Annaliese Abbott, Author Malabar Farm & The Rise of Sustainable Agriculture Common sense tells us that if soil is deficient in essential nutrients, the crops grown in that soil will also be deficient, as will the people and animals that eat those crops. And so we ask: Is there a common-sense connection between soil fertility and human health? Topic…

Marc Cooke, President, Wolves of the Rockies The Billings Gazette reports that the State of Montana will not have enough money to cover all the claims of livestock killed by predators. And so we ask: Who should pay for the animals that have been eaten by animals? Topics include the current state of wolf populations; how wolf populations are managed…

Nicolette Hahn Niman, Author, Defending Beef: The Ecological and Nutritional Case for Beef America’s beef industry has many enemies and few friends. The enemies-of-beef camp includes the environmentalists who claim that the cow destroys the earth by trampling it beneath its hooves, and forces the climate to change by emitting its greenhouse gases. …

Mark Cushing, CEO of Animal Policy Group and author of Pet Nation On a recent flight from New Orleans, my wife pointed to four companion animals that were visible from where we were seated. And when one is buckled into a seat on an airplane one’s vision is pretty limited. There must have been more animals aboard that flight! Holy Smokes!!! Our pets…

Judy Hoy, Author, Changing Faces & Amazing Wildlife On a previous edition of the Food Chain we talked with Marc Cooke of Wolves of the Rockies in Stevensville, Montana about the attempt to manage the predation of wolves, bears and lions. Marc made note of the fact that, to make it possible for farmers and ranchers to tolerate the predation of domes…

Jeff Herman, Editor in Chief, Lawn Starter I once worked as a story producer for NBC Magazine with David Brinkley. One story we told was about the “survivalists” who believe the economy is going to collapse and so move more than one tank of gas from the nearest big city, where they arm themselves with defensive weapons, store up canned foods, and h…

Mike Wade, Executive Director, California Farm Water Coalition What will happen to our food supply if politicians buy up farmers' rights to water? The good Lord blessed the Golden State of California with the perfect environment– for growing food! The State was given 28 million acres of arable farmland, a benevolent Mediterranean climate, and a spe…

Attorney Sarah Vogel, Author, The Farmers Lawyer BOOM! It was 1914 and the world was at war. Europe was being torn to shreds by trench warfare, and wherever the trenches went, the land was certain to be in fallow. It was hungry times for America’s friends and foes alike. What America had at that time that the nations of Europe did not have was farm…

China is buying up America’s farmland… with the money we send it to manufacture stuff for us in their coal-burning factories. Some say this a good deal because we don’t have to work in those factories. Others say it’s a bad deal because we are selling out our future. And so we ask: Should China be allowed to buy up America’s best farmland? Topics i…

Glenn Simpson, Executive Director. Golden Gate Audubon I was raised in the high prairie of Montana, very near the Crow Indian reservation. While growing up a boy under the Big Sky I became fascinated­– as boys once did– with the plains Indians and their culture. When we played cowboys and Indians, I was an Indian. But one thing puzzled me about my …

Stiv Wilson, Co-Founder, Peak Plastic Foundation & Producer, The Story of Plastic We were going to watch the Equinox sunrise while seated in the sand between the paws of the Great Sphinx up there on the Giza plateau. Our guide assured us that it would be a most mystical experience. It being very early, I grabbed a large to-go cup of coffee on the w…

Zeka Glucs, Ph.D., Director, Predatory Bird Research Group, University of California, Santa Cruz Should we foster the existence of birds that prey within our civilization? There are 557 species of birds that prey in our world. Each of these species has found a unique way to get along in nature. Carl Linnaeus, who went about organizing just about ev…

Janisse Ray, Author The Seed Underground and Wild Spectacle For a hundred million years, give or take, plants looked for a way to reproduce themselves. Those that found the most efficient ways to reproduce won the right to survive, produce seeds, and populate the earth. A hundred thousand years ago, give or take, we showed up on the scene and began…

With Amanda Starbuck, Research Director, Food & Water Watch There are a lot of ways to make people feel guilty, and so most of us go through life being guilty about something. What if our guilt could be used to make us to do something we would otherwise not want to do? Let’s give it a try, on me! Let’s put our collective finger on the chest of Mich…

M.D. Usher, University of Vermont Professor of Classical Languages and Literature & Author of How to Be A Farmer: An Ancient Guide to Life on the Land Does the more farming change, the more it stays the same? They are called “classics” because they do not wear out with time­ – even with thousands of years of time! The writers of the classics captur…

Allen Moy, Executive Director, Pacific Coast Farmers Market Association How can city dwellers close the distance to their food? We begin with Michael Olson’s Second Law of the Food Chain: The farther we go from the source of our food, the less control we have over what’s in our food. If, as is said, the average food in the United States travels 1,5…

Mike Keller, Michael A. Keller & Associates Consulting This just in: Russia has launched its first moon-landing spacecraft in 47 years in a bid to be the first nation to make a soft landing on the south pole of the moon. The Russians are racing to beat India, which launched its Chandrayaan-3 lunar lander last month, and also with the United States …

Farmer of the Year Tom Bros, Live Earth Farm, Watsonville CA A while ago, I had a consulting contract on the island nation of Cyprus. The task was to find a crop with an economy sufficient to repopulate an agricultural plateau near the village of Akourdahleia, that had been depopulated by the jobs available in coastal casinos. As I strolled the pla…

With Jo Ann Baumgartner, Executive Director, Wild Farm Alliance and Sam Earnshaw, Executive Director, Hedgerows Unlimited Back in 2006, a multistate outbreak of E. Coli O157:H7 killed three and sickened an additional 202. The source of that E. Coli was found to be spinach from California, and the cause was believed to be contamination from the spin…

Michael Olson with Royal Bagheri, Executive Director, COOK Alliance Should we open a restaurant in our kitchen? Let’s begin with Michael Olson’s Second Law of the Food Chain: "The farther we go from the source of our food, the less control we have over our food." Makes sense, don’t you think? If you eat a carrot from your garden, you have a lot of …

With Jessica Ridgeway, Executive Director, Farm Discovery at Live Earth I had the good fortune to have lived on the grandparents’ Montana farm when very young. I still remember, to this day, driving my first working tractor at the age of six. It wasn’t anything special. Grandfather Karl hoisted me up into the seat, put the tractor in gear, and said…

Lisa Steele, Chief Chicken Influencer, Fresh Eggs Daily Which should come first: the chicken or its egg? Having spent the summers of my early youth on the grandparents’ farm, I became well acquainted with chickens. When old enough to put on a pair of shoes I was taught how to feed them, and later, how to collect their eggs, and later still, how to …

Nicholas Sullivan, Senior Research Fellow, Tufts University and Author, The Blue Revolution: Hunting, Harvesting, and Farming Seafood in the Information Age Can we catch fish so there will be fish left to be caught? Given the technologies of the information age, we-the-people have become very adept at catching fish. In fact, if we could get away wi…

Dr. John Fagan, CEO & Chief Scientist, Health Research Insitute In the 1930s, people began the migration from the farm into the city. Those farmers who were left on the farm began growing food with money, which they used to buy equipment and chemicals to do the work that people once did. Thus it became cheaper to grow food with money, than with peo…

Ken Kimes & Sandra Ward, Farmer / Owners, New Natives Microgreens It really does seem as though we are running out of food. That is not to say that we are running out of things to eat. No! On the contrary! There are many things to eat, and most all of them are cheap and easy to get, too! And yet, so many of those things we are being offered in brig…

Various Participants World Ag Expo, Tulare, California How do they provide us with all our food? We all get our food from grocery stores, and we all take that food for granted – even the “fresh” tomatoes we eat in the middle of winter! It’s time we take a serendipitous stroll through agriculture, via the World Ag Expo in Tulare, California, to meet…

Jack & Sarah Kimmich, Farmers / Owners, California Kurobuta Pasture Raised Pork http://californiakurobuta.com/ Follow along: If one is curious about what one is becoming, one then should be curious about what the food one eats, eats as well. Now if one is eating a carrot from one’s garden, its pretty easy to know what that carrot ate, because one f…

Cynthia Sandberg, Farmer, Entrepreneur & Teacher, Love Apple Farm It was a soggy wet winter, that broke a bone-dry years-long drought, that capped off three dreary years of pandemic. But Spring did arrive, and with it the hope of new life bursting forth out of the soil with great shouts of joy. “Hallelujah! We are alive!” And we are alive, too! So …

Andy Dyer, Professor of Biology, University of South Carolina, Author, Eaters’ Digest Does our microbiome have a vote on how we live our lives? It is not just us that needs to be fed. It’s also them– the 100 trillion microorganisms that live on and in our body. Wow! That is a population 10,000 times greater than all the people on earth, give or tak…

Various Participants World Ag Expo, Tulare, California How do they grow our food? Given the extent to which we take food for granted, and how far we have removed ourselves from the source of food, and how much we pay for cheap food, we think it wise to pause and ask those at the source: How do you grow our food? Welcome to Part IV of our “Serendipi…

A Serendipitous Stroll Into Agriculture III Various Participants World Ag Expo, Tulare, California How do they make our food appear? As if by some kind of magic, our grocery stores get filled with food in the middle of the night, while we are sleeping! It happens every night, and every morning there is food to eat! That food is always there in the …

The World Ag Expo Tulare, CA We all get our food from grocery stores, and we all take that food for granted– even those fresh tomatoes we eat in the middle of winter! It’s time to meet the people who provide us with the food we take for granted, and ask: How do you provide us with all our food? Welcome to our “Serendipitous Stroll” through the worl…

What is not eating what this year is we-the-people eating king salmon. The kings, which are also called “chinooks” by those in the know, are those salmon that are hatched in the rivers and streams of California and Oregon, and which, when of age, migrate down the rivers into the Pacific Ocean where they spend their working lives. Then, when its tim…

Sally Fallon Morell, Founding President, Weston A. Price Foundation I tell this story often, because the telling feels so happy. Some time back I had the opportunity to attend a Weston A Price Foundation convention. What I saw there was one of the most hopeful things I have ever seen in my travels up and down the food chain. Everywhere I looked in …

Blake & Stephanie Alexandre, Alexandre Family Farms, Crescent City, CA Can the cow help save the earth? My attention was recently directed to an environmental organization in Texas that was helping farmers transition their farms from raising cows to raising plants. Other than the fact that the organizers were working over farms in Texas, their effo…

Mark Shatzker, Author, The Dorito Effect & The End of Cravings Have we become the food for our food? If you were to watch back to back videos of crowded street scenes, one from just about any city in China, and one from just about any city in America, you would see two different populations of people. The population on the streets of China would ap…

Dr. Julia Skinner, Author, Our Fermented History & Founder of Root, A Fermented Company How did fermentation help we-the-people survive and prosper? 10,000 years after brewing up our first batch of beer, we are only now coming to realize how thoroughly those little bubble-making bacteria have infused themselves into our lives. In fact, we can now l…

Dr. Omanjana Goswami, Interdisciplinary Scientist, Food and Environment Program, Union of Concerned Scientists Will there be enough fertilizer to feed our future? We are living in a world at war. The world’s major powers are now standing in opposition to each other’s interests, and doing so with all the armaments of political and military warfare. …

Lee Ann Pearce, Senior Vice President and Manager, Food and Agribusiness Industry Advisors Group, Wells Fargo Bank &Karol Aure-Flynn, Vice President, Food & Agribusiness Industry Sector Analyst, Wells Fargo Bank Where is the money to grow our food?' It takes time, money and know-how to farm our food. When most everyone lived on a farm, farmers grew…

Amanda Starbuck, Research Director, Food & Water Watch Will we be made to eat the elite's guilt-free meat? Franz Kafka, author of The Trial, once said, “My guiding principle is this: Guilt is never to be doubted.” There are a lot of ways to make people feel guilty, and so most of us go through life being guilty about something. What if our guilt co…

Andy Dyer, Professor of Biology, University of South Carolina & Author of Eaters’ Digest Does our microbiome get to vote on us? It is not just us that needs to be fed. It’s also them– the 100 trillion microorganisms that live on and in our body. Wow! That is a population 10,000 times greater than all the people on earth, give or take! But as the 10…

Survival Food: Buy or Build? Brooke Whipple, Host, The Girl in the Woods What goes around, does come around. That being the case, it’s time to reconsider the motto of the Boy Scouts: “Be prepared!” Why be prepared? For one reason, President Joe Biden warned that the sanctions placed on Russia for its invasion of the Ukraine will result in food shor…

Gretchen DuBeau, Executive and Legal Director, Alliance for Natural Health Do they not want our food to be our medicine? Hippocrates is said to have said, “Let food be thy medicine and medicine by thy food.” In 1994, those who believed food should be medicine, and medicine should be food, gathered in Washington, DC, to fight back an effort by the p…

Christine McDaniel / Senior Research Fellow, Mercatus Center George Mason University & Fellow Clayton Yeutter Institute of International Trade at the University of Nebraska The United States appears to be getting into a food fight with Mexico… over corn! Regulators in Mexico are moving to ban genetically re-engineered corn for human consumption. Th…

Dane Wigington, Lead Researcher, Geo Engineering Watch Is weird weather a consequence of nature or nurture? It used to be that our reservoirs out West held water, but if you were to look around, you would see that now they mostly hold air. At least, that is what I saw on a recent road trip up I-5 through California’s Central Valley into Oregon, whi…

Yeyen Gunawan, Founder, Drink La Vie Where can one find food that lives? Consider Michael Olson’s Second Law of the Food Chain: The farther we go from the source of our food, the less control we have over our food. There was a time­– not too long ago– that most of our food came from right here on the farm. But then we moved into town and now our fo…

Zen Honneycutt, Founder & Executive Director of Moms Across America, Author of Author of Unstoppable Are school lunches destroying our nation’s future? School meals are the only meals many of the nation’s children get to eat. As those meals are purchased, prepared and presented by institutions, they are most likely made up of the least expensive in…