Episode #221
Anthony Suau: Filming the Chemical Takeover

Anthony Suau, director of Organic Rising, returns to discuss the consequences of the ongoing chemical takeover of food. Suau points out that industrial players are continuing to increase the use of chemical biocides and to introduce new synthetic products that provide short term answers to the pest and weed resistance that has predicably appeared in crop fields. Dave and Anthony also explore the ties this reality has to our weakened usda organic program, which is bowing down to industry influence, by allowing for unlabeled hydroponic produce.

Our Anthony Suau interview has been edited and condensed for clarity:

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Dave Chapman interviews filmmaker Anthony Suau April 2025

Dave Chapman 0:00
Welcome to the Real Organic Podcast. I’m talking today with my friend Anthony Suau. Anthony, we’ve been talking non-stop for a day now. This will be revisiting a lot of things that we’ve touched on. I wish I was recording the entire time. It was really fun. I got to see “Organic Rising,” your beautiful film, once again yesterday at Dartmouth College. Then we talked together on a panel in front of the crowd.

Dave Chapman 0:29
I’ve learned some interesting things about you in the last day. One thing I had no idea about was that you had spent so many years as a professional photographer, flying around the world – you were in Russia and on Air Force One. But start with Russia; tell me just about the time you got to photograph Gorbachev.

Anthony Suau 0:54
Gorbachev and Yeltsin.

Dave Chapman 0:58
Just for younger people, who was Gorbachev, and who was Yeltsin?

Anthony Suau 1:04
Gorbachev was the leader of the Communist Party. He basically disbanded the Soviet Union shortly after I visited. It was 1991 when I first visited Moscow in Russia. I have been traveling around the world – I worked a lot in the Middle East, throughout Africa, Asia, South America, and, of course, across the United States for several decades.

Anthony Suau 1:32
But after the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 – which I was there for that, and had a very successful shoot there – and I started working throughout Eastern Europe. Then I decided I wanted to go to Russia at some point in 1991. I had met some people in East Berlin who spoke Russian and wanted to take me there. So I went, applied for a visa, and was set to go in August of 1991.

Anthony Suau 2:02
The day before I was set to leave, there was a coup, and Gorbachev was taken hostage in the Crimea. Yeltsin, who was an upcoming politician at that time, climbed on a tank and fought against the coup, which was partly backed by the Russian military. I thought they would close the airport and I wouldn’t get in – but they didn’t. I got in, and it was night. It was my first time arriving in Moscow, and it was out of a film.

Anthony Suau 2:34
I was going in a taxi – a Lada, or I forget what their old cars were – diving in and out of a tank column that was going into the city at night. Those were my first moments in Russia. I met my friend, and we went to the foot of the parliament building, where the resistance was holding fort. They were expecting the military to come in and assault them with military weapons. It could have been very, very bloody. There were a few confrontations.

Anthony Suau 3:05
We spent the night on the stairs, and I made a lot of photographs. I worked the situation for a few days. Time Magazine, who I was working for at that time, published quite a few of the photographs very well – large double pages and things. Because of that publication, ABC Television called me up the next day, just after Gorbachev had been released from the Kremlin – the coup was squashed and foiled – and Gorbachev came back.

Anthony Suau 3:36
But Yeltsin was this rising political figure. He ended up becoming the president of the country following Gorbachev. ABC had an exclusive interview with the two of them in the Kremlin, and they invited me to be the still photographer on set for that interview. I had been in Russia probably three, four, or maybe five days, and I was being driven in this big black Soviet limousine through the walls of the Kremlin at about 4:00 or 5:00 in the morning. I was right there.

Anthony Suau 4:11
The next thing I knew, I was standing in front of Gorbachev and Yeltsin – no further away than I am from you right now – photographing for ABC Television and Time Magazine. The pictures went around the world. But that’s the kind of thing I was doing back in those days – quite a bit of that. It was all exciting. Parachuting into one big event after the other – whether it was the Gulf War or Kurdistan.

Anthony Suau 4:38
We worked in Grozny, Chechnya. I traveled with the Spetsnaz Russian forces in Grozny on the front lines there for a few weeks. I had complete access to the Russian troops – I lived with them, drank with them, got drunk with them, recovered, and went back to work on the front lines. It was a very exciting and crazy life at that point.

Dave Chapman 5:07
I have learned that I have to explain who a lot of people are. I can’t take it for granted. So, I wouldn’t take for granted that a lot of the people listening to this will know who Gorbachev was because that happened before them – maybe before they were born. Gorbachev, at that moment, that was the end of the Cold War, which is back again in a way, but it was a huge shift – the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

Anthony Suau 5:41
Beginning the quick intro to the politics of it, when Gorbachev came back in, he dissolved the Soviet Union shortly after, I think, within a few months. He was somewhat shoved aside, and Yeltsin became the president of what was then, now, the first state of Russia. All the satellite states became independent – Ukraine and all the others.

Anthony Suau 6:07
Having that success of walking in the first time I was ever there, and five days later, I’m sitting in the Kremlin with Gorbachev and Yeltsin, I thought, “This is a place I really like to work. This is fun. This is wild.” It was always like that – every trip I took to Russia. I ended up getting an apartment there and staying for 10 years in Moscow and traveling all over the country and into the former republics and all of that, and watching the transition.

Anthony Suau 6:33
That turned into a big book in an exhibition called “Beyond the Fall: The Former Soviet Bloc in Transition 1989-1999.” There were four exhibitions – one was in Eastern Europe and Russia, one was in Western Europe, one was in the United States, and one was in England. We had an opening at the Royal Festival Hall where Prince Charles, at the time, signed the book, and Sting and all these celebrities coming in and seeing this exhibition. They did a terrific job.

Anthony Suau 6:59
It was a very big and important exhibition. It showed that 10 years from the start of the fall of the Berlin Wall, through the transition of the former Soviet Union into the sort of capitalist society. At that time, those 10 years that I worked there were completely open. We were friends with Russia. They welcomed me everywhere I wanted to go – whether it was traveling with troops into the Crimea, or into Grozny.

Anthony Suau 7:31
It was amazing, the access I had – into the old factories that were falling apart. They welcomed me. I saw everything. They were just so kind, interesting, intriguing, fun people to be around, and intelligent – as much like Americans as any country I’ve ever been in. Once Putin came in, things started to divide themselves again. I didn’t understand why that was happening. I still don’t understand why that happened.

Dave Chapman 8:40
Anthony, you were photographing presidents; you told me you flew on Air Force One, and you were this close to Bush and you were doing that work. Then something happened, and you got seduced by this project of “Organic Rising”?

Anthony Suau 8:59
Yeah. I was working on a story in 2008 on the mortgage crisis that was happening across the country for a time. I was given a blank check to cover that story. I was out in California. I just came back from Europe. I’d lived in Europe for 20 years, and I was getting sick on the food and taking on weight, and I didn’t quite understand it.

Dave Chapman 9:25
Getting sick on the food when you came back to the US?

Anthony Suau 9:28
Yeah. I didn’t know why. I met an organic farmer in California, and I was intrigued because, obviously, the food had changed in this country, and there were things going on that I didn’t understand. I had no idea what “organic” was. I didn’t even know the word “conventional” – what that process was. She invited me to the farm, and I went out to the farm and then introduced me to people like Jeff Larkey, Tom Bros, and Joe Schirmer through them, and Ness Durell, who runs the San Francisco farmers markets.

Anthony Suau 10:12
I met all these amazing farmers that were very inspirational, and they immediately opened their doors to me. It was so kind, and they were so generous with their time – especially Jeff. Jeff and I became good friends. These were just inspirational people to be around.

Anthony Suau 10:32
I began to learn what they were doing and the integrity that they had, and what the difference was between conventional and organic, what it is that they were doing and why it was so important, not only to human health but to the soil, the planet, and the environment that they were working with, and the community. Tom Bros also just had this community spirit at his farm that was second to none. I’ve never seen anything like it.

Anthony Suau 11:02
Maybe Eva Worden and her husband in Punta Gorda, they have something that’s a little bit similar too. They have really built a community around the farm where a lot of locals are coming there to get their CSAs, to have educational experiences, and to participate in all sorts of aspects of the farm – on-farm dinners, which Jeff Larkey was doing too. I was seeing all this integration of community, farming, and agriculture on a high-end level.

Dave Chapman 11:44
That’s so exciting.

Anthony Suau 11:47
I think that’s the organic farmers dream – they talk about it. But with Tom Bros, you saw it. With Worden Farm, you saw it. It was all beautifully done – exquisite.

Dave Chapman 12:08
Those farms that you’re talking about, it’s interesting because there are some wonderful non-profit efforts. We talked about Glenwood, Stone Barns, and Churchtown. These are beautiful, beautiful examples of biological processes working the soil and what that could look like. But the farms you’re talking about with Tom Bros and Jeff Larkey, these are for-profit farms. In other words, they’re surviving in our capitalistic system while also embracing a very different vision of farming.

Anthony Suau 12:46
Even Tom had a school that his wife wanted on the farm. They had a school entire building that was just for young students to come in from the, I think, Montessori school that they were working with. I saw Tom going into the field with these young boys and girls and talking about Michael Pollan’s “Omnivore’s Dilemma,” and how it changed his vision of organic agriculture and his business.

Anthony Suau 13:19
They were being informed of these things at a very young age. He and his wife were completely invested in that aspect of farming, of agriculture, and of education as part of building soil and creating great crops that are healthy for you and the environment, but also passing that on to generations down the road.

Dave Chapman 13:42
Of course, most of the farmers you and I know would feel that they just don’t have the bandwidth – the time and the attention – to do that. They’re so desperately trying to make a farm work. Making an organic farm work in our economy is like a round peg in a square hole. Then you look at these farms – Full Belly would be another example – where there’s an amazing connection with the community.

Anthony Suau 14:10
Pie Ranch has a big education. I think it’s mostly educational, but…

Dave Chapman 14:15
I think Pie Ranch actually does have a lot of donor support for their efforts, but these other farms we’re talking about are still running as businesses.

Anthony Suau 14:27
Tom was also involved with, I think, the California Farmer Coalition, or something. He was dealing with conventional farmers and their perspectives. He was trying to negotiate through that system as well. He’s such an interesting guy; he’s very dynamic, and he’s involved with so many things. His past history, what drove him to become an organic farmer is that he worked for the EPA, and he was studying conventional pesticides. He saw what was going on on these farms and decided that being an organic farmer was the way to go.

Anthony Suau 15:17
When he saw the film “Organic Rising,” one of his responses was “This is as important of a document as Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring.” I felt like that was the ultimate compliment. It couldn’t have a higher compliment. He wanted to get the film out to people, to get it seen. His son has come to New York and we tried to do some things together. He’s a particular figure.

Anthony Suau 15:52
Apparently, according to Ness, the guy who runs the San Francisco farmers market, his farm has become more and more important in the community in the area over the years. Now he’s become one of the most, if not the most, important organic farmers in the Santa Cruz area.

Dave Chapman 16:09
Sure. I think that “Organic Rising” does a pretty good job of looking at two really different perspectives. One is the perspective of organic farming in opposition to and in contrast to chemical agriculture, which is called conventional – I think it’s very unconventional. Let’s just say chemical farming and organic farming.

Dave Chapman 16:41
It lays out in devastating detail the physiological impact, our health impact, as well as the ecological impact on the greater living world of that chemical system. What are those sprays doing to us, our children, and our grandchildren, and our great-grandchildren?

Anthony Suau 17:06
Yes, that’s exactly how the film was designed. But the film is based on – you’ll see it right in the beginning of the film – a quote that came out of Mark Smallwood, where he says, “There are two types of farming in the United States predominantly: one is organic, which works with the science of biology, and conventional, which works with the science of chemistry.”

Anthony Suau 17:35
When I got that quote – when I heard him even say that – the simplicity of that definition was so easy to grasp and comprehend to anyone that you can build an entire film on that. That’s basically what I did: I took that quote, and I said, “Okay, let’s look at the organic and the biology aspect, and let’s look at the conventional and the chemistry aspect of that, and see how that plays out into our food and the environment.” As simple of a quote as that was, I could build endless hours of film on that one simple statement.

Dave Chapman 18:15
Yeah, that’s right. One of the things that was so impressive in the film…I think that most people do not comprehend the level – the intensity – of the chemical interventions in American agriculture – the sheer volume of spraying that is happening. You’ve talked about being out in the heartland and just driving by mile after mile of farm. Every farm got their chemical tanker ready to go, right?

Anthony Suau 18:49
Well, it’s more than a tanker. They have them in every single driveway of those areas, whether it’s Illinois, Ohio, or Indiana – that region of the country is 90% GMO soy and corn, conventional. You drive mile after mile in May, June, and July, and everyone has a semi-trailer truck, a flatbed full of chemicals – every single farm. It’s overwhelming. There’s no way to photograph that and convey that in an image or in film.

Anthony Suau 19:35
The scale of the amount of chemicals that are being used at a specific point in the year and are going into the air, the water, the food, the soil, and the environment that we all are eating, breathing, and drinking from. The effects that that is having on us, on a scale, are hard to comprehend unless you make that kind of trip – that drive. You drive a thousand miles or so across that part of the country, and you see the scale of that.

Anthony Suau 20:11
Then you start to understand that the problem of these chemicals, whether it’s glyphosate, atrazine or 2-4-D, or Dicamba or even the scale of the anhydrous ammonia fertilizer that’s, of course, going down into the Gulf and creating all sorts of other health problems – the scale is just phenomenal. It’s just insane.

Anthony Suau 20:36
In the middle of all the farms, there are these very large silos that are full of grain, where they sell all the chemicals and all the seeds, and you see hundreds of these big tanks of anhydrous ammonia just lined up – just hundreds of them. Then, a few miles down the road, there’s another place where you see all the chemicals and the farmers coming out there. You get a sense of the scale of how vast that chemical is being spread across the environment and across the land and entering into our systems.

Anthony Suau 21:13
That’s been going on now for decades. It’s devastating. There’s no way to relate the scale of it; there really isn’t. You’ll see a crop duster going over here, you turn around, there’s two more over here, and you can hear them. You can be driving down the road – you just hear them. You can just follow the sound. I worked with them on the ground. I worked with their central command. Some of them were deep inside cornfields where they had little runways – inside the cornfields, they’re impossible to get to.

Anthony Suau 21:50
I had people who were driving me into these really remote, little places that there’s no way you could find. But the planes would come in, they’d load them with fuel, they’d load them with the pesticides, and they’d give me the schedule. “Okay, we’re going here.” They showed me, and I’d race in my car, and I’d be able to film the guy spraying the fields. He was a lot faster getting places than I was in my car, so I was running red lights to get to them. But the scale of it – you just see it going and going.

Anthony Suau 22:23
When they do it from the crop dusters, which is usually… I remember I went just after the Fourth of July to central Illinois, it lasts maybe a week to 10 days where they’re doing that. It’s mostly fungicides and insecticides, I think, because the crops are too high for the land sprayers to go through. So, you have to spray it from planes. But the planes are just going.

Anthony Suau 22:50
These guys are just one field after the next, after the next, after the next, and it goes on for like 10 days. They’ve got maybe two pilots or three pilots that are just coming in and spraying, loading up and spraying, and spraying. Then they move to the next area – maybe some place in Ohio or another place. They’re just moving throughout the summer.

Dave Chapman 23:11
Would you say that they’re mostly putting on insecticides…?

Anthony Suau 23:16
At that point, it’s mostly insecticides.

Dave Chapman 23:18
The herbicides happened earlier?

Anthony Suau 23:20
There can be some herbicides on that, as far as I understand. Every farmer does a little bit of a different mix and how they do that. But as you see in the film, the conventional farmer who discusses it and kind of lays it out in the film says the herbicides are early. You want to clean the field before they plant? They’ll put down, probably glyphosate to clean the field, maybe something even harder – maybe Dicamba, maybe a little atrazine – and clean that field.

Anthony Suau 23:51
Then, once it’s cleaned, they plant the seed in. Then they may come in and spray it again, especially once it starts to sprout; they’ll come in with the sprayers – usually, within, like, a month or so. The soybeans, especially, you can spray them, because they’re broad-leaf plants; as I was told, they’ll take the atrazine directly. They don’t have to be genetically modified for the atrazine.

Anthony Suau 24:22
Once they get about a foot or two feet high, they’ll come in with a sprayer, and they really start spraying a lot of herbicides at that point. Those herbicides will last until the plant gets too high. They can spray it whenever they want. Those crops are resistant to those chemicals. If they have a weed problem, if they have an infestation problem, you just go in and spray. That’s all.

Dave Chapman 24:48
“Organic Rising” talks to a lot of scientists who I was very impressed with. Of course, there was Don Huber, who was talking about, I would say, the madness of the whole system. But then there was Paul Winchester and Michael Skinner, and they were talking about the health impacts. They were not looking so much at the fields, which I think Don was; they were looking at inside our bodies, our kids’ bodies, and our grandkids’ bodies.

Dave Chapman 25:22
As I said yesterday in the conversation afterwards, it’s pretty devastating to watch the movie, because it’s not good news. There is great news in it. It talks about the solution. There is a solution, and it does work, although it is not going to be easy to transform that mile, or thousand miles, of chemical alley there, but these guys were talking about why we need to solve that and appealing to people at a very fundamental level, which is that this is killing you. This food system is not your…

Anthony Suau 26:02
It’s altering your DNA, your biome, and all sorts of aspects of your health. Don Huber, in the film, talks about glyphosate, which he’s been studying since the 70s. He’s one of the great experts on glyphosate and what it’s doing. Tyrone Hayes talks about atrazine. He’s a scientist who specifically has been studying atrazine since the 90s and is a well-known expert on that specific chemical and its endocrine issues.

Dave Chapman 26:33
Could you explain endocrine issues…?

Anthony Suau 26:37
An endocrine disruptor is a hormone disruptor. It addresses the hormone system. Atrazine itself will convert testosterone to estrogen. So basically, it’s affecting your sexual and hormonal functions, and it’s altering them. He’s exposing these frogs to 0.1 part per billion. They’re changing into female frogs, copulating with males, laying eggs through their testes, and developing all these female traits because their testosterone is being converted to estrogen straight out through this chemical called aromatase.

Anthony Suau 27:24
It’s a very, very direct conversion. It moves in water very quickly, gets into drinking water, gets into groundwater, gets up in the air, and travels over a thousand miles. It can get down in rainwater. Tyrone said to me that sometimes he’s seen up to ten parts per billion coming down in rainwater. He’s converting these frogs at 0.1 part per billion.

Dave Chapman 27:48
The legal limit at this point is three parts per billion?

Anthony Suau 27:51
In the US, drinking water is three parts per billion. So, 30 times the amount that he’s exposing his frogs to is legally allowed by the EPA in American drinking water.

Dave Chapman 28:06
Three times the amount…

Anthony Suau 28:07
Thirty.

Dave Chapman 28:08
I thought he was exposing 1.1?

Anthony Suau 28:10
0.1 part per billion.

Dave Chapman 28:13
That’s what he’s doing in his tests?

Anthony Suau 28:15
Yes. And what we’re getting in our drinking water is three parts per billion. So 30 times.

Dave Chapman 28:20
Three parts. I get that.

Anthony Suau 28:28
There’s a lot of questions about what it’s doing to humans – actual effect it has on humans. But if you watch the film, we go into detail about some of the effects it is having on humans. Specifically, when a woman is pregnant and it enters the placenta, it stays there. That fetus is exposed in the placenta for the duration of the pregnancy – it doesn’t pass through. That can create all sorts of hormonal and sexual dysfunctions at birth or down the road – some years later.

Dave Chapman 29:03
Is atrazine one of the many chemicals that we all have in our bodies now?

Anthony Suau 29:08
As we stated in the film, there are more than 900 synthetic chemicals used in conventional agriculture. There’s a lot of talk about glyphosate and atrazine – there should be more. And, of course, Dicamba and 2,4-D now, which are now the newer chemicals, because these plants have become resistant to glyphosate because we’ve been using it for decades. There’s always a certain number of plants that survive the chemical, and they will repopulate the field, and you’ll have a field that is resistant.

Dave Chapman 29:45
You’re talking about a certain number of plants that we call weeds that survive and are resistant. Now we get superweeds that, it doesn’t matter how much glyphosate you spray, it’s not going to…

Anthony Suau 29:55
It’s not going to kill it. This had become – maybe five or ten years ago – a big problem; the glyphosate wasn’t working anymore. They modified the seed now for another chemical, either Dicamba or 2,4-D, so they’re resistant to glyphosate and Dicamba, or the seed is resistant to glyphosate and 2,4-D. You can spray both of those chemicals or a mixture of those two chemicals onto the field, and the plant will still thrive, and all the weeds that may be resistant to glyphosate will be killed by the 2,4-D or the Dicamba.

Anthony Suau 30:32
The problem, of course, is those two chemicals are known to drift big time and move in the air. They can travel many miles and come down. If your plant doesn’t have that seed that is resistant, it’ll kill it – it’ll destroy it. Originally, we had more than three million acres of crops destroyed when the chemical moved onto another farmer’s fields. He didn’t have the resistant seeds to the Dicamba or the 2,4-D.

Anthony Suau 31:07
They did damage to their crops and took their crops out. It became a huge problem. The fact is that all of these chemicals will build resistance over time. It’s inevitable. It’s a treadmill. They’re just jumping from one chemical to the other. Of course, the chemical and seed companies benefit from all of this. They keep raising the prices because now we have the Dicamba and the…

Dave Chapman 31:40
But you should spray some of the old one just in case, to help. They’re getting these very expensive cocktails.

Anthony Suau 31:46
When you’re there with the farmers, the sprayers, and the people, they’re making these mixtures – they’re mixing all these chemicals together. They’re not spraying just Dicamba, or glyphosate, or atrazine; they’re spraying a mixture. They all have their own formulas of what they use that they feel works for them and their weeds. It’s such a mess of chemicals going into the environment.

Anthony Suau 32:20
There’s no control over it. There’s no legal regulation whatsoever – what you can put on your field. So, it’s just this mess. That’s when we get into Paul Winchester and Michael Skinner and some of the others, where they’re talking about the effects of the chemicals, not as one chemical on us. The connection between your hormonal system, your gut microbiome, and your mental and psychological brain functions – they’re all connected. Once you start infecting one, whether it’s the hormonal or the immune system in your microbiome, it’s going to create problems throughout the entire system.

Anthony Suau 33:10
It’s a very complex thing, and I think that we get very simplistic information, particularly about one chemical like glyphosate. It’s a carcinogen, and it can create all these other problems. But that’s not the real story – that’s not what we’re being exposed to. We’re not being exposed to just glyphosate; we’re being exposed to a whole range of chemicals that are each having a certain effect on us, whether it’s an endocrine disruptor, or whether it’s a carcinogen, whether it’s something that can have problems with psychological – all of them are interacting with each other.

Dave Chapman 33:49
The synergistic effect of all of those isn’t being tested.

Anthony Suau 33:54
That’s the reality. That’s the real story. But who can really get to that story? Because it’s so complex and it’s so free-flowing – use of these chemicals – that who can control the idea of what’s happening? Because you’re looking at one, you’re looking at the other, and you’re looking at what that one’s doing. What happens when you combine those together? Then what effect is that having in the water, the air, the soil, and on your human health?

Dave Chapman 34:19
I heard the head of the Environmental Working Group say they had done some very expensive testing. They were testing the fluid in the umbilical cord going to a baby in development. They found over 200 neurotoxins in that cord that were invented. These were not natural neurotoxins; these were things that we created and put into our world. The problem is overwhelming.

Dave Chapman 34:50
If it were only as simple as saying, “Let’s ban glyphosate…” We’ve learned how to pronounce glyphosate. I know that you know people who have gotten cancer from it. I know people – family – who have gotten cancer from it, and they’re in Chuck Benbrook’s lawsuit. It’s horrible that that’s happened, but it’s far greater than one herbicide. It’s this whole system of madness.

Anthony Suau 35:20
As Tyrone Hayes says in the film, we’re coming out contaminated. It’s not just the pesticides. Of course, it goes into the shampoos and all the chemicals that we were exposed to in our daily lives that are not regulated at all. The EPA has no way of testing these chemicals. They look to industry – the producers of these products – to do the so-called testing – whether they’re safe or not.

Anthony Suau 35:49
So, you have all these chemicals coming onto the market every year. New chemicals that we’re being exposed to are altering our DNA, and as Michael Skinner says, affecting generations down the road through epigenetics. You don’t even have to be exposed to these chemicals. If your great-grandmother was exposed at one time to DDT, you can have four generations of effects of obesity, or of other health issues that were related to the exposure of your great-grandmother to this chemical getting into her DNA and passing through generations.

Dave Chapman 35:50
Can we talk about that for a minute? Because that was fascinating in the film, where they show an image of the four generations of rats, and each generation is getting more and more obese on the same diet, just because your great-grandma was exposed to… Was it DDT, the one you were using?

Anthony Suau 36:49
Yeah.

Dave Chapman 36:50
You saw by the fourth generation the rat was quite rotund. As we try to understand, because this has become, in America, a huge issue of people putting on weight, not wanting to, and having health impacts and not trying to understand it. There’s a lot of obvious things, which is that we eat this super, ultra-processed diet. But I think it’s a different way of looking at it to say, “Well, maybe you or your parents, or your grandparents were exposed to DDT. What’s going to happen in another generation if this is true?

Anthony Suau 37:35
Dr. Michael Skinner, at Washington State University, has done a lot of tests on various chemicals and the epigenetic effects down the road on rats through four, and sometimes beyond four generations to see… As with all the interviews that we did with the scientists, I could put out the entire interview, and everything they say would just blow your mind. But Michael Skinner was particularly that way.

Anthony Suau 38:08
He had told me that they had just recently finished working on a long study on glyphosate and its long-term epigenetic effects. He said that the obesity issues that we’re seeing now that may be related to the sinister effects of DDT four generations out was nothing compared to the obesity rate that he was seeing coming from glyphosate several generations down the road.

Anthony Suau 38:35
He believes, from what he’s seen through his research, that we haven’t even begun to see the obesity problem that’s coming from glyphosate. I think we touched on that in the film a little bit, but he was very adamant about what he had seen and very clear that this was something that we really need to consider – what we’re doing to our children, our grandchildren, and our great-grandchildren as we use these chemicals.

Anthony Suau 39:12
These guys, they were just one story after the other with different chemicals about what they’re doing to us. I think we see it in our society – that what these chemicals are doing to us – but we don’t identify where it’s coming from and stop it at the source.

Dave Chapman 39:39
And why don’t we? This is pretty compelling stuff, and these are issues really about people’s personal welfare and their happiness. People care about their children, and they want them to do well in life and have a chance at living a good life.

Dave Chapman 40:01
These things you’re saying have a huge impact on what’s going to come, and they’re so invisible – but they’re not unknown. You made a movie about it – you made a great movie. But why is it that this rock is not only hard to roll forward, it’s rolling backwards on us? It’s getting worse, not better.

Anthony Suau 40:21
I think there are a number of obvious reasons for part of it. First of all, I think we discussed last time, and we were discussing last night this issue – when Alar was exposed as probable carcinogen, particularly to children being sprayed on apples as a growth promoter. 60 Minutes, I did this piece with the NRDC…

Dave Chapman 40:49
This is back like 1980 or something?

Anthony Suau 40:51
1987 or 1988, something like that, I think. They did this piece. They were sued for $50 million by these apple growers for defamation. The apple growers lost the lawsuit. We wanted to put that footage in the film. We were unable to because their lawyers didn’t want us to get into that issue.

Dave Chapman 41:11
CBS’s lawyers?

Anthony Suau 41:12
CBS’ 60 Minutes. We were all ready to purchase it. We’d seen the interview by Fred Ed Bradley, which is an incredible thing. We have part of it on the organicrisingfilm.com website, where we actually have a link to a part of it that was on YouTube that somebody downloaded.

Anthony Suau 41:33
I wish I could put the whole thing on because the whole thing is so well done and so professional. Ed did such a great job. It really did. It’s what we should be seeing all the time on these chemicals. That’s the kind of story we should be seeing. Then there was something with Oprah – we discussed this last time.

Dave Chapman 41:53
About mad cow disease.

Anthony Suau 41:55
Mad cow disease. They had these big lawsuits, and these companies don’t want to touch it anymore, not because they’re going to lose these lawsuits, it’s because they have to put lawyers on them, they’re big, controversial things, and they get involved. Basically, the press, for the most part, is sort of pushed back on covering these chemicals and what they’re doing in pesticides in particular.

Anthony Suau 42:18
I think that the seed and chemical companies have spooked these big media outlets into talking about this. We’re not getting the information on that level. That’s for sure. The other part that’s really difficult for the scientists is to relate the cause and effect from the pesticide to humans – because you can’t study humans; you can’t use humans as test trials. How are you going to relate what’s happening with this chemical to humans when you can’t study humans as a direct effect?

Anthony Suau 42:58
It’s more of a correlation sometimes than a causation or whatever. It’s sometimes a little hard to quantify what that is exactly, scientifically. That makes it hard to quantify legally. You’ve got those kinds of things going on. In that they can create a lot of murky information: “Of course, these are safe for you.” Now you have these states such as Georgia and, I believe, Iowa, have now passed these laws where the chemical companies cannot be sued if you get sick from their chemicals.

Anthony Suau 43:35
I’ve seen the ads in Florida and some of the other states where they’re promoting this, and they’re saying, “Big agricultural crisis. They’re going to take glyphosate away from our farmers, and we’re not going to be able to feed the world anymore.” This is a crisis, crisis. Warning, warning. They’re trying to take this chemical away from you – our farmers – and it’s going to cause them great damage.

Anthony Suau 43:57
It’s totally twisted. It’s completely twisted logic. They’re winning in these states. People are voting to let these chemical companies off scot-free if you get cancer from glyphosate or any other sort of issue that can be related or linked to these chemicals, now or in the future, as I understand. These companies, of course, have a lot of money and power, and they are trying to control the population into believing that these chemicals are safe for humans.

Anthony Suau 44:40
Yet you have these scientists who are well-known, well-respected, and renowned scientists who are giving very clear information or studying these chemicals for years and looking at not only the short-term effects, but the long-tem effects on generations down the road from exposure to these chemicals.

Dave Chapman 44:56
Chuck Benbrook would say, “Yes, we still have these great scientists. We have far fewer of them than we did a generation ago who are willing to study that.” There’s this chilling effect in the press, the courts, and in academia.

Anthony Suau 45:12
In the scientists too. Because at the same time, as you know, we’ve discussed the attacks that they make on these scientists, such as Tyrone Hayes. There was a big New Yorker article about Tyrone. He was claiming that they were following him, threatening him on phone calls, coming to his conferences and trying to discredit him, calling him junk science and this and that.

Anthony Suau 45:40
This was all dismissed as Tyrone being a little crazy until there was this big lawsuit in the Midwest where water companies sued the Syngenta and the chemical companies that were producing this chemical to get it out of the water supply before they delivered it to their customers. In that lawsuit, they were able to unveil all of these interoffice emails that were being sent by Syngenta to attack Tyrone. Very clear.

Dave Chapman 46:11
They took notes about their illegal attacks on him. It’s amazing.

Anthony Suau 46:17
It all came out that Tyrone wasn’t in any way crazy. He was experiencing these attacks on his personal life, his academic life, and his credibility when, in fact, it was just the chemical company doing everything to discredit him. That’s the case in many of these scientists who are studying these big, heavy-use chemicals that make billions of dollars for these chemical companies because they have the money to try to discredit these scientists.

Dave Chapman 46:49
If the scientist pursues it, they might well find themselves in the crosshairs and life made very unpleasant for them, and professional life may be destroyed.

Dave Chapman 47:02
All right. This is all grim, but I want to look at another thing that’s a bit grim. “Organic Rising” does get into it and it doesn’t go real deep. But there is also an internal conflict in the organic world of large corporate forces coming in and changing organic. It doesn’t mean what it used to mean. It has a different perspective. I’m just curious, you covered some of the hydroponic debate in the film. Do you feel that this is an important issue, or this is a sideshow?

Anthony Suau 47:44
No, the whole hydroponic thing shifted the game. That happened about the time that we were wrapping up the production on the film. But that NOSB vote that allowed hydroponics to be used and labeled identically to anything grown in soil flipped the industry on its head.

Anthony Suau 48:14
Primarily, the film is built for consumers to understand what that label represents and why it’s so important that we maintain its integrity. But when you’re not telling consumers that something is not grown in soil, you’ve got a big problem. The farmers have a big problem because they’re being undermined by a completely different industry to a certain degree.

Anthony Suau 48:40
But the consumers have an even bigger problem, because they can’t identify in any shopping area, whether it’s a farmers market, a supermarket, Whole Foods, or wherever they’re going, whether that product was grown in soil or not.

Dave Chapman 48:55
Even though it’s certified as organic.

Anthony Suau 48:57
Because they have an identical label. This is a huge problem for consumers. We’ve gone around to all of these screenings. We’ve done dozens of screenings across the country of “Organic Rising.” I usually ask the audience, “Would you like to see hydroponic labeled in a different way that you could identify it, or not labeled at all?” Everyone’s hand in the audience goes up. Everyone wants to know.

Anthony Suau 49:23
We’ve been posting stuff too on our social media about this, asking people, “What do you think?” Most people say, “At least it should be identified.” But a lot of people say, “It should never be allowed to be labeled as organic at all, because it’s not grown in soil.”

Anthony Suau 49:40
What happened from that, of course, is that you had things like the Real Organic Project, and the term “regenerative” became this other big industry alongside it because at least it was telling consumers that the farmer was working with soil, the farmer was working to regenerate and build the soil alongside the USDA label, which was saying that, ‘You’re not using these pesticides.” Because basically, that’s all; it’s sort of telling you now.

Anthony Suau 50:19
The soil doesn’t have these pesticides, and it’s not depleted, and we’re not using GMOs. If you add on a Real Organic Project label, then it’s telling consumers, “Not only are you getting the pesticides, but you’re also getting soil.” Any consumers who are sort of in the know about the fact that this USDA organic label is also allowing hydroponics into the market, which will clear the area with glyphosate before they start putting in the hydroponic production and stuff.

Anthony Suau 50:50
It’s gotten very messy because of that one particular issue. It has set the organic industry against itself, and it’s become a divisive and an ugly issue within the within the organic. I haven’t met any organic farmers in the industry who didn’t at least want to identify hydroponic as not grown in soil, even if it carried the USDA organic label. There’s a concern for the consumer, for the integrity of the label depends on what it represents.

Dave Chapman 51:29
Trust and transparency.

Anthony Suau 51:30
Right, and there’s no transparency in the fact that you’re growing something hydroponically and you’re labeling it as USDA organic. To the consumer, there’s zero transparency. We’re advocating for that on our social media and we’re advocating for that in the film. We advocate, in the film, primarily for consumers to get involved – for consumers to participate in the process – because it is built that way.

Anthony Suau 51:55
The consumers can participate in the process. They can go to NOSB semiannual meetings and participate. They can connect with some of these watchdog groups who are influencing these important issues that are there to maintain the organic label.

Anthony Suau 52:16
What I feel is that, ultimately, hydroponics shouldn’t have that label at all. That’s all there is to it.

Dave Chapman 54:45
When we were talking yesterday, you were talking about Glenn Roberts and this amazing guy. He’s running around South Carolina breeding rice and finding old heirloom rice varieties, and then breeding them and making them available to farmers so that they’re coming back.

Anthony Suau 55:08
And corn.

Dave Chapman 55:11
And corn, I’m sorry. You said that, God, I think it was from Glenn, that you had him talking about making some food. He said it was so good, the dogs were howling at the…

Anthony Suau 55:27
Glenn is a great intellect in the agricultural community in this country. He works very closely with people specifically with chefs like Dan Barber and Sean Brock. But he also works closely with farmers like Jack Algiere at Stone Barn, and he’s revered by these people. He is doing, as he explains in the film, for his rice, 17-year crop rotations – 17 years to get the soil where he wants it to be.

Anthony Suau 56:07
There’s nobody else I talked to who was doing anything even close to what he was doing. The interview I had with Glenn, again, is one of those interviews you could just run the whole interview, and it was so engaging and intense – the whole thing was tremendously interesting. He really takes agriculture to another level, I think, than just to say, “I’m organic.” I don’t think he really has any great feeling for the USDA organic label.

Anthony Suau 56:41
He said to me, ‘They’re allowing things in there I would never, even, ever consider as a farmer.” I think that’s why people like Dan Barber and some of these other great chefs are drawn to his products. It’s because they’re so unique. In one case, it was Anthony Bourdain who did this great, animated little video about how Glenn Roberts brought back Carolina Gold rice, which had basically died off after slavery ended in the South as an agricultural method of growing food, because it was so expensive to do it commercially at that point.

Anthony Suau 57:27
It kind of died off, but Glenn brought it back. I visited some of the fields where he had the Carolina Gold rice, and they were just pristine, but it was really like walking into wild nature. I’d go in there before sunrise, and you’d be just swarmed by mosquitoes. You’d be covered with repellent, and you’d be completely wet in sweat from the humidity before the sun even came up.

Anthony Suau 58:04
The place was intense. There were water moccasins, bobcats, and all sorts of big bird flocks that were just off to the side. So much wildlife was taking place in this environment where he was growing this rice. One can only imagine what that was doing to the soil, seeds, crops, and the flavor of the actual crop that he was harvesting.

Dave Chapman 58:31
When you ate some of that rice as prepared by Sean Brocker…

Anthony Suau 58:35
What happened was that there was a small Gullah culture restaurant that I found on one of the islands in South Carolina. There was an old Black African American who was cooking in the Gullah culture – all of the traditional foods and ingredients that had been cooked maybe half a century or a century ago in the South. This stuff was like candy. Everthing he cooked was amazing. It was very simple, but it was cooked.

Anthony Suau 59:08
I told him, at one point, that Glenn Roberts was growing the Carolina Gold rice, and his eyes just lit up. He said, “People knock down your door to get at that stuff.” “How can I get it? How can I get it?” They knew each other, and I kind of hooked him up. He went and he got some. I went back, and he cooked it for me in the traditional Gullah style, with all the ingredients that he would use with this historical method of cooking.

Anthony Suau 59:35
I had never eaten rice before this. This was the first. He gave me a Styrofoam container of the rice, and it was gone in like 10 minutes. It was the most delicious… I can’t even say it was anything to do with any rice I’d ever tasted in my entire life. It was just so flavorful. So many aromas and tastes and flavors, it was like candy, really.

Anthony Suau 1:00:04
When you have that environment, when you have that extreme buildup of soil and nature around a crop, and then you have someone taking it and cooking it in a way that is traditional, they know what that crop is from centuries or decades, you’re going to get something that has long since been lost in this country.

Dave Chapman 1:00:31
And that we forget ever existed. People forget what real food tastes like and what…

Anthony Suau 1:00:37
That’s really Glenn Roberts specialty. He’s gone back and searched out those heirloom single-family corns that had long been lost, regenerating them and giving them away to farmers to plant. He gives them away to organic farmers to plant in their fields and reinvent these crops back into society and into food systems.

Anthony Suau 1:01:08
There are people out there working in the American food system that are so inspiring and are going deeper and deeper beyond anything to do with USDA Organic label with regenerative… Whatever you want to call it, what you’re going to get at Whole Foods, there are people that are working in areas… and you can see it at Stone Barns.

Anthony Suau 1:01:36
Jack and Dan are working in that area, and Glenn Roberts is closely associated with them and what they’re doing and some other chefs and farmers across the country. But there’s that movement going on, and I would love to explore more of that. It’s hard to get access to it because it’s kind of remote – some of it.

Dave Chapman 1:01:56
Yeah, it’s almost underground. Listen, we have to close. We didn’t even get to Winona LaDuke and Vandana Shiva, so we’ll have to do that in the next interview. They were these kind of powerful voices in the film. I know that your interviews went far beyond the little parts you were able to include in the film.

Dave Chapman 1:02:18
We’ll talk about them next time. But I wanted to close; you told me a story. It was about Ben Dobson – the contrast between some big chemical farm and what Ben was doing at that grain farm. Could you just talk about that?

Anthony Suau 1:02:37
Yeah. There was a point in the film when I was in Illinois. It was probably June or early July, maybe. I was visiting around. I was working on a few different farms. I went to one farm; they had just sprayed the glyphosate the day before on their corn plants. They weren’t too high yet, but you could see all of this corn was just thriving and alive. You could see that any other plant that was remotely near those plants was dying – within 24 hours of the spring.

Anthony Suau 1:03:10
You saw this death, and you saw these plants that were just thriving. It’s miraculous to see it – it’s something to see whether or not it’s a good thing or a bad thing; I’m not saying that. But it’s something to see that you can chemically do that – control that. But it was a lot of death. You saw a lot of things dying off, and one plant surviving. It was odd.

Anthony Suau 1:03:33
Within 24 hours, for some reason, I was supposed to be on Ben Dobson’s farm up in upstate New York, which is one of those extreme organic farms – very similar to Glenn Roberts’s adventures into agriculture. Ben is, again, another one of these great intellects in the organic movement and, as farmers who’s working with soil, and had a soil lab on his farm at that time.

Anthony Suau 1:04:03
I remember going out in the morning, which I really loved to do on that farm, and seeing all this life – beautiful mixture of cover crops, plants, birds, butterflies, insects, and all this life – beautiful. I thought to myself, “Where would you rather get your food from – where there’s all this death, or where there’s all this life, and that’s being built, encouraged, and planted in a way where you can really build the soil and that whole environment, turn it alive?”

Anthony Suau 1:04:42
It was just so obvious. It was so clear. It was like a black and white photograph between the two. “This is the system that we want to grow our food in and eat our food from, because that becomes who you are, and as your cells in months to come. You want to be alive. So, it seemed very simple from just those two moments.

Dave Chapman 1:05:07
Anthony Suau, thank you so much.

Anthony Suau 1:05:10
Thank you, Dave.

Dave Chapman 1:05:10
A pleasure, as always, and we’ll have another conversation coming, because we didn’t get there yet. There’s still more to do. All right, thank you.

Dave Chapman 1:05:19
Thank you, Dave.