(Conversation Recorded on October 10th, 2023)
Show Summary
On this Reality Roundtable, Nate is joined by small-scale farmer Jason Bradford, permaculturist and documentarian Andrew Millison, regenerative agriculture activist Vandana Shiva, and regenerative farmer and educator Daniel Zetah to discuss the feasibility of a food system fully or mostly independent of fossil fuel inputs. While a non-industrialized agriculture system is certainly possible (it was the norm for the majority of human history), what that will look like and how we even begin such a transition is daunting with a population of 8 billion humans to feed. How do we teach people the skills they’ll need as fossil inputs become less affordable, reliable, and accessible? Can we create a cultural shift towards a slower lifestyle that is more connected to the land which provides us food? What do the people of a society look like where we are once again centered around agriculture and in tune with the flows of nature? How would our relationship with jobs and the land have to change?
About Jason Bradford
Jason Bradford has been affiliated with Post Carbon Institute since 2004, first as a Fellow and then as Board President. He worked for the Center for Conservation and Sustainable Development at the Missouri Botanical Garden, was a Visiting Scholar at U.C. Davis, and during that period co-founded the Andes Biodiversity and Ecosystem Research Group (ABERG). He decided to shift from academia to learn more about and practice sustainable agriculture, and in the process, completed six months of training with Ecology Action (aka GrowBiointensive) in Willits, California, and then founded Brookside School Farm.
About Andrew Millison
Andrew Millison is an innovative educator, storyteller and designer. He founded the Permaculture Design education program at Oregon State University (OSU) in 2009. At OSU Andrew serves as an Education Director and Senior Instructor who offers over 25 years of experience, and a playful approach to regenerative design. Andrew is also a documentary videographer who travels the world documenting epic permaculture projects in places such as India, Egypt, Mexico, Cuba, and throughout the US. You can view his videos and series on his YouTube channel.
About Vandana Shiva
Vandana Shiva is a well known activist, author of many books, and is a global champion on regenerative local agriculture, biodiversity and nutritious food. She has a PhD in physics and 40 years ago founded the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology, an independent research institute that works on the most significant ecological problems of our times.
About Daniel Zetah
Daniel grew up on a farm in Minnesota where he learned to fix all manner of things driven from an insatiable curiosity about how things worked. He studied economics and business at university. After waking to our planetary predicament, he became a full time environmental activist, then moved to an off grid community in the mountains where he studied permaculture and built straw bale houses. He moved back to America to help steer culture in a more sane direction. He and his wife Stephanie moved back to the family farm in Minnesota where they are growing 80% of their calories, rebuilding the local ecology, and educating and empowering people to wrest back control of their sovereignty as human beings.
Watch on YouTube
Show Notes & Links to Learn More:
00:00 – Jason Bradford works, info, + TGS Podcast, Andrew Millison works, info, youtube channel, + TGS Podcast, and Vandana Shiva Works, info, + TGS Podcast, Daniel Zetah New Story Farm, New Story Farm Resiliency School, + TGS Podcast
04:24 – We use 10-14 for each calorie delivered to the table
04:45 – Limited fossil fuel resources and their ecological consequences
05:58 – Re-ruralizing
06:55 – Power complexity of modern cities
07:23 – Bill Rees + TGS Episode, Ecological Footprint
08:25 – Amount of energy used in transport/packaging of food
08:41 – The Future is Rural
09:16 – Much of the world is still rural
11:20 – Composting toilet
15:10 – Paani Foundation
16:44 – Mississippi Watershed, largest area of navigable river
19:38 – Most people globally are peasants
19:56 – US Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz, we’ve got to squeeze the farmer off the land
20:13 – The US was an agrarian society a century ago
20:58 – Milpa System
21:21 – Yield per acre
21:53 – Nutrition per acre and soil fertility is much higher in organic agriculture
26:05 – Most americans are nutrient deficient and obese
31:10 – ~1% of American population involved with agriculture, 70-80% in India
32:20 – Less than 1% of farmers are farming organically
33:30 – Conventional agriculture actually requires more inputs
34:39 – Amory Lovins, energy slaves
35:20 – Great Depression, Great Dust Bowl
35:31 – Conservation Corps
41:50 – Sahel
42:01 – Senegal imports 70% of food
50:40 – US rates of depression in youth
56:54 – Keystone Species
1:00:54 – Apprentice Systems
1:04:38 – Chipko Movement
1:04:59 – Year of Millets
1:07:55 – Roots of regenerative agriculture in ancient practices
1:11:08 – Silvopasture, agroforestry
1:19:22 – $182 billion dollars spent on agriculture subsidies in the US, and effects on the agriculture market
1:20:29 – Vandana on Green Revolution
1:20:59 – Seed and plant patents
1:21:24 – Districts corresponding to watershed boundaries
1:22:21 – Andrew’s permaculture class at OSU
1:23:07 – One Planet Development Program
1:27:24 – Climate migration
More: The Future is Rural: Source data for diet and land model tables (shared publicly)
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A valuable dialogue.
Thank you for this nourishing discussion!
What about permaculture of the oceans?
FEED THE WORLD WHILE SAVING THE OCEANS! Dr David King was the chief scientific adviser to the UK government, and Dr Tim Flannery held the same position down in Australia. Both have done lots of work on how 3d seaweed and shellfish farms could feed the world WHILE ALSO restoring the ocean! Seaweed grows 30 times faster than any land plant.
JUST 2% OF THE OCEANS COULD FEED 12 BILLION PEOPLE while repairing the oceans.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/jun/01/sea-forest-better-name-seaweed-un-food-adviser
The seaweed powder can be a food supplement that goes in everything from dairy to bread.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666833522000302
The dried seaweed protein yield per area (in the ocean) is 2.5 to 7.5 times higher than wheat or legumes (on land). https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7221823/
They also grow shellfish like oysters, scallops, and muscles in baskets under the seaweed lines.
20% OF THE SEAWEED BREAKS OFF AND GETS SEQUESTERED kilometres deep, trapping carbon for a thousand years. The more food we grow, the more carbon we sequester. https://www.jwu.edu/news/stories/magazine/2022/fall/sustainable-cuisine/index.html
OPTIONAL EXTRAS ON SEAWEED FOR THE KEEN:-
6 minute Youtube summary – the big ocean ecosystem groups sponsoring research into this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZW72i0DVqE
Bren Smith’s TED old talk from 2013: https://youtu.be/j8ViaskDSeI – now working with marketing team to commercialise seaweed powder
FREAKANOMICS interview Bren Smith: June 2021 – 43 minutes https://freakonomics.com/podcast/is-the-future-of-farming-in-the-ocean-ep-467/
FARM EVEN THE NUTRIENT POOR OPEN OCEAN: Solar or wave powered floating barges could pump nutrient rich water up from 500 m down.
https://theconversation.com/how-farming-giant-seaweed-can-feed-fish-and-fix-the-climate-81761
BUT WAIT, THERE’S ANOTHER
I’m not sure which will win – giant seaweed farms or huge Precision Fermentation factories cooking up all the fats and proteins we need from renewable energy. This decouples fats and proteins from arable land – indeed – inefficient photosynthesis at 6%. Instead if can come from solar at today’s 22% – probably 29% by 2030! Solar panels on rooftops and floating on fresh water reservoirs offer a combined area of up to 10 to 12 times the energy we use today, without touching our deserts – let alone arable land. More on PF here. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/nov/24/green-technology-precision-fermentation-farming
The most important aspect of fossil fuels is not the tractors and not even the global transportation of food etc. but the nitrogen fertilizers. Chemical fertilizers made possible cutting the link between the land and the people. Without synthetic fertilizers the ag system will look very different. It is possible to make synthetic fertilizers with renewable energy – the first fertilizers were made with hydroelectricity in Norway . but it will be much more exepensive and thus less uesd.
I think that most people don’t understand the drivers of food production and human population. There is currently en enormous over-supply of agriculture commodities which is driving human population, but as people can’t eat all that grain, industrial livestock production has increased a lot.
https://gardenearth.substack.com/p/why-do-we-grow-food
It is an excellent discussion.
That the “future is rural” is true, but the panel had disappointingly few practical suggestions for actually making it happen, especially in wealthy countries where the vast majority of people live in cities. Everyone agreed that cities are a dead end, but nobody had a plan for emptying them.
I agee with Vandana Shiva that the easiest approach to peasant agrarianism is to support the people who are already living that way, mostly in the Global South, first by preventing the global market economy from usurping their place on the land and second by getting them the very latest information about optimizing their subsistence farming techniques.
Those urban folks in countries like the US are likely just going to wait until the supermarket shelves are bare before they even consider living on a subsistence farm. By then it will be too late for them.