193 Fred Provenza - What should we learn from domesticated animals when it comes to food as medicine

A conversation with Fred Provenza, professor emeritus of Behavioural Ecology in the Department of Wildland Resources at Utah State University, about domesticated animals, their ability to self-select medicine and food and figure out what they need in terms of energy, vitamins and phytonutrients. We also discuss what they can teach us about rediscovering our nutritional wisdom.

This series is supported by the A Team Foundation, who support food and land projects that are ecologically, economically and socially conscious. They contribute to the wider movement that envisions a future where real food is produced by enlightened agriculture and access to it is equal. The A Team are looking to make more investments and grants in the space of bionutrients. You can find out more on ateamfoundation.org.
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Research shows that animals are perfectly able to feed themselves when they have the cultural background and intergenerational education plus the diversity in plants and feed they need. So, what does that teach us about human nutrition and its connection to healthy soils?

More about this episode on https://investinginregenerativeagriculture.com/fred-provenza.

Find our video course on https://investinginregenerativeagriculture.com/course.

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The above references an opinion and is for information and educational purposes only. It is not intended to be investment advice. Seek a duly licensed professional for investment advice.

Chapters

• 2:06 Why are you doing what you are doing? Why Soil?
• 18:08 Role of culture and intergenerational learning with animals
• 26:30 What does that mean for humans?
• 33:20 Why we are not eating enough healthy whole some foods
• 43:18 What can we learn from how plants manage their economies?
• 48:13 What we lost by selecting for yield
• 57:20 What would you do if you were in charge of a 1B investment portfolio
• 1:07:51 If you could wave a magic wand and change one thing in the agriculture industry

Transcript

SPEAKER_01: 0:00

What can we learn from domesticated animals when it comes to human nutrition? Aren't animals, and especially the non-wild ones, way too stupid to self-select medicine, food, figure out energy levels, and figure out what they actually need in vitamins, phytonutrients, etc.? Think again. Research shows that animals are perfectly able to feed themselves and nourish themselves when they have the cultural background and the intergenerational education, plus the diversity in plants and feeds they need. So what does that teach us about human nutrition and a connection to healthy soils. What are the connections between healthy farming practices, healthy soil, healthy produce, healthy gut and healthy people? Welcome to a special series where we go deep into the relationship between regenerative agriculture practices that build soil health and the nutritional quality of the food we end up eating. We unpack the current state of science, the role of investments, businesses, non-profits, entrepreneurs and more. This series is supported by the A-Team Foundation who support food and land projects that are ecologically, economically and socially conscious. They contribute or get in touch directly info at a team foundation.org or check the information in the show notes below. Welcome to another episode, today with the Professor Emeritus of Behavioral Ecology in the Department of Wildlife Resources at Utah State University, and also the writer of Nourishment, What Animals Can Teach Us About Rediscovering Our Nutritional Wisdom. Welcome, Fred, to the show.

SPEAKER_00: 1:55

Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be here with you today.

SPEAKER_01: 1:59

And to start with the question I always kick it off with, and usually it leads down numerous rabbit holes, let's say, how did you end up working I wouldn't say even in soil, but like indirectly a lot with soil, on soil, animals, like what was that path towards focusing so much of your time on how to restore actually and how to manage better?

SPEAKER_00: 2:24

I think for me, it began as a child, actually, with a really intense interest in the natural world, especially in wild creatures, anything that moved, insect, bird, fish, mammal. I loved it. I was totally enthralled. As I went along then, I ended up, during my years in college, majoring in wildlife biology, which came out of that interest, and acquired an incredible interest in plants. identifying plants and then in starting to understand the behavior of plants. I was also working on a ranch in Colorado at that time and that opened up so many I had no experience of ranch environment until I began working there as a senior in high school and learning how to raise crops which of course is involved with deeply involved with soil and plant and animal and learning how to work with goats and sheep and cattle opened up huge world to me and so those worlds merged over over the years the the interest in the natural world and then the interest in agriculture and farming growing crops and in livestock merged as as I went along and then and then the deep interest that came from those years in trying to understand the behavior of animals and plants why do they do what they do why do especially animals behavior behaviorally ecology, but then that became so linked with plants and what plants do, which then becomes so linked with the health of soils and what happens in soils. It's all, as you well know, so deeply interconnected in time and space.

SPEAKER_01: 4:11

And do you remember, like your interest started with the natural world and plants, and then somehow you started looking at the ones that are eating many of these plants, the graziers, the ruminants. Like what triggered that or was there a moment you were really surprised? Like, oh, actually there's something or were you mostly looking at, let's say the ruminants, okay, they're eating the interesting plants, let's keep them off or let's focus on the plant side and not on the animal side because there's that interaction that we often, I would say, underestimate like how important the animals are to the plants. Like, do you remember when that clicked? Was it a process or was it a moment? Without these animals, there probably are not these plants or they're actually not showing their full their full potential, like the role of the animal. Do you remember how that came about in your research, in your work?

SPEAKER_00: 5:02

Yes, you're taking me back many, many years now, actually. A little bit hard to remember, actually. It wasn't any one moment, I'm sure of that. It was a process, I think, a process of just a deep interest in plants, especially it began in my soft year in college, my mother had always raised beautiful flower gardens, flower gardens and vegetable gardens and so forth. And I was aware of that, but I'd never really seen a plant, as I like to say, until I took plant identification my sophomore year in college. And that just opened up such an amazing world to me, all these plants and the diversity of plants. And then I think really that interest in animals and food selection by animals, the relationship between plants and animals. What I had hoped to do, you know, after the years on the ranch and finishing my undergrad work, I thought it might be interesting to do research, to study the relationship between plants and animals. But my idea would be to study wild animals like mountain goats foraging in the high alpine areas of of the mountains where I grew up in Colorado that I loved so much, and all these different species, and just see what do they eat, what do they afford. But I ended up actually working with domestic goats down in southern Utah, southern Utah in the U.S., on a monoculture of a shrub called blackbrush.

SPEAKER_01: 6:45

How did it switch then from like the domestic? It sort of seems almost, I would not say more boring, but much more contained at least. Like how did you switch from looking at the wild, wild ones up in the mountains to studying goats in a fence, basically, to say it very bluntly?

SPEAKER_00: 7:04

Yes, very good question. By necessity, by necessity. I was accepted into a program at Utah State University and the folks that were involved in that program were very interested in how to use domestic animals to improve landscapes for wildlife species that's already a very

SPEAKER_01: 7:24

very deep question actually if you're like because a lot of the thinking still is and back in the day probably was as well like okay these animals we need to get them off the land because they only do damage like it's a tool that can only degrade and not regenerate but to ask this question means many people or at least some saw the potential of okay there can be there can be positive outcomes if we do this well. That was quite a profound, quite a lucky one as well, I imagine.

SPEAKER_00: 7:54

Yeah, so absolutely. And for me, it couldn't have been better. You know, going to undergrad school in wildlife biology at Colorado State University, there was a sense that you just articulated that, you know, domestic animals are bad for landscapes and they only harm wild animals through their use of landscapes and so forth and so on. But having spent the years on the ranch, it was obvious that there were possibilities for domestic animals to improve landscapes. And then to discover this program at Utah State University, where for many years, probably 40, 50 years, they had been studying how to use domestic animals to improve landscapes for wildlife species. So I thought this is perfect match And they had funding to look at the role of goats browsing this shrub called blackbrush during the wintertime. The idea was to stimulate new growth of twigs on blackbrush. And those new twigs, the idea was, were more nutritious and would be better forage for some of the wild species that spent their winters foraging on those landscapes.

SPEAKER_01: 9:15

And so,

SPEAKER_00: 9:17

yeah,

SPEAKER_01: 9:18

that triggered, like, that's a very interesting question. What was the, let's say, the biggest surprise there? I mean, there are many, but what was, like, studying those goats in the twigs, like, what surprised you the most, and what do you still remember from that first, because from then on, you did a lot of research in this space, but what was the biggest takeaway or surprise from that?

SPEAKER_00: 9:40

Yes, you know, what appeared to be a really boring study, in principle to me, because domestic animals on a monoculture of black brush turned out to be really probably the best thing that could have happened to me. Oh, no, in retrospect. But it was a very controlled kind of study in the sense that we did have the goats and the shrub. And there were two surprises that really hit me from those years. First, you know, the idea was that this new growth would be more nutritious and that animals would strongly prefer to eat it. Well, what we found out was that the goats weren't interested at all in eating the new twigs of the plants. They strongly preferred the older twigs to the new twigs, even though the new twigs were higher in energy and protein and minerals. So that was the first surprise.

SPEAKER_01: 10:37

Which sort of goes against all the, yeah, you would imagine that any animal would go for that.

UNKNOWN: 10:45

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 10:46

Yes, it went against all the conventional wisdom, right? And it illustrated what many people believed about domestic animals in those days is that they lacked any sort of nutritional wisdom. Why wouldn't they eat the new twigs as opposed to the old woody twigs?

SPEAKER_01: 11:03

So basically, it confirmed the idea of they're too stupid to choose.

SPEAKER_00: 11:07

Yes, it confirmed the idea that after 10,000 years of domestication, cattle, sheep, goats, any of of the domesticated species had lost the nutritional wisdom of the body. So that was one surprise. Another was that not all goats agreed. When I say goats didn't want to eat the new twigs of black brush, that was true for say 80 to 90% of the goats, but 10 to 20% of the goats thought those new twigs were delicious. So that was revealing something about individuality and how not all individuals are the same. tall. The third thing that was really a shocker was that we had built, my wife and I had built six large pastures, the details don't matter, but we had six large pastures there and we had 15 goats in each of those six pastures. There were also these little creatures called wood rats that lived down in those environments and they built big houses at the basis of these juniper trees that were on the study site. And in one of the pastures, the goats started to eat the wood rat houses. Now, black brush doesn't look like great forage, but wood rat houses look even worse. So that was a third surprise. Why? Why on earth would they do that? Yeah, what we did then over the years was to try to understand why are the goats avoiding the new twigs as opposed to the... the old twigs? Why are the goats eating wood rat houses? What is it about this individuality too? Why are animals so different in terms of what they do and how they behave?

SPEAKER_01: 12:59

And what was, I mean, just to finish the story on the wood rat houses, what was the reason, because you found out actually why later on, like why did some goats go for this very unpalatable, not interesting looking, nor probably tasting substance. What did they look for? Why did they look for it?

SPEAKER_00: 13:22

Let's talk about the wood rat houses and then let's come back to the new twigs and why they were avoiding the new twigs. So the wood rat houses are inside of those houses and on the outside of the houses are covered with bark from the trees that grow in the area. As you look inside the houses, it's very densely packed vegetation with with what one might call different rooms in the house. One of the rooms is the bathroom, and that was the area that was soaked in urine. Now you might say, wow, that sounds horrible, but vegetation soaked in urine is actually a source of non-protein nitrogen. Now, if we think about, as people talk nowadays so much about the microbiome, microbiome in the soil or microbiome in the gut of the animal, The microbiome organisms need nitrogen in order for their populations to flourish for their nutritional needs. That urine soaked vegetation was a source of nitrogen that actually enabled the goats in the pasture that ate wood rat houses to perform much better during the three months browsing period. Now, what was amazing is that that was the only group of goats that did that. The other five groups of goats goats. None of them ate wood rat houses. And over the next three winters with different groups of goats, 18 different groups of goats in total, that group was the only group that ever ended up eating wood rat houses. And so one might think, you know, well, how does innovation start, occur and begin in animal populations? That got me very much thinking about innovation, how innovation occurs, and then how those innovations are transferred from generation to generation, and that becomes the role of culture and transgenerational linkages, which is very, very important and often not, you know, we often think about genetics. What are the genetics of this or that or the other breed of animal? We seldom stop to think about the role of culture and how very important culture and extended families are in terms of knowledge and transfer of knowledge from generation to generation. So that was one part. And we did many, many studies over the years to show that animals have the ability to self-select for energy, for protein, for minerals, even for vitamins. When they're lacking those and they have the opportunity, they'll select the nutrients they need. So that led to this whole exploration of nutritional wisdom in domestic animals and to showing that animals didn't in fact lose the ability to select nutritious diets.

SPEAKER_01: 16:23

We just didn't give them the options to choose properly and we imagined they were dumb and not going for the new tweaks.

SPEAKER_00: 16:32

Absolutely, absolutely. The availability of nutritious alternatives, the role of learning and learning early in life, learning actually begins in the womb. The fetal takeover system is fully functional during the last trimester of gestation in all creatures, including human beings. So, creatures are starting to learn about the food smothers selecting.

SPEAKER_01: 16:58

Yeah, we're going to get to the human part soon, but what does that mean for two parts? On the farm itself, or on whatever structure we have to hold animals? It sounds like the more diversity, the better, because animals need to self-select, and we don't know what they actually need or what they need. We don't know what they need as a group, let alone individually, because they're able. So is that a fair conclusion, like the more diversity in terms of plants, in terms of plant species, in terms of as forage potentially for ruminants, the better? Is that something you have found?

SPEAKER_00: 17:37

Yes, absolutely. I think that's probably the key to it all. I often like to say, linking back with soils, that plants turn dirt into soil and diverse mixtures of plants turn soil into homes, grocery stores, and pharmacies for all the creatures below ground as well as above ground. So I think diversity is really, plant diversity is really the key to the health of systems.

SPEAKER_01: 18:09

And then on the herd side or the animal side, this intergenerational and this culture piece is something we don't really talk about a lot, or at least I don't. What does it mean for a rancher or a farmer that's having animals? How different does that mean operationally to look at a herd of animals and how does that work? How do we want to make sure that they have the knowledge to actually graze where they are and they keep that knowledge and they build up that knowledge and they have space for innovation? What have you found there? Because I know you've done research there to look at to look at that impact of intergenerational knowledge and learning and also the cultural side of animals, which always feels a bit weird to talk about the cultural side of animals, but it is really like the culture of eating and selecting plants, et cetera, is really culture. And so I think it's fair we talk about it. What have you seen there and how different is it from, let's say, quote unquote, the status quo?

SPEAKER_00: 19:06

Yes, absolutely. And, you know, I understand what you say when you say it seems a little strange to talk about culture and animals. I recently wrote a review paper with a colleague in Israel where we were talking about culture and goats and all the ramifications of culture and how that comes about and so forth. But, you know, it is important to mention culture. And, you know, so these animals then, take a young animal, begins to learn in the womb about what foods its mother is eating after birth through flavors in mother's milk. It's learning about what are going to be foods in the environment. And the more diverse the diet of mothers, the more flavors get into the milk. And then when the young animal begins to forage, it's remembering these cues, these flavor cues. And so some plants are familiar, others are not. Mother is also serving as a model. We did so many studies of that, of what not to eat. If mother eats something, the likelihood of her offspring eating it goes up compared to if mothers avoiding it and if the young animal samples which they often will something that mother's avoiding and they get sick a little bit they strongly avoid it in the future so mother becomes very important in terms of food selection beyond that she becomes very important in terms of habitat selection where to go in the environment where to go seasonally in the spring in the summer in the autumn mother also becomes very important in terms of knowing what's a predator and what's not a predator. So what not to eat, where and where not to go, what's dangerous, what's not dangerous. Mother plays huge roles in all of those sorts of linkages over time with the landscapes that animals inhabit. And that all ends up being what it means to be locally adapted to the environments that animals live in, really. It's fundamental to survival over time. And that's why with domestic and wild animals both, when they're taken from familiar environments and placed in environments where they have no experience whatsoever, they suffer much more from malnutrition, from predation, from over ingestion of toxic plants, and all that's saying that they simply, learning is very important in these ever changing environments. If you think about the environments animals inhabit, they change They change daily, weekly, seasonally. They change over time. And so learning becomes a very important way that animals are able to continually evolve and create in these ever-changing environments.

SPEAKER_01: 22:03

And so it's very, I wouldn't say dangerous, but also very risky to bring, let's say, a herd from one environment to another. There would be huge adaptive needs And they will, I mean, you mentioned they eat much more toxic plants. They are really are, let's say they, they are not at home at that place. And that, that will show in the animal behavior, but also in the animal growth, if you look at that, obviously as a rancher. Um, so just moving them around and imagining, uh, that, that they are sort of fine everywhere grass grows is, is a great, uh, under, under appreciation of the complexity of, of, of localism, but almost in, in animals as well. Like it's, it pushes. them way beyond their comfort zone. Is that fair?

SPEAKER_00: 22:49

That's absolutely the case. And it makes me think, you know, I'm just coming from spending 10 days in Colorado and hiking and fishing and visiting with old friends. They're the ones that are still alive. And I spent time on the ranch where I worked for many years. And it was fabulous, fabulous 10 days of just hiking and being out. But, you know, the old rancher that I worked with with Henry DeLuca. I remember very strongly coming back after my sophomore year in college to work on the ranch, and I took a class in genetics, and I was learning about animal breeding and heterosis and many things like that. And I remember asking Henry, I said, you know, Henry, I noticed that you always keep your own replacement heifers, your own replacement female cattle. Why Why do you do that? And I told him a little bit what I was learning. And he said, well, he started to tell me stories. He said, you know, and we had this huge landscape where the cattle lived seasonally. The cattle would be on the ranch during the winter. In the spring of the year, they'd go on to federally administered land, Bureau of Land Management land. And then in the summer and the fall, they'd go up to higher elevations yet to land. land administered by the Forest Service here in the US. So we were really moving up in elevation seasonally from about 8,500 feet elevation on the ranch to maybe 11,000, 12,000 feet elevation in the mountains. And we were talking about that, and we used to move the cattle by horseback around in those different pastures at different times. And he said, you know how we always find the cattle in little groups. They're not in one great big group. They don't just all stay together. They're in little groups. And we know in different pastures where we're going to find those little groups. And so it's efficient for us. And he didn't talk much about them, but it was efficient for them as well in the sense that we've been talking. Well, he said, I brought cattle that don't know this range, young animals, into these landscapes. And he said, You don't know where you're going to find them. You don't know if you'll find them because all they do is move. They move, move, move. What are they trying to do? I would say they're trying to find. We don't know where we are. We don't like it here. We want to try to find where our home is. Basically, that in my mind accounts for all the movement of the animals. But also, he said, when you bring them down in the fall, they won't be bred. So your reproductive performance is poor. and so on and so forth. So he told many stories like that. He also told stories of when he moved his cattle herd to a totally unfamiliar environment one summer that he called, quote, the summer from hell because his cattle were doing like the cattle that were naive. Keep

SPEAKER_01: 26:02

moving, moving, moving, trying to get back.

SPEAKER_00: 26:06

Yeah, moving, moving, moving. They didn't get bred. No reproductive performance. So he summed it all up by saying the problem is that the animals Animals just don't know the range. And that's really what I've been saying in all that I've been talking about here is what does it mean to know the range? And it has to do with all these things that animals learn.

SPEAKER_01: 26:29

And the very obvious question then, what does it mean for us human beings as, quote unquote, just another animal? Because it seems almost like this connection between healthy soils and healthy grassland produce or whatever grows on it. and healthy animals and healthy gut systems of the animals, etc., has been researched really well. It's been a body of research for the last decades, 30, 40, 50 years, and maybe more. Does it seem almost like it's researched better than the human side of things? And if so, do you have any clue why that would be? Is it easier? Is it safer to do it with animals so we don't have to ask difficult questions about our own nourishment Have you been surprised about that?

SPEAKER_00: 27:20

Yes. Well, in fact, you know, so we'd spent 40 years studying these kinds of processes. And then I retired about 14 years ago. And I thought that I would write a book just to try to pull together all the work that we'd done over the years. Nobody's going to read 250, 300 papers in the scientific literature. So I thought I'll try to pull it together. And I also thought it would be very interesting to try to review what do people study about people? I knew in a broad sense, but I had not really dived into the literature on human beings. So it was very interesting then to look at what people studied and compared that with what we'd studied. So let's talk about your question a minute. When I think of nutritional wisdom of the body, I think of three legs to the stool. One is the social cultural part of things that we've been talking about the transgenerational linkages learning what and what not to eat and so forth there's another one that we which

SPEAKER_01: 28:27

starts in the womb basically the last three months is fundamental

SPEAKER_00: 28:31

yes yes starts in the womb and in humans as well so that's one part of it there's another part that we haven't talked about much that let's touch on here briefly and it goes back to the black brush twigs. And why were the goats avoiding what we thought were the more nutritious twigs? Well, the reason was that those twigs are very high in compounds called tannins. And those tannins make goats sick, basically, when they eat them in too much amount. And so this sickness is, what would we say? It gives you clues to these feedbacks that occur. You know what If I were to ask you why you like a particular food, you would tell me because it tastes good. If I ask you why you don't like it, you would tell me because it tastes bad. If we're able to interrogate the goats and we ask them why they don't like the new twigs, they'd say it tastes bad, made me sick. We studied so much this notion that this feedback from cells and organ systems, including the microbiome is changing our liking for the flavor of foods as a function of our needs. Now, that's a mouthful there. But what's happening is, you know, we think we like food because it tastes good. And that's true. That's absolutely true. But what we don't realize are there are these non-cognitive feedbacks that are coming from cells and organ systems, including the microbiome, that are actually altering our liking for the flavor of food. It's not something we need to think about any more than we need to think about which enzymes to release to digest food we've eaten in a meal. This is happening automatically, but it's changing liking. And we did so many studies of that over the years to illustrate how profound that is. So these metabolically mediated feedbacks are what are enabling individual animals. I mentioned that some of the goats like the new twigs of black brush. Well, for for their bodies and their cells and organ systems, the tannins aren't a problem with them, and so they end up liking them. So one leg of the stool are these cultural transgenerational linkages. The second leg are these metabolically mediated feedback signals that alter liking for flavor of food as a function of need. The third is what you talked about early on, availability of alternative foods and wholesome alternatives, plant diversity in terms of animals below and above ground, and we can say for human beings, a variety of wholesome foods. And that's where we've really gotten off track, I think. People argue often that human beings don't have nutritional wisdom as well. How could they look at the obesity crisis and what a horrible metabolic condition most human beings are in nowadays. I can certainly say that for the United States, at least, and I know in many other countries as well. Well, it's the availability of alternatives that's really the issue here. And our food preferences have been hijacked in two ways. One is that the nutritional quality and flavor, which is intimately linked, as I'm trying to say, the flavor of foods is intimately linked with their nutritional quality, that has declined during the last 50 to 70 years in meat, in fruits, in vegetables, and that's been well documented. Yes, milk, all of those products, the quality has declined. At the same time, the desirability of so-called junk food or whatever, ultra-processed foods has increased markedly. So over the last 50 to 70 years, we've disincentivized real foods because they don't taste good because they're lacking nutritional quality at the same time that junk food has become all the more desirable. So that leg of the stool has been horribly broken and And so there's no way for nutritional wisdom to be manifest in human beings.

SPEAKER_01: 33:20

So you're basically saying that the lack of us, I'm saying the universal us, eating wholesome food, eating enough vegetables, what the doctors say, and enough fruit, et cetera, et cetera, is partly due to the fact that they're simply not as tasty and thus as nutrient dense as they used to be. So it's like... even if we wanted to, like to have your children eat vegetables, et cetera, is in many places a war. And that is sort of an unfair war because the vegetables lost so much of the flavor and the nutrient parts. And is that possible? I mean, one side, is that possible to reset and regrow, let's say on the broccoli side, can we regrow broccoli with more flavor? One, I think we have done some interviews on that side, but also two, like do our taste buds sort of need a set as well or need to learn new things or relearn things that we made made new before even if maybe our parents didn't eat wholesome meals when when we were in the womb which sort of puts us back like have we seen what can we learn there from the animal side like can we relearn these things even though we might be a bit behind because our our cultural and because our parents weren't so um weren't exposing us to these these foods

SPEAKER_00: 34:42

yes excellent excellent points that you you're making all the way across the board I think from the standpoint of fruits and vegetables the answer is yes definitely we can we can select for varieties that have a great deal of what I like to refer to as phytochemical richness that includes not only the energy and protein and minerals and vitamins and so forth but this tremendous array of different compounds that plant produce that come under broad headings such as phenolics, terpenes, alkaloids and we don't need to go into the details of those but the key point is that plants produce tens of thousands of these compounds and they serve multiple multiple roles in ecological systems actually probably far more than we have time to get into but from a nutritional standpoint

SPEAKER_01: 35:40

there are many many many papers if you want to go geeky and go very deep on this I mean, we'll put some links below in terms of references. There is so much on this, which is fascinating. But yeah, let's stay on the surface for now.

SPEAKER_00: 35:55

Yes, so much that's written. And, you know, for those who are interested, as you say, you can provide papers. We've written several review papers related to this and so forth and books coming out. But it's very important to realize the roles that these compounds play in terms of and Antioxidants, anti-inflammatory, immunomodulatory, anti-parasitic, the list goes on and on from a nutrition and health standpoint. And so we can select for varieties that are phytochemically rich. We can also, I think one of the things that strikes me so much, when I was thinking about it when I was back in Colorado here over the last 10 days, when I grew up in that small town in central Colorado, Colorado in the heart of these Rocky Mountains, you know, there were people, my grandparents and great-grandparents were still very much linked to growing their own food. They grew wonderful, beautiful gardens. They raised chickens. They had a hog and so forth. There was less of that during my parents' generation and by my generation that had pretty much disappeared. Those old people understood the value of growing your own food, of putting that food up, and that when you grow vegetables and fruits to maturity, that they're ripened on the vine as opposed to picked green and shipped where they lose much, much of their nutritional quality, they understood the value of that. And so when you ate a meal at their houses and stuff, the flavors of the foods were delicious. And the meals were satisfying. You didn't have to eat a lot to be satisfied. Well, all that's reflecting the fact that the body is meeting its needs through those foods. My wife and I were always interested in what the old people did. We've grown gardens and raised animals throughout our 50 years that we've been married. And right now we have vegetables that we're picking fresh. We have tomatoes that we're picking fresh. We have carrots. And the flavors of those are outstanding. We took some of those to Colorado with us on this recent trip. And instantly, the people that were with us said, where did you get those tomatoes? Well, we grew them ourselves. The body knows. The body knows when it's eating something that's phytochemically rich and tasty.

SPEAKER_01: 38:40

Which is interesting because, of course, I mean, you're nutritional history goes back because you grew up in a place where food was very important the homegrown food was very important but i'm imagining maybe not all the people that were on the trip in colorado with you had that same experience and yet that's a hopeful sign that we are able to recognize also if you grew up in a city on fast food potentially um to that we're able to recognize taste and flavor um when we when we notice it or when we eat it and and that triggers i mean there's so many stories of people tasting a certain tomato in a certain place or certain fruit or certain X, Y, Z, and really get triggered and still talk about that story years later, like when I ate this and this and this and this place. And that's a helpful sign. And then, but what does that mean for, I mean, the cultural part, of course, but also like you now say we can select genetics or the varieties that deliver that. What does it mean, if you know, obviously, on the agriculture practices, like how does that influence, like how much of this is sort of genetics for like behavior versus genetics also in fruit but also we can talk about animals of course like how much are we limited by genetics and is it mostly is it behavior or how much is it we have to get the genetics right and then we have behavior in terms of getting these nutrients and flavor and quality in the end products

SPEAKER_00: 40:02

yes absolutely well it's a combination of the two of in part the genetics but also in part the environment where the plants growing and you know You know, there's been so much work in ecology, plant ecologists, and people who are interested in foraging behavior of animals, looking at how the environment where a plant's growing is influencing the chemistry of the plant. And so sunlight, nutrients, water, are all influencing the production of these not only primary compounds, but the secondary compounds as well. We did a lot of study of that over the years and the same ideas relate then to fruits and vegetables. The environment where you're growing particular plants is going to influence the chemistry. And I think the more that people really get into the nuance of what's happening, not only with the varieties that we select for, but also the environment where plants are growing, you can really fine tune the flavors of of fruits and vegetables. I think of wines and fine wines and the terroir that goes into all of that. That's the same idea. And so we can certainly play important roles. And I think the, well, the old people that I knew growing up in this town of Salida wouldn't have, they wouldn't have talked about all these things that we're talking about in terms of phytochemistry and so forth and so on, but they understood that fertile soils and it was amazing to see the soils and the gardens that they produced. They knew that that produced really nutritious kinds of foods with wonderful flavors. So I think, you know, without going into details and there are some breeding programs that I'm not as up on that as I probably should be nowadays, but when I was writing nourishment, I was in touch with people that were really thinking thinking about tomatoes and strawberries and broccoli and so on and so forth, and selecting for varieties that were phytochemically rich. See, there's a trade-off. There's a trade-off. Talking about economics, we can talk a little bit about economics.

SPEAKER_03: 42:33

Perfect bridge.

SPEAKER_00: 42:34

Plants are making economic decisions every minute of every day of their lives. And you may think, oh, look at that plant. It's just sitting there. No, it's not just sitting there. It It's making these decisions about how to allocate resources. And depending upon the availability of resources, the plant determines how much to allocate to growth, how much to allocate to these phytochemicals that it's producing and so on and so forth. And when you get involved in research on that, you realize how dynamic that is and how much sunlight, nutrients, water are influencing the decisions that plants make.

SPEAKER_01: 43:18

And what can we learn as human beings that are allocating immense amount of resources every day and make decisions? What can we learn from how plants are approaching those trade-offs?

SPEAKER_00: 43:34

Well, I think let's back up just a little bit and think about to pursue your question. You know, to grow a calorie of food nowadays requires two to three calories of fossil fuel input. So that's how we're allocated. We've had this amazing source of energy. Which I think is

SPEAKER_01: 43:54

direct and now even indirectly depending on what happens after we're at six, seven, eight, nine, much more. So it's an immensely inefficient system from that perspective.

SPEAKER_00: 44:07

Yes, we require two to three calories of fossil fuel input to produce a calorie of food and that's going into many, many things, including herbicides, pesticides, fertilizers, and so forth. And then we require, what, another 8, 10, 12 calories to process, transport, store food. So we're looking, what, 12 to 14 calories of energy, of fossil fuel energy, to produce a calorie of food. No plant would survive for a week on that kind of a budget. You have to bring in more resource than you expend. And same with animals. They wouldn't survive at all. Now, here's where I think it gets very interesting. And I don't mean this in terms of some kind of critique or being some kind of arrogant person at all. We do what we do as a function of what we know. And I think mostly we probably don't know very much. I'm saying that for me, I've After years of studying this, you realize how little you know. So during my career, when I participated some in this, ecologists were learning about the multiple, multiple roles that these phytochemicals or what were called secondary compounds, these terpenes, alkaloids, phenolics, on and on and on, the plants produce. They play so many roles ecologically in protecting plants against... being overeaten in the environment, in sunscreen, protection from UV radiation, in attracting pollinators and fruit eaters, and in relationships with other plants. Plants can produce compounds that help prevent other plants from growing around them, so-called allelopathic effects, and on and on and on and on. Well, at the same time, ecologists were learning about the multiple, multiple roles that these phytochemicals play in mediating relationships with other organisms in the environment, agronomists were selecting for varieties that contained lower concentrations of these compounds because there's costs. There's costs involved in producing the compounds. If the plants are not producing them, they can allocate more of their resources to growth as opposed to these compounds. But what we didn't realize is that those compounds were playing all these roles. They protect plants against insects, so there goes insecticides. They protect plants against other plants, so out the window goes herbicides. Legumes are important sources of fertilization, of nitrogen fertilizer. I'm thinking right now of studies that show that were long-term studies, 20 or more years in the Tallgrass Prairie, showing the importance of plant diversity for nutrient content of the plant species growing in the mix. And they were showing much greater nutrient carbon concentrations, much higher levels of carbon fixed in the soil when there was a diversity of different plant species, going back to our theme of diversity, when there was a diversity of plant species as opposed to monocultures. So you have these multiple roles then that plant diversity and these plant secondary compounds are playing in terms of mediating relationships within the system. And we simply didn't realize all that was happening. plants were originally producing these compounds, which were playing these vital roles. We got rid of those compounds. We had to make up with that with fossil fuel inputs, fertilizers, herbicides, pesticides, and so on.

SPEAKER_01: 48:12

So basically by selecting, no, no, absolutely. By selecting for, for, we selected for yields primarily and maybe shelf stable or depending on the crop. And by doing that, we, we deselected or didn't select for, or we started to basically select for plants that put all their energy in yield, et cetera, and didn't quote unquote waste energy for producing their own pesticides, herbicides, et cetera, which we didn't see. It wasn't that we, it was an evil plan to do this, but we thought, okay, this plant yields a bit more. Let's keep breeding with this one. And down the line, we noticed that if the plant doesn't spend this energy on protecting him or herself or itself, we probably need to do that with outside energy which means digging a hole and getting a lot of petroleum out of the earth so we get into a very very destructive train that just kept going faster because the more we select for that the more energy we need to put from the outside in which plants could perfectly do by themselves is then the trick of getting the agriculture system off the fossil fuel drug that it's on at the moment not going back but starting breeding like you mentioned when you were doing research for nourishment starting to to select for plants that do a lot of this themselves, even though they might take a yield, like a yield cut at the beginning, because of course then we can start selecting again also for yield and the mix, and then take in the whole picture, like we have to spend a lot less energy to grow this so the yield can be a bit lower, is that the path forward, let's say, to get out of this sort of loop that we're in, just more energy, less productive, more productive plants, but plants that need more energy to grow, and just we keep going, like this is a sort of never-ending story if we don't get all Yes,

SPEAKER_00: 50:00

that's a great summary that you just made of what I've been trying to say. And I think that's true. And if you think about when we eat, what is it that we want? Our body needs nourishment from all these different kinds of phytochemicals and biochemicals that are in fruits, produce, meat, milk, and so forth. And so it's not quantity necessarily. that we need, but it's quality, phytochemical and biochemical richness. And so in the end, you know, if you produce for quantity, you've got this great amount, but you may have to eat, let's say just for the sake of argument, two times as much to get your needs met when you've diluted the nutritional quality. So that's, I think, exactly what becomes very important to to refocus on what is it that we're trying to do with the foods we eat. We're trying to nourish our bodies. That means that what we want is phytochemical and biochemical richness and not necessarily just yield.

SPEAKER_01: 51:11

And how do we transition towards that in a world where we're so used to only look at yield and look for the cheapest gallery or almost the cheapest gallery in any supermarket or on the shelf to like, what can I do with my dollar or with my euro? or with my yen or whatever money you're spending. How do we... Because it's very easy to say this and we go, okay, we have to feed the world and it's all about calories, calories, calories, calories, and it turns out to be not. But then we still have a world that goes into the calorie direction. How can we even reframe

SPEAKER_00: 51:46

it or what would be pathways to trigger that? Yes, I think through the palates of people. I think through the palates of people. Is it

SPEAKER_02: 51:55

about taste?

SPEAKER_00: 51:56

Yes, to get people linked back in with wholesome foods again. That's a big challenge. But, you know, the example we just gave of when we were there in Colorado, and here's this salad with these different, you know, different kinds of lettuce and cucumber and blah, blah, blah, and these tomatoes that come, and instantly these people are recognizing, wow, where did those tomatoes come from? People know, the body knows, and I think it's true what you were saying earlier, that we may need to recalibrate, especially, and I interact with many people who try to deal with one-on-one, either nutritionists or medical doctors dealing with people that have been hooked from birth, basically, on ultra-processed food. And that's a big challenge to try to, you know, how do you retrain a palate to like wholesome foods? But I think it's very difficult to retrain a palate to like foods that have been selected for quantity as opposed to phytochemical and biochemical richness and quality that leads to this incredible flavor. So I think however we do that, trying to get in your idea of investment, invest in ways that create wholesome foods for people. I think it's fundamental to the health of society. I think too, and this may sound crazy, but... Please share. We like it. the more we can get people linked like those old people who grew gardens and who appreciate it. You know, maybe you don't have to grow chickens and bees and a pig and all that, but even growing a tiny garden can get you back in touch with something so fundamental to every facet of health, below ground and above ground, appreciating what those old people I think, appreciated about the value of good soil. And they wouldn't have known all the chemistry of that, but they knew the smell. You've got, you know, look at the color of this and look at the smell and you know this is good. And look at the crops that it produces, the broccolis, the cauliflower, the corn, the peas, the beans, and on and on and on. They knew those linkages. And I think, you know, we've become very great tech technologically as a society, but we've left behind, we no longer realize, I think, that we are still members of nature's communities. And what we do to them, ultimately, we do to ourselves. And I think only by nourishing them, nurturing them, can we nurture ourselves. And so, like I said, thinking about the world and how it is and how busy people are nowadays and running, running, running, In a way, it sounds crazy to me to say, you know, well, grow a garden. The other thing I think about a lot nowadays here in the Western United States, and I know in Europe and many parts of the world, China, you know, the changing climates, the heat, the amount of heat, the lack of water. I mean, reservoirs are drying up here in the U.S. I was reading that in China, the Yangtze River is dry. Now, you know, we're going to have to really change the way that we think about everything economically in that sense. And not only growing your own food, thinking about how to do that, but here in the US anyway, and in the Western US, we've been so extravagant with our use of water to irrigate lawns that are not locally adapted at all. So you have to put a lot of water to keep them going, golf courses. I mean, the amount of fertilizer, the amount of pesticide, herbicide, the amount of water that we use to do that is astronomical. And it's simply not going to be possible to do that. So I think getting back into growing native plants, the plants that survive naturally on what's provided in the environment and coming to appreciate the beauty of those plants and the diverse of those plants in combination with having you know growing little gardens I think can be a path forward for people as we go into what's looking to be much different times in terms of changing climates.

SPEAKER_01: 56:59

Absolutely and that whole shift I think how do we expose so many people to better or to different flavors and tastes and then at the other side the pressure that just mounting from water use, completely extracted water use over the last decades. And it's just going to hit pretty hard. And so what would you do in these times of great changes or great upheaval as well if you would be in charge of quite a large investment fund? You would have a billion dollars to invest, to put to work with all your knowledge and all your work you've done. I'm not looking for a dollar amount or exact, but where would you prioritize? What would you how would you put this money to work and where would you go first if you had practically I'm not saying unlimited resources but for sure an enormous amount of money to put to work and potentially I mean ideally also get back at some point it could be very long term investments but what would you focus on is it genetics is it buying land and regenerating is it water rights like what would you be focusing your energy and also your investments on

SPEAKER_00: 58:07

those would certainly be part of it I think I also think a lot about education. How could we educate from young people right on up about the need to become as a people to get locally adapted to the environments that we inhabit? How could you do that? I'm thinking of a one-hour movie that I used to show when I was teaching at Utah State University, and we were having these kind of discussions in the class, the upper level, undergrad class all the time about our relationship with the environment and what we could do. But one of the movies I like to show was titled The Power of Community. And it was about Cuba. And it was about what happened to Cuba in Cuba after the fall of the Soviet Union. Cuba was absolutely utterly dependent upon the Soviet Union for fossil fuels. And when the Soviet Union collapsed, they no longer had access to that. And so as they talk in the early part of that movie. They were an economy in free fall. They were absolutely free falling. And so the beauty of it, though, the beauty of it was that they figured out how to work together to produce what they needed. And I tell you, everybody was involved in doing that, whether you were a medical doctor or a lawyer or whatever kind of professional. They all became organic farmers in a hurry. And they learned about how to produce. And the beauty to me was that they pulled together rather than pulled apart. rather than warring and fighting and so forth. They became educated in terms of what they needed to do and they all pulled together to do that. So I think a lot about money, you know, that's needed in terms of how to do things, as you're mentioning, it's very important, but also the educational part of things and how to get people, how to make people become aware. What... what are the best ways possible to get people thinking about where food comes from? What's the difference between wholesome, delicious kinds of foods and ultra-processed junk food and so forth? How could you make a shift in the consciousness of the people to show our linkages physically, emotionally, spiritually, with the landscapes that we inhabit. I think as we've moved away from that, we've become less healthy, not only physically, also mental health, and also spiritual health. We're very, there's a very spiritual aspect to all of these things as well. And our connection with the natural environment helps us to realize our connection with the transcendent as well. And so, you know, that's maybe pie in the sky kind of stuff. But I would be thinking about those kind of things and getting with the best people that I could pull together who know about those kinds of things. I would be pulling together the best teams I could to try to think about how to do something like that.

SPEAKER_01: 1:01:39

How do we trigger, let's say, a higher state or a different state of consciousness around our connection in the the natural world and and like everything we do to it comes is is also to us and everything we eat comes from there and we go back there at some point as well any ideas how to do that apart from i don't know large-scale meditation or a large scale i don't know tomato trials from your garden like what what do we need to which are both good solutions actually but like how do we awaken that part or in in us is it really through take and through culture like it for sure wasn't only the salad it was also the the settings the fact that you're with friends hiking walking and then eating a salad like that that triggers something like that like how can we it sounds bad like replicate that at scale if you have any ideas

SPEAKER_00: 1:02:36

yes it's a good question and i don't want you know when i say that i i know that that that worked for me so i don't want to be arrogant and say that that's going to connect everyone but I think there is this, you know, we all eat, we all eat and we nourish our bodies through the foods we eat. And as you said so nicely, and we're both trying to say, you know, that there's these deep connections with that. So then that's right. The question is, how do you do that? And, you know, when during the last 10 years of my career, we had a program called Behave. And we had at that point, about 25 years of studies about processes, behavioral principles and processes, behavioral ecology. And we wanted to share that. We wanted to share that with people around the world, as it turned out. And we got a large grant for us, anyway, about$4.5 million grant. And the whole point of that grant was to take the research that we'd done and to get that out to people around the world. And so So one of the things that we were required to do was to put together an advisory board. And we thought about who are the most innovative people we know involved in farming and ranching kinds of things, in growing food. Who are some of the best people we know? Or in managing lands, federally administered lands here in the US. And so we put together 45 people. We kicked it off with a three-day workshop and discussion. And then for 10 years, we did all kinds of work, promotional kinds of work from websites and videos to umpteen jillion kinds of talks and workshops. And what started out to be 45 people on our advisory board ended up being 250 people that were coming from around the world to participate in our annual meetings. We were doing research as a partner. throughout the program, and the research was directly related to the needs of farmers and ranchers. What issues do you have? What kinds of things are you dealing with? And so we decided early on not to make it a bricks and mortar kind of structure, a permanent structure. We thought what's important is to get the ideas out to people, to make that a part of the knowledge base of people. And so I think And as part of that, we had programs going in schools around the valleys. And we had kids growing out, working on growing gardens, helping grow gardens and so forth. And so it was very– it had many, many layers to it. The program had many, many layers that went from hands-on involvement with kids in schools to working with– with people who grew food to working in broader communities. So I think, you know, grassroots efforts like that are a way to do it. And then, you know, what I would be thinking about if I did have that money, I would be identifying who are key people, who are people that are really, really on board with this, doing good work and trying to put together a program like we put together over that 10 years with Behave that really ended up having people from all around the world coming to those meetings, from Europe, from Australia, from South America, from Africa. You know, I think that's one way, in a way, to get word out and to get people hands-on involved. We had train-the-trainer kinds of programs related to... It was very much, though... ultimately about education. I used to say all the time we're all students attempting to learn, to understand the processes of nature and to use that understanding to benefit communities ecologically, economically, socially and so forth to really to work like that.

SPEAKER_01: 1:07:12

So what we need is behave 2.0 or like continuous of that work on a global scale. There's some kind of that that encompasses everything from the rancher and the farmer to the school meals where you learn if you maybe didn't get it at home or if you did what taste and growth looks like and how life gets created as well and how that education piece comes back and again back and back again in this podcast and I don't think anybody has cracked the code completely but we need a lot of attempts to to do that. And I want to be conscious of your time as well and ask a final question. If there's one thing you could change, you have a magic wand and tomorrow morning Fred has changed something in the world of food and agriculture, what would that be?

SPEAKER_00: 1:08:02

I think, as we've been saying, the most important thing, I think, is for people in general to change their relationship with the environment at this point. And I think nobody's going to do that just because, just because we're saying, oh, that's a good thing to do. But I think what's going to really drive that are the harsh realities of what's happening ecologically, economically, socially, politically nowadays. I think some heavy hands are going to fall down in a way it's like a perfect storm

SPEAKER_01: 1:08:34

do you think it's severe enough like as in Cuba when they had to shift from overnight from a very input heavy industry to basically nothing not an input heavy they had to figure it out themselves and they are on an island which makes it even more complex like is that are we facing our Cuba moment let's say and I'm not saying the Cuba crisis that was a different one but this

SPEAKER_00: 1:08:55

Cuba moment I think it's here actually I really do and I don't mean that to some sort of a pessimist and a blah, blah, blah, but there is something to be said for being a realist and for looking at what's happening and thinking about our relationship with the environment and that we need to rethink again, like what that rancher I mentioned earlier was, or what's it mean to be, to know the range, to be locally adapted to these environments that we inhabit. I think that would be be it for me and thinking about what would be wonderful. And I sometimes, if we were to take all the resources that we spend in trying to kill one another and going to wars and trying to arm ourselves, and I realize that's part of how life is on this planet, but I often think if we were to take all those resources and put them into nurturing, one another and the landscapes we inhabit, how much that could help us as peoples. That would, I guess, be my magic wand kind of wish of, you know, For humans, you know, we're now participating in the sixth mass extinction. There's no question about that in my mind after reviewing all the studies that are going on, what's happening with insects, fishes, birds, mammals, and so forth. But there have been five previous mass extinctions. Life went on. It changed. It went on. It'll go on after the sixth. I guess the question I ask all the time is do humans want to be a part of of what goes on after the sixth mass extinction or, you know, the 99.9% of the species that have ever been on this planet were told by paleontologists are extinct now. So, you know, humans aren't unique in any sense in that way. But the question I would ask is, do we want to stick around? Do we want to have opportunity for offspring to come to this beautiful, beautiful planet and enjoy a blink, a moment on this earth?

SPEAKER_01: 1:11:20

And I think there's a better way to end this conversation. I want to thank you so much for taking the time to share for obviously all the work you do and have done and for sharing that work here on the podcast, but in general as well. We only have a very small audience, but you reach way more people through the books and through all the work you do. So thank you so much for your time today and for everything you've done for this space.

SPEAKER_00: 1:11:45

And I want to thank you very much for the opportunity to spend some time visiting with you. It was wonderful to do that. And thank you for the work that you're doing. It's educational. That's what you're doing, what we're talking about. And it's one more way of trying to get people to think about these topics, which at least you and I and some others feel are very, very important. So thank you very much.

SPEAKER_01: 1:12:21

Thanks again and see you next time.