Episode #274
Hugh Kent: The Science of Life on a Real Organic Farm

Hugh Kent makes a vivid case for organic blueberry farming as a living system, not just a pesticide-free one. Drawing on years of experience at King Grove Organic Farm, he describes how healthy soil, biodiversity, predator balance, and restrained intervention can produce exceptional blueberries while challenging the chemical playbook still promoted by extension and the hydroponic model still mislabeled as organic.

Our Hugh Kent interview has been edited and condensed for clarity:

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Dave Chapman interviewed Hugh Kent at King Grove Farm in January 2026:

Dave Chapman
Welcome to the Real Organic Podcast. I’m back here in Eustis, Florida, talking with my good friend, Hugh Kent. Hugh, you’ve got some things that have been on your mind lately, I know, and I’ve got a few on my mind. You said you wanted to start this conversation with a note of thanks, because when you started farming, you were so alone, as so many of us are.

Dave Chapman
Some people grew up in the support of a whole farming community and a farming family. In fact, for them, the opposite is true, that it’s very hard for them to do things differently. Francis Thicke had to actually lie about spraying a field to his father, saying, “Yeah, I sprayed it.” He didn’t spray it, and he wanted to see what would happen, and it worked beautifully.

Dave Chapman
But you were in a position where you didn’t know how to farm, and you didn’t know anybody trying to do what you were trying to do – trying to do it organically. What was that like, what did you discover, and how did you find your community?

Hugh Kent
Thanks, Dave. I actually wanted to thank you personally first. Jenny will edit that out anyway. But yeah, it’s really been a profound experience to have the organization that you started be available, because this does feel like a lonely experience sometimes.

Hugh Kent
I feel like there are a lot of us, because we don’t have the resources, we don’t have the extension involvement, and we don’t have the university involvement to the same extent that chemical agriculture does, so we’re out there doing these things on our own. It’s easy to think that you are going down the wrong path, or you’re missing something. Really, you’re not lost, you’re just disconnected.

Hugh Kent
Then when you start to get exposed to all the people that you’ve brought together under this Real Organic Project umbrella, then you start to realize, “Well, I’m not seeing these things. I’m not crazy. This is how it works.” Other people have found this phenomenon on their own. They’ve found natural systems and learned how to farm with them. Many, many people have come before all of us, but when there’s not a real cohesive community and a lot of communication, it’s easy to miss that.

Hugh Kent
Then once you get started and you start to hear different people expressing their experiences, and they’re very parallel to your own, you realize that you’re on the right path. That’s hugely gratifying and supportive, because the chasm between what is available to chemical agriculture in terms of research and outreach, and what’s available in organics in this country is astonishing.

Hugh Kent
When I started farming here, I realized there’d be pest pressure. I talked to the University of Florida entomologists, and they said, “Well, are you sure you want to do this? It’s really tough to do in Florida.” I’d go to the extension meetings, and there’d be field days, and they’d say, “Well, if you have this problem, then you spray this.”

Hugh Kent
The organic farmers would put their hands up and say, “Well, what about us?” They’d say, “Well, you’re on your own. You’ve got one chemical if you want to use it. Good luck with resistance.” That repeated over and over again. I stopped going to those things, because there wasn’t anything in it for us.

Hugh Kent
It was an exploration and education that we learned on our own. Then after a while, I realized that, “Yeah, it’s just not that hard. You can find other farmers that are doing this.” Just there isn’t so much noise around it. There’s not so much money to be made, as Eliot Coleman says, so there’s not the sponsorship for the education programs. They’re just not there.

Hugh Kent
Part of the irony of that is that if you’re farming in a good system and you’re working with nature, you just don’t need those things. I’m just constantly amazed at how little I do now. I just do less and less. I interfere less and less. I get more nervous about interfering now, because things are in such a good balance.

Dave Chapman
I think it takes a lot of courage or foolhardiness to challenge the huge establishment. You said you just saw a flyer from the University of Florida about how to grow blueberries in the southeast, and it was basically a list by time of year of what you should be spraying.

Hugh Kent
Yeah, it’s more than that. But I want to be clear about this. I didn’t come at this with some kind of ideological predisposition at all. The reason I’m so convinced about these natural farming systems and Real Organic farming is I’ve just seen it work.

Hugh Kent
I’ve seen it with my own eyes. I came to this from a farming family, but this was all brand new for me in my lifetime. I wasn’t really a farmer. I wasn’t raised on a farm. I guess it’s in me somewhere, but it’s not in my background. I came at this with a blank slate, and I wanted to try this.

Hugh Kent
Then when I saw how well it worked, that’s when I really started thinking, “I need to be an advocate. We’re really doing something wrong by ignoring organic in this country as much as we have, and now basically substituting hydroponic for organic in this country.”

Hugh Kent
What I was referring to with the outreach from university and all the academics that are supported by tax money, they have an astonishing app. It’s not just a list or a publication, it’s an app. Pretty involved to put together a sophisticated app.

Hugh Kent
If I were a chemical farmer, I would have a recipe for every month of the year – here’s what you need to look for, here’s what you scout for, and here’s what you spray for it. All the potential problems that have been cataloged. Then here’s all the chemicals that you use on them. I looked at the list. It says, “here’s what I should be spraying in March, pre-harvest. Here’s what I should be spraying during harvest.”

Hugh Kent
I don’t do any of that stuff, and I just don’t need to. I don’t have those pests. The philosophy of pest control for us has just become very, very simple: keep the plant as healthy as possible, eliminate stress as much as you can – a healthy amount of stress – and concentrate on the soil health.

Hugh Kent
The plant basically has its own external immune system, so it can take what it needs from the soil, change its own chemistry, and remain healthy and productive. I was just seeing this over and over. But there’s a good illustration of just how much is available if you’re farming the other way, and how much…

Dave Chapman
Tremendous support?

Hugh Kent
Tremendous support, absolutely.

Dave Chapman
You got hundreds of thousands of people working to supply you with the information and the products that you need to make it work in that system. It does work, there are just some unfortunate consequences.

Hugh Kent
Yeah, sure. But I keep thinking about, “Well, what if those resources were available to organic farmers? What if we had an equivalent amount of resources put into our kind of farming, which is, of course, the only farming there was until 80 years ago?”

Hugh Kent
We had, all of a sudden, the land-grant universities, and with extension, and with all of the money behind the Green Revolution, now there’s resources for using chemicals – tremendous resources.

Dave Chapman
Yeah. Just to say, not all farming before 80 years ago was good farming. Not all of it was organic farming, but it might have been chemical-free farming.

Hugh Kent
Correct. Certainly, there was a lot of irresponsible organic farming before we had agri-chemicals, and so were using resources before people understood crop rotation and things like that. There was obviously a lot of extractive type of farming, or farming that wasn’t keeping land healthy over the long term. It was being depleted. But I think that’s changed quite a bit. Certainly, we understand organic farming better than we used to.

Dave Chapman
Yeah, absolutely. Allan Savory gets that look and challenges me and says, “Well, six civilizations have been destroyed by farmers, and that was all organic farming.” I say, “Well, Allan, that wasn’t good organic farming. That was bad farming. It was non-chemical, but it wasn’t what we’re trying to do here.”

Dave Chapman
He knows that; it’s what he’s trying to do too – the Savory Institute is trying to do real organic farming. They have different ways of describing it, but we mean the same thing.

Dave Chapman
All right, let’s just stop, because you mentioned it. Let’s just visit for a minute the external immune system of a plant. That’s an interesting term. What does that mean to you?

Hugh Kent
I had an academic relative of mine, an AG professor, ask me – this was, I think, before I started or just when I was starting – “Do you think that plants have an immune system?” I didn’t really have an answer for it. I didn’t, I don’t know. But over time and experience, I’ve come to think, absolutely, they have an immune system.

Hugh Kent
In my mind, it’s an external system, as opposed to ours, which is more internal. We have a gut microbiome, of course, and we have a very sophisticated immune system. The gut microbiome, in a way, is external because it’s in the digestive tract, which is open to the atmosphere. A lot of times, we have a system of microbes in our bodies that are contained in organs, which, if they escape from those organs into the rest of the body, would be very toxic.

Hugh Kent
In that way, it’s kind of external. But we think of it, of course, as mammals having these internal immune systems. But a plant is really living in close relation to the soil and all the microbes that live in the soil, and all the life above and below ground. I’m convinced that when there’s some sort of disturbance from the equilibrium that nature wants to create, and the healthy systems that nature wants to foster and maintain, that there are ways that the plant adapts.

Hugh Kent
Plants have been around for a lot longer than we have, 200 million years. They have all these adaptive mechanisms and very sophisticated survival mechanisms. I do believe that they can change their chemistry and they can make themselves healthier. They can pick and choose what they need out of the soil, and they can adapt when there’s above-ground pest pressure. This is not my research, but there certainly is a lot of it out there.

Dave Chapman
Would your cousin have agreed with you? I’m just curious – when she asked that question.

Hugh Kent
I don’t know. I think so. She was curious about it. It was really interesting. She kept an open mind after a whole career and kind of wondering what… But I think aren’t we sort of coming on a lot of this information recently? I don’t think there was that much awareness about soil microbiomes and things like that until fairly recently.

Hugh Kent
Certainly there wasn’t that much information or interest in gut microbiomes until fairly recently. We understand just how significant all that was and what the interplay was between the two.

Dave Chapman
A big change in understanding, which is interesting, makes you wonder how many other things we completely don’t get…

Hugh Kent
Yeah, everything.

Dave Chapman
…that we might have a better understanding of in 20 years or 200 years.

Hugh Kent
Sure, yeah. Boy, that’s been my experience; the more I know, the less I know. I’m just constantly amazed at how… I just watch these things happen with my own eyes. I could not have anticipated that resolution or that response that the farm has to problems. As long as I don’t interfere too much and I’m observing carefully, I can see these things happening over and over again.

Hugh Kent
They’re not things necessarily that are out there in academic publications. They’re some things that I’ve seen. Repeatedly, I’ve seen the farm adapt to problems, and I’ve seen an equilibrium come back. I’ve seen healthy stasis return. I’ve told you the story about the root weevil, but I love it because it was so bizarre. But Diaprepes root weevil is a pest in citrus groves, especially, but also in blueberries and a lot of leftover citrus land, or formerly citrus land.

Hugh Kent
These things will survive. The adult stage is a kind of nondescript fly, but the larval stage is a voracious root eater. It’s a grub, it’s about the size of a pinky finger, or half of a pinky finger – it’s quite big. It’s translucent, kind of grotesque. When I first saw them, I thought, “This is Diaprepes root weevil. I’ve got a bunch of them out here. What am I going to do?”

Hugh Kent
I got a hold of the university, and they said, “Well, you can spray this. You can fumigate.” They’re in the soil, of course. I said, “Well, I’m organic.” They said, “Find a new address.” I was concerned about that. Then at the same time, I saw earwigs. Lots of earwigs were out there. I thought, “What in the world are they doing? I want to learn earwigs.”

Hugh Kent
They’re not necessarily a pest. They’re not there for the plants, but certainly there is no description of them as beneficial. I was learning at the beginning, “What are my beneficials? Spiders, ladybugs. That’s about it. Kill everything else.” That’s sort of the advice – just kill everything if it’s not your crop. Then I realized this is probably my first experience with this, which is why it sticks with me.

Hugh Kent
I just thought, “Well, maybe this is related – these two phenomena.” I got a ziplock bag, and I put three root weevils in there, and one earwig and some blueberry leaves. I watched this earwig walk right up to one of the root weevils. I didn’t know they did this, but like a scorpion, he threw his tail over his head, and those pinchers on the back punctured the root weevil.

Hugh Kent
Sure enough – I was startled by this – and I came back in the morning, and there were three dead root weevils, and one of them was eaten, and one fat, happy earwig. I thought, “This, sure enough, will take care of itself very quickly.” The earwig population actually increased, and then the root weevils basically disappeared. I see one very, very occasionally. Then the earwigs went back down to a baseline population.

Hugh Kent
This is my first understanding. Here I am thinking, “I’ve discovered something,” but then I realized, after talking to a bunch of organic farmers and being involved in this, “This is very well understood. This is how it works – this is how the natural system works.” As long as there’s a baseline of some sort of predator, so long as you can maintain a nursery of some kind on your farm, everything is a predator, everything’s a pest.

Dave Chapman
What happened when you looked in that plastic bag with the three root weevils?

Hugh Kent
The Mutual of Omaha experience. Three root weevils and one earwig. The earwig walks up to the root weevils and throws his tail over his head like a scorpion, and those pinchers on the back punctured the root weevil and killed it. In the morning, when I came back, there were three dead root weevils, and there was one eaten one and one fat and happy earwig.

Hugh Kent
The progression was what I would expect after seeing that – the earwig population continued to expand, and then the root weevils were depleted fairly quickly and down to a baseline of almost nothing, almost never see one anymore. The earwig population also declined afterwards. It was a lockstep increase in the population of the predator. Something got out of control, and we had a natural predator here, even though it’s not acknowledged in the literature.

Hugh Kent
But the earwig also increased in population until it brought the pest under control. I’ve seen this over and over again. I believe as long as there’s a sufficient nursery of potential predators for pests on your farm, then this natural system works on its own. I’ve just seen it over and over.

Dave Chapman
This is the study of ecology.

Hugh Kent
Yes.

Dave Chapman
It’s studying the system instead of the parts of the system – how do those parts interact, and how do you separate. That there is nothing in isolation, which is how organic farming works.

Hugh Kent
Yes. Instead of a philosophy of you identify your crop and then try and kill everything else, or identify the beneficials and try and kill everything else, it’s less concern about pest pressure and a recognition that if you have a functioning natural system, that it will always seek this balance. If you have something out of control, then you will have the controller – the predator. Everything has a predator. Almost everything is a beneficial in one context or another.

Hugh Kent
If you’ve fostered enough life and enough biodiversity on your farm, if there’s enough left around you, then the balance can be re-achieved. Let me give you a couple more examples. This is not just a single example phenomenon for me. I came at it pretty skeptically and said, “Well, this is pretty scary. I’m just supposed to sit back and don’t do anything? Or at least intervene as little as possible.”

Hugh Kent
There’s a very bad fruit fly that’s a scourge all over the country and many parts of the world for fruit growers. There’s been a tremendous amount of research that I think has probably been inconclusive. There’s lots of chemicals. When we were first exposed to this fruit fly – I think it was maybe 12 years ago or so.

Dave Chapman
This is probably an import from some other part of the world, Spotted Wing Drosophila.

Hugh Kent
Right. It arrived, and the advice was, “Well, you need to monitor these in traps.” Then when you have a certain number in your traps, you need to get on a broad-spectrum, specified spray program to kill these things. Otherwise, you’ll have an infestation, you’ll be in big trouble. Then not too long after that, the advice changed. Initially, I think it was, when you see two, “You find two in your traps, and then you need to start spraying.”

Hugh Kent
Then after that, the advice changed, and it was, “Well, if you see two in your traps, it’s too late. You need to be in a prophylactic spray program. You need to start spraying before you see these things, and you need to spray throughout the season or a rotation.” This is, to me, horrifying. It’s a bad pest we had the very first year it was here. It’s still in the area, and the best chemical farmers I know still spray for it. I think virtually everybody does.

Hugh Kent
We stopped spraying after the first year. We sprayed the first year. We used an organically approved insecticide, which I don’t know if it was effective or not. But after that, we did something else, and it’s worked flawlessly. We haven’t had a problem ever since.

Hugh Kent
What we did was, we thought about the trapping, and we thought, “Well, if we put out monitor traps, those are going to catch some of these. Well, what if we use mass trapping? What if we use the monitor traps, but we put them all around the perimeter of the field, every few feet? We put the bait solution out there, and we catch everything we can?”

Hugh Kent
We do that. We still do that. I don’t think that’s what solved our problem. I think that we had some sort of predator for that pest when it got out of control. I think its population has increased here also. Now control brought the SWD population down to a level where it’s not even detectable.

Hugh Kent
We still do the mass trapping. We’re scared to take away this thing that maybe coincidentally helped us. So every year we put out Solo cups that are perforated, just below the lid. We put a solution in there of apple cider vinegar and a nice Merlot or red wine.

Dave Chapman
A happy death.

Hugh Kent
Yeah, some of the papers I read said, “Well, Merlot is good.” They seem to like Merlot better than Cabernet or something. I had a little bit of soap to break surface tension. It’s non-toxic, obviously. We replenish these things on a rotation every week. We do half of them every week. We do all of them in a two-week period. The only drawback is a little bit of expense and my wife’s reputation, because she has to go to the ABC liquor store every few weeks to buy 25 boxes of red wine. She’s a raging alcoholic.

Dave Chapman
“The wine is Lady is back.”

Hugh Kent
Other than that, it’s pretty simple. It’s not that expensive. We haven’t had a problem at all. Another example would be gall midge. We had a blueberry gall midge, which is a terrible pest. We had our plants analyzed, and “Yep, that’s what you have.” But when they found the gall midge, they also found some beneficial mites in our flower buds as well that they’d never seen before. I think they named them after Eustis for our location.

Hugh Kent
But I do think that there’s probably a lot more life inside of our plants, as well as around our plants and underneath our plants. It’s a very active living system. But we don’t have gall midge anymore. That was generally thought of as being basically the end of your farm. You start getting that, your plants will decline – it will get worse. We had it for a year. It’s gone. We haven’t been out there just now, and I looked and looked and looked, I haven’t seen any evidence of it at all.

Dave Chapman
What do you think would happen if you had sprayed a pesticide?

Hugh Kent
I don’t know, and that’s the problem. I don’t think anybody knows. You spray a pesticide, maybe you’re going to get your target pest. But what else are you going to get? Are you going to get that predator that is after your Spotted Wing Drosophila fruit fly? Are you going to kill something else? Are you going to throw things out of balance?

Hugh Kent
One of the things that’s fascinating… I really enjoy the interviews that you’re doing. Will Brinton was a particular favorite of mine. He talked about this – about the concern of throwing things out of balance. He was convinced about it, because, if I remember right, they were doing it in a controlled atmosphere, or controlled environment. They were doing it in greenhouses. It was much more measurable, and they could monitor the environment in there more carefully.

Hugh Kent
He said whenever they did anything at all intrusive, or interventionist, they would see all kinds of other things go out of balance. I think it’s really scary. These are not highly targeted poisons, most of them. They kill everything. Predators, for example. We don’t do anything that would hurt honey bees. All the farmers do that. They don’t want to take these commercial bees and hurt them and hurt their honey-making operations, directly or indirectly.

Hugh Kent
But there are all kinds of other pollinators out there, and that’s what we see. We don’t just see the honey bees on our flowers. We see wasps, butterflies, and we see lots and lots of southeastern blueberry bees. There’s a native bee that’s specifically adapted to pollinate blueberry flowers in the southeast, including in Florida, where there are six or eight native species of blueberries.

Hugh Kent
To see them out in your farm is really gratifying. This is what they were made for. They’re very happy to be out here. They found a blueberry farm, and I don’t know how susceptible those are to other chemicals. I don’t hear much in the literature, or see other farmers talk about, “Hey, I’ve got a lot of southeastern blueberry bees this year,” but I know we have a lot of them.

Hugh Kent
I didn’t want to give you a couple more examples, because they’re always on my mind now. We had snails come in. We had Bulimulus sporadicus, which is a really nasty invasive snail. A huge problem in citrus groves, because they clog the low-volume irrigation micro-jets under the trees. If they get in there, they can clog them up. If you have 150 to 200 trees an acre, and you’ve got hundreds of acres, you’ve got to try and go and clean those things out.

Hugh Kent
Anyway, they’re not good on a blueberry farm either. We were concerned about them. They’re misnamed. They’re not sporadicus. They should be like…

Dave Chapman
Ubiquitous.

Hugh Kent
Ubiquitous, yeah. They’re everywhere. We didn’t know what to do with these things. So we watched. It was well after harvest, so we weren’t that concerned about them. But white ibis came in, a flock of maybe 15 of them. They came in, and they started eating. They live in the area. We’ve got a lot of wildlife around here. They started eating snails, and they were here for almost a month. They came in every day, dawn to dusk, and they ate snails. They loved them. They ate them until they were almost all gone, and they left. This was extraordinary and beautiful.

Hugh Kent
We had some come back, I think, two or three years after that. I was looking for the ibis, and none of them showed up. I tried to intervene gently. So I did some research. There’s gotta be people that study these things, have PhDs in white ibis.

Hugh Kent
Sure enough, there’s a way to try and get them in to study them. There’s a call that they use. I got a hold of the Cornell ornithology lab. I said, “Can you send me a tape of these things – what they like to hear?” They did that, and I sent it off to the company that makes the recordings for the bird deterrent speakers that we use to try and keep berry-eating birds off the field when we’re harvesting.

Hugh Kent
They made me a tape, and I could play that white ibis over that little PA system. Then I took some pink flamingos, and I painted them up like spray paint. Made them look like white ibis. It’s been a lot of time. My wife thought I should be doing something else.

Dave Chapman
But these were plastic flamingos?

Hugh Kent
Plastic pink flamingos. They were long ornaments. They were about the right size. You paint them up the right colors. They look pretty good. I put them out in the field, and I thought, “Who can resist this?” My wife said, “Well, they’re not going to work. These are scarecrows. The snails aren’t going to look at those things and run away.” I said, “No, no, I’m trying to get the birds to come back.”

Hugh Kent
It actually didn’t work. But something else controlled them, and it was a lower level of presence that we had, so it petered out. It’s not all grubs, fruit flies and things like that; some of it’s quite beautiful. We brought in some nursery plants. We had to get nursery plants from another farm, and they came in with a bunch of whiteflies.

Hugh Kent
I said, “What’s gonna happen now? Lots of them on these plants.” I thought, “Well, things are in good balance right now. Let’s see what happens.” Within two or three days, I started noticing – and I’m sorry, I don’t know the name of these things, but they’re absolutely beautiful. Just gorgeous, stunning, iridescent balloon dragonflies, small ones. They came somewhere from the woodlands, wetlands, and wildlife – somewhere around the farm.

Hugh Kent
Farm fringes are down at the bottom of the hill, where the wetlands are, or in the woods. They multiplied, and they were flying around like a squadron. I’ve got videos of these things. They’re just zipping around everywhere. I’d say within two weeks, they brought the whiteflies totally under control. Whiteflies gone.

Hugh Kent
It just seems like a wonderful way to go. I have to believe that the food that a system like that is creating has got more beneficial things in it than if you’re just trying to grow a crop and kill everything else.

Dave Chapman
The way of thinking about farming – the way you’re doing it – is in stark contrast to the way that extension is teaching people to farm. I heard this from Stephan Schneider, and I thought, “That’s very good.” I might have it wrong a little bit, but he talked about the Science of Death as being how agriculture is practiced in this country. We’re experts at fungicides, herbicides, pesticides, and insecticides. Then there’s the Science of Life.

Dave Chapman
What you’re practicing is the Science of Life, which is how we bring enough life to critical mass, where we create this ecological balance, where things don’t go winging out of control. Call me old-fashioned, but I think that the food that comes out of the Science of Life is going to be the food with life that’s going to provide life. It’s going to be better for us to eat than the food that comes out of the Science of Death.

Hugh Kent
I think so. The two comments that we get most frequently about our blueberries are, number one, they taste better than anything else the person has had. The other one is how long they last. There’s no explanation that I have for how long they last. I know the typical practice for farming blueberries in the southeast is to spray a lot of fungicides in the spring – lots of fungicides because fungus is really what attacks the berries and decreases their shelf life.

Hugh Kent
Ultimately, they’re going to start to decay. We don’t do any of that. But we have a phenomenon. People say these things lasted more than a month after they were abused by UPS for two days. I put them in my refrigerator and did an experiment, and we’re also insulting me. So you should have eaten them all. They’re really that good. You should have eaten them. No, no, I kept a small little batch in the back, and they’re still good after a month, or more – five weeks.

Hugh Kent
That’s nothing that we’re doing. That’s just the natural system, and I do believe, of course, the antioxidants that the plant is creating to preserve its own fruit are the same antioxidants that are good for us.

Hugh Kent
But your comment about the two philosophies, yeah, that really is profound. It’s also a really pleasant way to try and make all this work. It’s a great way to live. I love living around a farm that doesn’t have toxins on it. For me, for my family, the people that work here, for everything else that lives here, that’s great.

Hugh Kent
But also just in another sense, Paul Hawken says this so well. I love this in his book “Carbon: The Book of Life,” when he talks about… The way I would paraphrase it anyway, is that we’re living in this time when there’s no shortage of dystopian scenarios. But what do we do? What do we all do about this? He says, “Why don’t you measure your activity in terms of whether you’re actually creating more life or stewarding more life, or whether what you’re doing is resulting in less life.”

Hugh Kent
This is obviously a system. This is a way of thinking, a way of farming, where you’re just creating life. It’s as simple as that for us. The one thing I would comment about the Science of Life, though, is just how imprecise it is. The Science of Death is pretty precise. It’s dead, and we’ve got the stuff that’ll do that.

Hugh Kent
How you farm with the Science of Life? I know nothing. I’ve been trying to watch this and learn as fast as I can for quite a while now. I still feel like I don’t know anything, and the more I learn, I feel like the less I know. It’s so complex. It’s endlessly, infinitely complex. That’s why I have faith in it. Because it’s a time-honored thing. Nature’s got a lot of seniority, and I want to defer to it every time I can. Whenever I do, I think it works beautifully.

Dave Chapman
We’ve talked about the huge resources that we, the people, have allowed the government to pour into the Science of Death.

Hugh Kent
What if we had two parallel systems, where we had an equal amount of resources in the Science of Life as we do in the Science of Death? What would we be saying when we’re talking about yield, when we’re talking about shelf life, or when we’re talking about other things?

Dave Chapman
Expenses and costs. All of that. What we’ve talked about is how complex that science is. It’s not easy. For somebody to talk about root weevils and to go, “Well, we’ve seen their six parasites and nine predators that we know of. The question is, does your natural system support them?” Amazing story of Hans Herren hunting for the insect that was going to predate or parasitize the mealy bugs that were wiping out the cassava crop.

Dave Chapman
When he finally found them, many continents away, down in Bolivia, I believe – and this was for Africa, because that’s where the mealy bug had been imported from – they weren’t a problem. They’re really hard to find because they were in such balance in the neighborhood. It wasn’t people going, “Oh, yeah, that’s a bad one.” It wasn’t a problem. It was just a minor insect that lived in the neighborhood with many others.

Dave Chapman
To actually study this in a way that researchers can confidently say, “Well, this system works,” it’s really a whole system. That’s why we talk about whole farms instead of just part farms. Indeed, a whole farm in a very toxic neighborhood is still going to be very challenged by their toxic neighbors, because no good guys are going to be coming over from next door. Bad things are going to be coming over from next door.

Hugh Kent
Wasn’t this understood by the people who wrote the regulations that we operate under? Woodlands, wetlands, and wildlife… You’re supposed to increase the quality of your soil, water, woodlands, wetlands, and wildlife. It’s all over the regulations and the law. I think they knew why. It’s not just a feel-good philosophical thing. This is the farming system. That’s what makes an organic farming system work.

Dave Chapman
As we said, it’s a pretty good law.

Hugh Kent
Yeah, you’re right.

Dave Chapman
It’s a pretty good law. I wish we could follow it.

Hugh Kent
Right. When you look at a hydroponic system, which is the other end of the polemic, it’s anathema. It’s “We’re going to create a sterile environment, and the plants are not going to fend for themselves. It’s not going to work in relation to everything else in nature.” It has nothing to do with woodlands, wetlands, and wildlife. It has nothing to do with soil. There isn’t even any soil.

Hugh Kent
It’s just a system of sterility and man-made solution that gets basically spoon-fed to the plant. Is it going to create the same kind of food? The system is so different. It’s staggering to live in the only country in the world that says, “Yeah, hydroponic produce is organic.” They don’t do that anywhere else in the world. People go to the store, and they don’t know which one they’re getting.

Dave Chapman
No, no idea. Let’s talk about the hidden hand of nature. I love that term that you came up with. Of course, in capitalism, the hidden hand is the hidden hand of the market, which theoretically guides us to wonderful outcomes for people who are not familiar with the study of economics.

Dave Chapman
That’s assuming that there is such a thing as a free market, so that it’s a neutral weighing scale to reflect people’s desires and so forth. I would contend that, unfortunately, whether you like it or not, we don’t have capitalism. We don’t have an open market; we have a very rigged system.

Hugh Kent
Yeah, we don’t have a free market.

Dave Chapman
We don’t have a free market, all right.

Hugh Kent
The invisible hand in a market system is the ability of an unfettered market to basically create the right amount of supply when there is a certain amount of demand. You reach an equilibrium of supply and demand, and that’s where you are allocating resources efficiently. If you have more supply than demand, prices will go down. If you have more demand than supply, prices will go up. You reach this position where, socially, you are putting your resources in the right place.

Hugh Kent
We’re talking about a couple of different things. When I talk about the invisible hand of nature, I see it in the same way. It almost provides the same function. When you have the supply and demand of predator and prey, things will reach an equilibrium if you have the right setup and the right environment for the market – or for the invisible hand of nature – to work.

Hugh Kent
We’re sort of mixing metaphors and economic and agricultural terms, but another way of looking at it would be laissez-faire agriculture: farming in a way where you don’t intervene too much and don’t mess up the natural system. Not pure laissez-faire – you don’t do absolutely nothing. I don’t just plant a blueberry bush and say, “Okay, have at it. Good luck.” I don’t do that. But I am certainly trying to allow the natural system to work. I’m trying to let this equilibrium happen. I regulate a little, but I don’t overregulate.

Hugh Kent
I think people would say the same about a good market economy: it’s not overregulated. If you overregulate a market, you lose the good stuff about capitalism. At the same time, if you underregulate it – if you just say, “Have at it,” like putting a blueberry plant in the ground and saying, “Good luck” – you end up with the mess we have now. You end up with monopolies, oligopolies, and a political system that can be perverted.

Hugh Kent
The example you were going for was, “Do we have a free market in some of our organic food?” No, we don’t. One reason is that to have a free market, you need good information. People have to understand what they are buying. For the invisible hand of the market to work in economics, people need to know what they are getting, how much demand there is for that product, and whether the knowledge about what they’re buying is accurate.

Hugh Kent
Here is where I’m really troubled by hydroponics. Hydroponic producers do not put that on the label – they never do that. They put “organic” on there. The USDA doesn’t step in to say, “Hold on. That’s hydroponic. That’s a soilless system. How can that be organic? That doesn’t meet the regulations. That’s not what organic is about.”

Hugh Kent
We end up with two different products out there. In the public market – the marketplace – people see it as one. They both say “USDA Organic” on the label.

Dave Chapman
But the reason that we have that is because of the influence of the big companies on the government and on the retailers, on both. You’ve got them controlling the sheriff; the sheriff works for the mine, and we also have them controlling the company store, saying, “Hey, we’ve made a deal with so and so to only sell their brand of berries,” for example. They are two different ways of screwing up a free market.

Hugh Kent
The one that we’re dealing with, not just organic farmers, but any farmer who is a family-scale farm – medium, small, or even large now. Everybody, except for the ultra-large, huge farms. The problem we have now is that, regardless of whether they’re organic or whether they’re chemical agriculture, there’s no access to the wholesale market. It’s very, very difficult to get into the wholesale market because there’s so much consolidation in retail.

Hugh Kent
We have a few enormous companies which are controlling the flow of food and the availability of it in a store. You have to know somebody to get to those big stores. There are people in the middle who can try and get you in those stores, but they basically work for the store. The price is always depressed. It’s way, way down there. They are huge stores.

Hugh Kent
Austin Frerick makes this point very well. He says, “Well, the big the big guys want to play with the Goliaths. They want to deal with them.” Increasingly, we’ve got just fewer and fewer places to find our food, and we have them sourcing from fewer and fewer farms, and they’re just bigger and bigger industrial farms. Now we’re losing choice and quality.

Dave Chapman
As Dan Barber told us in that amazing story of his visit to the mid-range organic farmer out in California, he’s being put out of business. This is someone with 3,000 acres. He is being terribly squeezed because the people he’s competing with have 30,000 acres, and they’re selling their organic at a loss because they have far bigger conventional holdings, and that’s the contract that’s important. They make a deal with the store, “I give you the organic at a low price, but I want a better price for my conventional.” It’s a rigged system.

Dave Chapman
Okay, I didn’t even mean to go there. What I meant to do was go to this interesting idea of the invisible hand of nature. If we take aside, for a minute, the business of agriculture, which we all have to endure, you can’t stay in business as a farmer without somehow figuring out how to survive the marketplace. However that might be, whether it’s direct sale, or CSA, or wholesaling, whatever. You somehow have to make a living in order to pay your bills and come back next year.

Dave Chapman
If we set that aside and we just talk about the horticulture of it – the beautiful dance of nature, and the dance of life, and the dance of death, and the science of life, and the science of death – if we look at the invisible hand of nature, and that’s what you’ve been describing, I believe that you don’t do it. You don’t come in with a solution. This whole natural system is always evolving towards stability.

Dave Chapman
Stability means that somebody is not going to come and wipe out all the plants. It might mean you don’t have 1,000 acres of one plant, because that makes you vulnerable to that kind of disruption as well. One thing you told me about was the kind of two halves of taking that product to the marketplace. Here we are back at the marketplace for a minute.

Dave Chapman
What people who are buying organic – the majority of people who buy organic – want to buy organic because of a lack of pesticides. They don’t want to eat poison. Me too. I’m with them. But there’s another huge side of organic farming, which is hidden.

Dave Chapman
It’s the hidden half of nature. You can’t see it. It’s not about the bad things you do; it’s about the good things that you create the environment for them to happen. Am I getting this right? Is this what you meant when you said the other half?

Hugh Kent
Yes. I don’t want to create the impression that we don’t do anything; it’s the level of intervention that we do. What we’ve done is very consciously created an environment and tilted it towards blueberry production. We want this to be the best environment for a blueberry plant, and that’s what we get paid for. Some plants will thrive in different conditions more than others.

Hugh Kent
If we were doing this and we weren’t skewing it in favor of the blueberry, well, we wouldn’t have so much success. It’s not like we’re not actively participating in this. We’re just not intervening any more than we absolutely have to. Same as the free market. We want a functioning free market. We have got to be very careful about over-regulating. We have to be careful about under-regulating it.

Hugh Kent
But I think in terms of contrasting to chemical agriculture, that’s real control. They’re trying to control everything. I think that, ultimately, it doesn’t work. When we talk about the two parts of organic, that’s how I conceive of it. It’s pesticide-free. That’s wonderful. That’s great stuff for everything: for our environment and for our own personal health, because there’s a lot of downstream effects of using poisons.

Hugh Kent
But that misses out the rest of it, which is having a bioactive farm, so you have a lot of life. This natural system includes billions and billions and billions of microbes in a handful of soil. Soil is a barely understood, or only partially understood, phenomenon. It’s a living thing.

Hugh Kent
I’ve told you this before, I have a PhD Ag professor cousin. I asked her, when I was starting to learn about this, I said, “Is it true that we can only identify 10% of the microbes that are in soil?” She says, “No, that’s not fair.” She says, more like 1% – between 10 and 1% somewhere – let alone understanding all the complexity and how they relate to each other, and what the synergies are between the different ones, and how they’re relating to the plant and the mycorrhizae, and what’s going on around the exudates and the root tips.

Hugh Kent
We know that there’s this enormous, enormous universe of activity, and of creatures, and living beings that are surrounding a plant’s root system. Here is the foundation of life on the planet. The whole thing is based on sunlight – photosynthesis. Where would we be without photosynthesis?

Hugh Kent
We have these plants that are in relation with the soil. They couldn’t live without the soil. The soil couldn’t live without them, without the sugars that come down from their photosynthetic process, and what they’re doing with the sun’s energy, water, and carbon dioxide, and what they are creating in the soil. This is all one big, complex system. It’s very poorly understood. It’s miraculous. It’s incredible; it’s life. It’s astonishing.

Hugh Kent
Let’s contrast that with a hydroponic system, which doesn’t even have any soil, or a chemical system where there are chemicals we use which are killing the life in the soil. It’s a whole different process of growing food, but it’s not an organic system. It’s not just a pesticide-free system. That’s what we have learned and heard because it’s been repeated so many times, but it’s also this living soil system.

Hugh Kent
Regenerative is a tough topic now, because I would argue that in the same way that chemical farming only gets half of the equation, and hydroponic gets half of the equation, I think regenerative only gets half of this equation, half of this whole. There’s a two-part whole.

Hugh Kent
Obviously, chemical agriculture works with soil, or most of them do, but they’re heavy on the chemicals. It’s not a biological system. It’s a chemical one. It’s really reliant on these sophisticated, powerful chemistries that kill things. Then we have a hydroponic system, which doesn’t use the chemicals – well, they use a lot of plastics – but they don’t have any soil. They don’t have this vast amount of life surrounding this food that’s being created.

Hugh Kent
Then there’s regenerative, which, of course, we know it doesn’t really mean anything. There’s no legal definition for it. Everybody from Cargill, to Pepsi, to McDonald’s, to General Mills, to Bayer-Monsanto, or more, they’re all considered regenerative now, because they call themselves regenerative. Everybody’s regenerative.

Hugh Kent
But a lot of the so-called regenerative farming systems, yeah, they talk a lot about soil, and they talk a lot about soil health, but they’re not chemical-free. They’re out there using Roundup (glyphosate). A lot of that’s chemical no-till.

Hugh Kent
I keep looking at all these other descriptions for these other systems for growing food and how they’re promoted, and I just am at a loss. Why aren’t we talking about organic more? Of course, one of the reasons we’re not talking about it more is because the USDA is not doing a good job of maintaining its integrity. But that’s another topic, right?

Dave Chapman
Another reason we’re not talking about it more is because a great deal of money is flowing into not talking about it. We’ve seen the explosion of regenerative, and God bless, some of the regenerative farmers are real regenerative farmers. But a great deal of it is not. But who loves it? Pepsi loves it, Bayer-Monsanto loves it, and Syngenta loves it because they can sell their products under that name.

Hugh Kent
And it can mean anything. There’s no definition.

Dave Chapman
It can mean anything for everyone for a little while, until they figure it out, and say, “Well, I can feel good about myself if I say what I’m doing is regenerative.” For some of them, it will be a very profound, deeply held belief. But let’s face it, that is not where that word is going right now. It’s becoming a weasel word.

Dave Chapman
I’m sorry, but it is. I have said I will embrace very much a real regenerative movement, but I haven’t seen it yet. I haven’t seen anybody dare to say, “That’s not me. That’s not what I mean, and I’m going to create a label to prove that.”

Dave Chapman
Regenerative organic, obviously, is. Regenerative organic is essentially our standards. So they chose the word, God bless them. Their standards are not very clear. There are some important differences. Whole farm versus certifying a crop. That’s a huge difference, which doesn’t get talked about much. It’s what you were talking about. Are you creating an ecosystem? Are you creating a product for a brand? Those are very different.

Dave Chapman
Listen, I have a couple things I wanted to throw out, and then anything you want to throw out. One was you said to me, “Our nutritionists have let us down. We are so far away from being able to say this is just better for you. If everyone was forced to own their externalities, we win.” Those are three powerful sentences. Our nutritionists have let us down.

Dave Chapman
My favorite nutritionist in the world is Joan Gussow, and towards the end of her career, she refused to call herself a nutritionist anymore because she agreed nutritionists were letting us down. She didn’t want to be connected or associated with that because she thought it was too complicated.

Dave Chapman
They’re making it into these simple things that were untrue, and couldn’t be measured, and pretending they could be measured. She was truly a deep, organic thinker. We all take our hat off to Joan Gussow. Given that there’s this religion of Nutritionism out there, as Michael Pollan would talk about it, externalities is something that we can look at.

Dave Chapman
What we haven’t figured out is how do we value them? Externalities are the unintended consequences. I made this great beer, but in the process, I polluted the river, and it’s undrinkable water for everyone downstream. That would be an externality.

Hugh Kent
It’s a cost of something that’s not reflected in its price that you pay.

Dave Chapman
That’s right. Now, some externalities, like the one I just mentioned, would have a cost. If the government catches you polluting the water in that direct way with a known toxin, up to a point… There are too many examples of where they aren’t forced to pay. Of course, the whole PFAS tragedy is one. The water is polluted with PFAS by manufacturers, and they’re not forced to pay. Nobody goes to jail for that, even though people die as a result.

Hugh Kent
Which one do you want to talk about?

Dave Chapman
You pick.

Hugh Kent
Well, I’ll try and take them in order. The frustration I have with nutrition is that we don’t seem to have the measuring tools. You have the figures better than I do, but 29,000? We know there are a lot of bioactive compounds. We know that there are secondary metabolites, thousands and thousands of them.

Dave Chapman
I think they’re somewhere close to 200,000 now, although they don’t have names for most of them, but they know they exist.

Hugh Kent
A little bit like soil. We don’t really know what’s going on there.

Dave Chapman
I love the name nutritional dark matter.

Hugh Kent
Yeah, there we go. Call it that – nutritional dark matter. We’re not measuring nutritional dark matter. We’re just measuring a few simplistic things. We’re saying, “Okay, it’s got this much calcium or this much vitamin C.” We’re just not good at it. I think what’s more compelling is to see the whole population and see how they’re doing.

Dave Chapman
If we look around us and we say, “Well, how are humans doing physically? How’s it going with the food that we’re eating?” I don’t think it’s going well. Personally, I don’t believe that you can supplement yourself to health as well as probably nature could do it for you if you had access to good food. That’s what the frustration is. I think a lot of people feel that way. I think we’re now in a position where we have really lost a lot of freedom of choice.

Dave Chapman
A lot of us would spend more money on better food if we could find it. It’s getting really hard to find. We’re feeling that all the time because we have people really caring about nutrition come to us, because we’re getting to be a scarce commodity. We have professional athletes come to us, chefs are coming to us. They want good flavor, they want good nutrition, and the food’s getting worse.

Dave Chapman
I’m frustrated that we don’t seem to be able to measure this in isolation. We can’t look at a piece of food and say, “Well, that’s really good food and that isn’t,” but we’re saying we can. We were being a little bit too aggressive and optimistic, maybe a little arrogant about our measuring tools, and not deferring enough to just good natural food. What was Joan’s line? “I trust cows more than scientists. That’s why I eat butter instead of margarine?”

Dave Chapman
I think it was “I trust cows more than chemists.”

Hugh Kent
Yeah, that’s right. I’m sorry, what was the second one you’re talking about?

Dave Chapman
The second one was the question of how do we as human beings deal with the fact that these externalities get passed off and the people who are creating very inexpensive products? Cheap food is a religion, and understandably, because people have to have food, and often they don’t have resources. They can’t afford good food. They have to have food. They want to buy the cheapest food they can.

Dave Chapman
For sure, if you want to create political problems for yourself, have the price of food go up if you’re a national-level politician. That is not popular. But to create cheap food always, it’s done at the expense of other things. Usually, the first thing it’s done at the expense of is the people who work in the food system. That’s the easiest to just abuse.

Dave Chapman
I just interviewed the Coalition of Immokalee Workers yesterday, and they were so clear about this. The first thing, and almost sometimes the only thing, a farmer can do is try and screw down on the labor because they can’t control the cost of inputs, or tractors, or anything except maybe the cost of the people who work in those fields.

Hugh Kent
The other thing they do is go out of business. Oh, man, if people understood what’s going on. This is happening at a very alarming rate. We see it locally. Farms are turning into one of two things. They’re turning into sod farms to grow lawns for other farms that have turned into developments, or they’re turning into agritourism.

Hugh Kent
They’re becoming these quasi-theme parks for nostalgia – for the things that we’ve lost now, or the real farms that we’re losing. This is accelerating all over the country. It’s this really extraordinary time we’re in. That’s the other thing they can do to create cheap food. But we’re just importing more and more and more from countries that really do abuse labor.

Dave Chapman
Yeah, and the environment. The environmental laws are always weaker.

Hugh Kent
There’s huge costs to cheap food. They’re just not reflected in the food cost.

Dave Chapman
So here we are. We’re citizens of, certainly, one of the most powerful countries in the history of the world. What can we do? I don’t mean to hit you with this impossible question, but do you have thoughts about the direction that we can go? How do we talk to each other about this? Do we band together? Do we start up old-fashioned food buying clubs? Do we find the factory farms out in the world and order direct from them?

Hugh Kent
You didn’t tell me you’d asked me this one.

Dave Chapman
I didn’t tell you, I know. I’m sorry. It just came out. Forgive me.

Hugh Kent
Some things are encouraging. Go to that for a second. There seems to be a lot more awareness of the problem anyway. There are a lot of recommendations even from sources that I wouldn’t have expected. They are saying, “Go out and buy organic food.” One of the things that’s troubling, though, that misses the whole problem we have, is that we have the USDA calling hydroponic organic. That does a couple of things. Well, it does many things.

Hugh Kent
One of the things it does is confuse these two types of farming systems. They are two very different foods that they produce, and saying they’re the same thing. When somebody makes a recommendation, “Go buy more organic food,” that’s what you need to do. That’s what the country needs to do. We need to be healthier.

Hugh Kent
Well, this is a mass experiment. Is something grown in a liquid feed without any soil the same thing? We start eating just that? What are we going to be in 20 years? I don’t know. I’m not too optimistic about it.

Hugh Kent
The other thing that’s happening is when they allow hydroponics. Somebody goes to the store, and they get an organic blueberry or an organic tomato, and it’s a Hydro One, and they eat it. I haven’t tasted a good hydro berry ever. I don’t know how you feel about hydroponic tomatoes. You’re the expert there, but the ones I’ve had are no good at all.

Hugh Kent
So if I’m somebody who does something else for a living – which is what most people do – I go to the store and I buy that organic because it doesn’t say hydro on there, and I eat it and go, “Why should I spend extra money on that? That doesn’t taste any good. It doesn’t taste any good. It’s probably not that great for me. My body should be attracted to something that’s flavorful because it knows what it needs.”

Hugh Kent
That’s another problem that’s being created. That’s putting a lot of real organic farms out of business. I think we’re looking for this stuff, but a lot of things are conspiring to keep people from having the freedom of actually finding it, including that it’s becoming less and less available, so you just don’t have that choice. Every day there’s less and less of it out there.

Hugh Kent
The other thing that’s conspiring is what we talked about before, which is this huge consolidation in the marketplace, where we have a fewer huge retailers, and they’re buying from huge, huge, huge industrial farms, which are increasingly south of the border, exploiting or taking advantage of dollar-an-hour labor and lack environmental oversight, and governments down there that will subsidize them and come in tariff-free, and so here we go. That’s what we’re going to get.

Hugh Kent
With all of that, making it an increasing problem to grow and find this kind of food to eat, well, what do we do? I think the wholesale system is totally broken for anything other than the companies that have enormous leverage in that system, where they can say, “Okay, if you don’t buy from me, you don’t get any because I control 70% of the market,” or whatever. Well, wholesale works for them because there is no competition.

Hugh Kent
But it’s really a closed system for medium and small-scale farms and for some large farms now – increasingly for large farms. So what do you do? We have people who want good food, and we have some farms still producing good food. How do they get together?

Hugh Kent
After realizing what was going on, my only thought was, “Well, I have to get direct to my customers, and we have to go from 100% wholesale farm, which we were five years ago, to 100% retail farm, which we are now.” It took only five years. I’m convinced that the way shipping works, the way retail purchasing works now, and the way delivery works, this is very viable.

Hugh Kent
This is a viable way for people to get food, and who knows what’s delivery going to be like in 10 years or 20 years from now? Is everything going to be dropped at our houses by drones? We don’t even have brick-and-mortar stores. We don’t know. I thought so for us, and it turned out to be true. We’re in a position where we can find our customers. We can have an e-commerce business, and we’re entirely e-commerce.

Hugh Kent
We ship 85% of our product through UPS and 15% pick-up at the farm. We have very loyal customers, and it’s really a gratifying way to work and to know that you’re feeding people who want this food, and you know you’re feeding them really good food, and they love it. What a wonderful way to live and to hear from your customers say, “Thank you for what you’re doing.”

Hugh Kent
It’s really different than working for a distributor, a wholesaler, or a big store, where the only thing you hear is, “Hey, I didn’t like that. We can get it a nickel cheaper from Mexico,” or some sort of strategic complaint about the quality, just because they think they can get you because your tons of product are now in New Jersey or someplace else where you can’t recover it. You can’t resell it; it’s a perishable product.

Hugh Kent
You go through that enough times, then you just say, “Well, I’m either done or I’m going to go to the people who want this.” Increasingly, I think that’s what we’ve got. We’ve got farmers who want to grow this way, but can’t, and we’ve got customers who want this food but can’t get it.

Dave Chapman
All right. King Grove Organic Farm is very inspiring in helping to create that alternative. It’ll be your blueberry season soon enough, maybe that’s when we’ll release this interview and remind people that blue surf is up. So thank you.

Hugh Kent
Well, not not just us.

Dave Chapman
I know, not just you…

Hugh Kent
There are so many great farms that are doing this now. Real Organic Project has created a system for people to find them. Boy, when I’ve used it – and I use it quite a bit – I get Full Belly Farm’s nuts, I get their almond butter, I get meat from Glen Elsinga, Alder Spring Ranch.

Hugh Kent
We collect a bunch of different things that way, and it’s always the best food we eat. The real organic stuff is just… You don’t need to have a laboratory; you just need to taste it. It’s food like I remember when I was a kid.

Dave Chapman
Absolutely. I want to ask you one last question. I’m sorry we didn’t get to a whole bunch of things, and I didn’t tell you about this one either. There’s a thing called rewilding. Rewilding is the idea that if you grow very intensive agriculture, and typically, the champions of this – George Monbiot, Michael Grunwald – are saying you do it chemically.

Dave Chapman
They’re saying, we don’t love chemical, but it has to be super, uber-intensive, and so we feed more people off an acre. Then, as a result of that, we let the other acres that were being farmed less intensively go back to forest or grassland, to their natural ecosystem. This is all about climate, about how we can sequester more carbon. A natural system, a natural forest, will…

Dave Chapman
It’s also called land sparing. Apparently, that’s a term that’s used in academia now. I bring this up… So coming up on September 19th, at Churchtown Dairy, we will have our annual Real Organic Conference. This year, one of the sessions will be about an hour long. It will be a debate between Michael Grunwald, who is a great champion of this – he’s written now like six op-eds for the New York Times about it – and Tim Bowles, who’s a professor of agroecology from Berkeley.

Dave Chapman
I saw them do this debate a year ago, and I was like, “Whoa, I want to have that happen for us.” And so it is. They both agreed to it. It’s going to be a lot of fun. It’s going to be really interesting. These people have been sharpening their swords for a while. They’re very thoughtful, very bright people.

Dave Chapman
I wanted to ask your opinion about this. Do you have any thoughts about land sparing in order to rewild? Does that make sense to you? Like, we’re going to grow this chemically and use the science of death in order to get the yield a little bit higher?

Hugh Kent
No. Three things occur to me about that, if I can remember all three of them, and they were popping in my head.

Dave Chapman
I didn’t prep you on this.

Hugh Kent
Three main things. So one of them, I think, is like man over here, nature over here. That’s what we’re doing: man over here, nature over here. That troubles me. Number one, because I don’t think it works at all. You can’t contain the chemical farming system on the chemical farms. That’s the problem. The pollution is rampant. If you really own up to what it takes to grow chemically, and you factor all that in, no, it doesn’t work.

Hugh Kent
First of all, we’re going to deplete all the extractive resources that we have in order to make those systems work. It’s really finite, and we’re almost at the end. Then there’s all of the pollution, and that doesn’t stay in one place. That gets in the groundwater, it gets in people’s bodies, it gets in the rainwater. How are you going to keep the rain over here and the rain over here – those rewilded areas?

Hugh Kent
You’re going to keep the glyphosate out of the rainwater that’s going over into the preserve? That doesn’t make any sense to me. You can’t contain it. It’s bad for people’s health. The people over in these intensive agriculture areas—are we just going to give up on them? They don’t get to have a good life, and they don’t get to be healthy and cancer-free. What about the people who eat that kind of food? Are we going to be healthy if we continue eating that kind of food? I don’t think so, not even close.

Hugh Kent
It doesn’t work because you can’t contain it. That would be my first argument. I also argue that it defeats the good agriculture that I was talking about, which integrates the whole biological system. If you’re going to separate these things, you no longer have the soil, water, woodlands, wetlands, and wildlife that are going to support real good farming. You can’t separate them. You don’t separate nature and good agriculture. They work together.

Hugh Kent
I’d also argue the third one: it’s not really a planet I want to live on. I think you’ll deprive yourself of a lot of what’s beautiful in life if you live that way. I want to live around nature. I want to be integrated into it. I’m part of it. I’m a biological being living in a biological system.

Hugh Kent
We keep forgetting that. We are not chemical beings; we’re biological beings. This is biological farming we’re talking about. An organic farm is biological farming. A philosophy of living on the planet where we recognize that we’re part of a biological system. I think it’s insanity to think otherwise.

Hugh Kent
I think that’s the path towards: “Let’s abuse this planet. Let’s use it up. Let’s ruin it. Let’s get off this planet. Let’s go to Mars. Let’s go out into the universe. Let’s be the adolescent vandals that go out into the universe. Haven’t got our shit together, so we’re going to go out now. We’re going to do the same to other planets we can colonize. We’re just going to be the scourge of the universe?” That’s our ambition. I don’t think that’s good.

Hugh Kent
I would much prefer that we recognize where we are on this incredibly beautiful planet that we have. There’s so much life here, and there’s so much going on we don’t understand. We’re just starting to understand the sophistication, the communication between these other species. We’re just starting to understand how plants work. We’re just starting to understand some of these huge, ineffable questions of existence and our existence, consciousness.

Hugh Kent
We’re starting to understand some of these things. What’s next? Probably a little bit of the afterlife. Maybe it will get to be known to us. If we stay put and try to be healthy and work with where we’ve been placed, to me, that’s a much more beautiful way to live than man over here, nature over here. Ultimately, that’s man planted over here, nature planted over there – it just doesn’t make any sense to me.

Dave Chapman
Yeah, all right. Hugh, my good friend, thank you very much.