get a very effective and diverse community of soil life through those three principles of minimal disturbance, cover crops, and diversity. But those three principles happen to be pretty much the opposite of what we've taught in modern agronomy for almost 100 years, where we've encouraged aggressive mechanized tillage as a routine operation. We've encouraged the over-endarmine. application of synthetic, of agrochemicals for both plant nutrition and plant defense as opposed to

relying on their natural defense systems or helping to support their natural defense systems. And we've been growing things in monocultures or functional monocultures of things like a corn, soybean rotation, a two crop rotation, which is an invitation for pests to come into the fields as well. So it's a very different, these three pillars are a very different way of thinking about how to treat the land in the active farming. And many people involved in regenerative farming would offer up a fourth pillar as well in terms of reintegrating animal husbandry into cropping operations. And you can think of animals in that sense as something that can help to process the crops double by consuming it

and turning it into manure and returning that manure to the land. And it's not just the nutrients that are returned, but a cow is also actually an inoculator. I mean, their manure is full of microbes from the rumen that can then make it into the soil. So there's a number of connections all rooted in how you would cultivate, if you will, the beneficial life in the soil is by feeding them, housing them, giving them a community to work with, maybe giving them the accelerant of a faster organic matter breakdown through livestock on the land. And so regenerative farming systems employ all three of those components. And the three major pillars that you identified are really the foundation for what the UN calls conservation agriculture. It's a system of farming that depends on doing all three,

no-till, cover crops, and diversity. And there's very few studies that have looked at how all three combinations, all three of those principles work in combination, but those studies that have looked at that find big effects from the combination, much bigger effects than if you just went to or if you just rotated your crops or if you just planted cover crops. There's a lot of synergy that comes through this new system and it's all through cultivating the life in the soil as an ecological system. It's a radically different way of thinking about the soil as the foundation for farming. So I seriously have a lot more questions. I don't know how you guys are doing for time, but let's just keep going and just flag me if you have to stop. But,

this is clearly going to probably be a two-part thing. I'll have you back later. Let me ask you about no-till. So a couple of years ago, I stopped with the land we have back here with the corn, soybean, and now we're putting barley grass with bees and stuff. And it's, it's, it's no-till. So people that are vegetarian and they just choose to eat wheat and grains and things, the industrial practice is every year you get those big combines and those machines and they till up the soil. Clearly that's killing worms when it's all dug up. But is that disrupting the soil? Is that also killing the homes of all these tiny little myceliums and micro critters that are helping the plant? And then they have to start all over until next March it's tilled up again. And this cycle is just

not ever giving them a chance to build a stable home? Pretty much, yeah, that's what's going on. And it, the effects and the impacts of that vary, and it varies, and it varies with crops. With an annual crop, like, say, you know, a cereal grain, it's probably not as bad as if you're doing those kinds of practices running through a vineyard, right? The grapes are a perennial crop or an apple orchard, right? You've got these trees with root systems all over the place. And you can't just go slicing up those root systems.

That's going to be pretty bad for the plant. So, I mean, if you're going to do that kind of a practice, it's better to do it with annual crops and perennial. But that said, what it also means is that you're starting out every growing season, with this huge disruptive event. And that sets the microbiome communities off in a different trajectory. I would say organic farmers,

the very best ones that are really on top of their organic matter management and how much they're applying and in what form, they've been able to kind of thread their way through this tillage problem because organic farmers till a lot because it's for weed control. purposes.

And they manage to have, like I said, it's our very best organic farmers. It's not all of them. They manage to do okay on soil health. But it's only because they are paying a lot of attention to how they're preserving to the extent they can and constantly adding organic matters so that the microbial communities that are left after the tillage. have the best possible chance of reproducing, getting those numbers back up and getting that conversation going right away with their crop partners. You fall down on the organic matter,

and organic can become an industrial level process. So where does this organic matter that these farmers, that you just said, the best organic farmers, are adding, where does that come from. Yeah, that comes from organic farmers that are using animals as a part of their cropping system. So Dave had mentioned before

you know, you get a ruminant animal. So that's cows, goats, and sheep are ruminants. They are basically walking compost heaps. Now, as a gardener, that is what I want. You know, you can have these big

windrows. This is a big long pile of compost and you're turning it with your tractor and you're providing all that material and I mean that's a job in and of itself for anybody who's done that what's you know vastly better than that in terms of energy inputs and convenience and your time and your labor is to have walking compost heaps that are dropping compost out of their back ends onto your fields which is right where you want to get all of this stuff so that's one source of organic matter. Another is cover crops.

Those are, these are exudates. Exidates are carbon and other compounds, and that's a form of, it's a form of organic matter. It's different than obviously animal manure. So that is another source. And then also just leaving mulches and residues of dead plant parts on top of the soil

as a mulch, that's another way that organic farmers and conventional farmers, some of them, will return organic matter to the soil. So on the scale question, something I worry about is our current industrialized system is a 10 to 14 to 1, depending on the boundaries, energy sink, that we use 10 to 14 fossil calories, to deliver one food calorie to our plate. A lot of that is, like you said, it's the pesticides, it's the nitrogen fertilizers, the ammonia, et cetera. So what is not often spoken about,

and I looked this up and got the reference from a guy named David Montgomery, is that there's a decline of around 20 to 60% loss in the organic content in global soils, something like that. And so there's a double-edged sword here, right? There's the risks in the future of having less fossil fuel inputs as oil declines. But then it's like the heroin addict needs another fix. Our soils are having less living systems in them. And the organic matter has been cut in half or a third from where it used to be.

and we're going to have less inputs. So isn't that a huge risk? And how do we get ahead of that for those people working in agriculture? Yeah, no, that is a huge risk as we're basically, if you imagine a post-oil agricultural future, we're going to have to figure out how to get along with far less use of things like synthetic nitrogen fertilizers that are very energy intensive to produce. but we're going to have to do it and maintain agriculture in a system that doesn't have all those things. So we need to basically figure out how to generate a very intensive agriculture capable of high yields in a way that doesn't degrade the ability of the soil to actually maintain those yields without fossil fuel inputs.

And that's the real challenge in a nutshell. And the same kind of things you would do to rebuild soil organic matter, the farming practices that would do that sort of help to fix all those problems, right? Because they will use fewer, will be less reliance on fossil fuels, but will also

encourage and enhance our ability to grow large amounts of crops without that reliance. And so if we make, the longer we maintain conventional agriculture in degrading soil organic matter, we're just digging the whole deeper that we're going to have to figure out how to get out of. Now,

the good news is I think that we do have methods in terms of regenerative agriculture that could supplant conventional methods today. And we've got a few decades to manage that transition, but we don't have a few centuries to do it. We need to do it this century. And so, you know, our interests in helping to combat and mitigate the climate issue really line up with our interests in being able to maintain the fertility of our soils because they both argue that we need to transition towards this more new, this more regenerative style of agriculture that is less fossil fuel dependent and can rebuild the organic matter content of our soils.

So like many areas in society, this discourse seems to be polarized. There's like two interest groups in agriculture with diametrically opposed views on what the right thing to do working on food systems. On the one hand, you have folks doubling down on very modern, very tech intensive more mechanized systems with the Gates Foundation is promoting in Africa for yields, you know, efficiency, etc. On the other hand, you have permaculture, agroecology people, many other names working on this, pushing for more diverse cropping systems, replacing external inputs and embracing but also updating traditional systems.

Do I have this right? And what is your take on which approach should be pursued and how do we steer that conversation. I think you're right in terms of casting the conversation is usually pitched around those two end-member views, but I think it's the wrong way to look at it. I think the right way to look at it would be towards reorienting agriculture, towards soil health building practices, and those are technology agnostic, right? There's technological solutions that can help with that process, but there's also an awful lot of what I like to call ancient wisdom in terms of the ideas of cover crops, crop rotations.

Those are not new ideas. These are simple practices that many traditional societies around the world embraced because it helped them sustain the fertility of their land, even in the cases of societies that were plowing the hell out of it like I wrote about in dirt. I mean, the Romans were all about like manure and returning organic matter to the land, but they plowed eight or nine times a year. They really went overboard on the tillage. So where I think sort of the future of agriculture ought to lie would be on merging modern technology with ancient wisdom. But what I mean by modern technology are things like no-till planters. John Deer has this amazing technology to help farmers plant no-till.

But it needs to be coupled with the wisdom of doing cover crops and crop rotations and adopting a fairly different system of agriculture. So I tend to view it that the over-reliance of thinking on one or the other ends of those, of that currently polarized spectrum is sort of missing the bigger point that we ought to unite them around where the technology that we do embrace in agriculture going forward needs to be oriented towards building soil health. And if it's not, then it's probably inappropriate technology for sustainable agriculture. And yeah, yeah. I mean, that's essentially the way I look at it. And I mean, what's ironic to me, Nate, about

Some of the things that are going on and what you had mentioned as being sort of tech-intensive visions for the future of agriculture, it is ironic and just completely befuddles me as to why some of these ideas don't really even consider the soil. because sure there's some things you can grow hydroponically but that's not going to be the majority of how we produce our food in the future. It is going to be soil-based agriculture and so technologies that sort of don't support or do research in or trial and do demonstration farms on things like we've been talking about whether that is this idea of, inoculating soil with beneficial microbes and then nourishing that in a soil that's maybe depoporate or lacking those things. If we're not doing research on this vast world of plant communication with the soil microbiome, as well as flavor feedback processes that are happening between animals and the kinds of plants that are available to them in a pasture,

technology and science and research that doesn't sort of merge these two things and be asking questions about what technology is relevant to the biology that is inherent and innate in soil, plants, animals, and people is a technology that we need to push off to the sidelines. That kind of technology is not helping us. On the other hand, the more we dovetail with how our bodies work, plant bodies, animal bodies, the soil body, then we're going to get to a vision and a future in agriculture that will be, I would call a wisdom-based vision instead of a, you know, intelligence, increasingly artificial intelligence-based kind of a system. So I have on that note, I have one more content question,

and then if you have a few more minutes, I know David has a PhD defense coming up. I have some personal questions to wrap up. But yes, this is yet another example of intelligence being bound by wisdom. But how can we shift the system if our entire economic system is based on a single goal, which is monetary profits, when from a sustainability standpoint, from a propelling, human futures for centuries and millennia to come, soil and soil health, as David has pointed out many times, is going to be one of our most important variables. How do we, as a culture, start to bump that up the priority list when all we care about is dollars? Is there a way?

Yeah, because it's like the economy as a whole suffer similar problems. We live on a finite planet, So infinite growth is an impossibility, right? And the basic problem behind economics. So what do you do? You basically put sideboards on things. So when you look at things in terms of if you're dealing with the market economy, you think about people's monetary incentives that they will be sort of attuned to as they go through life. And so in dealing with farming, you're talking about, you know,

how are our agricultural subsidies arrayed? You know, are we rewarding farmers for doing the right things by their soil or are we subsidizing them for doing the wrong things by their soil, which in fact we are doing today? So we can think about, you know, it's our regulations, incentives. We could think about opportunities for essentially trying to reward farmers for putting carbon back into the ground. I think there's actually real opportunities for political alliances between urban dwellers who are very concerned about the climate issues and rural residents who are struggling to make a living on farms where it's, hard today because farmers are caught between high input prices and low commodity prices that they get for their crops. They're kind of in an economic squeeze play. There's a lot of policy initiatives

that could help to try and reframe the incentives that both consumers have and also in terms of what farmers face. And one of the biggest things that we're kind of missing is, again, one of the big points that Anline made and what your food ate is that when we think about agricultural policy, if we track that all the way through to how we raise our food influences our health on individual levels and then integrate that to a societal level, we look at our health care costs in the U.S. today where seven out of ten of us suffer from some type of chronic illness. One of the biggest levers we have for undoing those costs and the human suffering that is entailed for them is changing our diets and the way that we raise our food, that our

agricultural policy really is health policy when we think of it in a broader framework. So that's one way to start thinking about how to reframe that. And one of the things I was very encouraged by in the research for the last two books is it looks like some of the economic incentives for farmers are starting to line up with the ecological incentives for our society in terms of these regenerative practices actually being more profitable for farmers today, even without restructuring many of our incentives. subsidies. That's a positive sign forward, but you know, it could use a little more support in the policy arena. Excellent. I'm just super passionate about this topic and I want to learn more and

you two are fonts of wisdom and intelligence. So I'm going to have to have you back. But as is my habit, I end these interviews with some personal questions. Maybe you could each give brief answers. Because I know you have to run. More broadly beyond your four books and your career choice, do you have any personal recommendations just as a human being alive at these times to the listeners of this program who are aware of our food, climate, economic, geopolitical predicament? these topics can be really um we if we drench ourselves in the hopelessness that too often i think comes along with conversations and discussions like this you it's not good for us it makes us it makes

us feel well hopeless so i'm always for at least once a day getting outside and finding some moment of wonder or awe out there because I find that it all of a sudden my thinking can turn and I instead of dwelling on so much of the negative stuff I can start to see a little bit of blue sky and where we might go with solutions and some of the policy stuff that Dave was talking about. I kind of, I think it's really important to get back to, I don't really know, it's a bit of a reset. It's a bit of like, we got to clear the doom and gloom out if we actually are going to pursue some of these other things that really need to happen in terms of setting up framework, policy, lifestyle, lives, societies, built environments and all of that. You've got to get to the right headspace to begin thinking about that. And we were recently on, I can't remember the event, but it was too much about the negativity and, you know, the crises that we're in.

Because they, these are solvable. We have, we have intelligence and wisdom to solve, to solve the climate thing, the food thing, the oil thing. It's just that we, you know, are locked in political. and economic systems that are like sort of this ball and chain on us. So I'm all in favor of at least once a day get, get outside and find some awe and wonder. I mean, you can reset in as little as a five-minute walk, I mean, depending on where you are. Springtime is a great, a great time a year to do that too, because spring is about renewal. And it, you know, at least in our neighbor, right now and being a person enthralled with botanical world, I can't wait to get out and

what's changed out there today? Oh my gosh, this thing is now out and it's singing its song. And I love that. And it makes me feel fresh and ready to approach. How are we going to solve these other problems then? I love that too. I incorporate that in my life. What you were just saying, the challenges that most people are ecologically and energetically unaware of these. things, so we still have to do the education, but a lot of people like yourselves are already aware of that and you're rolling your sleeves up working on, okay, how are we going to respond to this? David, how would you answer that question? Well, you know, in a kind of similar fashion, I would say that, yeah, I run into a lot of what I would

call climate despair or climate anxiety among undergraduates on campus these days. and I advise people, you know, don't give into it. Instead, channel your energy towards actually fighting to change the system and to produce positive change in directions. There's a lot of really interesting and innovative things going on that are just starting to get off the ground. That could help with many of these things. And, you know, dedicating one's time to furthering those is a very worthwhile proposition. giving in to climate despair is a recipe for inaction and not changing the status quo. So basically, keep fighting is one way to think about it.

What do you care most about in the world briefly? You can each answer. That's a hard question. I think for me, it just sort of stems from my background in biology and in the world of gardening and everything. And one thing that's super important to me is that we we hang on to the intact ecosystems, the intact and functioning ecosystems that we still have. And the reason I think that's so important is that that is how nature is supposed to work. And when we chip away and and start to be, you know, unravel those things. We lose, talk about losing wisdom and losing

knowledge and losing intelligence. That is what I don't want to lose any more of. Because so far, Nate, you know, every time in all of this research and writing, the more you get into how plants are communicating with soil, animals with their diet, it's so, it's a, it's a complicated as it is clear to me that when things are normal, things are right in an ecosystem. That is how the world and nature works. And we need to hitch ourselves to that if we want to continue, you know, persisting on this planet. So I'm all about understanding that stuff and then taking care of it, taking care of it. David?

Yeah, well, this may sound corny, but I'll kind of endorse what my wife just said. You know, I think that in the big, the very big picture of things, what I care the most about is that we don't degrade this amazing gift that we have of this planet that we live on and the natural abundance that we've essentially inherited from geologic time. We've risen to dominance globally in terms of the globally dominant speed. species. And I don't want to see us lose what actually makes Earth incredibly unique and precious in the grand scheme of things for all we know. It's the one place that we know of with life. We inherited it with an amazing diversity of life. And we're living through what may be a very real bottleneck on that diversity and abundance of life. And I would like to see us do everything that we can to come through with as much nature intact on the far side as possible. And agriculture is at the center of those. arguments. Yeah. You both are my people in your sentiments. Last question, if you could wave a magical wand and there was no recourse personally to you or your status, what is one single thing that you

would do to improve human and planetary futures? Well, I'll go first on this one. I would wave my magic wand and make regenerative agriculture the new conventional agriculture in the sense that everybody was doing it. And I second that, and I think I have a few things, Nate. Can she wave the wand a few times? Okay, first wave is let's tackle poverty. Let's tackle poverty through educating girls and women everywhere, because when everybody does better,

the entire global population can do better. And I would stop all wars. And those are my two big wand waves. Education for girls and women and stop the violence and war where it's occurring. Those are big wishes. I agree with you on that. Are you guys working on another book by any chance?

We are just a, about through the oh my god i'll never write another book phase of book writing so if you were to come back yeah if you were to come back uh and i i did a poor job of of covering uh all the questions that i planned on asking you just because i'm i'm a kid in a candy store with two people like you but what is one topic that you would like to take a really deep dive on that is very relevant to human futures. Could be super esoteric academic topic. Do you have brief ideas on that? Well, I always like talking about microbiomes in the soil and the human body. And in part, you know, I say this a lot in public talks, but, you know, long before agrochemicals

and pharmaceuticals, we had what we ate, where we lived, and our microbiome. and that's taken us far as a species. That's been 99, if not more percent of life as a human. So I like to think about the implications of that, where we are now, and why we may want to be thinking about diets for the soil and diets for people. Excellent. David? Yeah, you know, I would be happy to have a longer conversation about the feasibility of some of these regenerative agricultural

practices and sort of how it is they can be scaled up, some of the other ancillary benefits that flow from them, and the experiences of farmers in different parts of the world, because there's no magic bullet in terms of regenerative farming. So there's a lot of arguments say about what it is, what it means, how to define it. And I tend to subscribe to the view that it's farming practices that build soil health through intensive farming. And the experience of farmers around the world are really different in terms of how you might achieve that. So it would be actually fun to talk about, you know, the many flavors of a regenerative agriculture.

What is the future and what's the prognosis for the future of agriculture? Can we get through some of the roadblocks that people like the people who sell nitrogen fertilizers are undoubtedly going to start throwing in the way? Excellent. Thank you both so much for your time and for your work. And I expect you're both going to be very busy in the coming decade as more people. take off their soil blinders and look at how everything is connected on the ecosystems in our fields and in our bodies. So thank you both. Oh, thank you, Nate. It's a pleasure talking to you. Thank you, Nate.

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