Down to Earth: The Planet to Plate Podcast
169 episodes - English - Latest episode: about 1 month ago - ★★★★★ - 80 ratingsDown to Earth is a podcast about regenerative agriculture, and it’s for everyone who eats. We invite you to meet the people shaping a healthier food system—farmers, ranchers, scientists, land managers, writers, and many others. Designing a future that draws on both tradition and innovation, they’re on a mission to change the paradigm so that the food we eat is healthy and long-term sustainable—for families and growers, for wildlife and water, for climate and planet. downtoearthradio.com
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Episodes
What is Your Foodprint?
June 28, 2022 01:37 - 47 minutes - 37.9 MBWe all know the term carbon "footprint." Well, Foodprint takes this idea and broadens it to apply to our food system; they explore how the foods we eat affect not only carbon emissions, but a whole range of things, like livestock and wildlife, soils and water, communities and human health. Foodprint is a project of the GRACE Communications Foundation, and in today's episode we talk to its director Jerusha Klemperer, who is also producer and host of their podcast, "What You're Eating," and U...
Kiss the Ground: A project born of devotion to the earth
June 07, 2022 02:10 - 54 minutes - 43.6 MBRyland Engelhart came from a family of vegans and vegetarians and knew early on that he wanted to devote his life to the health of the planet. Once he began to see that there is no food –– no life at all –– without the death of animals, he revised his perspective and at 35 ate his first hamburger. (It went well.) This perspective grew into a deeper understanding of the role of soil as the source of all life, and as the best answer to the question of how to reverse climate change, and he star...
Food, forests, and farms
May 24, 2022 04:16 - 52 minutes - 41.9 MBMost of the American Midwest was once a vast savanna, an open grassland with abundant trees and wildlife. As the land was converted to agriculture many of the trees were lost, and with them went countless benefits to the landscape, to air and water, soil health, and wildlife. The practice of agroforestry allows farmers to return those benefits to their land –– and provides profit opportunities and increased carbon sequestration. We talk to Keefe Keeley, executive director of the Savanna Inst...
Western Wildfires
May 10, 2022 04:39 - 48 minutes - 39.2 MBIn New Mexico and across the West wildfires are burning through wildlands, farms, ranches, and communities. Lesli Allison, executive director of the Western Landowners Alliance, has many years of experience in prescribed burn management—and like many New Mexcians she's directly affected by the fires. She helps us to understand how we got to the volatile situation we're in, where "controlled" fires so easily go out of control, and the critical importance of prioritizing good land management ...
The path to positive food policy
April 25, 2022 22:31 - 48 minutes - 38.7 MBAria McLauchlan and Harley Cross, co-founders of Land Core, have been working for years on food and farming policy that promotes regenerative practices. In this podcast we talk about the Farm Bill––a trillion dollar piece of legislation which most people know little about, but which deeply affects all of our lives. It plays a huge role in how farming is done––and could help to make a shift toward regenerative practices and the many benefits that flow from them.
Making the regenerative transition
April 12, 2022 17:25 - 1 hour - 49.4 MBJessica Chiartas is a PhD soil bio-geochemist who's working to catalyze the transition from "conventional" to regenerative agriculture. She’s a postdoctoral researcher at the Innovation Institute for Food and Health at UC Davis and fellow with Food Shot Global, and is UC Davis partner for the California Farm Demonstration Network. She’s lead Soil Scientist at Kiss the Ground, and the founder of Soil Life Services and a new project called Soil Life. On this podcast we talk about her work wit...
Restoring landscapes...with goats
March 29, 2022 03:31 - 36 minutes - 29.1 MBAmanita Thorp Berto is owner of Horned Locust Remediation, and she uses a flock of goats and sheep to do landscaping projects. In gardens, parks, photovoltaic installations, and many other places, goats take the place of toxic herbicides and pesticides and of course machines like lawnmowers. They love to eat plants that cause allergies in people––even poison ivy––and they easily go to places machines can't reach. And in the process, they leave the land more fertile and resilient, as they mim...
Rebuilding resilience on native land
March 15, 2022 05:10 - 26 minutes - 21.5 MBIn the late 1990s, members of Santa Ana Pueblo embarked on a long-term project to restore their land, which had been damaged over the last century by multiple forces, including overgrazing, hunting, logging, and habitat fragmentation. Glenn Tenorio is former governor of Santa Ana Pueblo; he currently works with the pueblos’s Department of Natural Resources as a water resources specialist, and he’s also a farmer. He talks about the decisions the pueblo made to bring in outsiders like conserva...
The Sequestration Solution: Soil
February 22, 2022 05:10 - 59 minutes - 47.4 MBKarl Thidemann is co-founder of Soil4Climate, a non-profit that advocates for regenerative agriculture, with a focus on grazing and the restoration of grasslands. In this podcast he makes the case, supported by extensive scientific research, that the restoration of grasslands can provide a multi win-win––for the climate, biodiversity, soil health, good nutrition, farmer profitability, the water cycle, rural communities, anti-desertification, and maintaining traditional agrarian practices wor...
Restore the water cycle, revive the planet
February 08, 2022 02:44 - 42 minutes - 33.8 MBZach Weiss has seen land so degraded that even weeds couldn't grow...and helped transform it into healthy, living landscapes by changing the flow of water and letting nature do most of the work. Protégé of Austrian farmer Sepp Holzer, he works all over the world helping agrarians to restore natural flows on their land, increasing water for crops and livestock, but also for wildlife and downstream water users. The implications for agriculture, wildlife, and climate are huge.
This earth to which we belong
January 25, 2022 02:55 - 36 minutes - 29.6 MBThe title of Pamela Tanner Boll's new film, To Which We Belong, comes from a quotation by the author Aldo Leopold, early 20th conservationist and environmentalist whose work has inspired generations of ecologists, agrarians, and nature lovers. Leopold wrote, "We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect." In the film Boll features nine agricultural projects in the US and abro...
Science meets compost
January 11, 2022 05:32 - 45 minutes - 36.6 MBEva Stricker is director of the Carbon Ranch Initiative for the Quivira coalition and a Research Assistant Professor at the University of New Mexico Department of Biology. One of her projects is the scientific study of compost––with the goals of helping farmers and ranchers heal and improve their land, increase their profitability, and sequester carbon. Emily Cornell, owner/manager of Sol Ranch, a cow-calf and grassfed beef operation in northeastern New Mexico, is a participant in the progra...
Cultivating the People-Planet-Profit model on an urban farm
December 15, 2021 02:05 - 41 minutes - 33.5 MBMatt Draper and Minor Morgan started North Valley Organics on two plots of land in Albuquerque, and have made a commitment to the People-Planet-Profit model for their business. Working with diversity and resilience as core principles, they want farm work to be something that not only produces healthy, nutrient-dense food, but also provides a long term sustainable and joyful living for the people doing it—and the communities around them.
Planetary regeneration on a community scale
November 30, 2021 15:53 - 57 minutes - 45.7 MBAbout a decade ago Tijinder and Juliana Ciano took over Reunity Resources' land from a centenarian veteran, and they've continued to honor his mission of feeding the community. Their work includes vegetable farming and a farm stand and food truck, soil and compost programs, the founding of a biodiesel program, educational programs, food donations, and community organizing. They're part of the Quivira Coalition's Carbon Ranch Initiative and have been working together on developing a model for...
Growing pecans in the desert?
November 16, 2021 15:38 - 49 minutes - 39.7 MBIn today's podcast we look at the synergistic collaboration between a soil scientist and a pecan farmer. Southern New Mexico is not an ideal landscape for pecans, which grow best in warm, wet climates. But the industry is here, and Josh Bowman has determined to grow a healthy and abundant crop by focusing on the soil. Using cover crops and grazing animals, he's been able to increase the life and organic matter in the soil, and to produce a greater yield and a higher quality nut—while using ...
Got goat?
November 02, 2021 14:09 - 47 minutes - 38.3 MBRenard Turner and his wife Chinette founded the Vanguard Ranch Natural Gourmet in Gordonsville, Virginia, 25 years ago, and through creative entrepreneurship and wise land management and animal husbandry practices have built a value-added business model that works on a relatively small scale. Their ideas about sustainability and regeneration on a global scale inform their daily practices. And they are also encouraging African American people of the next generation to think about leaving the...
Tribal food renaissance
October 19, 2021 03:31 - 29 minutes - 23.8 MBLatashia Redhouse is director of the American Indian Foods program at the Intertribal Agriculture Council, where she supports food producers across the country to get their food to consumers in the US and beyond—while encouraging traditional and regenerative agriculture practices.
From despair to care
October 04, 2021 23:36 - 42 minutes - 33.8 MBWilliam deBuys is a prolific author of books documenting people's relationship to the earth—which is too often destructive. In his new book, The Trail to Kanjiroba: Rediscovering Earth in an Age of Loss, he writes of an expedition to Nepal that he made with a group of doctors and other medical professionals, led by American Zen Buddhist Roshi Joan Halifax, and reflects on what it means to care for an ailing earth as doctors care for patients.
Stepping back from the abyss
September 21, 2021 17:44 - 57 minutes - 45.8 MBJames Rebanks is the author of the newly-released book Pastoral Song: A Farmer’s Journey, which recently won the 2021 Wainwright prize for UK Nature writing, and best-seller The Shepherd's Life: Modern Dispatches from an Ancient Landscape. His books explore the experience of being a farmer from a millennia-old farming tradition that was almost lost to "improvement." Wonderfully written and highly readable, these accounts of his life in the Lake District of Cumbria, England, give us a lived ...
Restoring the global water cycle
September 07, 2021 16:01 - 50 minutes - 40.8 MBSandra Postel has devoted her life to studying the world's freshwater systems, and they're not looking so great right now. Through a combination of over-allocation, over-engineering, over-use, and climate change, we'll be in trouble if we don't address the problem soon—in fact, we're in trouble now. But the solutions are there, and already in place on a small scale, and they involve working with nature rather than against it to restore the natural flows and stay in balance.
How—and why—to be good to your microbes
August 24, 2021 05:41 - 40 minutes - 32.3 MBMany of us were taught that microbes—and bacteria in particular—were dangerous pathogens, and the safest thing human beings could do was create a sterile, bacteria-free environment. But in fact microbes are absolutely essential to human health, the health of the soil, and to pretty much all life on earth. Dr. Emeran Mayer is a gastroenterologist, executive director of the G. Oppenheimer Center for Neurobiology of Stress and Resilience, and the director of the UCLA Microbiome Center. And he’...
Lush and abundant biodiversity—in a desert city
August 10, 2021 05:45 - 54 minutes - 43.7 MBReese Baker has been designing permaculture landscapes for many years, and with his family has turned his home on a quarter-acre lot in Santa Fe, NM into a teeming oasis of life, complete with wetlands, a pond, trees, and food and flower gardens—not to mention bats, pollinators, fungi, soil life, and other friendly creatures. His vision for Santa Fe is to make it a pilot city for large scale water conservation, capturing each drop of rain to grow gardens and trees, and lessening the pressure...
The deep history of apples
July 28, 2021 06:31 - 44 minutes - 35.3 MBGordon Tooley and his wife Margaret Yancey started Tooley's Trees in Truchas, New Mexico, in the early 1990s. They grow and sell rare and heirloom trees that are well adapted to the semi-arid climate of the region. But just as important as the business is the history of these fruit trees and the genetic preservation of varieties that have very specific characteristics and uses--and the way of life that cultivates a deep relationship with the wildlife, soil, water, and even air in their parti...
Pests, pathogens, and porcupines
July 13, 2021 05:08 - 43 minutes - 35.1 MBSteve Wood is an apple grower and cider maker in Lebanon, New Hampshire, and he's been working on the family orchard since he was a child. Dubbed the Godfather of the hard cider industry in the US, he's one of the New England's leading voices on Integrated Pest Management—a way of keeping creatures of all kinds from destroying the trees and their fruit while minimizing harm to the ecosystem.
Rockweed: underwater forest or industrial commodity?
June 30, 2021 12:21 - 36 minutes - 29.2 MBDr. Robin Hadlock Seeley grew up in Maine and has dedicated her life as a scientist to the preservation of coastal ecosystems—in particular a form of seaweed called rockweed. Severine von Tscharner Fleming is a farmer and activist whose farm is on the Maine coast where rockweed is being harvested by the ton and shipped all over the world. What is the function of rockweed in ecosystems, and what would sustainable harvesting—as opposed to extractive mining—of rockweed look like?
Designing systems that improve as they age
June 16, 2021 13:12 - 55 minutes - 44.8 MBJesse Smith was studying design when he was asked, how can you make something that gets better than age? Intrigued by the question of how to design stuff that won't end up being thrown in the trash, he found his way to agricultural systems, cultured foods, and a community-based way of life. As director of stewardship at the White Buffalo Land Trust, which recently bought the Jalama Canyon Ranch near Santa Barbara, California, he is working with a team to bring back a degraded landscape using...
Into the Pasture: Grassfed Goes Mainstream
June 01, 2021 13:50 - 38 minutes - 30.6 MBCarrie Balkcom grew up on a cattle ranch in Florida. In 2003 she returned to her roots when she became the executive director of the American Grassfed Association at its founding--and she's been there ever since. AGA certifies pasture-raised livestock--and not just beef--and they help producers develop and sustain regenerative practices for the sake of the animals, the land, and the consumer.
Busting myths about beef
May 18, 2021 03:38 - 1 hour - 48.1 MBNicolette Hahn Niman never thought that she would have anything positive to say about animal agriculture. An environmental lawyer and a committed vegetarian who had seen the horrors of industrial livestock production up close, her life changed when she married a rancher and began to perceive the complexities of both animal and crop production. She's author of the book, Defending Beef: The Ecological and Nutritional Case for Meat, and we talk about the new and updated edition of the book, in ...
Transforming the American Prairie, one strip at a time
May 05, 2021 01:30 - 46 minutes - 37.6 MBOmar de Kok-Mercado Scientist with background in Agro-ecology, Soil Microbiology and Biochemistry, and he’s at Iowa State University working on a project that integrates prairie strips into row-crop agriculture. By working with farmers to plant strips of land—"prairie strips—with native prairie vegetation, he and his team are working to bring back healthy soil, wildlife, corridors, a healthy water cycle, and innumerable potential benefits to land that is currently being cultivated in ways th...
Welcome to Cowgirl Camp!
April 20, 2021 05:19 - 45 minutes - 36.1 MBBeth Robinette is a fourth generation rancher in Eastern Washington State, where she and her family run a grassfed beef operation, the Lazy R Ranch, based on holistic management principles. She’s co-founder of LINC Foods (Local Inland Northwest Cooperative), a local food hub based in Spokane Washington; and she runs the New Cowgirl Camp, an intensive ranching retreat for women, and New Rancher Camp, which is for both men and women.
Lipan Apache: Bringing back the buffalo in Texas
April 06, 2021 15:37 - 43 minutes - 34.6 MBLucille Contreras discovered her Lipan Apache roots as a young adult. After working in IT for many years, she founded the Texas Tribal Buffalo Project as a way of bringing together the Lipan diaspora, cultivating healthy land and food, rescuing the language, and honoring the co-existence of people and buffalo on their native lands.
Regenerative production of...seaweed
March 16, 2021 07:50 - 38 minutes - 26.7 MBKristina Long is founder and CEO of Sea Forest, a kelp farming company in British Columbia, Canada. We talk about everything kelp--sustainable farming and harvesting, uses of kelp, the business model, and the community.
Biosphere 2: farming while sealed off from the world
March 02, 2021 06:39 - 51 minutes - 40.9 MBMark Nelson is an environmental engineer, author, and farmer at Synergia Ranch, in Santa Fe, NM. He's co-author of the book, Life Under Glass : Crucial lessons in planetary stewardship from Biosphere 2, and he's in a new documentary about Biosphere 2, Spaceship Earth. Starrlight Augustine is a scientist manager of the organic farm at Synergia Ranch. We talk about the experience and lessons of Biosphere 2, and their methods of farming in New Mexico.
Starting a ranch--from the ground up
February 16, 2021 19:19 - 38 minutes - 26.8 MBRachael and James Stewart were both personal trainers in Phoenix, Arizona, eating a high-protein diet. When the pandemic hit, they decided to make some big changes. Stu (James) sold a classic car and they bought some land in southeastern Arizona, where they are in the first phase of starting a ranch for goats, sheep, and heritage poultry--Southwest Black Ranchers. Stu is African American, Rachael is Filipina-Mexican, and their children are loving their life outdoors and with the animals.
Acclaimed chef Deborah Madison on her new food memoir
February 02, 2021 03:15 - 40 minutes - 27.8 MBDeborah Madison put vegetarian gourmet cooking on the map—and yet she's not a vegetarian. She learned to cook at the San Francisco Zen Center and the restaurant Chez Panisse, and then co-founded Greens Restaurant in San Francisco in 1979. She’s a chef and is author of over a dozen books on food and cooking; her latest is a memoir called, An Onion in My Pocket: My Life with Vegetables.
It's the policy, stupid
January 19, 2021 23:11 - 44 minutes - 30.8 MBJoe Maxwell is President of the Family Farm Action Alliance, formerly a state legislator Lieutenant Governor of Missouri, and is retired from the Army National Guard. He's also a family farmer, and has witnessed the shift from a functional capitalism to one that favors large monopolies at the expense of farmers, consumers, and the earth itself. He knows—from multiple perspectives—that consumer demand alone is not enough to make the shift toward a healthy food system. He lays out the problem...
From journalist to butcher
January 05, 2021 19:11 - 39 minutes - 26.8 MBCamas Davis is executive director of the Good Meat Project and founder of the Portland Meat Collective. A decade ago, after she apprenticed as a butcher in southwestern France, she returned to her home in Oregon to find that there was a lack of education among consumers about meat—where it comes from, what parts of the animal they're eating, what's behind variations in flavor—and so she started the Portland Meat Collective, which educates consumers to understand and prepare meat. Davis is ...
Deep resilience: healing through herbal medicine, farming, and ancestral memory
December 15, 2020 04:59 - 40 minutes - 27.8 MBJovan Sage is a farmer, chef, community organizer, entrepreneur, herbalist, doula, and wellness coach. Drawing on the knowledge of her West African and Indigenous ancestors, she is deeply engaged in healing on many levels--the soil, the body, communities caught up in the global pandemic, race relations--through deeply reciprocal relationships with the land and one another. Find out more about her work at Alchemist Jovan and Sage's Larder.
Renewing Native American Food Traditions
December 01, 2020 05:31 - 27 minutes - 19 MBFilmmaker Sanjay Rawal's new documentary, Gather, explores how Native Americans across the U.S. are rediscovering their food traditions--and building on them in the context of present-day realities. We meet a world-class chef who returned to his roots and opened a Native cuisine-based restaurant in an old gas station; a young Lakota woman from a buffalo ranch who is combining her love of science and of her own culture; and a group of young men from Pacific salmon country who are reclaiming t...
Funding the science of regenerative ag
November 17, 2020 19:40 - 45 minutes - 31 MBLaKisha Odom is Scientific Program Director (Soil Health) at The Foundation for Food and Agriculture Research. A non-profit organization funded by the Farm Bill, FFAR is helping to fund the scientific research behind healthy soil practices so that more farmers can make the transition to regenerative agriculture and long-term sustainability and resilience.
Reclaiming the Commons
November 03, 2020 21:00 - 1 hour - 57.9 MBDr. Vandana Shiva is an environmental leader, scientist, and activist. Author of over 20 books, she’s founder and leader of Navdanya, a non-governmental organization and movement that promotes biodiversity, organic farming, the rights of farmers, and seed saving. Her latest book is, Reclaiming the Commons: Biodiversity, Indigenous Knowledge, and the Rights of Mother Earth, published by Synergetic Press. She's delivering the keynote address at the Regenerate Conference.
From art to agriculture: Emerald Gardens
October 20, 2020 17:53 - 50 minutes - 34.8 MBRoberto Meza was a multi-media artist and MIT graduate student when he went encountered some health challenges. He found that eating healthy greens restored his health and spirit so powerfully that he started apprenticing with a farmer and then moved to Colorado to start Emerald Gardens, a greenhouse-based farm that delivers microgreens to customers in the Denver area—and which brings a focus to issues of food sovereignty, equity, and building a robust local food system.
First nations food and agriculture
October 06, 2020 04:59 - 42 minutes - 29.5 MBA-Dae Romero Briones is director of the Native Agriculture and Food Systems initiative at First Nations Development Institute. We talk about programs across the country that are helping native people build healthier food systems and to strengthen the traditions that have kept these systems alive even during the most devastating periods of colonization.
Making ag finance work for farmers, not just for bankers
September 22, 2020 03:46 - 1 hour - 46.5 MBZach Ducheneaux is a third generation family rancher on the Cheyenne River Sioux Reservation, and he’s Executive Director Intertribal Agriculture Council. We spend the hour talking about how the current financing system for agriculture doesn't work for the people growing the food—especially in Indian country, where discrimination is still the norm—and how innovative new financing structures can provide a real alternative. Zach will be be speaking at Regenerate 2020.
The Reindeer Chronicles: Stories of restoration from around the planet
September 08, 2020 06:48 - 1 hour - 41.4 MBJudith Schwartz is the author of several books, including Cows Save the Planet and Water in Plain Sight. Her new book, The Reindeer Chronicles: And Other Inspiring Stories of Working with Nature to Heal the Earth, is a riveting series of reports from all over the globe about people who are restoring landscapes and dealing with deeply entrenched conflicts that are exacerbated by their degraded ecosystems. She takes us to China, the Middle East, New Mexico, Mali, Hawaii, Spain, Norway, and oth...
For the birds: Audubon's conservation ranching work
August 25, 2020 05:32 - 56 minutes - 38.7 MBThe "Radical Center" concept says that food producers and conservationists have far more in common than not—and the Audubon Society's Conservation Ranching program is a prime example of this idea in action. Working in collaboration with prairie grassland ranchers, the Audubon Society is helping them to accommodate grassland birds, with the result that the land gets healthier, grazing animals benefit, and birds thrive. And they're driving "market-based conservation," in which consumers can ch...
The risks and rewards facing young farmers
August 11, 2020 04:16 - 30 minutes - 21.1 MBVanessa García Polanco is from a farming family that emigrated to the US when she was a teenager. Now she works with the National Young Farmers Coalition advocating for policies that help young farmers, new farmers, and farmers of color--who are often ignored, as infrastructures tend to serve larger commodity producers--especially during the global pandemic.
Bringing Buffalo back home
July 28, 2020 03:10 - 44 minutes - 30.7 MBJason Baldes is Tribal Buffalo Coordinator for the National Wildlife Federation. An Eastern Shoshone native, his people called themselves gweechoon deka, the Buffalo Eaters. But when the buffalo were killed by the US government, their way of life was badly damaged. Now Baldes is helping to restore buffalo to native lands and public lands as wild animals, and in so doing engaging the people to restore their relationship to them--as food, cultural icon, and keystone species on the landscape.
The Rodale Institute
July 14, 2020 06:19 - 52 minutes - 36.2 MBWhen the "green revolution" offered the promise of better agriculture through chemical-intensive farming, J.I. Rodale was skeptical. He started an organic farm and then an institute to study how farming could improve the land and human health. Now the Rodale Institute is doing agriculture research not only in their home farm in Pennsylvania, but also at new research centers in Iowa, California, and Georgia. We talk to Rodale's Diana Martin about the past and future of their research, about ...
Hopi farming: a 2000-year-long agriculture experiment
June 23, 2020 05:41 - 36 minutes - 25.1 MBHopi farmers were practicing regenerative agriculture before it was named. Working with the soil, the weather, the water cycle, seeds, and cultural practices, they fed themselves in the dry land of northern Arizona for millennia. Now the industrial food system has challenged their way of living and farming. We talk to traditional Hopi farmer Dr. Michael Kotutwa Johnson; he's a research associate with the Native American Agriculture Fund and has a doctorate in natural resources management.