
Unshod with D. Firth Griffith
Conversation about relearning the kinship worldview with author, horse-drawn woodwright, and renowned storyteller, D. Firth Griffith. Unshod is a podcast and community that believes to rebel, we must pause, that we live with Earth as Earthlings, that we must approach creativity, curiosity, and compassion in conversation.… but we must approach this ground UNSHOD. This has nothing to do with "saving the world." It has everything to do with leaving the right kind of tracts in the mud.
Unshod with D. Firth Griffith
Exploring The Blue Plate: Bridging Food Systems and Climate Resilience with Mark Easter
Explore the fascinating intersection of food systems and climate change with Mark Easter, author of the book The Blue Plate: A Food Lover’s Guide to Climate Chaos. Mark illuminates the unpredictable ways our food production impacts greenhouse gas emissions and how agricultural practices have both contributed to and buffered against climate change. You'll discover the complex history and evolution of agriculture, from the introduction of fossil fuels and chemical fertilizers to the innovative solutions that attempt a more sustainable future.
Join our online community to discuss this episode with us directly!
In this conversation, Mark unravels the powerful role of methane and the transformative impact of fossil fuel-dependent farming practices that emerged in the 20th century. He sheds light on agriculture's dual role as both a contributor to and a preventer of climate chaos, and how practices like the Haber-Bosch process have changed the landscape of farming.
Mark discusses pioneering strategies for sustainable food production, from integrating livestock into farming systems to enhancing soil health with organic matter. Learn about his creative journey in writing "The Blue Plate" and the profound connections fostered between farmers and consumers through sustainable practices.
Buy Mark's book HERE.
Buy Daniel's new book HERE.
Well, Mark, I don't know where you want to begin. I have so many thoughts. I've been blessed and honored to read through your book the Blue Plate. What is uh I'm meant to put this into memory, but a food lover's guide to climate. Chaos is the subtitle, and I wanted to start there because you've been described to me as like the world's premier scientist studying the food system's impact into the carbon crisis or the climate emergency. You chose a subtitle climate chaos, Do you mind? Can we start there? Why that terminology? I think language is so important. Obviously, you wrote a whole book on it, but why chaos?
Speaker 2:Sure?
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's a great question, and you're putting me in a heady company and there's hundreds thousands of people working in this space and I'm just one of many that I'm happy to stand shoulder to shoulder with a lot of hardworking colleagues studying this issue and very concerned about it.
Speaker 2:Climate chaos what I was really trying to get at here is that we are facing a crisis here, and the food system the way we grow, process, cook and deal with food and especially how we deal with the leftovers intersects directly with the climate in interesting and fascinating ways. In interesting and fascinating ways and an awful lot of it is unpredicted, has been unpredicted by the scientific community, and there's been a lot of surprising findings as we delve into trying to understand okay, adding up the greenhouse gas emissions that come from basically from human society, from the process of just living on this planet, which is what I and my colleagues do. We're greenhouse gas accountants, and so we've just been continually surprised at how the food system interacts with the climate, both in the way it generates climate heating emissions, but also where the drawdown opportunities are how we can grow food, process it differently and deal with the leftovers differently in a way that actually reduces greenhouse gas emissions and can draw carbon emissions down from the atmosphere back into soil and trees and the crops that we grow.
Speaker 1:I think a lot of people today are weighed down by this fact, and so I would imagine the consciousness around this crisis or chaos is in the billions, regardless if we call it the climate crisis or we just feel it as a climate crisis, like my neighbor, who is not the type that you would imagine to talk about the climate crisis with you. He showed up the other day sweating and he made the joke Because it was about 100, maybe 107 degree heat index here in virginia end of july and he made the joke. He said anybody who doesn't believe in climate change is a white collar worker with ac. Everybody else gets it right.
Speaker 1:So there's a lot of consciousness around that, um, but simultaneously I think you know I'm thinking of like jordan peterson, who is a pretty outspoken individual, obviously very intelligent, but he's had a lot of conversations recently about the climate crisis not existing. Could you just talk about that? Why do some scientists consider climate change or the greenhouse gas in the atmosphere as not an actual problem, but it's been misunderstood as a possible opportunity? And where do you fit in your book? How does that fit within this narrative? Can we just start there at?
Speaker 2:the beginning. You bet that's interesting. The understanding that producing greenhouse gas emissions leads to, essentially adds to the Earth's warming blanket has been evolving in the scientific community for more than a century. The first reported studies that have been discovered and there may be more go back to the 1850s and that's when the first reports were read to the Royal Society in England, the British Royal Society that explained that carbon dioxide if you burn and produce carbon dioxide, which at the time was called some variation on carbonic acid, if you add additional amounts of it to the Earth's climate or, I'm sorry, to the Earth's atmosphere that it would actually help heat. It would essentially add to the heating effect that was there and there's been.
Speaker 2:Other scientists have built upon that over the years and it wasn't until the 1970s and 1980s that we started to really understand that One of the really important roles of science is to be essentially one of the characteristics of the science and the scientific community is really to be self-correcting. We question everything. That's just tremendously important and so we ask questions like is that true? Why is that true? How true is it? Can we measure the truthfulness of any kind of an assertion using statistics or other methods and to just really try to get to the core of issues other methods and to just really try to get to the core of issues and and so, and that's through that process of questioning the understanding about the extent of humanity's effect on the atmosphere and how the atmosphere interacts with the climate and the extent to which adding greenhouse gas emissions to the atmosphere is warming. The climate has been evolving and we've reached now what is considered to be, you know, an overwhelming consensus. Be, you know, an overwhelming consensus.
Speaker 2:More than 95% of scientists that are publishing in this field assert that the climate is warming to dangerous levels and humans are at the cause of it. It's us, basically, there's a small percent that do not? Some of them fall in the time-honored tradition among scientists of being essentially good skeptics playing the devil's advocate, I think, continuing to ask the question okay, are we sure? How sure are we? How true is that assertion? And, essentially, keeping us honest, and I think that's tremendously important. There are others that remain unconvinced. I've spoken with a number of them throughout my career and we just have an honest disagreement about it. But I, um, and you know, they continue to play a role, um, and I I think that's important, um, that we don't get into um essentially groupthink, because that's in in any sort of self-correcting discipline that becomes dangerous yeah, yeah, that that's.
Speaker 1:I think that's the important point. You know, like science isn't a narrative creation tool, like you're not storytellers to some degree, you're asking questions and the story might erupt out of that. That's true. It's not that science and story are interposed. It's not like they're against each other. I agree with you, and a healthy disagreement in view of asking better questions continually seems to make a lot of sense, exactly.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah it's, it's interesting, um, you know it's uh to be in a group of scientists. Well, people that you think you're, you know pretty much on the same page about a question. Uh, you make an assertion, um, whether it's in a workshop standing in front of a whiteboard or at a computer screen, or, you know, in a bar afterwards with beers around the tables, you're almost always somebody's going to raise the question okay, how true is that? Are you sure? How true is that? Are you sure? Let's try to draw a box around what was just said and make sure we know that that's actually true. And, of course, that leads to a lot of tangential conversations and it's like when you have trying to keep a group of scientists focused on a topic of conversation is way worse than herding cats.
Speaker 1:In a lot of ways, it's fun appears, you know, from this questioning, from the 95% consensus that the food system worldwide appears to be responsible for I believe it's to a quarter or about a quarter of the human-caused greenhouse gas emissions. And so to some degree, you know, looking at you know yourself as a greenhouse gas accountant, as you mentioned earlier I like that. It seems like, regardless of the fact of that finer aspect of the mathematical analysis within the science, the food system is changing. Like you brought up the 1950s, right, anybody and you do parts of this in your book, of course, but anybody who looks at the history 1950 to 2024, we see the evolution of an entirely new food system, the evolution of an entirely new food system. And maybe evolution is a problematic term because in some degree it doesn't seem to be a biological evolution, it's not like an evolution of qualities and things that we would like to keep.
Speaker 1:But you know, like in your book you talk about waste and pollution and you know like manure bogs in, you know hog farming and so many other places. Like you get into the microbes, which I want to do maybe a little bit further in this conversation. I'm really excited to talk about microbes with you and ruminants and everything else, but it just seems that there's a relationship between a great change in how we produce food and a great change in the Earth's atmosphere. Is that accurate? Is that a fine way to look at it? For the layperson? It seems like in your book that's to some degree what you're doing. You're equating these two changes.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's a great observation. There's sort of two pieces to this that I think are really fascinating in the context of what you just asked. In the context of what you just asked, one is that it appears that humans have actually been changing the climate for 8,000 years or more, and agriculture seems to have been the principal cause of that. When we invented agriculture, and depending on when it actually started, it appears it could have been more than 10,000 years ago, but things really seem to have ramped up about 8,000 years ago, and the reason we know that is scientists who are described themselves as biogeochemists, people who try to understand, essentially, the flow of elements back and forth between the Earth, the Earth's soil, forests, grasslands, oceans and the atmosphere. They began seeing trace gases start to appear in the Earth's atmosphere about 8,000 years ago, and this became evident in the ice core studies, ice cores that were pulled up from Antarctica and also Greenland. And what's fascinating about these studies is, as you drill into the ice, we can go back literally hundreds of thousands of years and as ice was laid down over those periods within those layers of the ice, the using fascinating techniques that I don't think we need to get into now, but they can actually determine how old the gases essentially how old those layers were from the gases that are trapped in that ice. But then they were also able to determine methane concentrations really started to rise around 8,000 years ago and they asked the question hmm, why is this?
Speaker 2:Bill Rudiman from University of Virginia was one of the first people who really started to examine this and they teamed up with archaeologists and anthropologists historical anthropologists who had been looking at how the Earth's system had been changing historically and examining, through the archaeological evidence, that this rise of methane and other greenhouse gases in these ice cores around that time coincided with great changes in Asia, specifically Southeast Asia, and that appeared to be when humans had first started to realize wow, if we gather these grasses, gather seeds from these certain grasses and it was mostly rice at the time and clear some land cutting down forests or cutting down shrublands or clearing grasslands and plow the soil, dig up the soil and plant the seeds intentionally and then grow these seeds intentionally, we can actually grow food. We don't have to go out and gather, we don't have to travel as much, we don't have to go out and gather these seeds from all these dispersed locations. We can grow it close to a central location, our homes, and maybe use the residues to feed animals that we'd like to keep in or near our homes to, for food or for dairy products in or near our homes too, for food or for dairy products and um, with that, um the the benefits of that to the humans. At the time, really, people really started to see it and it literally exploded over the course of a few hundred years and agriculture expanded dramatically and with it came fascinating to me this big rise in methane emissions.
Speaker 2:Methane is an extremely powerful greenhouse gas on an instantaneous basis that has about 120 times the climate warming effect as carbon dioxide on a pound for pound-pound basis. So if you produce a pound of carbon dioxide and a pound of methane, that methane, over the very short period of its life, has an impact of about 100, more than 100 times that of carbon dioxide. If you amortize that over 20 years, it's considered to be about 80 times the impact of carbon dioxide. If you amortize that over 20 years, it's considered to be about 80 times the impact of carbon dioxide. Or you spread it out over 100 years, which is the lifespan of a pound of CO2 in the atmosphere, generally, it's considered to be about more like 26 to 30. But it's much more powerful. And what I think is fascinating about this is it's that, plus other trace gases and the carbon dioxide produced from clearing the forest, plowing, digging up the soil, growing these crops, um seems to have kept our climate from sliding towards another glacial maximum, or what a lot of people refer to as an ice age. Um, it's kept us warmed, the, the, the, the climate, by a little over a degree um, compared to what it would be, would have been if we hadn't been um, hadn't started growing crops like that. I just think that's fascinating.
Speaker 2:And where this really intersects with what you just described about, you know, what really started happening in really the 1920s, through the 1950s, is it was really the spread of the use of fossil fuels into agriculture. We invented tractors. We also. I think one of the really critical pieces here is we learned how to invent chemical fertilizers, how to manufacture and produce them in great quantities and apply those to soil, and the combination of having tractors and mechanized farm equipment and chemical fertilizers allowed us to dramatically change how we grew crops.
Speaker 2:And it wasn't so much um, it wasn't so much that burning the fossil fuels to um use the, the tractors and the other farm implements in the field, or burning the fossil fuels to manufacture these chemicals, was the biggest source of emissions.
Speaker 2:It was what they enabled they, essentially dragging a piece of steel through a field and applying these chemical fertilizers, allowed farmers to shift from methods that they had relied upon for thousands of years to provide the nutrients to grow crops to methods that did not rely on that.
Speaker 2:We were essentially able to burn through the ecosystem capital we had in the soil, the organic matter that was there, and we didn't have to rely on using things like cover crops. We could take livestock off the land and confine them in concentrated animal feeding operations and grow their food elsewhere and bring them in and feed the livestock in large groups in buildings rather than having them out on the land where they evolved. And I I think that's the second most fascinating part of this story that essentially it's not the fossil fuels that are um the biggest part of that 25%. It's what their use enabled us to do in agriculture that burned up so much of this ecosystem capital and drove so much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere from soil, from forests, from um, you know, from other parts of the ecosystem. That led, that added to the earth's insulating blanket.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, there's this idea of limits, which we seem to have forgotten about. I could see how fossil fuels entering into the agricultural scene in the 1920s through the 1950s, as you say, tip the scale from being a relatively benign climate, environment, global maintenance affair, like you're talking about increasing the global temperature by one degree. Uh, it is interesting that you bring that up. I mean, you know there's a lot of talk about interglacial events and last glacial maximums and minimums and all these things and the return of the ice age, and you know we have this greater perspective now thanks to you know, geo, biogeochemists and so many other people the people that you mentioned in this understanding that ice ages are on this repeated cycle throughout the place deocene and a lot of other geological epochs. You know, especially here in this quaternary period, but that agriculture actually played a pivotal role in maintaining this, like goldilocks moment, like that's. That's really an interesting thing that maybe we can come back to, but before we, I just the thing that you ended with. Just really, I don't know. I have like a whole page of notes of questions, so we'll see how many we can unpack, but it is so okay.
Speaker 1:So what you're saying is because the global narrative that I see, that I interact with on the daily, uh, as somebody who's been, you know, full-time in agriculture for the last 15 years is that agriculture is the problem. And what you're saying in terms of the global climate chaos or climate emergency or climate crisis, what you're saying is no, no, no, there's nuance there. It's not agriculture per se, but the agriculture that was available to us given the opportunity presented by fossil fuels. So fossil fuels aren't the problem, agriculture isn't the problem, but there's some problematic nuance in the relationship between fossil fuels and agriculture fossil fuels, also including chemical fertilizers, as you say. That has created a problem. Am I understanding that correctly?
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's correct and um, but I, I think, I want to, um, I think it's important for us to, not for the world to not point the finger at farmers and ranchers as being the source of the problem. Um, you know, um, the agricultural system, the food system, has been basically added up to be about a quarter of our human caused greenhouse gas, emissions from transportation, generating electricity, how we heat our homes, and also, you know, the other pieces of the industrial revolution, other chemicals that we use to manufacture chips, for example. And so agriculture is not, even though I I know I hear this from a lot of producers that I talk with they are concerned that you know, they're getting the blame, and they're also concerned that they're going to be forced to essentially shoulder the greater part of the solution. And, um, I don't think that's it's, I don't think it's accurate to blame the producers at the base for this problem.
Speaker 2:The agriculture has evolved in response to the availability of fossil fuels, and chemical fertilizers were considered to be miraculous when they were first invented, in the 1840s, which I write in the book. That's really, I think, in my opinion and the opinion of many of my colleagues, that's when the age of modern agriculture began was when the first chemical fertilizers were manufactured, and they've evolved since then, but they really exploded with the invention of the Haber-Bosch process and the ability to produce ammonia that could be added directly to soils Wow. Or it could be the basis for other synthetic fertilizers that bring in phosphorus and potassium and trace minerals and all the other things that plants need. They were really considered to be miracles and it wasn't until, especially since, at the time, you know the earth, we'd been living through food shortages around the world and the scientific community and political leaders at the time were concerned about how to sustain the food system through, you know, through the ebbs and flows of, you know, political crises, and we had actually, fascinatingly, a climate crisis that occurred in the early 1800s, related to a volcano that exploded. It's Tambora. That was one of the greatest volcanoes in the world. It was over 14,000 feet tall in the Pacific ring of fire and it exploded, and what the scientists who have studied this have reconstructed to be the largest volcanic eruption next to is second only to the Yellowstone Caldera explosion that occurred and it generated an explosive force that was heard thousands of miles away, generated an explosive force that was heard thousands of miles away, and it generated, threw up so much stuff into the atmosphere that it cooled the climate enough for multiple years to completely disrupt farming systems around the world. There was snow falling in July in the sahara desert at times, and the climate went through just these dramatic swings.
Speaker 2:It induced famine just around the northern hemisphere and millions of upon millions of people died because of this from famine and disease, through this climate disruption that had a big effect on the world and the effects of that. You know what people felt, going through four years of essentially famine where agriculturally essentially failed. Everybody knew somebody who died or was severely affected. Entire regions and communities were wiped out from this. That was something that carried forward in society and that was one of the things that led to the invention of chemical fertilizers, as I write in the book, and it's sustained. The effects of that have carried forward to, I think, to this day. We are, you know, intensely. Food security is always present, you know, in our minds and it's something that has made its way into agricultural policy and virtually every government in the world that examines this.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's been presented to me that agriculture to some degree is this security force that, while it might have actually allowed human civilization to produce a lot more humans, the rise of the human population, the rise of the human population and the population of the human population all over the world, you know, during, you know, this era of agriculture, the last 10,000 years, or at least the era of dominant agriculture, if it, you know, was birthed long before that. Regardless this uniform domination of agriculture over man and man over agriculture, we do see the rise in population, but it is also the securing of population, Because, I think, you know, as we sit in the modern sense, you know, something that I would love to bring to you and to question that I receive quite often is, to some degree, feels like we're stuck. We have agriculture, we have civilization and we have to feed a lot of people. Simultaneously, the global narrative is that agriculture is an aspect of a problem that are killing people, right, or has the potential to kill a lot of people, right? And so we, these modern individuals, you and myself, who've been handed a world, because obviously you and I were both not alive in 1840, let alone 1920, when all of this was really at that tipping point when agriculture was an aspect of a system, and now, to some degree, agriculture controls that system chemical fertilizers, fossil fuels and the opportunities presented, you know, because of that, global distribution systems overnight, you know food, you know shipping and all of these things that you write about in your book and we feel stuck in the middle To some degree. When I was reading your book, I felt unstuck, which I think you know.
Speaker 1:At the end of the book, you provide some hope and I don't want to get lost from that, because I think a lot of conversations around this topic just to some degree feels so lacking hope that I kind of just let my mind trail off because it's like, yeah, but what do you want us to do? So, for instance, right, so we're in the 1840s or you know, whenever that volcano erupted and we had that climate disaster and agriculture was there and we started to look to securing agriculture better with chemical fertilizers and such. And now we live in 2024, we have chemical fertilizers, we have fossil fuels, we have tractors, we have these high production systems, we have people that are starving, we have people that need food right, as you write, like the blue plate, like we are on earth, what do we do? And I know that's a big question, but I want to open it up and see where it goes, and we'll break it out into pieces and make it smaller.
Speaker 2:I love that question Because you know, if you go into a grocery store, you walk down the aisles, you know you go into a grocery store, you walk down the aisles, you know canned food, frozen food, you, you know. Or you walk the perimeter shop from the perimeter, like I do from the, from the produce aisle and um and so on, or go to your local farmer's market or whatever. Um, focusing on the grocery store because that's where most people go, right, um, it's really hard to imagine. Um, okay, first of all, most people don't know where that food came from. Um, and there's hundreds of billions of dollars that are invested worldwide in that production system, that essentially that food pipeline that takes raw materials and funnels that into baked goods, canned goods, frozen goods, whatever it might be, candy soda to get into your grocery cart for you to buy and take home, and and that there's a tremendous amount of inertia in that there's so much investment in the production systems, but also the pipeline, the processing facilities that gather these sorts of things.
Speaker 2:I was in, spent a fair amount of time in Arizona and Southern California, in the lower Colorado River Valley, which I talk about in the book, and that's essentially America's vegetable basket. It's where not just America, but US and Canada get most of their winter vegetables over 90% by some measures and you go. I sat and watched a field of romaine lettuce getting harvested and it was this fascinating machine. It's a sanitized, stainless steel harvesting machine that costs hundreds of thousands of dollars, moving slowly through this field with about eight workers that were harvesting the romaine and bagging it and boxing it on this sheen, moving through, and within about an hour all of those boxes would be loaded onto a truck and driven, the entire semi driven into a facility that was cooled to 38 degrees. They literally drove the entire semi into this facility and they quickly cooled the vegetables there and prepared it and in a few days it would be cold enough where it could be shipped around the world, literally mostly around North America, but to other places, either by truck, some of it by air, and that same story plays out whether it's beef or blueberries or red peppers, cantaloupes, those sorts of systems.
Speaker 2:That's how the majority of the produce that we produce or meat products get handled in these incredibly high infrastructure, very expensive, centralized facilities, and it's hard to imagine a future that's different from that, I think, until you go to a local farmer's market or until, as I've heard you describe in some of your other conversations, you go meet with another farmer, you go to their farm and say what have you got that I can buy, or is there anything I can do to basically work with you to make sure that I've got food that's being produced here locally? Until you start having those sorts of conversations which, frankly, a lot of people maybe most people don't have the luxury to do because of the complexities of their lives. It's hard to imagine how things change, but there's a tremendous amount of interest in changing things and, as I write about in the book, I think one of the most fascinating sort of centers for change is the Land Institute in salina, kansas, and started by wes jackson in the 70s. And wes and other people, founders of the the land institute, asked the question really basic question do we have to keep growing food the way we've been growing it? And he was motivated by looking at the erosion, the soil erosion that was washing into the rivers in Kansas where he lived, and saying you know, the rivers weren't always this way, they weren't always low and brown and muddy.
Speaker 2:Can we grow food in a way that doesn't mean we have to go out and plow it every spring and plant new seeds, plant a new crop, plant a monoculture and sustain it with chemical fertilizers and herbicides and pesticides. Can we do things differently? Can we work with nature rather than essentially fighting nature to grow these crops, rather than essentially fighting nature to grow these crops? And so they started this process of trying to domesticate perennial plants, what we call perennial, and that's essentially a plant, that it's like a lot of grasses and legumes and what we call forbs, essentially broadleaf plants, not grasses. Can we grow these things in a way that they don't have to be replanted every year, but also can we grow them in combination with each other, which is the way the Earth's ecosystems work?
Speaker 2:You don't really go out into a natural ecosystem. You don't really go out into a natural ecosystem that's in sort of its native state and see just a single plant dominating an entire field, like you do a wheat field or a corn field. You see these very diverse ecosystems that are made up of dozens to potentially hundreds of plants within a few hundred acres. And Wes asked this basic question wow, can we grow our food in ways that mimic this, where we've got multiple crops growing in the same place and we don't have to come through and plow the soil every year and replant the crop and don't have to fertilize it as much, don't have to rely on synthetic fertilizers, and don't have to fertilize it as much, don't have to rely on synthetic fertilizers? I think that's fascinating and they've had a lot of success. They've introduced a crop called Kernza, which is being grown on tens of thousands of acres here in North America and other parts of the world, and it's a perennial grass. It's a lot like wheat. It's not technically exactly wheat, but it's close and it can be used to make crackers and bread and beer Um, lots of things that we rely on grains for. Um, they've coming out of that and collaborating with research, scientists and agronomists in China and other parts of Asia, is a perennial rice crop that can be grown four to six years in a row without having to be plowed and replanted. It has so many benefits. There's other new crops that are coming out of this system, legumes or beans that are like one product they call baki bean, which is in a way similar to pinto beans as one way to think about them. Sorghum, corn, millet. Crops like this are on the horizon and, equally exciting as these perennial crops is, they're growing these in these combinations two or three different crops and, inspired by this, other people around the world, other farmers are doing similar things with annual crops, where they're growing barley, for example, or oats and peas at the same time oats and peas at the same time and experimenting with other combinations, trying to get the number of crops that are growing at the same time up to three or four, beyond just two. And they find that the crops are more resilient, they produce a lot more, the yields are a lot higher and they see the soil, the quality of the soil, improving. They don't have to apply as much chemical fertilizer in some cases none at all in order to grow these crops, so there's tremendous progress being made there In the book.
Speaker 2:I call that a moonshot, although it was a moonshot in the 70s when Wes Jackson first dreamed this up and he received a MacArthur fellowship for MacArthur Genius Grant for just asking the question and starting to work on it and we're starting to bear fruit. There's tremendous, I think, opportunities for hope is that people are, I think, a way to describe it as re-recognizing how we could actually be growing food on trees throughout the landscape nuts and fruits and reintegrating those into farming systems. And there's been a lot of innovation in the polyculture community around this for decades. And there's new, I think, revived interest in that new varieties of things like pecans and acorns, surprisingly, but which are delicious and incredibly nutritious when they're processed well, and other species of walnuts, hazelnuts, other sorts of things that are being grown in broader areas, that are being expanded out of these incredibly centralized systems and that holds some promise to be, um, a more localized food source. Been going on there for a while about that and I think I'll I'll stop no, I, I love it.
Speaker 1:I think you know I have this image here, that that you've given me, which is you know, in 1840s we create chemical fertilizer to secure. You know, to some, this image here, that that you've given me, which is you know, in 1840s we create chemical fertilizer to secure. You know, to some degree, the food system in the 1820s, through the I'm sorry through the 1920s, through the 1950s, and we really see the scale shift. Because of this, we have, like, the de-limiting of agriculture to some degree, instead of having these very natural limits. Right, because, like oak trees, like we're talking about acorns, every, every odd of my family and I, we, we do a lot of wild harvesting, our family does for our daily meals. We have the ability and the privilege to do it on the land that we live. But in the autumn, you know, we go out for acorns and some years there's a lot and some years there's not.
Speaker 1:Right, it's called the oak mast and so to some degree, that's the point of agriculture, especially in the modern sense, especially the chemical fertilizer-based version of fossil fuel-infused agriculture, which is no, no, no, we have to have a harvest every year. We can't go six years without a healthy oak harvest of oak nuts or acorns. And so to me it seems, like that de-limiting which happened in the 1920s and 50s, you're you're talking about now a very creative limiting, once again not in a negative way, but but in a more diverse way. Instead of trying to de-limit corn production right, rather, let's accept the limits of earth that we really are not good at fighting, or shouldn't fight, or have failed to fight successfully, which I think are all the same things and instead focus on a diverse array of foods, so not corn purely, obviously, but also acorns and hazelnuts and walnuts and other things. Do I understand that right? I mean, that's to some degree what you're asking.
Speaker 2:I think that's exactly right system with the earth, soils and with our prairies and forests in a way to produce food. That where we essentially we're not liquidating the ecosystem, capital, the organic matter that's in these systems and the plants in order to grow food, but we're actually using the plants, leveraging the plants in a way that produces food and also becomes self-sustaining. This is something that I see throughout. There's farmers around the world that are trying to leverage this principle, and one in particular stands out and I write about him in the book. His name is Dan DeSutter. He and his dad and son and wife and neighbors are working on developing a new farming system that's based on an old system where they're basically they're growing corn and soybeans, which is the dominant crop throughout much of the Midwest and certainly in Indiana, but they're doing it in a way where they don't have to rely on chemical fertilizers at all. They're using cover crops and they're working from the principle of you want to. Rather than intentionally keeping plants from growing in the soil for six, seven months out of the year, they're actually trying to make sure that there are plants growing in the soil year-round and leveraging the benefits of that to grow the corn and the soybeans, but also to raise livestock expanded beyond a traditional corn soybean system into what they're calling a corn soybean cattle system and where they they're making sure that they have plants growing to sustain the corn and the soybean crops, but also to feed the livestock and
Speaker 2:the livestock, then the feedback there of the livestock beyond the land also helps cycle the nutrients for the corn and the soybeans. It adds another profit center for their system, another income stream, and it's a system that allows them to live on the land, which you know is increasingly hard for a lot of farmers like yourself, and I think that's tremendously exciting to see that. And it's not just them, but they are part of a network of other growers that are trying to do this, and not just in corn and soybean systems, but in the Great Plains, where we grow more small grains, wheat, oats, barley and the beans that I described, other sorts of crops, examining this in a way that moves livestock out of the confined feeding operations where we have livestock here in the forage that are being grown over here, getting them back into a system where the livestock are essentially feeding themselves on combination of maybe what the leftovers or the cover crops that are grown to sustain the corn and soybeans also can be feed for the livestock, where essentially we integrate them back into the system rather than this model of separateness that is driving so many problems right now with air quality, water quality, tremendous concerns about the health of the animals how healthy is the food that's being produced, the meat products that are coming out of these systems is greatly questioned, and also concerns about what is required to sustain them in those systems. The antibiotics that they have to be fed prevent them, protect them from disease outbreaks, but what that potentially means in terms of breakout diseases for the human population and for the animals themselves. So I see tremendous hope. There Also tremendous opportunities to leverage the waste products from operations like, for example, dairies. Depending on where they are. Most dairies are operating in a confined feeding operation arrangement Not all of them.
Speaker 2:But even if you are raising dairy cattle or sheep or goats in a pasture-based system, there are times of the year when there is no forage out on the pastures and they have to be fed in a central location. And what do you do with the manure from a situation like that? A lot of times it either goes into a lagoon or it goes in piles. And being able to essentially leverage that as a resource, as opposed to just a waste product that has to be dealt with, taking it out and dumping it on frozen soil not a good strategy for people who depend upon the rivers downstream being able to capture that manure and use it to generate energy through methane digesters, or what are called methane digesters. They're essentially anaerobic digesters that create conditions where the manure can produce methane that can be burned to generate electricity and I write about that from a storied dairy in california, the strauss family creamery.
Speaker 2:But also diverting the manure from these systems into essentially composting operations, where it can be combined with other waste products what has traditionally been considered to be waste, such as wood chips from orchards or vineyards, leftover from pruning operations or leftover from when orchards periodically have to be renewed combining that with the manure in order to be able to generate compost that can be cycled back into these systems to improve the soil and avoid having to add chemical fertilizers into these systems. Integrating waste and livestock back into these farming operations in the way to help them become self-sustaining can solve so many of the problems that we're discussing here.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, it seems that the linearization of agriculture to some degree, which is the opposite of what you're describing, is for the increase of this idea of production, a particular definition of production, of, like, this idea of production, a particular definition of production, how does that play? The idea of production, you know, in the 1920s, you know, I say historically, I've said, you know it was, just how many bushels of corn could we get out of a field For good reason? I mean, we had just finished one war, we were about to dive into another massive war. 87 million people were about to lose their lives. We had to feed, uh, hundreds of millions of people on the front lines. We had globalism, we had the rise of so much in dust industry and city living and, like, we had a lot of production to care for.
Speaker 1:And let's, for now, take all of the things that I just mentioned, put them to the side and just say that they were there and they needed to be there.
Speaker 1:It's not challenge any of that for now, um, but as we start to diversify, you know, like you brought up the idea of who it was, it was a particular uh wheat or uh grain species with like peas growing within it right, I would imagine that they're not actually getting the yield of peas they would from the same land that they would have if it would have just been all peas. So to me it takes a different system to surround this right, like one farmer can't just start diversifying their products and think that we're actually going to succeed at producing enough food to feed people. Is that true? I mean, what sort of systems need to surround this? What relationships need to be created and nurtured and loved and cared for in order for this more diverse system, which decreases the overall production of each component part, to actually have a viable effect, an efficient effect on the living populace of humanity? What does that look like?
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's a topic of intense conversation and research, not just well, wherever people are talking about food whether it's the farmers themselves, whether it's the extension specialists and research scientists like myself at the universities, whether it's the people invested in the food system, the ConAgras of the world, and then people at all levels of government that are engaged with the food system, the departments of agriculture at the state and federal level, and county resource conservation districts, those sorts of things. Everyone is asking questions about this. Fundamentally, can we diversify the system? Can we break out of this linearization in a way that where we keep producing enough food and I think the answer is yes, we can do that and there's a lot of good examples of it. And going back to the example that you brought up, where you have a field of oats and peas that are grown in the same field and they're harvested essentially at the same time, if you split that field in two, you had peas growing on one half and oats growing on the other half they would get a specific yield and you might get, let's say, hypothetically I don't know what would be a good example, but hypothetically 50 bushels of oats and 30 bushels of peas out of those fields separately, on a per acre basis. If you grow them together on that same field, what we tend to find is that you get, on average across the whole field, you get more of the oats and more of the peas because of the symbiosis.
Speaker 2:The combining of these, of diversity in these fields, leads to greater production, and we see that over and over again. And this is emblematic of natural ecosystems. The more diversity you have there, the more productive the system is, the more each of the different constituent plants in the system is able to capitalize on a specific niche you know within the ecosystem, and so if you can diversify, if you can grow three or four or more, you can glean even more production out of these systems and potentially grow more food. There's limits to this, and that's essentially. There's always a limiting factor in these systems, and I think we have to be careful how far, how hard, we try to lean on the land in order to um. We don't want to try to exceed those limits, we want to work within them.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:Um and so um.
Speaker 1:I think there, think there's, you know, tremendous opportunities in um, in trying to capitalize on those concepts, and this is another example of, I think, learning from nature in a way that brings things back in I think, I think the the main thing that if our understanding of the problem 100 years ago was accurate, so, for instance, chemical fertilizers, right like let's just break this all down and summarize the, the this, this, this knowledge that you've been sharing over the last hour chemical fertilizers come onto the scene with the intention of good work. We understand. Now, looking back, that might not really be the case at all, but it's created a system, an agricultural system that has, to some degree, created a culture. Like you mentioned earlier going to the grocery store, very few people have the privilege of having a farmer locally that they can actually buy food from, and that is a privilege. That's the culture that this fossil fuel-based, chemical agricultural system has created is a very passive consumer of food, which is an interesting conversation in its own way, which is, you know, an interesting conversation in its own way. But now, as we look at this and we start to look back and we have hindsight, we have questions of scientists like yourself, we start to question okay, but else? Um, decreasing fossil fuels, decreasing tillage, eradicating tillage, all of these things. The question is are we still going to be able to sustain the culture birthed and maintained from fossil fuels and chemical-based agriculture, with an agriculture less dependent on fossil fuels and entirely devoid of chemical agriculture.
Speaker 1:Like you know, I don't mean to extend the conversation or really to extend the question, because I think you get it and I've kind of asked that question completeness, but another way to look at this which I find to be very helpful.
Speaker 1:You know, like, if you take something out of a system and it starts to collapse, right, any intelligent individual in any way that's thinking understands that maybe that aspect of that system was pivotal, right, that was a pivotal aspect of that system. And if we can take it out and it doesn't collapse, right, we need to start questioning why it was there to begin with, why didn't it form a relationship with its surroundings, why it was there to begin with, why didn't it form a relationship with its surroundings? Why didn't it, you know, actually become a pivotal, you know, species or part of the function, depending on if it's living or non-living system, etc. To some degree, if we can pull out the fossil fuels and the system is still good, and we can pull out the chemical fertilizer and the system is still good, I think we have to start asking the deeper questions, which are very surprising questions, I think the most, as you know. Why are we in this predicament?
Speaker 1:yeah why do we have the agriculture creating the culture today in such a bad way, when we didn't need it all along, you know?
Speaker 2:yeah, you know the invention of chemical fertilizers and the spread of the Haber-Bosch process. That's now produced in thousands of chemical factories around the world. It's a tremendous source of income and it's created a constituency within the agricultural community. We've built the entire system around the availability of these inexpensive, easy to use chemical fertilizers. The same with herbicides, pesticides, fungicides, these sorts of things. And we haven't it made well, I hesitate to call it making farming easier, because I didn't think anybody who farms would say wait, farming is never easy. Say wait, farming is never easy, um, but it's. It's allowed essentially um an economic system to be built around this. That's hard to imagine breaking out of um until you actually do it. It definitely makes farming more um, more complicated to try to work without these systems, but that's a lot of that is well, that's probably a conversation for another time with people who actually do it, people like dan de sutter and others and people like yourself. I imagine um there's tremendous incentives built in within at from the county to the state, to the federal level, to sustain this system because there's so much economic activity around it and it's not until we start to create economies, I think, that are focused on the alternatives that constituencies then can be built to break out of this, and I talk in the book about local farmers markets. That's one economic model. Another is what's called community supported agriculture, which is a direct farm to table sort of approach. The same sorts of growers that are engaged in farmer's markets and farm-to-table through CSAs are also raising foods for local supermarkets and these sorts of things.
Speaker 2:But what I see through the system is that when people recognize the health benefits, the actual deliciousness of the products that are grown in these ways, that are more nature-based as opposed to chemically-based, they immediately see the benefits of it.
Speaker 2:And when there's opportunities to take these sorts of things to scale, the economics of it, the prices fall and the relationships build and we start to see more of it. Taking that to scale means, though, sort of breaking through the um infrastructure, the linearization that we have in the food system right now, and that's a difficult thing, especially when you consider, you know, all the money that's been invested in the pipeline, the food pipeline, the logistics, the logistics. When you see trucks, multiple trucks, pulling into a grocery store or something like that, it's just extraordinary the distance that these products flow. But that work is starting to be done. It's been actually going on for quite a while. It's been actually going on for quite a while and I think when we try to break through the institutions and essentially reduce the subsidies for the institutions that are leading to this linearization, it creates opportunities for others to break through.
Speaker 1:I think also, when we start to consider what the impacts are elsewhere, not just to local communities, but in the places where we have such concentration of some food industries, what those impacts are for air and water and on the communities themselves themselves, where diversification starts to become an option, people embrace that and um, and I think you know there's, there's a lot of examples there where those, those sorts of changes can and are being made yeah, the the idea of climate change, climate crisis, climate chaos to me is such a you know, it seems like such a separative, you know, isolationist type narrative, because what it's really getting at is that the foundation of this moment in time is really the idea that we don't depend upon each other, all of our relations, not just me and you, not just the consumer of food and the producer of food, the farmer, et cetera, but like, when you need food, you go to the grocery store and it's there, and if your particular version of crackers isn't there, another one is. Or maybe you don't eat crackers that week, but at the same level, like the veggies are there and the meat is there, and that availability makes us believe that earth turns. And as earth turns, we get food and we are fed. We don't actually have to depend upon you know that head of lettuce, because there's always more. You know, traveling thousands of miles to get here. We don't actually have to depend upon our neighbors, and I mean mean that quite, quite expansively. I don't necessarily mean your next door neighbor, but our neighbors. You know the trees that are local to us, the fruits that are local to us, the humans that are local to us, our actual human neighbors, et cetera.
Speaker 1:And so to me it seems I know I love that you've called this book the Blue Plate because everybody has a plate. Regardless of what's on that plate or not, we all have a plate and it's a moment of connecting right the dinner table. I love that idea, but the life that also we need to start having this relationship with is on that plate or around that plate. We need to start actually incorporating the oak nuts into the plate, right Along with having more people at the table sharing this food.
Speaker 1:You write about all these things in the book and so to me, as I understand it, what I'm getting from you in this conversation is there's a lot of complexity around the scientific narrative and there's a lot of work being done to remediate the errors or problems existing in the modern food system, to diversify instead of to linearize, etc. But, at the end of the day, what really actually is needed in this moment are those things, of course, but centrally, in the heart of the matter and like the feel, intelligence of the thing, it's to realize that we are connected, that where your food comes from matters, regardless if it's from a farmer you know, or you know a farmer a thousand miles away, acknowledging that food's importance in the creation and maintenance of your own life. That acknowledgement seems to matter primarily first and foremost, and then maybe attuning that life to that acknowledgement might be a second step.
Speaker 2:Oh, I love this question, daniel, this ops, this observation. Um, yeah, it all ultimately goes back to soil, and soil is not just this collection of minerals with, you know, some decomposed bug parts in it. Soil is this incredibly diverse living thing and it's surprisingly thin. Um, and we depend, and it is the basis for human society, for human civilization, for everything that we rely upon. That lettuce head of lettuce that we buy at the grocery store is a product of the soil. The crackers, a pound of hamburger, whatever we might buy from.
Speaker 2:There is the product of the soil and it's this incredibly diverse living thing, and it's oftentimes in this sort of linearization of the food system. It's treated as a commodity. It's essentially treated as capital that we can burn through and then eventually, when it's used up, then whoever was burning through that resource sells the land and moves on to something else or finds something else to mine from it. We have to be careful about that sort of economic model, because there's only so much upon it and also that the soil is the principal mechanism that we have for the exchange of carbon dioxide between the earth and the atmosphere and it's the principal opportunity we have in order to draw carbon dioxide from the atmosphere back into the earth, essentially drawing down these excess greenhouse gases that are in the atmosphere now, reducing or decreasing the effect of Earth's insulating blanket back to what we hope will be a sustainable level. I think that's one of the most fascinating aspects of this. It's also the source of the nutrients that make the food products so nutritious to all of us and when we respect the soil, when we leverage it in a way, as Dan DeSutter's doing, to try to keep a living plant in the soil 365 days a year, 365 days a year and trying to treat it as essentially as an ecosystem, as opposed to just substrate, as is done in so many parts of the world. We see so many benefits. The foods that are grown from it are more nutritious, and we also see this opportunity to actually draw carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and build it up in the soil as organic matter. One of the things that I think is so fascinating about this question is that when, as a greenhouse gas accountant you know, we add things up, we try to understand okay, where is all the carbon in the earth system? Where is all the nitrogen in the earth system? Where is all the nitrogen in the earth system? There's actually more than twice as much carbon in the soil as there is in the atmosphere as carbon dioxide and methane and other greenhouse gases. Um, there's more carbon in the soil than there is in the forests of the planet. Um, it's, um, it's in more carbon in the soil than there is in the atmosphere and the forest combined, and there's tremendous opportunity to store more of it, more of that atmospheric carbon dioxide in the soil. Because that John Sanderman, a colleague of mine at the Woodwell Research Center in Massachusetts, and his colleagues wrote about in a paper in 2018.
Speaker 2:This idea that, by the way, we've essentially liquidated that ecosystem capital, the organic matter in the soil through agriculture over the centuries, we've created this debt. There's this idea that there's approximately about 45% of the carbon dioxide the extra carbon dioxide that's in the atmosphere right now came from soil and from burned forests, just from the way we've been growing food, and the whole concept behind a debt is framing it as a debt is. It's something that needs to be paid back. It can be paid back with the way that we manage, the way we grow our food, and this is one of the things that gives me so much hope in this space. Is because it's a win-win solution? There's essentially no. Is because it's a win-win solution? There's essentially no.
Speaker 2:The scientists I've talked with, farmers I've talked with nobody has come up with a downside to increasing the organic matter, the carbon, in your soil. It increases the soil's resilience. It can store more water. It cycles nutrients better. The crops that come from it are more productive. They're more nutritious. It eases the peaks and valleys in the production cycle.
Speaker 2:So in a drought year, you tend to produce more when you have more organic matter in the soil compared with when you don't, if you get floods, as we're increasingly starting to see more and more of these flooding conditions and drought conditions, as I know you're experiencing in Virginia, and there's another one coming your way here, it sounds like as we talk about this right now, as hurricane is moving its way up the coast, it can hold more of that moisture that these floods drop, but also hold the soil in place better when it's more resilient to these sorts of flooding events essentially within limits, and so there's really no downside to trying to do this. It's more complicated from an operation standpoint to grow food in ways that increase your organic matter, in ways that increase your organic matter, but in the long run, and for the growers who are able to approach these things with a long-term vision and with long-term plans, they see so many benefits from this, and those benefits find their way into society that consumers recognize and want to see sustained Right.
Speaker 1:Right, yeah, and it and it's a wonderful system. I mean it's it. It doesn't invite community and relationship, it demands. It Like it seems like when fossil fuels, when that, when that those scales were tipped, as you said earlier in the conversation, it enabled that shift in agriculture to truly happen. Obviously, as you said, for the last 8,000 years, maybe the last 10,000, looking at ice core data from Antarctica and Greenland and everything else that you mentioned like agriculture was shifting climate. That's true, but the shift, the shift occurred when agriculture allowed for something else to arise, or fossil fuels allowed for something else to rise in agriculture. To get that back, it seems like we have a wonderful opportunity that demands and it does. It demands integration, right, it demands, you know, the dependence on each other again that we drop this facade. You know, and I, my wife and I, we've been.
Speaker 1:Just this morning we were laughing at each other somberly. It wasn't a funny laugh, but we were because we don't know what to do. Sometimes we can just laugh at serious things. You know what I mean. And, uh, you know we, for 15 years we've dealt with it. Every farmer deals with this. That works in the local level, whether or not they go to farmers markets, you know, direct uh the door delivery systems, restaurants, grocers, csa models, co-ops, whatever it is, you know, and we'll have a far uh consumer, one of our customers, reach out and they'll say, oh man, I've been meaning to reach out to you for months. We've ran out of know, pork or beef or whatever. It is a long time ago.
Speaker 1:And then you just you get to it and you get very excited initially and you think to yourself, wow, this is wonderful, we get to continue serving this great gift of the land to this person. And at the same time, all you can do is laugh, because it's like they ran out of food months ago and yet they're still alive. Their life is not dependent upon their local system and we all suffer from this. I'm not pointing this person out to say, you know, as this lone idol, this lone statue that crumbles in front of us, that we can pick on, no, that's not interesting to me. The point is, we all struggle with this.
Speaker 1:The better system that you write about, this new world, which is simultaneously, as you say, the very old world, is a system of dependence, actual dependence, where real conversations, real intimacy, real relationship can be, and that to me, regardless of the science, is a climate narrative that I can get behind, because, regardless of the finer questions that you guys that I can get behind, because, because, regardless of the finer questions that you guys are so much more powerful and knowledgeable of talking about, we can inhabit this right. This is a plate, a blue plate. I love that title again, that um that we can eat from yeah, there's so many.
Speaker 2:There's so many layers between us as consumers and the people who grow our food and then who transform it into a food product, whether it's bakers or canners, factory workers, whatever it, the people who are harvesting the food in the fields and getting it shipped to us. There's so many layers between us and it reduces the connectivity there and sustaining that connectivity I think ultimately having that direct connection leads to better food. It leads to also a better understanding between the consumer and the farmers than, say, a grower who, um, but you know, we go to the midwest and um. There are lots of examples of co-ops and other sorts of systems where growers are sharing machinery or they're buying farm chemicals in mass or seed in mass and together and reducing costs and that sort of thing. But ultimately the systems are so homogenous that there's less reliance upon each other for the bulk commodities.
Speaker 2:They're not necessarily producing the chemical fertilizers themselves, producing the chemical fertilizers themselves, they're just buying it from somebody else and they're not necessarily. In some cases they're collaborating on building processing, investing in processing facilities to use their products and send it out into the market. But there's much less of the reliance upon each other in farming communities than there is. When there's more of a direct connection between the growers and the people who are directly consuming the products and there's resilience that comes from those direct connections, the quality of the products improves. And also I see it in the farmer's markets, I see it in the grocery stores, when I literally run into a grower there in front of one of their products that's in the produce shelves and can talk with them and it's tangible, it's electric to have that direct connection there to the product that is I'm going to take home and cook that evening.
Speaker 1:Right, yeah, we don't often think about that.
Speaker 2:I mean in legacy and lineage and care and husbandry, etc. Sort of this sort of expectation that we should be able to get romaine lettuce, you know, 365 days out of the year, um, and that we can, or that we can get, um, you know, lipstick, red bell peppers, 365 days out of the year when um, you know these sorts of things, that we can get pork or beef any time of the year.
Speaker 2:When we reestablish our connection to our local food sheds, to the local ecosystem, what we're more likely to rely upon are the foods that actually can be sustainably grown in those ecosystems, and so that might be where I live in those ecosystems, and so that might be where where I live. Um we actually um there's an awful lot of land here, um and I write about this in the book that probably never should have been plowed um, and it's just because the soils are so vulnerable to to wind erosion and um vulnerable to wind erosion and water erosion or whatever, but also because the soils are so unproductive if they're plowed to try to grow crops as opposed to grazing livestock Right, and there's a lot of other parts of the world that are like that. A lot of the areas where the romaine lettuce and the bell peppers are grown. The soils are increasingly saline and they're on a steady trajectory downward, and the irrigation systems, the reservoirs, are being shown to be great sources of greenhouse gas emissions and but also, um the way the water is used um is accelerating the soil's decline and we're not going to be able to rely upon that forever and when we it really, when we examine um and essentially close the food circle, like gary nabhan did in his in his books and others bar Barbara Kingsolver did in her book on this topic when we examine this, we start to really recognize the seasonality of food and also realize that whereas for a lot of people plant-based foods are a healthier option, but it's not necessarily the only option for everybody, because there's a lot of places where the smartest thing to grow if humans are going to live there and eat in that ecosystem are going to be livestock grazing livestock or a derivative of something like that, and so we have to recognize those sorts of things.
Speaker 2:And that's a big part of the conversation right now, and I'm not necessarily advocating that everybody around the world should pivot to eating grazing livestock. We need to be careful about that because of the secondary effects that can come from that. But I think we have to recognize that we have to eat from the local ecosystem in a way that the local ecosystem can sustain itself. Sometimes that involves eating animals, eating dairy products. Sometimes that involves eating largely plant-based foods. Sometimes that's a combination of those sorts of things where the soils and the ecosystem allow it, and also keeping in mind the larger community that you mentioned the wildlife, the pollinators, the other things that have to live in, essentially live in harmony with these food production systems, because we depend upon them as well.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's a whole other conversation how fragile the pollinators are given the rest of the food system, which maybe will be another topic. I was excited to talk to you about ruminants and microbes and methane, and so maybe we'll just do another episode a little bit more focused on that, because I feel like this conversation is pretty well handled and I feel like opening it up to the idea of microbes and methane would be a whole new episode. So let's, let's do this again. Where, mark, where can people find you? Where can people buy this, this, this book, the blue plate?
Speaker 2:So the book is going to be published September 17th. It's available for pre-order right now. Thank you for this question. You can order it through right now. Thank you for this question. You can order it through if you go to bookshoporg and just search on the blue plate and Mark Easter. The book is available there and it can be either shipped to you directly or, better yet, you can have it delivered to your local bookstore and access it there, and that's the approach that I'm recommending people go through in order to find the book. It will be on local shelves. It's being published by Patagonia Books, and that's Patagonia, the food and gear manufacturer. They have a book division. I'm I'm just delighted to be able to work with them. It's just been a great fit, and I don't think an author could have asked for more from their production team. They've just been terrific. It's awesome. Yeah, um, and then um. It'll be on a local bookshelves and then through other online outlets available on for pre-order right now, but also after September 17th it'll start to ship.
Speaker 1:Wonderful, and did I see online that you recorded the audiobook? I did? You're the narrator.
Speaker 2:I'm the narrator. Very cool on the narrator. It's coming out through uh penguin random house and that will also be available through all of the regular um audio downloadable audio outlets yeah, wonderful. It's a wonderful experience as well, too yeah, it's hard, isn't it? Golly, that is is hard so you've done that too I have have, unfortunately.
Speaker 2:You know I'm not somebody who typically talks for six hours a day, for, you know, four days straight. But I had to do that and at the end of it my tongue and my lips and my mouth felt like my arms do after a heavy workout. Yeah Well, I don't know if you had this experience too, but beforehand I was sort of intimidated because I'd read the book, obviously to myself, but read it online or not online, but out loud as part of my writing process so many times. But it was a wonderful experience to encounter the book in its designed and completely edited form, from beginning to end, speaking the words out loud it was a wonderful um, in a way, validation, but also humbling experience to to encounter this to think about.
Speaker 2:There's so much more to think about, it, to talk about, and um, so many different directions.
Speaker 1:Yeah, um, this work can go yeah, well, I think, with any good creative act, what did uh pablo picasso? I read this uh earlier last week, but he said all art is a lie that tells the truth, or something like this yeah, all art is a lie that tells the truth. I think that's pretty close to the exact quote, but but, it's, it's. It's so interesting, like even on this conversation, I have literally a page of notes and you know we got to about a quarter of it and like any well-written book, you know you read it and the whole world opens up and you realize that the book occupies very, very little amount of space in that that bigger world and there's so many places to go and see and touch and expand upon. And I think that's the the work of good art to be, to be overwhelmed and humbled by it.
Speaker 2:So yeah, yeah, to bring your, especially if you're in a position where you can bring your whole self to it and encounter it, um and respect it um. Whatever the art is, whether it's your own or or somebody else's um, especially especially your own, approach it with humility and um yeah, yeah, that's a.
Speaker 1:That's a good way to end it. Approach this with humility. I like it. I like it Well. Thank you again, mark. It's been a blessing. Thank you for being with us.
Speaker 2:I so appreciate the opportunity here. Daniel, thank you for reaching out, and I look forward to more dialogues with you.