The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens - Jason Bradford: "A Hybrid Path to the Future of Farming"

Episode Date: June 22, 2022

On this episode, Jason Bradford, who is an author, activist, farmer, and teacher, talks about the energy intensity of our modern industrial agriculture system.  How do we feed billions of people with depleting energy systems? How do we also protect existing biodiversity and ecosystem health? We also discuss what makes for healthy soil, why we're losing it, and how small farms can help get it back - while creating higher yields of healthier foods for fewer inputs.  About Jason Bradford: Jason Bradford has been affiliated with Post Carbon Institute since 2004, first as a Fellow and then as Board President. He grew up in the Bay Area of California and graduated from U.C. Davis with a B.S. in biology before earning his doctorate from Washington University in St. Louis, where he also taught ecology for a few years. After graduate school he worked for the Center for Conservation and Sustainable Development at the Missouri Botanical Garden, was a Visiting Scholar at U.C. Davis, and during that period co-founded the Andes Biodiversity and Ecosystem Research Group (ABERG). He decided to shift from academia to learn more about and practice sustainable agriculture, and in the process, completed six months of training with Ecology Action (aka GrowBiointensive) in Willits, California, and then founded Brookside School Farm. For Show Notes and Transcript visit: https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/episode/24-jason-bradford

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. Today's guest, Jason Bradford, has been a friend of mine for almost 20 years. Jason is a conservation biologist turned organic farmer. He's been involved with a post-carbon institute from the start, co-founded Farmland LP, and has run various CSAs, including one currently in Corvallis, Oregon.

Jason and I dive into the relationship between energy and agriculture and the various tradeoffs between monetary efficiency and food yields. We discuss how the future living arrangements are likely much more rural, with a higher fraction of our population working on the land. This was a wide-ranging and at times emotional discussion. I hope you learn some things about how the future of agriculture will likely be different, perhaps very different than our recent past. Here's my good friend, Jason Bradford.

So, Jason, you and I have been doing conversations for a long time. I tried to find online. I was on your podcast like 15, 17, 20 years ago when I was starting my PhD. It wasn't a podcast. What was it? It was a radio show. Well, it was actually a live radio show that ended up getting, you know, put on MP3 and you could go download it if you wanted to or listen. But it was never in a podcast format.

But you were interviewing me. We talked a lot about all these things, about the evolutionary hijacking of our neurotransmitters in a growth economy, about oil depletion, about agriculture, about climate change. So here we are. So I know you quite well. We've been friends for a long time, but my listeners don't know you. Can you tell a little bit about what you do now and the path that brought you to this point? Sure.

Yeah. Well, as you kind of tell from my introduction, I'm a farmer now, pretty small farmer. I'm managing about seven acres that I kind of rotate around into different crops, a lot of vegetables, and for a subscription service, a CSA, and some seed crops for, like, you know, companies that might sell you vegetable seed. So I'm the guy that might grow the seed that gets put in these little packets, organic seeds. But my family has a property that I farm on, but it's a lot bigger than I've farmed. So I also managed kind of the property and we have other people working on the land.

So it's kind of fun because I've got other people out here farming and we're sharing this larger acreage. And we collaborate a lot. So I think it's a neat model. And I didn't really think I'd be a farmer. I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area and got a PhD in evolution and population biology was this super into tropical cloud forests and their diversity and their ecology. and got very concerned about conservation of those. I was really fortunate that I had a girlfriend in college. Kristen, I met in zoology class.

We end up getting married and she's a physician. And so that's kind of allowed me to not be super ambitious in a career and to sort of follow what I thought needed to happen that was important. And she's sort of, you know, gone along with it, very supportive. You know, I've been really fortunate to be able to spend time. like this and not kind of in the rat race consistently. Been to some of those biodiverse places on Earth just awestruck by our planet. And part of what I then, you know, did is I was reading, I had this really interesting

research group when we were studying tropical forests in southern South America, though the Amazon basin hits the eastern slopes of the Andes. And then the forest goes up along the slopes of the Andes and it goes into these montane regions that are like grasslands and stuff. So above tree line and then there are glaciers. And just imagine how much richness there is in a short space with time or an area, I mean, the distance you can travel.

I could walk from 4,000 meters of elevation down to 1,500 meters elevation on these old Incan trails. And so we set up these research plots. And the idea was, well, how's these ecosystems that are so diverse going to change as the temperature regimes shifts and rainfall patterns may shift. So I was looking into that and trying to think, okay, well, let me read the IPCC reports. And that's when I kind of got really discouraged because it seemed that everything was so

tied into growth and techno fixes. And we just locked in. Like, even in these IPCC reports, it felt like here's what we're going to do. we're going to keep going and doing this and it's going to be bad. So that's how I kind of got into the stuff we talk about, about belief systems and culture and energy. So I decided to kind of drop out of academia and start farming. It's kind of an odd shift and got connected to Post-Carbon Institute back in 2004

and ended up then starting a business that was doing farming at larger scale and management. So I've had a real mix of academic. nonprofit, business, some local government stuff, and public outreach, such as what we're doing here in writing. And you had me write this report called The Future is Rural Food System Adaptations to the Great Simplification. I don't think I had you write the report. Well, you encouraged me.

Yeah, that might be better. You encouraged me over and over again. It was a great process. It's a good report. We'll put it in the show notes. The future is rural. Yeah. So anyway, that's my story.

Excellent. Well, since you and I have known each other for a long time and you are a particular expert in the field of agriculture, I am going to do a speed round with you on some concepts that I think some of our listeners know, but maybe others don't. What is the term net energy positive? Okay. Well, yeah, so it's probably the biological systems. You can think about it related to, of course, exploration for energy, right? And a lot of the models that you actually have for energy, you know, fossil fuel exploration and discovery and development actually apply the same math as biologists would with called optimal foraging theory. And you can think of this is like the low-hanging fruit principle as well, right?

You're going to go after the stuff that is you can just sort of reach up and grab. Now, let's play it to like an animal system. We're omnivores like raccoons are omnivores. So we can eat a variety of stuff and we can go out and we can grab nuts and fruits. But if we're waking up, shaking off the cobwebs, and we're going to go out and we're going to go harvest something from the environment, we better spend a lot less energy harvesting than we get back in the food calories. So there has to be a positive return on your foraging and consumption.

So you can do everything else that is required, reproduce. heal, create social networks, play, whatever, you better not be spending all your time foraging. Some animals spend more time than others. So, for example, herbivores, like I've got some cattle and sheep over here, their heads are down eating a lot, and then they're sitting down there chewing their cud, and they spend more time. They don't have as dense of food as omnivores do like us. They're eating cellulose that makes more time to play.

process, but they still have to be net positive. Can I inject this question on the fly? What exactly is chewing the cud? So you'll see the animals sitting down, right, and they're still chewing and they're not, they're not grazing directly at the moment. What's happening is that these livestock will swallow grass and clover's and chickery or whatever the mixes that they're grazing. And they will go into one of their stomach chambers.

they have four stomachs, ruminants, and it will start to get digested a bit. But then they'll regurgitate that. And it's just wad of masticated, semi-digested material that they then chew some more and then reswallow. That was selected for somehow. Yeah, the idea is that walk around and look around the environment, most of what you see that's plant matter is not digestible by our gut. We need starches, sugars, proteins, fats.

if we eat the stuff that the cows and sheep are eating, it basically flows through us like fiber. That's what fiber is. It's the cellulosis. We do not have the suite of enzymes or the digestive system that can handle it. But what it means is that we can eat a lot less and still be very active and do other things. So we only need to eat two or three pounds of food a day and we can flow through our system quickly. and we also cook it a lot. We use tools for chopping.

So we're kind of predigesting. But try going out and just chewing on grass and see how far you get and how long you can maintain yourself. Okay. Moving on. What is NPK? Why is it important? And where does it come from?

MPK is often, well, it stands for nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium. And it's used on fertilizers when they're often sold with a rating. for that. You'll see 10, 10, 10, 10, or 16, 16, or whatever. And so, where does it come from? Well, nitrogen now and fertilizer is usually from the Haber Bosch process or basically pulling it out of the atmosphere, which is 78 percent nitrogen gas, and they're converting it to a form that can become biologically available, you know, ammonia or urea, and then phosphorus and potassium are basically mine. Haber-Bosch isn't pulling it out from the air, is it? Well, it's providing both the energy from the natural gas.

So you take natural gas and through the Haber-Bosch process, natural gas is used as an energy source for heat, and there's some sort of catalysts. I don't know the exact thing. And then also the hydrogens of the natural gas, some of them are then moved on to the nitrogen, is cracking this nitrogen, this N2. And you can imagine, you know, methane is C4. So some of the hydrogen has to move on to the into the nitrogen. And that will make it soluble either as a liquid or you can actually change a little more and make it to urea, which is going to be a solid. That's how you can spread solid fertilizer on, the little grains of urea. That's the energy source for nitrogen and a lot of synthetic fertilizers.

In nature, you don't, you know, there's biological processes that do that, that convert the atmospheric nitrogen. is called fixation into an available form for life. And there's processes that will reverse that as well. And phosphorus and potassium? Well, they tend to be like, you know, mineral deposits. So there are certain parts of the planet that just happen to be have higher, higher density of rock rich in phosphate and potassium. And just like anything in geology, history and what was going on,

might be old seabeds or particular volcanic suburb. that end up getting mined. Craters. Sometimes there's craters. We're using nitrogen naturally from plants that fixated, but additionally from the Haberbosch process, adding ammonia fertilizer to our fields. And we're also mining phosphorus and potassium. Yeah, they're important because they tend to be what's called the macro nutrients.

And if you were to like take any organism and combust it, you know, you can take a just like, you know, cremation or whatever. What's left over is ash. And you add up what's in that ash. Well, a big part of it's going to be P&K. So if you just look at the constituents of life on the planet, P and K are some of the major macronutrients. There's a lot.

There's, you know, a couple dozen minerals, actually, in any organism. But those are the big ones. Nitrogen actually volatilizes. So it will go back when you combust things. It goes back to the gaseous state. That's why our atmosphere is dominated by nitrogen. But those other two are part of ash. So that's why it's called potash, you know, potassium.

That is also called potash because they used to get it from ashes and fires and stuff. But why are NPK are important and why are we talking about them? Well, they're important because if you add these things to crops, then you're tending to supplement what the plants need and they end up usually having higher yields, let's say. So we rely on these fertilizers right now on our farm soils in order to reach the yield potential of them. So that's what people believe right now is very limiting for crop yields is fertilizer. There's often a relationship between fertilizer addition and crop harvest yields, right? The idea being that if you don't have these, then yields will decline.

And I think it's complex. It's more complex than that. but in the short term, that's probably true. Okay. So what is the law of return? Oh, that's the idea that, and this is really kind of fun. Remember, I said anything has, if you were to burn it, has ash, right, in it? So the law of return is basically saying that what you remove from a farm field needs to go back

if you want to maintain the mineral wealth of that field. It's very basic. It's just a mass balance. And you can go onto USDA websites and say, I harvested this many tons of corn, or this. much alfalfa. What was my loss? What was the removal from my soil of all these elements? And people use that to then say, okay, I'm going to plan when I do fertilizer next year to replace those. Okay. Well, what is soil and what's the difference between soil and dirt? Oh, I have very closely related and, you know, in common conversation, maybe doesn't make a difference

to what you say. But typically, you know, the officiados, the soil officiantados will tell you that soils alive, that soil has all these, what they call the microbiome or the soil food web. It's the minerals that is dirt plus organic matter and the life that's in there. And we're talking in the size of my thumb, like teaspoon or whatever. There's just billions of organisms, you know, of bacteria and fungi, etc. So it's microscopic, so we ignore it. There's a tremendous difference between a live, healthy soil and something that is sterile, which might be the dirt, or somewhere in between because you're farming it a lot and a lot of

our practices disturb the soil and end up making dirt. So presumably, if you had all the minerals that you wanted, plenty of NPK, but you didn't have the life, you didn't have those billions of little organisms in there, your yields would be, much lower. Well, that's the tricky thing. We are basically, you can have what's called hydroponics. You've heard of that where plants are rooted into, you know, they're in water. There's roots hanging in water. And they're giving this, they're given this solution that's the perfect mineral balance. It's like, it's like I'm in the hospital and my digestive system shut down because I'm having some surgery or whatever, but they put me on an IV. All right. I'm okay. I still alive. But just like the human

gut. Right. You're alive, but it's a temporary thing. Right. So we are basically doing that. That's our farming system. That's the short answer. Okay. I have a lot more questions. So let's for now stick to the short answers. What is soil health or what is healthy soil? All right. So this is a really important kind of a new concept that's taken off in the last 10 years. So I'm really glad you're bringing this up because it kind of relates to what I've been hinting at is that they tell you a story. I've got a field out here that has got this one type of soil. It's called Malabon. It's a local soil type.

Good soil, really high-class soil. But there's a road, and then my neighbor has the same soil type, and there's like a line of it on the soil maps. You can look, and you can stand and see it's about the same level in the landscape, et cetera. And I tested the two different fields. And my field had really excellent soil health, and the neighbor field didn't.

And this has to do with very simple test like infiltration. So I put water in a disk, like a tube, and it went right into my soil, like within about 20 seconds. That same, this water went in. The neighbor's soil, 100 feet away, sat, pooled. So one of the important things about soil health is incredible is the structure is different. And I kind of make the analogy is like, you ever see, like scaffolding against a building. There's like some high rise where they're redoing something and they put these giant scaffolding up. So scaffolding is structure that you can climb on and it's

got tensile strength and compression strength and air and water can move through it. Now imagine you basically take sledgehambers, you just start knocking everything and that scaffolding collapses. So what happens when you lose soil structure is you might still have, you have organic matter, you have, you know, that it's, it's, it's stuff is still there, but the structure got lost. And that happens often with the chemicals that are applied and the tillage programs and these sort of things that end up turning these microscopic scaffolding. These are, this is on scales you can't see with the naked eye and destroying those structures. And it has important properties like water infiltration, air movement. So so healthy soil has aggregate stability as well. It doesn't like

blow away in the wind because it's being held together at a scaffold. So we have minerals and we have the microbiome of the living organisms and we have the structure. Those three things are required. Yes. And it's the microbiome that creates that structure. So the reason there is the scaffolding is that these little organisms, these little bacteria, are interacting with the plant roots and creating a scaffolding system that allows air and water movement and allows for rapid cycling of minerals, nutrients. So do we have any idea what percentage of the farmland in the United States has the erect scaffolding versus the sledgehammer smashed scaffolding in the soil? I don't know if we have a really good idea.

I would estimate, you know, it's less than 5% is in good shape. And how does that relate to the stories we hear about at the current rate, our top soil we'd be gone in 50 years or something like that? What do they mean when they say that? Well, what's happening is that because the soil is not healthy, there isn't the microbiome and plant roots that are creating this structure that holds everything in place. So it easily washes away and blows away. And then there's a lock-in to like keeping going with the same program. It's like being on a drug and being weaned.

There's a painful process to transition. So that's why, I mean, we know enough to change completely, but we're locked in. Okay. What percent of the United States population works in producing food? Yeah, what percent works in producing food? If you look at these charts about, you know, percent of labor force that are farmers, it's around 1 percent. I think, you know, if you start adding things of the people in food processing and farm services, it goes up. But, you know, let's just say it's low. It's like under 5%. Right.

And how does that compare to other countries and to historical norms? The U.S. has a very highly industrialized, highly mechanized food system and farming, farming system. And so that has removed most of the labor. And if you were to go back and look at early agrarian societies, pre-industrial revolution, even early after the Industrial Revolution got going, labor was still on the farm for the most part. Most people lived on farms and, you know, if they were agrarian societies.

So, you know, 90% would be typical if you go pretty far back. And early mechanization, it shifted that so that maybe it was 70%. And there's plenty of places today where it's still pretty high, but it's tending to go down almost around the world right now

because of mechanization. But it's still kind of 80%ish in India, which has a billion people. Yeah, right, exactly. There are places still like that. And I've got an interesting chart in my future's rural report showing kind of that difference between nations. Yeah. So the past was also rural. Yeah.

Okay. Is modern agriculture an energy sink or an energy source? And how does this compare to? pre-industrial revolution. Yeah, if you look at agriculture, like on the farm, when you start using all this equipment in the embedded energy in fertilizers, irrigation pumping, all the tractors that move around, et cetera, you look at that energy and then you say, okay, how many calories that I harvest in terms of corn?

You can convert everything into B2s or whatever you want. It ends up that on the farm, it's slightly nays. In other words, you harvest less calories and you put into it. And then the food system itself, once you go off the farm, it just gets a way worse. Of course, in the past, I mentioned net energy positive, optimal foraging theory. All food systems in the past were very energy positive, of course. So it's kind of weird right now. So I'll get to that in a second.

Just a story that I recall, I wrote an essay on the oil drum. you were with me as a contributor back in the day where I calculated the energy return of my own labor and the caloric output of my potato crop. Yeah. And I counted the hours and did some metabolic how many kilowatt hours I worked. And the math was that my potatoes were like a 20 to one energy return that didn't include the shipping of the potato seeds here from Maine or things like that. So it was kind of a medium boundary analysis.

But it struck me at the time that my energy return from planting, weeding, hilling, harvesting, drying, storing potatoes for the amount of calories they gave me was a higher energy return than modern oil extraction. Wow. Of course, we can't fly a plane on baked potatoes. But, you know, if you do a lot of human labor like that and you have good soil and amendments, the energy return can be quite high. Yeah. I mean, it was typically it was 10 to 1 to 5 to 1, something like that.

And it depended usually on how productive the system was and how much animal labor was being used. Well, it also depends on I had added. And potatoes are especially good return. Right, right. And I had really good soil, which kind of had energy additions from years. past that I was mining down. So how many fossil calories does it take to deliver a calorie of food to our tables, roughly? Yeah, it's about an order of magnitude. Yeah, about an order of magnitude more, right? It's like 10 to 1, 14 to 1, something like that. And no one's going to be really precise,

but I just sort of think of that level. So that when people talk about the fact that our current agriculture system is incredibly sensitive to fossil inputs. That's the punchline is that we're using 10 to 14 calories of natural gas oil derivatives. We're using like two calories to produce one calorie, but we're using 10 to 14 to deliver after the packaging and the drying and the delivery and the cooking and all that. It's 10 to 14 to 1, whereas in our past, it was an energy source, not a sink like that. Yes, that's right. Yeah.

Yeah. This is why it's kind of crazy making to be in this world right now. You know how weird it is. Well, it's weird being in the world being energy blind because people go to the supermarkets and they have these beautiful little styrofoam plastic, clean, pack. packaged food that costs not too much money, though it's going up, partially because of Ukraine. But we're disconnected from the massive energy inputs that go into our food. Yeah.

And the fact that that energy, since you and I have been on the planet, we've had pretty much more energy available to humanity globally every year. And that will probably not be the case the rest of our lives. And so what does that portend for our food system? A couple more short questions. And then we're going to get to the long questions. What is a trophic pyramid and how do human economies fit into that concept? Yeah.

Okay. So trophic pyramid is an idea. Any basic ecology course will teach you this, that there's the level that's called the primary producer level. And that's going to be like the plants, right? and they call it a pyramid because that's going to be the widest base. And then above that, you have things that eat plants, herbivores. It's going to be a little narrower.

Then you're going to have things that eat the herbivores, omnivores, carnivores, etc. That's going to be smaller. So it's a pyramid shape because at each trophic levels, you go up from primary to secondary to tertiary, there's a reduction in the population of those different levels. And that's just because of laws of entropy. There's going to be, you have to have more producers. at a lower level to support what's at the higher level.

And so human economies are sort of weird in a sense that if you look at labor force, it's upside down. Like I said earlier, 1% of people farm. Well, that's sort of at the primary level, right? But a lot of people are in this sort of service economy side of things, their management, et cetera. they would normally, if you think of an ecosystem, that would be pretty rare. Because most of the time what you need is the primary production level to be big as a base for everything above it.

And so what is the tertiary sector of human economies? Yeah, that's what I, yeah, I kind of mentioned that was the top. So, well, those would be the people that aren't in the primary and secondary. Let's say the primary being like food, agriculture sort of sectors where you're harvesting. raw materials from the earth. You're mining energy food production. Secondary would be turning those products into materials that are more useful. So maybe I raise cattle, but I'm not going to make leather. Somebody else is going to do that and then turn that into shoes. And then the tertiary level would be basically, you know, people that are retailing, designing,

buying shoes as status symbols because, you know, they want to have the latest, greatest fashion, they want to look awesome because they have some high status job. But they aren't really, they're not doing any of those productive tasks dealing directly with materials. Maybe they're musicians. Maybe they're bankers. Maybe they're life coaches. Maybe they're therapists.

I'm not saying none of this is useful. It's just that. Or podcast hosts. Yeah. It's not to denigrate those. It's just to say that. Our society has so many more at the tertiary level than is normal. And that's because of the fossil fuel supplement.

Right. So compared to the rest of biological nature, the human trophic pyramid is engorged and misshapen in that we've used kind of half to two thirds of our fossil and mineral endowment to have an enormous goods and service. services sector in the middle. And on top of the pyramid is all these financial claims that are enormous that are trying to be supported by the stuff on the bottom. We did the speed round, J.B. So let's move into the main course of our agricultural discussion. I think we've kind of alluded to this already. But what is our fundamental problem with agriculture and modern food systems in coming decades, in your opinion? Well, I think the short, you know, the short term, if you look at what's going on now with

rising energy prices and supply chain disruptions, it's just the rising cost of energy is then leading to a lot of inflation and shortages of some critical things in the food system. And it's that complexity itself where you've been relying on this particular set of suppliers for so long and they disappear, what do you do? It's hard to turn somewhere and figure out how to manage this, especially in this globalized system. So I figure that, you know, now for the next decade, we're probably going to see a lot of problems related to this energy and complexity leading to these episodic kind of breakdowns and this or that. So you have empty shelves of certain things now and then and rising prices in general. That's the first thing, I'd say.

And longer term? Well, I kind of hinted at the lock-in, right? So longer term, you start to have to wean off of fossil fuels. Let me pause you there. We have to wean ourselves off of fossil fuels, not for climate reasons per se, but because we will be forced to because there will be fewer available fossil fuels. Yeah. I don't know if we're going to do anything about this related to climate. I can't, it doesn't even if we're doing anything.

It'd be nice that we did. I'm really worried about that. But in reality, these are fossilized hydrocarbons that we've taken the low-hanging fruits and now we're going off to the dirtiest, most difficult to access things. Because we have to. The great simplification. Yeah. So how do you respond to this? My worry is that we're not going to do anything sensibly.

We've got this lock and this cultural momentum about our previous investments in our equipment and technologies, all which rely on the high-dense. energy of fossil fuels at the right price with the right repair systems and parts and all that. So we have a biophysical reality shift that's going to happen that is completely mismatch with our culture, our workforce, our infrastructure, and then a lack of understanding of those involved. I have not seen a lot of comprehension. It's there more like a more like a doubling down of the madness really, right? We're going to use more technology. We're going to drones are going to farm for us and we completely get out of humans. Weak involved.

Farms are getting bigger, right? So can technology offset fossil fuel depletion insofar as its effect on agriculture? Can we use technology to improve reductions in NPK or energy used in industrial agriculture? Yes, I agree. There is a lot of technological things we could do. but we're mostly doing the wrong ones. We're doubling down. Here's a really important example, I think.

So it was discovered as the organic food industry started getting bigger, there started to be more demand for seeds in organic seeds. But there weren't enough. So organic farmers had to go buy conventional seeds. And it turned out there was trouble because the crops have, been grown in such a way for so long that they no longer have the genomes that do a proper job interacting with the soil microbiome. And so you have to now start using breeding techniques to breed a whole new set of crops that are really good at partnering with the soil microbiome

to create the soil health you need to win yourself off of the external synthetic NPC. Now, there's a whole set of technology there, but it's not the tiny technology that people tend to think of. They think of vertical farms and, you know, precision agriculture with GPS and drones and microsensors everywhere, as opposed to, oh, we need to breed for weeding ourselves off of synthetic fertilizers. So that kind of stuff, right? Where, yeah, there's technologies, being really good at making compost. Right. Well, that's a technology. So our system, Jason, has optimized not for agricultural output or for health or for soil health. Our agricultural system has optimized for monetary profit per input of time.

So we have become more efficient at producing monetary output. Could that be different if we optimized agricultural output? What are the tradeoffs? Can you unpack that for me? Yeah, that's a really good question. I think about this all the time, Nate, you know, living in a place where labor is cheap and energy and machines are relatively inexpensive, the incentive is to just remove people from the farms and find a way that you let a machine do the job.

That's because the highest factor of production right now is human labor. And it's always been the drive, cheaper in the cost of production. So, yeah, we have big machines that can cover a lot of territory. So the same thing we're doing at a coffee shop in San Francisco to fire the barista and have a automated robot serving coffees. We've been doing the same thing over time in our agricultural fields and producing food. Yeah, I mean, to even the most extreme manner possible, these machines, you know, 500 horsepower tractors better than a 300 horsepower tractor, right?

because one is only 3,000 human workers at a time, and the other is 5,000 human workers at a time. And it's pretty remarkable. It's fascinating. We can cover so much territory, so fast with these big machines, with so few people. And this drive for specialization and economies of scale. And it's also then led to this conundrum where farms have now,

if you've got these big machines and you've got fewer people, management complexity needs to be reduced. So farms also now specialize in fewer crops. So these big machines, they can cover tons of territory, but because they're so expensive and there's so few people, then management has to simplify. And so they want to do fewer things. They would rather farm 1,000 acres of one crop than 100 acres of 10 crops. So whatever gets common in the region then also becomes what you can start doing. So if there's not enough people, doing asparagus anymore, then the asparagus packing facilities go away. And then the buyers aren't showing up to even buy your asparagus. I saw this happen in California. And that was

because Mexico got into asparagus big time. So it's the Amazonification of agriculture. In other words, big retail driving out small retail kind of thing or getting it from somewhere else in the world drives out the local producer. Yeah, that. And that, and that fewer people in farming means simplify management, simplify cropping programs, when what we need is the opposite diversified. Well, not only are we pushing small farms and farmers and their expertise out of work, but over time, we're putting the soil in the intensive care unit that requires an IV and the soil doesn't have that scaffolding because of this process. where it's large mechanized machines that are sledgehammering the scaffolding of the soil down

every year. Now, that's really true. It's the machines. It's then the dependence on these synthetic inputs, which are quick fixes that'll also allow you to do the same crop over and over again because you've got the pesticides and the fertilizers and you're not relying on the diversity of life that helps maintain healthy soil in the absence of these. And the smaller farmers, you know, I have.

Ironically, of course, are the most energy efficient, you know, with like we said, with you and your potatoes, you have a positive energy return. They also have been shown to out yield these larger farms. And that's because they can tailor what they're doing to the specifics of that soil and not grow stuff that really doesn't work. But if you have a big machine, you just run across the landscape and it's heterogeneous, but you're going to fit it. You're going to fit the same thing in to every acre you can. Well, the modern farms are then, you know, turning soil into dirt. So what about I hear a lot, especially in our networks, that organic agriculture can

outproduce conventional industrial agriculture? What are the caveats and the truth to that? That's a good question. I think organic agriculture, but especially, you know, the smaller farm agriculture can. as long as there people are experienced, knowledgeable, have the proper equipment sets to do what they need to do, have the proper seeds, you know, and that's the problem is not, can it be done theoretically? The problem is how do you go from a situation where that's a small part of the egg system to then a dominant part in a way that can maintain or improve

yields? That's what I think is the challenge. Is not that can it do it? Well, it's going to have to, some ways, but can we get the right people with their right support that know place as well to make smart decisions? Well, the other challenge is if you had an industrial system that had, I don't know, 10,000 acres and you had 10 people that were using industrial machines to farm at all, and you had a certain yield. And now we want to have 5,000 people work the land. We could then have a higher yield, but 4,990 people had to come out of other jobs in the

tertiary sector, which it would largely, we would boost our yield and we would boost our soil, but we would reduce our standards of living, at least the way we described them today, those people would be making on average substantially less money, correct? Yeah, I think that's a problem where it's like, does modernism a one-way trip? And yeah, I think you're right. We could get more yield per area and have higher food security in many respects if we get more people farming that can turn dirt into soil, they can diversify what's going on in the land, And so there's a diverse diet coming off the land.

Like how many industrial farmers actually feed themselves? None that I've seen. Right. They're doing a few commodities and then they're going to the grocery store. But this is a tradeoff we have to deal with, right? So let's expand that then. If we only were able to focus on best practices and we had as many people in the world as possible working in the fields, Meaning a lot of our Amazon delivery trucks and junkets to Vegas and safaris to Africa and NASCAR races and all these other things would probably recede somewhat or a lot.

But if we had all the people going to the fields, how much food could we grow without any fossil fuels or without most fossil fuels? because a lot of people say without fossil fuels, we only have a billion or at most two billion food for one or two billion people. So can you unpack that a little bit? I know there's lots of speculation involved, but help me understand the boundaries there. Yeah, this is a tough one. And so we can break it into parts and take our time and work around it. You gave you a story.

I did the math for Benton County, where I live, Benton County, Oregon. And I sort of thought of, what would a food system look like? at the level of the farm? Like, what would the farms in Benton County have to grow to provide a complete, healthy diet that's regionally appropriate for our place? And then how much area it would it take up and how many acres do we have?

And you have to deal with so many things and you're thinking about this. And I have this in the future of Israel Report and the spreadsheet's free to download and you could adapt it to anywhere. And other places have done this, other academics have done this much more detailed than I have,

complex models, but they all assume the industrial ag system is in place. And it's like, we will make New York food self-reliant, but it's all the same food system in many ways in terms of all the inputs. But how do you grow healthy soil first? How do you get a diversity into the diet? How do you integrate animals, you know, these kind of things? And I came up with about, and then how do you also account for fiber and energy, right, you're going to grow the energy for to run the food system itself, which is what had to be done.

So I did that. I came up with about four-tenths of an acre. If you'd extract that to the world. Per person? Yeah. There's plenty of land. Often what people say is that you need about half a hectare, which is about an acre per person, is sort of the minimum.

But like I said, it varies because, as you know, different places have more, have richer soils and better climate. So it can vary from, you know, two-tenths of a hectare, which is kind of like what my result was, up to an entire hectare per person. But if you use a global average of about half a hectare... Half a hectare or half an acre? I'm going back to hectares,

because that's what the stats are globally, which is about half a hectare is about an acre. It's almost two to one. Yes, there's about eight billion people. There's about four billion hectares of supposedly arable land. So you could do it. theoretically, but there's so many For how long?

Factors. Well, maybe indefinitely, but, you know, what I worry about is all the other stuff. I worry about resilience in the face of climate change. Are these hectares that are present today that we call it farmland or arable land? Are they going to be in the same place in 50 years? I don't know. Well, not to mention that if there were 8 billion people perpetually just sitting around on a half acre each, or a half acre each, and doing nothing else other than farming

to grow their food without any entertainment or education or hospitals or whatever. I don't find that altogether plausible. But we still have a lot of fossil fuels left. Well, no, and this is the thing is you have to think about this from a food system perspective and how many professionals and workers are there, relative to people who are doing other things. And I don't think we're studying this at all. We're just assuming we're going to continually, we're going to have robots eventually do it all for us. But what does society look like when a higher percentage, I don't know how many,

are engaged in this? And what kind of social structures are there in terms of like habitation relative to where the productive landscapes are, ownership of land, how is that capital allocated in your society, these are all just really complex questions. And we have models for what things were like before or other countries now that are different than ours that are more like that. But, you know, I care enough about the world we have today and the knowledge we have and the education levels. And, you know, I'm a product of this culture too. I don't want us to to see it tossed out in some sort of like pole pot crazy insanity of shoving people onto the land. And with no understanding, it'd be nice, it'd be done well.

Let me ask you a hard question, Jason. And you can guess because no one knows the answer to this. But what do you think the odds are of a gigafammon this century? A billion plus people starving? That's a good question. It's horrible. I think it's pretty high odds. that, I mean, I know if it happens all at once or it's just intermittent.

I mean, you had Dennis Meadows on your show and seeing the population curves and how does that happen, right? There's war, disease, famine, all kinds of ways. So I think all these things happen in combination, don't they usually? Yeah. My own view, which is, of course, speculative, is we're likely to have more people on the planet in the next 20 or 30 years. but they're going to be a lot poorer.

And that the gigafammon truly from a reduction in our fossil inputs to the system is in the back half of the century, not in the near term. The near term is going to be wider poverty and environmental chaos, first financial, then more societal. But I don't know. But that's why I'm asking you this question because I think a lot of people in our tribe, in our choir, which is energy and ecologically literate, they naturally assume that the population maximum on the planet sustainable is a billion people. And I think that's realistic because people think, oh, 500 million to a billion people living at the standards of a Western industrialized nation.

But I think if you draw the boundaries of the analysis, it is possible that a human doing labor and regenerating the soil and processing and recycling the waste, like you said, an acre or a half an acre, there wouldn't be much else complexity in the world, but you could feed 8 billion people that way, or at least 5 billion anyways. It's just we wouldn't be living like we are today. Yeah. So it's really, to me, the population argument is really two axes. There's the population, a number of people, and then there's how do they live?

What sort of a footprint do they have? And we can have a lot of people if we have a low footprint. Yeah. And the irony, of course, is the longer we keep doing what we're doing, the way we're doing it, right? The harder it is for the more benign scenario where people have the ability to go back to more self-provisioning or community-like. level provisioning in working landscapes where biodiversity is protected, the water is cherished and the soil health is rebuilt.

It's nicer if you can start from an environment that is less degraded. It makes the odds that more people make it in less difficult and risky path. If 8 billion people and have the energy rug pulled out of us over, say, 30-year period could do it. It's a bottleneck. But boy, it's on the margin, right? Because you don't, like, if you were going to grow, if say you had to grow potatoes and other stuff for your family, you would not do some math and say, oh, I need exactly this many potatoes and this is a million calories per person. you'd say, I'm going to try to double that because you don't know what's going to happen. I had a potato harvest as half last year than the year before.

Yeah. So there's all this variability that happens. It's not just the return you want. It's the risk adjusted return. It's the amount of risk or amount of return you have adjusted for the standard deviation because you never know when there's going to be a bad year. Yeah. I'm going real off tangent here, J.B. But do it.

What happened in the potato famine in Ireland back in the day? My understanding is people got by by eating potatoes, kale or collards or something, and milk. Like that was it, those three things. And still, there were a lot of people that starved. Do you know anything about that? A little bit. I mean, there was a blight that hit the potatoes. So you had a society that had a very simple diet, like you're saying.

And the potatoes had a blight. Now, they are also, there's a lot of weird stuff. that went on because they were also a big wheat exporter to England. And so part of the problem was that they did not have a very, they were not a very monetarily wealthy economy. And in order to service, you know, debts, etc., they kept having to sell wheat. So they actually starved while wheat was being exported

because people didn't, the peasants didn't have money. So it's tied up with a lot of kind of colonial nastiness as well. And, yeah. So, but you know, the vigarities you're talking about of the environment and the buffers, I just want to point out that's a lot of what happened in food systems in the past is they would deal with this by integrating livestock. I think this is an important point that people don't understand because a lot of what you hear is talk about veganism, vegetarianism.

And I understand why, because the current system of, Kaffo meats, poultry and hogs and feedlot cattle, it's pretty horrific and I think should be outlawed. But if you look at why people, why those animals exist from a historic perspective, they were to handle stuff like what we're talking about. You always grow more grains than you think you're going to need. You worry about mold. You worry about rats. You're worried about a poor harvest. you're worried about all kinds of things you can't predict.

And the animals are the bead buffer. And so if suddenly you have half the harvest, but you've been feeding animals, now you can call animals, you can call your hurt down, but you've also maybe grown enough at least to take care of people. And so that's why I think if you look at where people lived, some people have lived in places that are dominated by animals and some dominated by plants. In fact, where I live now was dominated by a plant culture, the Kalapuya. And they ate these camis bulbs.

It's a prairie lily. And they burn the landscape to keep it open so that these lilies, these camis would flourish. And they didn't want the trees to encroach too much. You go north towards nowadays Portland. You hit the Columbia River. Those were salmon people. The salmon didn't get up the Willamette River to where I am. So just going 100 miles away, you have a meat-based diet, and here it was a plant-based diet.

And so I just think that people need to understand that these food systems evolved to deal with what was present or not and what the environment was throwing at people. And there was trade. The Kalapuia would trade their flour from their camus. They'd trade camus flour for salmon. So in a more rural future with less fossil inputs and maybe some more human labor, will it be efficient from an input standpoint to have more animals or less, more vegetarian or more? Yeah, it's interesting. We probably have way more animals of certain kinds. And we have way less animals of other kinds.

So that's what's kind of interesting. Remember I talked about how the organic industry couldn't get the seeds it needed. Well, the same thing is kind of true probably for livestock. Livestock have been bred with these CAFO systems, you know, hogs with that much fat. What is CAFO? Confined animal feeding operation. So you can think of a hog barn with a half a million animals or whatever, chickens like that. Whereas, you know, we would probably need different breeds and probably fewer of fewer

of certain things, but do we have any more draft animals, right? There used to be a lot more horses around, but the horses nowadays aren't as useful as the horses would have been in the past for doing certain kinds of work. But overall, there's way more, there's way more human livestock than there should be. Yeah. Human livestock or livestock for humans? Yeah, a ladder. Yeah. Well, Well, in Minnesota here, there are more pigs than people, a lot more, as one example. Yeah. There's a billion, 100 million cows, over a billion goats, over a billion pigs. We eat 75 billion chickens and turkeys every year, et cetera.

So I realize in talking to you, Jason, that we probably could cover four hours and not get to everything I wanted to get to. But let me ask you a few more questions here before we get to the closing questions, which I ask everyone. So your book, your report is called, The Future is Rural, laying out the path that some of us, many of us, would be wise to start forging that path for ourselves and our communities. What do you think is most likely? Is there a hybrid path between industrial, large-scale agriculture?

and a rural low-tech future, or is it kind of all or none? I think the hybrid path is what makes sense, because if you look at the transition, it takes time, it takes the ability to fail gracefully, training people and all the stuff that needs to happen and building this sort of parallel way of life that is the opposite of high energy modernity, but maybe it still has one toe in it in a sense that

there is still this system in place that is cheaply and abundantly and reliably supplementing to the transition, just like we supplement all kinds of enterprises early on with capital and government and community support as a human being. I was taking care of by my family for a long time before I could stand on my own. So I think doing this hard, really, you know, work that's very fascinating and very complex and a lot of people would really be into. But knowing you have the backing of the industrial food system, modern medicine, the support

there so that you can push, push, push the envelope, learn, learn, fail gracefully, and build something new would be really nice. And that system maybe over time can grow and grow and grow. as the other one draws down. And I think a lot of what we need be thinking about is such difficult questions, Nate. I wish there was so much more work into this. But what are the elements of the sort of high-tech modern world that we want to bring through this bottleneck and the great simplification?

What kind of energy systems that can be more advanced in the 1800s, right? DC motors connected to versions of photovoltax. that aren't as so complex, right? Wind systems that are, and all these things can be longer lasting and repairable. Can you still do some 3D printing for parts and repurposing of all the waste steel that's going to be laying around,

using wood again for fuel, but not in ways that are, that are so detrimental to health and lead to deforestation? You know, what kind of culture forms around these questions of a civilization that can persist for thousands of years in a place with the knowledge and carrying through some of the, most of the knowledge we still have. This just fascinates me, but almost nobody is

doing anything about this. If we were being wise, we would be incubating these centers that could grow and develop and become beacons for the future, you know? I really, I mean, this is self-referential opinion, but I do think it's because of our energy blindness as a culture. We think technology is what produces the yields in the seeds and the engineered crops that continue to feed the world because we conquested that. But Norman Borlaug told Paul Ehrlich that that technology bought him a generation to use it wisely. Yeah. And once oil starts to deplete in earnest, the agricultural system is going to have to play catch up or the yields are going to drop or the magnitude of crops are going to drop.

So I think we need like you say, these models and pilots and especially getting young people involved learning the things that you know instead of going and being a mid-level programmer to create video games as one example. So a lot of people in our network talk about permaculture being the answer to our current overshoot ag energy situation. What is something that permaculture can do that paves the way to a better future that our current society does not? And what does permaculture lack as a global solution to the upcoming great simplification?

Yeah, I'm a big fan of permaculture. And it's a design system, right? It really focuses on just learning about the place you live in and inhabit and designing around it. And the idea of the permanent culture, you know, a civilization that can have this permanence. So it gets that right in terms of its philosophy, I think. And what it really encourages is people to be engaged in self-provisioning while supporting biodiversity and soil health and community. Okay, they talk about a culture.

So it's there. I mean, a lot of what you see examples are households, homesteads, but ideally you bring a lot of these permaculture principles into sort of building a lot of this new community, new civilization, right? What it doesn't really deal with, I don't know how it would, is the legacy of the complex civilization we have. We've got nuclear power plants all over the place. We've got missile silos.

We've got toxic waste that we have to be able to have enough capacity to deal with those so we don't burn the next generations with this. So there's probably a lot of stuff like that where it doesn't know what to do about that and isn't talking about it. So there's still a lot that has to happen outside of sort of permaculture, right? Bend, not break, is my philosophy. Yeah. Right. Yeah, no, I agree. I think we have to, we can't just throw the baby out with the bathwater because then we have all these complex problems that need addressing. So I think we need lots of pilots of people going towards a future as rural direction, but we still have to keep the system stable in the meantime. Okay. So we are kind of running out of time, my friend.

I will definitely have you back because I want to take a deeper dive on the future as rural report and recommendations that you have. Here are some questions that I ask all my guests, kind of personal closing thoughts. What kind of advice would you give to young people who today discover and understand that they're alive during this, the peak in complexity and energy availability and with climate, risk to nature, energy depletion, etc. What advice do you give to young people. Yeah, it's tough because it's kind of anxiety provoking. It creates a lot of fear. But, you know, how that's mitigated and how people find purpose, you know, find a tribe of like-minded friends that's really huge of a social network that also gets this stuff, hang out with the right

people. Be a helpful person that has skills and passion for things that are useful with or without this world we're in, you know, what works now and what would work during the great simplification. And I do this all the time is what helps me, you know, maybe helps others, but, you know, connect with nature, find ways of supporting the restoration of and preservation of biodiversity. Those are the main things I would say. And you have young people working on your farm, right? What is their motivation and how do they come away from the learning experience of working in the soil every day? I'm so lucky. God, that's so hard because there's so many wonderful kids out there. I mean, God, they're 20 or whatever, but, you know, I'm 53. And I think

about myself when I was their age. They have so much they're going to have to deal with. But gosh, they're just wonderful people. I know. I've taught hundreds of them myself. Yeah, we're out there and the farm and it's beautiful out and we're talking and working together. And this is what they want to do. But geez, how do you do this as a kid? How do you do this as a young person? You know how money? You can't buy a farm. Nothing pays you well enough. How do you get health? care how to get housing. So I get kind of upset because we have a whole generation that actually knows this stuff in many ways and is ready to do something about it. But this society doesn't support any of that. So I'm a little, I'm a little amped out about it now. He just triggered me.

But I care so much about them. Yeah. I hear you, my friend. I have hundreds of former students and they understand this. They care. Their hearts and minds are in the right place. But yet they're still part of the vortex, which is our consumer growth culture. And it's really tough to make the right decisions. So I try my best, you know. I don't have enough for them, you know. I really feel I don't have enough for them. Well, you have an opportunity to educate them about ecology and soil and farming. And we need thousands of you around the country, scaling this. And maybe podcasts and conversations like this will alert more people to the centrality of agriculture, soil, community in a world of soon to be depleting fossil inputs to the system and maybe change

some choices and change some priorities and change some systems and incentives from the government. Yeah. Well, why couldn't we have, you know, a mandatory year off between high school and college where people went to do ecological and community restoration around the country as a young person. They would love it. They would learn a ton. They would build social capital and skills and help the soil and the ecosystems. Why couldn't we do something like that?

Yeah, we totally could. Okay. So a couple more questions, Jason. I'm curious to see what your answer to this will be. What do you care most about in the world? Oh, God. I travel around the world studying biodiversity when I was in my 20s. And God, it's still a big passion. I'm just stunning. What's out there? So what the hell are we doing? Yeah. Even in a diminished state, this world is stunningly beautiful and diverse.

Yeah. That's, you know, that's kind of what I got into this for. It was like, you travel around, you see these places. You see, you know, lemurs hopping around. on trees in Madagascar, you see the most ridiculous birds flirting around in these forests covered in mosses and orchids. You're on the reef in Fiji to giant groupers and just colorful corals. Just absolutely ridiculous. So I kind of want to keep that around. And of course, I love my family and my friends, my dog. So, you know, it's endlessly curious and awe-inspiring.

Well, that's why we've been friends for 20 years, because you know. No, that's exactly how I view the world. And that is what is sacred beyond religion or economic growth. That is truly what is sacred is the natural world we share this planet with. We will miss these creatures when they are gone one day in the future. And I really hope that when your kids are my age, our age, that the largest animal in the world is not a cow. and that we don't exclaim with joy when we saw a squirrel this week because that was all we saw. Yeah.

And I think the first step is we have to care about these things and recognize them. It's a tall odds, J.B. But, I mean, that's what we're trying to do. Yeah, totally. So a couple more questions, my friend. What are you most worried about in the next decade or so? You know, you had Chuck on the show. Yeah.

Yeah, war, authoritarianism. That stuff. Yeah, absurd. The absurd doubling down on our non-negotiable, quote-unquote, way of life, the stuff you were talking about, like just, you know, create another $6 trillion and just do nothing, nothing useful with it. So that's the stuff I worry about. And what, in contrast, are you most hopeful about in the coming decade or so?

Well, the students I interact with are fantastic. Like I said, they're pretty savvy and sophisticated. And like you said, their care, this is what is amazing, is their care is so present. A lot of them aren't into the heavy materialism of our culture and find their kicks in these healthy ways. And there's a lot of amazing information available now. Some of it's junk, of course. But it's also easier than ever to get out there, the ideas that we have, for example. So, you know, could it be with the crisis?

Another crisis comes and maybe we don't miss that opportunity. Maybe real reforms become possible. And then I think back on nature is incredibly resilient and just respond and bounces back pretty quickly. I've seen that. So we give it a chance. I've seen it with the soil. I've seen it with forests. Well, your soil compared to 100 feet, it was.

way is got the scaffolding. So it's resilient. Yeah, it's five years. It takes five years or so do that. So if you were benevolent dictator, benevolent dictator Jason Bradford or could make one wish for humanity without any personal recourse in our present circumstances, what would it be? All right. Well, yeah, it kind of running in circles. But the sort of investments now were making in the military and space colonization, building more skyscrapers, more roads, if just some decent chunk of these could be turned towards developing this civilization that can last thousands of years, you know, one that preserves our knowledge that we've, that are incredible. I mean, I love that we understand our place in the universe, for example, that we can, you know,

how do you put front and center, a care for this thin veneer of light? right, this complex life, maybe the only in the universe. And it gives all these people of an opportunity to build that, to be part of that. So, God, funding all the potential out there, the trials, the research, at the level we fund, you know, cancer research or whatever, our professional sports. I guess allocating capital towards the challenge, which is, are we going to have some kind of long-term survival on earth? Thank you, my friend, for sharing your wisdom and reflections here. Do you have any other thoughts, advice, or closing comments for our listeners?

Well, I guess, you know, I just don't give up on things. I know it can be pretty, it feels like we're kind of in for it. And that's kind of too bad. I'm sorry, a lot of us are trying. And but nobody, you know, nobody really knows for sure what's going to happen. I'd say avoid people who are too certain, right? And spend your time trying to be, trying to be helpful. Because much of what does need to be done is pretty awesome anyway.

So just get at that. Excellent. Thank you, my friend. We will talk soon. I really appreciate it. Well, thanks for the opportunity. I love listening to this podcast. And I appreciate the ability to be on it.

Because it's been really interesting so far. Keep it up, Nate. Thank you, Jason. To be continued, my friend. All right. Thanks, Nate. If you enjoyed or learned from this episode of The Great Simplification, please subscribe to us on your favorite podcast platform

and visit The Great Simplification.com for more information on future releases.