Episode #255
Deborah Koons Garcia: Future Of Food 20 Years Later

Twenty years after releasing the groundbreaking documentary The Future of Food, filmmaker Deborah Koons Garcia joins the Real Organic Podcast to revisit the film’s impact and the battles it illuminated – GMOs, corporate control of seeds, regulatory capture, and the hidden dangers facing farmers and eaters. Reflecting on two decades of activism, and her later film Symphony of the Soil, Deborah shares what has changed, what hasn’t, and why she still believes soil health, community-based food systems, and scientific integrity offer real hope for the future.

Our Deborah Koons Garcia interview has been edited and condensed for clarity:

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Dave Chapman interviews Deborah Koons Garcia in California, Spring 2025

Dave Chapman 0:00
Welcome to the Real Organic Podcast. I’m talking today with Deborah Koons Garcia, who has been a filmmaker for many years, making films that I think are very important to our conversation. Your first film was not about farming. It was “Grateful Dawg?”

Deborah Koons Garcia 0:19
No. I didn’t make that film.

Dave Chapman 0:22
Oh, you didn’t make that.

Deborah Koons Garcia 0:22
Someone else made that – Gilliam Grisman made it.

Dave Chapman 0:23
They listed it as you.

Deborah Koons Garcia 0:26
I was part of it. I instigated it. I’m the one that came up with the idea. I saw David Grisman in the bank and said, “David, let’s make a film about you and Jerry.” He said, “Great idea.” I said, “Gilliam should direct it.” It was her first film. He said, “Okay.” I said, “You’ll produce it.” I should have taken producer’s credit, but I didn’t, because that was a mistake. That would have been nice on my resume. But yeah, I had full approval rights over it, and it turned out well.

Dave Chapman 0:56
What was your first film?

Deborah Koons Garcia 0:57
I’ve been making films since 1970. My first film was with a 16-millimeter camera I borrowed from a friend who never used it. I was like, “Can I use it?” It was funny. I was living in a farmhouse with my boyfriend. It was about this city slicker whose car breaks down near the farmhouse, and he comes in, and the farmer helps him. The farmer has a daughter, and there’s a big party.

Deborah Koons Garcia 0:57
It was all like a silent film, and it was so fun, because it was my first film. You get it back, and you see it up on the screen, and it’s just a kick. It’s like, “Oh God. This is so great.” That was, “This is it for me. I’m a filmmaker.” That was a long time ago.

Dave Chapman 1:45
Of course, the first one that you were really famous for was “The Future of Food.”

Deborah Koons Garcia 1:49
“The Future of Food,” yeah. But I had made a series in the 80s called “All About Babies,” a five-part series about the first two years of life. That was really good, and it won the CINE Golden Eagle and lots of awards, and it was shown in universities and hospitals all over. That was great.

Deborah Koons Garcia 2:08
Then I made some fiction films and short films. I became a vegetarian in 1970. I started eating organic food and learning about food, and becoming outraged and all this stuff.

Dave Chapman 2:25
Where were you living then?

Deborah Koons Garcia 2:25
I was living in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where I went to school in the country. There was that whole thing in that era: back to the land, growing your own food, and organic. I learned a lot about beef and how destructive those practices are if they’re not natural. I became a vegetarian, which I was for many years, and now I still don’t eat beef. I do eat fish because it’s nice to have protein. I like to eat salmon.

Dave Chapman 2:56
There was a thing that was going on in that time. Young people today have no idea.

Deborah Koons Garcia 3:04
Yeah, and it was just revolutionary, because people wanted to live in the country. Nobody wanted to work in an office; everybody wanted to do something with their hands that was real and that had impact. So, a lot of people went on farms. In fact, the “Agrarian Elders: Harvesting Wisdom” film is about a lot of those guys who were influenced by the back-to-the-land movement.

Dave Chapman 3:35
Yeah, they were part of it.

Deborah Koons Garcia 3:33
So, I’m not a farmer. It’s nice to have a garden, but I knew I wasn’t going to be a farmer, because I’m a filmmaker. You can’t lose money on two things. You can’t be stressed about two things. But I had always wanted to make a film about organic and how it’s good. The food system was always in the back of my mind, even though I wasn’t that interested in documentaries.

Deborah Koons Garcia 3:50
The time came in about the year 2000 when I thought, “It’s time to make that film.” I just wanted to make a film that I could absorb a lot of information, distill it, and give it out to people, because that’s something I know how to do really well. I thought that no one had made a film that really explained a lot of things about farming or organic farming.

Deborah Koons Garcia 3:34
What kicked it off was that I was living in California, in Marin County. I had lived there for many years at that point. I found out about genetic engineering. I knew about genetic engineering because I had lived in the Bay Area in the mid-70s, and I knew it was discovered there.

Deborah Koons Garcia 4:37
I was interested in it, because when I was a sophomore in high school in Cincinnati, I did a science project called Polyploidy in Plants, where I put colchicine on seeds, and I did a test of the ones that were treated and the ones that weren’t. The ones that were treated had chromosomes had doubled or tripled, so they were bigger and thicker. I put some seeds in my dentist’s X-ray machine, and those were… I won first prize in the Cincinnati Engineering Society Science Fair in botany.

Deborah Koons Garcia 3:34
So, it was amazing to me what I could do to these seeds and the plants that came out of them, basically in my bedroom with light coming through the window. The normal ones – they were radishes – I could say I would eat that. The ones that were so much bigger looked slightly deformed to me.

Deborah Koons Garcia 3:34
That also got me interested in what you can do to plants. I thought, “This is a mutagenic quality. Could that be transferred to the humans that eat the radishes?” So, I kept up on genetics, and I kept up on genetic engineering when it came along.

Deborah Koons Garcia 3:34
Anyway, in the year 2000 I started finding out that they were genetically engineering food, and I didn’t know about it. I was living in Marin County, and I was extremely well-educated about food, and this thing went totally under the radar. I was outraged.

Deborah Koons Garcia 3:34
I started researching it and talking to people, and I thought, “Okay, now is the time to make that film about agriculture, because I can talk about agriculture and organic versus chemical agriculture. But then in that I can talk about genetic engineering and corporations buying up the seed supply, and Monsanto suing farmers.” All these things that were totally under the radar. Anyway, I thought, “I’m just going to make it.”

Deborah Koons Garcia 3:34
And I did. I made it. We went to the United States, Canada, and Mexico, because the issues could be discovered and revealed in these three places in North America. Keep it kind of contained. I didn’t know if anybody would want to see it, but it turned out everybody wanted to see it.

Deborah Koons Garcia 3:34
It did really well, and opened in New York at Film Forum, which is the premier independent theater. It played in New York for a few months, and then IFC. That was great. I showed it at lots of festivals.

Deborah Koons Garcia 7:14
That came out in 2004.

Deborah Koons Garcia 7:14
2004.

Dave Chapman 7:14
I just want to say, it’s a very powerful film.

Deborah Koons Garcia 7:28
Thank you.

Dave Chapman 7:28
I just watched it, and these many years later, I still learned a lot. It’s still alive. It’s still meaningful. Unfortunately…

Deborah Koons Garcia 7:38
The system, yeah. More people know about this whole thing. No GMOs is on many, many products. Even ice cream. It’s like, “Duh, what do you… No GMOs.” That film had a real impact, because I wanted to change the food system. I wanted to change it and create awareness.

Deborah Koons Garcia 8:04
The thing I really loved about that film was it was very grassroots. People told each other. I sold it through my website, which was very radical at the time. No one was doing that. Some people would buy…

Deborah Koons Garcia 7:58
This woman in St. Louis called us and said, “I live in St. Louis. I hate Monsanto. I want to buy 200 copies. I’m sending them to all my friends. I’m Republican. I hate Monsanto.” It did really well. I have to say, I made a million dollars on my website with that film.

Dave Chapman 8:36
Amazing. You were selling DVDs. You couldn’t stream it.

Deborah Koons Garcia 8:40
When DVDs were around, it was great for filmmakers, because you could sell it: “Here’s the DVD, here’s my $20.” That was a boon to filmmakers. Now, it’s so difficult, because people want it for free, and you have to go to these big…

Deborah Koons Garcia 8:41
If people know about the film, you can find ways, like Vimeo, where people can see it without Amazon or these places taking a big chunk, or not wanting to show it because it’s too old. It’s like, two years old, it’s too old. That was great, because there were lots of community screenings.

Deborah Koons Garcia 9:20
I did an anti-GMO tour in Vermont and in Maine, probably 2005 or 2006. The guy from no GMO Vermont set it up for me, and it was really barnstorming. I showed the film every night. I did seven screenings in Maine.

Deborah Koons Garcia 9:43
First I did seven screenings in Vermont, and I wanted to end up in Maine, because I have past here and friends. I did seven screenings, and we went to theaters, church basements, and people’s barns. It was really fun. That was rewarding.

Dave Chapman 9:56
It’s interesting, because that was a time when seeing a film could pull people together physically. They would come together to watch something. Now, of course, it’s not that it won’t have impact, but we all watch it in our own homes alone.

Deborah Koons Garcia 10:12
That’s right. That’s one of the things I really liked about it: it created community because people could come. I always would have local people on a panel with me afterwards, and often the local people would set it up, and we would help them set it up. We’d say, “This is what you have to do.” If there’s a local magazine, their deadline is usually two or three months before. We had a whole list of things.

Deborah Koons Garcia 10:51
There would be composting people who did that. They could have a booth. It was really fun, because people could get to know other people in their communities, and get resources, and meet people who had seeds – people who were seed growers.

Deborah Koons Garcia 10:54
As with the “Symphony of the Soil,” the next film I did on agriculture, they showed it at all the big… they showed it at EcoFarm. They showed it at almost every organic farming conference in the United States, and then the big, giant conventions, like the natural foods convention.

Deborah Koons Garcia 11:17
There’s one in Baltimore, and there’s one in Southern California. There, it was the keynote. It was at nine o’clock in the morning, and all these people came to see it in this giant theater. And that’s their field. Then they could learn about GMOs, and then they could get some political backing behind stopping it, and also getting it labeled – all kinds of things I was really helped with, I think.

Dave Chapman 11:42
The film gets into the science and is really interesting for explaining what genetic engineering is, and it also gets into the politics and the economics of it a lot. Your segment where you’re showing the national leaders that we know – people who are very high in government – and showing how they’re bouncing back and forth from Monsanto to the federal government, to Monsanto, to the federal government, is staggering. You’re like, “Oh my goodness, no wonder we’re in so much trouble.”

Deborah Koons Garcia 12:18
Now people see that more – they kind of know that. But back then, people didn’t really understand how embedded those corporations were, even with the FDA and all those kinds of things. They’re trying to do something about it.

Deborah Koons Garcia 12:19
There were a lot of good people in those departments in the government who really do care about science, testing, and finding out what’s going on. But when it comes to what the policy is at the top, that tends to be a little more political.

Deborah Koons Garcia 12:19
The farmers, what I call the chemical farmers – the big farmers that use lots of chemicals and use up water in corn and soybeans – what do they feed? Cars and cows. They don’t feed people. The most fertile soil in the United States doesn’t even feed people. All those farms used to be smaller farms. They all had a garden. They don’t have gardens anymore.

Deborah Koons Garcia 12:19
You go across Iowa, and you don’t see any gardens with the farms. You get one guy with a multimillion-dollar combine who can farm 10,000 acres. You can’t even get from one side of it to the other in a day. Some of them are so big. They’re the two sides of it: the gigantic farms – it’s really a corporation. It’s corporate farming. There are some that are family farms, but most of them are corporate farming. That’s gotten more and more intense.

Deborah Koons Garcia 12:19
The small farmers, the farmers that feed their communities, that’s just blossomed. That’s all over the place now – farmers markets. I grew up in Cincinnati, and my best friend saw the film. She has lots of friends, and she gets stuff done, and she’s really social. She said, “Why don’t we have a farmers market?”

Deborah Koons Garcia 12:19
She started a farmers market in the neighborhood, in the suburb where she lives. First it was in a schoolyard, and then it was at the town square. It was so popular they closed the town square on Saturdays when it was happening. They had music and stuff for kids. All these farmers came in. They had to be organic, and she organized it all.

Deborah Koons Garcia 12:33
It’s just like this thing that didn’t even exist. It’s a social event, as well as people supporting local farmers and also getting really good food. Once people know they can demand that – they can have that – then they start to do it. And they have started. They’ve been doing it for a while.

Deborah Koons Garcia 15:07
Okay. Let’s just talk about hope, optimism, and a few things like that. One of the things that was certainly obvious in “The Future of Food” is that the last 15 minutes or so came after a fairly painful journey. It’s hard to see up close where things are going. This was 21 years ago, and clearly the concentration of power was getting greater and greater. But you had hope at the end for ways that we could move forward.

Dave Chapman 12:40
I heard you in an interview back then say that you thought the next five to ten years were critical for what was going to be the future of food in America. Nowadays, here we are 21 years later, my first question is: do you think that since then, the food system in America has gotten better or worse?

Deborah Koons Garcia 16:09
I think it’s gotten better and worse. It used to be like, “Oh, this tippy thing, organic.” People want organic. They want it. It’s kind of co-oped, but all the big corporations either have organic or they’ve bought organic. I think that it’s normal now. It’s not seen as a freaky thing. People who aren’t the slightest bit hippie or left wing or anything, they want organic.

Deborah Koons Garcia 17:27
I’m not happy that Whole Foods has lost some of their sense of mission since Bezos bought them, but they had a real mission, and people flock to those stores because the produce is good, and it tastes good, and they feel it’s good for them. These places that have the name of the health food stores have gotten so much better than when you got these old apples. Remember those things, like, “Well, I want it. Where’s the good food here?” There’s tons of them and farmers.

Deborah Koons Garcia 17:27
I think you can find organic, and you can find lots of really good restaurants now. They all want to say, “This is where our produce is from. This is a local farm,” and they support this. I think that’s all gotten better. I think the corporations that control the food supply have gotten worse and worse. I think they’re supposedly trying to change that now.

Deborah Koons Garcia 17:55
But I think that in the government now, the big thing is they need to get the chemicals out of the land. That’s the cause of a lot of these diseases. You can take the red dye out, but you have to go deeper than that. I don’t know how you can have a political stance where you’re having less and less regulation, but we want healthier and healthier people.

Deborah Koons Garcia 18:17
Because if you want healthier people, you’re going to have to have more regulation. You’re going to have to just get rid of Dicamba and all this stuff. As I explained in The Future of Food, they haven’t. I know because I keep up with this fairly well, they haven’t really discovered a way to use genetic engineering that isn’t basically so you can poison plants and they won’t die.

Deborah Koons Garcia 17:51
Still, that’s what they do. They put the poison in the plant, like Bt, which organic farmers use. But when every cell is producing Bt, it’s a whole different story than if you just spray it on once or twice. Also, the whole thing of the Roundup Ready. Now, because Roundup, as I said in the film, and everybody knew, the plants get resistant to Roundup, so now they’re going to use more and more poisonous chemicals to try to kill these weeds, which upset the whole natural balance.

Deborah Koons Garcia 17:51
But organic farmers do fine without using those. They have their own things. But one thing I think that is really good is using science, using robotics, to weed. I don’t know if you’ve seen that. I think that’s fantastic. So, that’s kind of back to the land. In organic, that’s one of the big problems, is how do you weed? So you have to have people weeding, and that’s fine.

Deborah Koons Garcia 17:51
I think there’s a lot of promise in using science, and even using AI, which at this point I totally hate, because I feel like they’re just messing with us. But if there’s a way to do that. Even they have very sophisticated machinery that can take beetles off a plant and identify it. We can do that. That I think is good, because then that could completely eliminate a lot of the pesticide industry.

Dave Chapman 20:10
It’s interesting. One guy I interviewed… I don’t know if you have met Hans Herren?

Deborah Koons Garcia 20:15
Oh, yeah. I interviewed him. He’s in my “Symphony of the Soil” film. He’s fantastic. I love Hans. He’s great.

Dave Chapman 20:21
He’s fantastic. And his story of what he did in Africa.

Deborah Koons Garcia 20:24
Exactly. I think I have that in the film, and he told that. He used it and I think he won the World Food Prize for that.

Dave Chapman 20:31
He won the World Food Prize and the Right Livelihood Award. It’s an amazing story. What’s beautiful about it is that for, I don’t know, three or four million dollars, they were able to really reverse what was going to be a catastrophic problem for the people of Africa. This insect, which was not native, was wiping out their cassava, their staple food crop.

Dave Chapman 20:58
To me, that’s really using science. That’s using really smart entomology. Instead of figuring out what’s a better poison, how do we adjust the system so we don’t have the problem?

Deborah Koons Garcia 21:11
Basically, what he did was, instead of them going on the crops, he gave them another place to go. He attracted them away from what they wanted to eat.

Dave Chapman 21:25
He was mostly releasing predators and parasites of the mealybug, so they were eating them. They did a great job. It took him a long time to discover where this mealybug had come from – it came from Ecuador or someplace like that. He went through these different zones. He knew that it had to be in one of five areas. The last one he went to is where he found it, and it wasn’t a big problem there.

Dave Chapman 21:49
It was a little hard to find, because there weren’t a lot of them, because they were in balance. They were in a natural ecosystem, and in a natural ecosystem everyone is in balance. He figured out who was missing in Africa that would eat them. He took them and found that they could breed them.

Dave Chapman 22:12
He did it in England so that if they escaped, they would be killed, because they didn’t want to inadvertently release them in a place where they might create a problem. Then they tested them in Africa, and they worked so well. They released them in the morning, and by the afternoon, they were two football fields away. They were like, “Oh, my goodness. This is going to work.” Then they were throwing them out of airplanes.

Deborah Koons Garcia 22:34
He’s a real scientist.

Dave Chapman 22:35
Yes, he is.

Deborah Koons Garcia 22:36
He’s also a farmer. He’s a grape grower. I used to see him around and interviewed him. He was very frustrated that there wasn’t more and more energy and money put towards those kinds of solutions. He’s so brilliant, and there are so many brilliant scientists who love agriculture and want to help. They’re all out there, and they want to help. That’s where we should be putting our science dollars.

Dave Chapman 23:10
That’s right. You’ve done a great deal of work to try and turn that around. I want to go to “Symphony of the Soil.” But just a question, for “The Future of Food,” do you have a guesstimate of how many people got to see that film?

Deborah Koons Garcia 23:24
I’ll tell you one thing. When it first came out, Netflix, which had just started up, they bought like 8,000 copies. Then they came back a few weeks later and bought another 8,000 copies from me. So, I got all the money. They didn’t pay $20 each; we gave them a break. They bought 50,000 or 60,000 copies of it. Those were going out repeatedly.

Deborah Koons Garcia 23:57
It was shown in Europe on television, in different places like France and all kinds of things. It got on TV here, but it didn’t go on PBS because they were afraid. They were afraid because some of their sponsors were very big ag.

Dave Chapman 24:11
There was a chilling effect, and PBS was afraid to put your film on.

Deborah Koons Garcia 24:22
They were afraid then, but some local ones did show it. “Symphony of the Soil” PBS got all over. About 75% of the markets took it. That was good. That’s how the culture had changed so much, where you could say this kind of stuff.

Dave Chapman 24:37
Also, I will say that there’s a thing… Let’s talk about “Symphony of the Soil.” I’ll bring up my point. This is a beautiful film. Thank you. It was beautiful. I’ve seen it several times now, and it’s really inspiring. Whereas I come out of “Symphony of the Soil,” and I feel uplifted. Of course, it’s this love song to the beauty of the soil ecosystem.

Deborah Koons Garcia 25:08
There are a lot of things in it, like the dead zones, the pesticides, and soil dying. There’s actually quite a lot of bad news in there. The end of “The Future of Food” is not a bummer. It’s not a downer ending. It’s good because it gives people something they can do, like local food and eating… People did do those things, and they were looking for those things.

Deborah Koons Garcia 25:41
It wasn’t a total downer like some films about food that I could name, which I’m not going to, where it just makes you never want to eat again. But this makes you want to eat good food. “Symphony of the Soil,” I wanted to make it beautiful because I’m a filmmaker, and I like well-crafted and beautiful films. The better crafted a film is, and there’s a lot that goes into it that you don’t really know about, but it affects you in a way. You’re in the film, and it builds…

Deborah Koons Garcia 26:13
I don’t believe in dumbing down to people. I don’t believe in scare tactics, because you move them with a horrible “ah!” But that doesn’t get them to do anything positive. It just gets them feeling trapped. I don’t believe in dumbing down; I believe in smartening up. There are ways you can give out information.

Deborah Koons Garcia 26:37
You give it out, and then you show examples of it, and you have wonderful people who are cool, like John Reginald. He’s a wonderful soil scientist. Say he’s talking, and he goes like this, and he’s got this ponytail. I go, “John, that’s so cool.” Then people feel like they understand it.

Deborah Koons Garcia 27:01
A lot of food films, the earlier ones, they don’t want people to really understand what’s going on. Or the ones where they have all these celebrities, “Trust us. We’re a celebrity. Do this, do that.” It’s like, “Why should I trust you because you’re a celebrity? I’m sure you’re a wonderful person, but…”

Deborah Koons Garcia 27:18
You have to let people understand it so they feel empowered, because they feel like, “I’m smart. I get this. Because I get this, I’m going to do this. I’m going to do that. I’m going to stop using fertilizer. I’m going to use compost. I’m so smart to be able to think I can do that.”

Deborah Koons Garcia 27:35
So, I think there are ways of… Also, the more beautiful something is, and the more people can take it in, the more they want, and they get engaged. There is beautiful music in it, which I told the composer, Todd Boekelheide. I said, “It’s called ‘Symphony of the Soil.’ Symphony. I mean it. Like movements, themes, go for it. Let’s go.” He also did “The Future of Food,” and he’s a wonderful composer. “Symphony of the Soil” was nominated for a National Emmy for sound and music.

Dave Chapman 28:07
It’s beautiful.

Deborah Koons Garcia 28:08
Plus, it’s fun. It’s fun to make something that just blows people over, even if they come thinking, “I don’t want to see a film about soil. Why would I want to see that?” Then they start seeing it, and they’re like, “Oh, wow, this is great. I want to see the whole film on soil.”

Deborah Koons Garcia 28:27
As I’ve said often, you look at soil… I tell this story when I would show it – this funny story with the camera. I did all this research on soil, read all these soil books, and talked to some soil scientists before I started making the film. I thought, “I can do this.”

Deborah Koons Garcia 28:44
First day, we were shooting with John Chater, my cameraman I had worked with quite a bit before that. We’re out somewhere, and there’s this patch of bare soil. I said, “Okay, John, that’s the shot.” So, he sets up the shot. I say, “Okay, action.” He turned to me and said, “There’s nothing happening.” I said, “John, there’s so much happening. How do we fit it all in?” He’s like, “Okay.” He did a wonderful job in the film.

Deborah Koons Garcia 29:13
Nancy Schizzari is another cinematographer who did the UK stuff in that film. But when he saw the premiere of it – the friends, family, and crew – he came to me and said, “Now I see what you were doing.” He follows me and says, “No, get their feet on the soil, more soil.”

Deborah Koons Garcia 29:33
He knows I know what I’m doing, so he did it. He’s a pro, but at first he didn’t want to shoot. It’s like, “I don’t want to find my name on a shot like that, but this is probably going to work out.” He was very happy with the film.

Dave Chapman 29:46
What year did that come out?

Deborah Koons Garcia 29:47
That came out in 2012.

Dave Chapman 29:48
“The Future of Food” was a pretty big film. It touched a lot of people. A lot of people saw it. Was “Symphony of the Soil” as big?

Deborah Koons Garcia 30:01
It was. It played in a lot of the same places. It played at agricultural festivals, conferences, big conventions, at the UN, and in the US Congress. It was not so much this, “Oh, my God…” We did sell a lot on the website. It was on PBS, and we showed it a lot in Europe.

Deborah Koons Garcia 30:13
I had some really fun screenings, like at Châteauneuf-du-Pape. There was a screening in France in… gosh, I can’t remember the town, but for the Châteauneuf-du-Pape, so all the people that grew grapes for that kind of wine were there. That was really fun. Lots of screenings in Paris.

Dave Chapman 30:56
How much has the world changed since then? If you made “Symphony of the Soil” and released it this year, whatever the updated version would be, I think the distribution would be very different.

Deborah Koons Garcia 31:12
I self-distributed that. It’s different if you’re distributing a film and you’re going to be in theaters. It did show in a lot of theaters, and it showed in a lot of independent theaters. Yeah, it was big. It was actually more general in a lot of ways. That film was bought by 375 universities and teaching…

Deborah Koons Garcia 31:40
Yeah, that’s phenomenal. That’s great.

Deborah Koons Garcia 31:42
They use it in their… It was just different. “The Future of Food” was like, “Oh, my God. This is amazing.” It was kind of hot. But “Symphony of the Soil” is more subtle. It was a little more of that. But also, one great thing is that the government used it for the Natural Resources Conservation Service, which is the soil science branch of our government. They bought a whole bunch of copies, and they used it to teach farmers all over.

Deborah Koons Garcia 32:05
There are lots of reasons why, but the whole idea of using cover crops, crop rotation, and compost, which is one of the big takeaways from that film as far as agriculture goes, was in there. A lot of farmers are doing that now, even if they’re chemical farmers, so they can use fewer chemicals. That was rewarding, because it was validated in many ways.

Deborah Koons Garcia 32:47
Also, the other cool thing I’m remembering – like ancient history – but there are a lot of soil science conventions. It was shown at the World Congress of Soil Science, which was in Korea. It was sort of the cultural centerpiece of that conference, which is held every five years. There were 5,000 scientists there. Not all 5,000 came, but that was a real honor.

Deborah Koons Garcia 33:21
Also, it showed in the US. There’s a tri-society, it’s soil science and agronomy. They have a convention every other year, every few years. I was invited to show it there, and it happened to be in Cincinnati the same weekend I was having my high school reunion. I went. It was downtown at this big, giant convention hall, and it was amazing. I hadn’t even seen that convention hall.

Deborah Koons Garcia 33:52
My parents lived there. They died several years ago, but I’d never been inside it. I think it was right near the same place where I won my award for polyploidy in plants. I think it was the same block.

Deborah Koons Garcia 34:03
So, it was surreal. I walked in, and it was sponsored by Monsanto. There were all these big Monsanto displays. But the guy who was the head of the US soil science organization – I can’t remember – he liked my work. He liked “The Future of Food” and “Symphony of the Soil.” He’d seen them, so he invited me to come. It was very interesting.

Deborah Koons Garcia 34:26
I was walking through there with my assistant, who I brought because I said, “This has to look good.” When you do video, sometimes it can just look terrible, and she’s really good at that, so I said, “You have to come. You’re the tech person. It has to look and sound good.” I brought those people along who worked for me, who made the film with me as well, to make sure everyone was having a really good experience.

Deborah Koons Garcia 34:49
It showed in this giant auditorium, and it was on big… I don’t know how many people were there, many thousands. Of course, they all didn’t come to the film. But there were big Jumbotron screens all over this giant convention center. I was just like, “Oh, my God, I have totally arrived all around this thing.” They served wine before the film and during the film, which is a mixed blessing, because things get pretty loose.

Deborah Koons Garcia 35:19
The film was done. Daniel Hillel, who was in the film – he was at the end of the film – he is very moving. I just love him. He invented drip irrigation. He had won the World Food Prize that year, and he flew from St. Louis, where he had received the prize, to Cincinnati to be on my panel afterwards with me. He’s such a lovely old man. He said, “I don’t agree with everything in the film, but it really helps people understand what soil is and to value it.”

Deborah Koons Garcia 35:56
What was also a riot was that there were two contingents of people in the audience. There were the organic farmers and their soil scientists, and then there were the ones who believed that we can’t feed the world organically – which we actually can, it just depends on what we eat. What’s with the wine?

Deborah Koons Garcia 36:18
For some reason, some people were so angry, because I was saying, “Organic, organic. We can do it,” during the film. They said, “There’s too much talk about organic. People just want organic all the time.” There was this little war going on. Not war, but people were getting very vociferous.

Deborah Koons Garcia 36:38
This one woman came up and she was like, “Too many people are talking about organic. What about what we do?” She was pretty young. I could see the people she was sitting drinking wine with. Then, on her way back, she tripped, and she did a somersault, and she bounced right up and went back to her seat. So, it was wild.

Deborah Koons Garcia 37:00
It was also wild when I showed “The Future of Food” at Cornell. There was also a clash between the people, the town and gown, and also organic versus the genetic engineering components. The Q&A after showing “The Future of Food” at Cornell got pretty wild too.

Deborah Koons Garcia 37:23
I know that people have become more aware of soil and that it’s alive. We don’t want it to die, and there are different kinds of soil, and we have to appreciate it. I think it did have a wide impact, and also it showed on PBS.

Dave Chapman 37:40
I can’t help but wonder, have you tracked the regenerative movement in this country?

Deborah Koons Garcia 37:47
Yeah, I do. A lot of products now say “regenerative” and they don’t say “organic.” But I’m like, “We can’t just jump to regenerative, we have to have organic in there too.”

Dave Chapman 38:00
Yeah. Most of them are not organic.

Deborah Koons Garcia 38:04
I know. You can’t measure what that means to someone, that’s the problem. So, any of those kinds of things, they say “natural.” They say natural because people want natural, but if it’s not organic… There are a lot of people who farm organically that decide not to get certified, and that’s okay. There are a lot of great, great farmers that do that. They have their customers; customers know them and trust them, they don’t need to. So, why get the government in your business?

Deborah Koons Garcia 38:39
But also, because people like things to be natural, and they want to feel like they’re regenerating, because of all that, there are these labels, but they have to do all the work. That’s the thing. They need to just go further along and actually do it completely instead of still using stuff that’s…

Dave Chapman 39:06
You said that all the big companies have a branch of organic, but that’s not true. Of course, Bayer-Monsanto, and Syngenta do not.

Deborah Koons Garcia 39:16
No, not that. I was talking about the food companies.

Dave Chapman 39:19
I agree. Food companies all carry some organic. In fact, most of the big farms now have an organic branch.

Deborah Koons Garcia 39:22
That’s right, they do.

Dave Chapman 39:27
But not the big chemical companies.

Deborah Koons Garcia 39:30
No, because we won’t need them. That was probably the worst investment Bayer ever made, because they’re just going to be shelling out the money, because of what they’ve done to farmers. That doesn’t even count.

Deborah Koons Garcia 39:45
The whole stuff with Dicamba floating. The thing they have to use now, because glyphosate doesn’t work, is the Dicamba floating over to farmers’ fields and killing all their crops. There are lawsuits about cancers, and kinds of stuff.

Dave Chapman 40:03
I think that the lawsuits are new. Since you made “The Future of Food,” now there have been serious losses for Bayer-Monsanto, because it’s been established that they do cause cancer.

Deborah Koons Garcia 40:18
That’s right. It said in the film that it is thought to cause cancer, because they hadn’t proved it yet, but we knew it was coming. It’s so sad. Even people I know who were organic farmers, because they spent time around non-organic farms, especially when they were young, a lot of them die of cancer. There’s a lot of cancer, and there’s a lot of cancer in farming communities.

Deborah Koons Garcia 40:42
When I was shooting Percy Schmeiser up in Canada, one of the first people I shot in 2000–2001 or so, his wife, we were driving around, and I said, “There’s so much cancer around here too.” “Oh, there’s cancer there, there’s cancer there, and there’s cancer there.” There was cancer in every household. That’s unacceptable, because we have a choice about that, and we need to make those choices.

Dave Chapman 41:13
Yeah. Just to start to wrap up, because I know you’ve got an appointment, your films have had more significant impact than most people have ever dreamed of having. Yet, we’re also up against pretty powerful forces, and they’re doing very well. We have not brought down Monsanto. We got them to change their name, but we didn’t get them to change their strategy.

Dave Chapman 41:55
I think you have done amazing work on this. I’m curious what your thoughts are about going forward. Is there an opportunity that you see?

Deborah Koons Garcia 42:07
I think what we need to go after is this regulatory capture that these corporations have because of money, and the staffing of… Now, of course, it’s just going to be worse for the next few years. It’s just going to be worse.

Deborah Koons Garcia 42:07
But the positive thing could be that it gets so bad with this idea that corporations are getting away with all this stuff that… It’s possible a new mentality comes into the state government, and they just say, “You cannot use those chemicals. You cannot use that. You can’t do this, you can’t do that.” We’ve done it before with all kinds of things, and they know it. Lots of people know it. It’s been proven. So, we just have to make those.

Deborah Koons Garcia 42:07
Those corporations might die off. There may be no Monsanto in 20 years. It’s possible that could happen, especially using science, AI, robotics, and all things like that. You might not need it. Using Hans Herren’s mentality of, “Let’s figure out the natural way to get rid of that,” because there are lots and lots of organic farmers.

Deborah Koons Garcia 43:44
In “Agrarian Elders: Harvesting Wisdom,” every single one of those people were told in the 1960s and 1970s – I’m sure you were told – “You can never make a living farming organically. It’ll never happen. Don’t even try.” They’d go to the state Ag Bureau and say, “What about doing this?” “No. You can’t do it without those chemicals.” They basically said, “F you. We can too. We’re doing it.”

Deborah Koons Garcia 44:12
And they did it. They did it so nobody can say now, “Well, you can’t do that. You can’t grow those. You can’t make a living farming organically,” which is just nonsense.

Deborah Koons Garcia 44:22
I think we need to change the progression of where we’re going, to have faith that banning some of these chemicals – starting off banning Dicamba, these things that are worse – because Roundup doesn’t work anymore, now they’re getting worse and worse chemicals in there, and that has to stop.

Deborah Koons Garcia 44:47
When they start realizing, “Where are all these cancers coming from?” I think even autism – there’s possibly an element in autism that has to do with having all these chemicals in children’s systems. Vaccines, that’s one thing, whatever. I’m so happy I didn’t get polio. I got everything else. I’m happy not to have had measles.

Deborah Koons Garcia 45:16
But I think the deeper issue is all the chemicals, the plastics, and all these kinds of things. That’s what we really need to change. We need to change everything. I think it’s going to require making some very hard decisions.

Deborah Koons Garcia 45:34
It won’t be that hard, but pro-farmer, pro-land… This is the real pro-life: to have the soil alive, plants that are healthy, food that people can eat, and not have to be afraid that down the road this is going to make them horribly sick.

Deborah Koons Garcia 45:53
So, I think there is hope. But I do think that the forces are enormous. The other good thing is that people have really lost faith in corporations. People thought, “Oh, these corporations…” Like my mother’s generation, she’d say, “Well, they can’t be lying. They’re on TV.” I’m like, “Mom, listen…”

Deborah Koons Garcia 46:23
There is a lot more realization now that corporations are not necessarily your friend. Some are, but a lot of them aren’t. They’re entities. There’s no moral force behind corporations, because they’re a thing. If these were family-owned corporations, where there was one family or one guy in charge, and he was really in charge, if he thought something was wrong, he’d say, “We’re not doing that.”

Deborah Koons Garcia 46:54
Now people are just employees of that corporation. So, if you have one guy saying, “We shouldn’t be doing that,” you’ve got somebody else with a vested interest saying, “Get the hell out. We’re doing it. If you don’t like it, get out.” The whole thing has changed, but people don’t trust corporations anymore. I don’t think so. That’s a sad thing, but a lot of corporations are not trustworthy in terms of what they’re doing to our bodies, our land, and our world.

Deborah Koons Garcia 47:26
I think that can change, and it just has to kind of well up and make people realize that their own health, their children’s health, and the future is at stake, because things are going to get crazy. I’m not going to be around to see it, but between climate change and water running out, and all the other things, it could be that food becomes more and more local, which I think is a good thing, and it is already that.

Deborah Koons Garcia 48:05
Look at COVID. I stayed up here in Maine for COVID, and there were these farms, and they’re like, “We can’t sell to stores anymore. We can’t sell at the farmers market. We’re going to sell at our house.” People just flocked to these farms. They didn’t have enough food to feed all the people that wanted a box of food and take it back with them because they couldn’t sell in stores anymore. They were so popular. They did well during COVID.

Deborah Koons Garcia 48:36
We don’t want any more of that, but we do want this idea that people will support local farms, and you have a farm that you can count on, and they count on you, and you have this relationship. You can get a lot from that. You don’t need to even involve the corporations. You can just get big sacks of rice.

Deborah Koons Garcia 48:58
I think this communal, this transition idea, where you become as self-sufficient as you can, and yeah, somebody’s going to want bananas, and someone’s going to bring in the bananas. That’s right, and that’s okay.

Deborah Koons Garcia 49:13
I live in California most of the year. It’s like heaven going in the store there, because you get really great food year-round. Obviously, that’s not the case in most places. But there are ways to even do trades, trucking them in, and trucking that back down.

Deborah Koons Garcia 49:38
I think there are ways to do it, and we just have to start thinking creatively, because people are going to have to become a lot more independent, but also at the same time dependent, and being able to depend on their community.

Deborah Koons Garcia 49:55
That, I think, is happening. It’s on its way to happening, and we’ve been slapped around because of the political situation and COVID and now the political situation, but underneath that, people sense that. They want a sense of safety, and you can’t necessarily depend on the government to provide that for you. You have to get the people around you, people that you trust, and farms that you trust.

Deborah Koons Garcia 50:20
I’ll see the name of a certain farm in California, and even up here, and I say, “I know that’s going to be good. It’s going to be good for me, it’s going to taste good, and they’re telling the truth, and I want to eat that.”

Deborah Koons Garcia 50:38
Things look pretty grim now, but sometimes things get so bad, so gross, that you just like, a welling up: “We are not going to have that anymore. We are not going down that road anymore with this mindless, destructive, and selfish, to me, current administration, for no reason, just destroyed the Farm to School Program.”

Deborah Koons Garcia 51:08
The farmers growing food and sending it locally – just for absolutely no reason, did that. Meanwhile, to say, “Oh, we’ll send lots of subsidies to the farmers. Lots of subsidies to the farmers in the Midwest.” That was a good subsidy. That was a meaningful subsidy: good for the farmers, good for the soil, because they’re growing actual food, good for the kids, and good for the community. Let’s kill it.

Deborah Koons Garcia 51:34
See, that is the thing that’s going to push people saying, “Wait a minute. What’s is going on here?” Even right-wing people are going to say, “What is going on here? This is wrong. Who benefits from that?” Only a sadist benefits from that thinking, “Hahaha, I destroyed this great thing. Hahaha.”

Dave Chapman 51:54
Deborah, I promise you, it is time. I know you have someone waiting for you. So, Deborah Koons Garcia, thank you so much. This was a great conversation.

Deborah Koons Garcia 52:04
Thank you. It was fun to do that. It’s going down memory lane and telling some stories I hadn’t shared in a while.

Dave Chapman 52:05
And on to the next project with the “Agrarian Elders: Harvesting Wisdom”…

Deborah Koons Garcia 52:14
“Agrarian Elders: Harvesting Wisdom” will be out within the next year, I promise. A lot of wonderful old farmers, a great generation, will be showcased.

Dave Chapman 52:26
Great, thank you.

Deborah Koons Garcia 52:28
Thank you.