Episode #297
Kendra Klein: Pesticides, Power, And The Future Of Organic

Kendra Klein has spent the past decade studying pesticides and organic farming at Friends of the Earth. Her work has shown that pesticides are not simply an agricultural input problem; they’re also a public health problem, shaped by powerful companies that help define regulation and influence the way eaters think about farming. Kendra sat down with us to explain why she believes organic remains one of our clearest alternatives, even as the newer language of “regenerative” agriculture is increasingly embraced by corporations that continue to rely on herbicides and other synthetic chemicals.

Kendra Klein’s interview has been edited and condensed for clarity:

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Kendra Klein was interviewed by Dave Chapman in the late summer of 2026:

Dave Chapman 0:00
Welcome to the Real Organic Podcast. I’m talking to Kendra Klein today. Kendra is a senior scientist at Friends of the Earth. Kendra, I’ve known you for a long time because I met you in those early battles with the National Organic Standards Board. You were one of many people who got up and testified.

Dave Chapman 0:22
We’ve started talking again more recently, and I’m really impressed by the work that you and Friends of the Earth have done around pesticides. I thought we might start there. You’re quite an activist, so could you tell me what inspired your work? What are you focused on? What are your thoughts about where we’re at with that? Are things getting better, or are they getting worse?

Kendra Klein 0:49
Just some brief thoughts on everything. I’m, first, very happy to be here. Thank you so much for inviting me to join. You asked what inspires my work, and I have been working on pesticides at Friends of the Earth for the past 10 years. That really started long ago when I was two.

Kendra Klein 0:58
My mom got breast cancer, and again when I was 20, she had breast cancer. As a 20-year-old in college in an environmental studies program, it really started me asking questions about why there are rising rates of cancer and so many health problems, and learning about all of these industrial chemicals, including pesticides, that we are ubiquitously exposed to.

Kendra Klein 1:46
That, through many turns, has led to work like what I’m doing at Friends of the Earth, where I’m really bringing together that perspective on chemicals and our health, what can we do about it, and organic as a really critical piece of the solution.

Dave Chapman 2:07
I’ve seen a lot of organic farmers who became organic farmers because their families were touched by cancer from the pesticides that they were using in the fields. Of course, many of us are not farmers but are still touched by cancer because of the toxins in our world, in our food, in our water, and in our air. How much of your work at Friends of the Earth is focused on agriculture?

Kendra Klein 2:40
I’m on our food and agriculture team, so all of my work. I talk about pesticides in relation to pollinator health. When I first came on, that was really a key part of the work. We have a very large base of members who care deeply about bees, as I think many of us do, so pesticide harm to pollinators.

Kendra Klein 3:06
But over the past 10 years, I’ve really expanded the research and the storytelling I’m doing to talk about pesticide harm to soil life, harm to our own health, and again, why organic and ecological farming is a really clear solution to those harms.

Kendra Klein 3:42
The thing about pesticides is that they very elegantly highlight the interconnectedness of the web of life because it’s the same chemicals that are driving declines in pollinators, that are harming other wildlife, and that are harming ourselves and our children.

Kendra Klein 3:48
Any work that we do, or whatever is driving each of us to really address that, is going to result in benefits across the system. That is so much of why I love working on agriculture because there are real solutions. We’re not just talking about what’s wrong.

Dave Chapman 4:10
That’s right. I think organic farming is a way of farming that works, that we can grow good food, and we can get good yields. People can make a good living, and it does not involve the use of all of those chemicals. It’s an interesting conversation about why, given all that, the chemicals are still so dominant in our agriculture. Is that something you want to talk about?

Kendra Klein 4:41
Sure, yeah. I think it points directly to the power of the pesticide industry. I think people are very accustomed to thinking about the power of big oil and big tobacco, but we don’t talk about big pesticide in that same way. Yet, these companies similarly are destroying our health and destroying the environment for their own profit. By some measures, they are even more powerful in Washington, D.C., and have influence over the agencies meant to regulate them.

Kendra Klein 5:17
We have the Environmental Protection Agency, which ostensibly is regulating the pesticide industry to protect our health and the environment but is failing entirely at that job. Part of that is because of the deep influence that the pesticide industry has over the EPA. There’s been excellent investigative work that has uncovered that. There’s both that real influence over policy.

Kendra Klein 5:50
Then I think there’s also the influence over our minds and how we think about agriculture, and the fact that the pesticide industry has so thoroughly shaped people’s understanding of themselves as standing between humanity and starvation, and that we need pesticides to “feed the world.”

Kendra Klein 6:14
I think even other environmental groups, even progressive policymakers, and others who could and should be allies in this fight don’t readily take on pesticides as a problem because they don’t understand that that’s a marketing ploy. It’s not a scientific argument.

Dave Chapman 6:37
Yeah, absolutely. I’m going to quote Michael Pollan a couple of times because I think that these are good jumping-off points. One, he and I were talking about regenerative agriculture, and he said, “Well, organic was about pesticides, but regenerative is about climate.” There were several things about that that I disagreed with. One is that somehow he was acting as if we had resolved the issue with pesticides, but I believe it’s only gotten much worse.

Dave Chapman 7:18
He was talking about basically a period of 15 years ago, and organic was coming up. I think it’s true that the popular response to organic is that it was farming without pesticides, but I don’t think that is an accurate way to define organic.

Dave Chapman 7:38
I think organic was about soil health. It was really a symptom of soil health that you don’t need all those pesticides. Are we doing better on pesticides, say, in the last 20 years?

Kendra Klein 7:57
No. I agree completely – the origins of the organic movement go back many decades, of course. Your audience, I think, knows this more than most, long before we had a federal standard for organic. The basis of that is and was soil health, and healthy farming and healthy bodies. Lady Eve Balfour said, “Healthy soil, healthy plants, healthy people.”

Kendra Klein 8:27
I think in the public mind, people’s understanding of the value of organic is deeply linked to avoiding pesticide exposure. I think what’s driving the growth in the organic market is people who don’t want to be exposed and people who don’t want to expose their children through the food they’re eating. Organic is so much more.

Kendra Klein 8:50
Part of the work that I have been doing is lifting up the science that shows that organic… We’ve got decades of research on organic farming showing that it results in regenerative outcomes. Now it’s the new buzzword. Everybody’s excited about the new baby on the block – regenerative – not understanding that we have regenerative farming.

Kendra Klein 9:14
It’s called organic. It’s the original regenerative, and the science shows us that the ideas we have about what we want – the healthy soil, the reduced climate impact, and the thriving biodiversity – come from organic farming systems. You asked me something else, but I…

Dave Chapman 9:41
No, that was beautiful. There were two things that struck me about that comment of his, and you answered both of them. One was the idea that somehow regenerative agriculture, as it’s called, is the response to climate change, and organic is not.

Dave Chapman 9:57
I disagreed with that. I think organic was not intended as a response to climate change because I don’t think in 1940 very many people were thinking there was such a thing as climate change. Although it had begun, I believe that, but it just wasn’t part of our awareness.

Dave Chapman 10:16
As it turns out, I believe that the very same things that create a living soil and create health for people also create health for the climate, and there’s a lot of research about that too.

Kendra Klein 10:22
There is. This growing momentum behind regenerative as a concept, I think, is driven by urgency around climate change. For people who understand organic as the farming methods that give us regenerative ag, they’re getting hung up on, “But organic hasn’t taken us there quickly enough. Therefore, we need this new concept of regenerative.”

Kendra Klein 11:10
To me, that’s a policy question. This is one of my biggest challenges in helping people understand: don’t throw the organic baby out for this vision you have of regenerative saving us from climate change, because we have something showing us the way. The reason why organic hasn’t grown as it could is because our public policies entirely prop up industrial, chemical-intensive agriculture.

Kendra Klein 11:44
We could flip those policies on their head. They could be supporting more and more farmers to farm organically and to farm truly regeneratively. But it’s been an uphill battle from the very beginning. I look at it and say, “Look at what organic has achieved against all odds. If we want that regenerative future that people are envisioning, then we need the policy changes that really support farmers to make that transition.”

Dave Chapman 12:16
Kendra, could you talk about what those policy changes are? What are the policies that favor chemical agriculture? We know that there’s a tremendous lobbying machine pushing our government to do that, and I suspect our government is essentially helpless in the face of that onslaught. There’s just so much money being spent.

Dave Chapman 12:44
As Chellie Pingree said, there’s more money spent on big food and farming than there is spent on defense. That’s a lot of money. But what are the policies that they’re actually persuading our government to fund that do favor chemical agriculture and disadvantage organic agriculture?

Kendra Klein 13:09
As we speak, the Farm Bill is being negotiated, and ostensibly we negotiate that bill every five years. Now I think we’re in year seven or so, trying to get it across the line. The Farm Bill, right now, as it’s written, is like a love letter to big ag and big pesticide.

Kendra Klein 13:32
The system is set such that commodity farmers growing industrial corn and soy are stuck in a system where, for them to stay afloat financially, they need to depend on the subsidies and insurance – the way crops are insured – to bring that money in, and then the money goes out the door to Bayer, Syngenta, and other input producers, and there’s the farmer stuck in the middle.

Kendra Klein 14:10
We could be investing in our conservation agriculture programs like EQIP and CRP. Money for those is being slashed right now in the proposed Farm Bill. We could be spending much more to grow organic, to help farmers transition, and to help expand cost share to cover the cost of certification. There’s so much.

Kendra Klein 14:41
What we’ve seen in this Farm Bill, and really over the past decades of farm policy, but especially in the past couple of years, is funding for conservation agriculture being stripped as the influence of the pesticide industry remains unchecked in Washington.

Dave Chapman 15:03
When we talk about the Farm Bill, most people’s eyes glaze over, and they go, “I don’t know anything about that, and I don’t really care about what EQIP is, and I don’t care about these strange programs which start to get rattled off. It has nothing to do with me.”

Dave Chapman 15:23
Of course, I think it has a great deal to do with them, but they don’t see the challenge that faces all of us here. How should they look at this? The Farm Bill is really the food bill, and the food bill is really our world.

Kendra Klein 15:48
Right. This is what sets the rules of the game about what food is grown, how it’s grown, and what options are available to us as eaters. This is why organic does tend to be more expensive. This is the bill that is setting the rules that continue to make the healthiest, safest food more expensive and make the ultra-processed, least healthy food the cheapest.

Dave Chapman 16:23
Let’s explain that. How does the Farm Bill make ultra-processed food cheap? I agree with you, but I want you to explain to people why, for some poor person who’s struggling with two jobs to feed their kids, it’s cheaper to go to the store and get some not very good food than it is to go to the store and get some carrots and broccoli. Why is that?

Kendra Klein 16:52
The bulk of the funding in the Farm Bill is funneled into what we call commodity crops. I grew up in the midst of southern Wisconsin, to be clear, where there are acres and acres of corn and soy. Then, of course, as you move down and across the plains, we’re growing roughly 180 million acres of corn and soy in the U.S. on prime farmland. Almost none of that is food.

Dave Chapman 17:27
We’re not talking about corn on the cob. We’re not talking about tofu.

Kendra Klein 17:33
As a kid, I didn’t know that. Surrounded by all this corn, I’m like, “Wow, people like to eat a lot of corn,” and later I learned that this is not about food. This is producing inputs for animal feed, a very inefficient way to feed ourselves, given the number of calories it takes to produce a calorie of animal meat. It is ethanol fueling our cars, and it is the ingredients of ultra-processed food. It’s high-fructose corn syrup and sorbitol.

Kendra Klein 18:16
We are using billions of our taxpayer dollars to prop up that system that is not growing food, while the farmers growing the real food, what we call specialty crops – the almonds, peaches, and apples – and the farmers growing the organic food are getting just pennies and don’t have the sort of financial safety net.

Kendra Klein 18:47
It is financially riskier to grow organically. That is what makes that highly processed food cheap, because it’s being subsidized with our taxpayer dollars.

Dave Chapman 19:05
How do they subsidize it? What is the actual mechanism? Do they write the farmer a check for what…?

Kendra Klein 19:06
For this, you’re going to have to bring in my policy counterpart at Friends of the Earth. I’m part of a team of people, and I am not the person on Capitol Hill who gets the ins and outs of it.

Dave Chapman 19:19
All right. I know one way that they do it is with crop insurance, and basically they’re guaranteeing the corn grower or the soy producer a certain income per bushel. It’s high enough that they can stay in business even if nobody wants to buy it, and even if the production is very poor that year.

Dave Chapman 19:43
The reason nobody wants to buy it is because they grow more corn than anybody knows what to do with. Would you like to speak about ethanol, or is that something that you’d prefer not to talk about?

Kendra Klein 19:55
I can speak at a very high level. Again, it would be somebody else who could get into the nitty-gritty, but at a high level… Funny enough, I did a paper like 15 years ago as part of my graduate studies. I was very curious about ethanol. Maybe it was 20 years ago, to be honest.

Kendra Klein 20:20
Having grown up in Wisconsin and seeing the advent of corn being used as a biofuel, I was just digging into whether this was sitting on top of a figment of our imagination or a well-produced myth that this is an environmentally conscious or sustainable way to fuel our cars or anything.

Kendra Klein 20:52
The amount of energy that goes into producing ethanol makes it an absolute environmental loss. So this really is about the Farm Bureau. This is about Big Ag seeing another outlet for this overproduction of corn.

Dave Chapman 21:19
Do you happen to know what percentage of the American corn crop goes to ethanol?

Kendra Klein 21:24
No, do you?

Dave Chapman 21:25
I do. It’s over half, which is amazing when you think about it. You think of those miles of corn growing in Iowa, and then you think half of that is going to make ethanol, which takes more oil to produce than you get as a benefit from burning it.

Dave Chapman 21:50
I think it’s really a scam created in order to create a market for all this surplus corn that we’re paying farmers to grow, and we have no use for it. We don’t have anything to do with it. Nobody wants to buy it. They make more than they can feed to animals in confinement. It’s just a tremendous problem.

Dave Chapman 22:10
It’s really fascinating to me that we live in, and we are part of… I can’t say we built a system. I will say that a system grew and evolved in which we are paying a lot of money to grow food we don’t want, that is not good for us, and that is not good for the land. It’s so insane.

Kendra Klein 22:30
Then think about how perverse it is that arguments about feeding the world are what are being used to continue to prop that system up. I’ve talked to other environmental advocates who are not in the food space, who don’t see it. There’s a lot of education that needs to be done about really how perverse this system is.

Kendra Klein 22:56
The destruction of the natural systems that we need to grow food abounds, and so it’s not just that that system is not growing food; it’s that that system – the monoculture, industrial, chemical-intensive agriculture, benefiting these corporations enormously – is very profitable for them and is essentially sawing off the branch we’re sitting on.

Kendra Klein 23:23
It is destroying the living soil, the pollinators and other beneficial insects, the water resources, and the stable climate that we need in order to continue to grow food into the future. The truth is that the expert consensus internationally is that we need to rapidly move away from pesticide-intensive agriculture if we want long-term food security.

Kendra Klein 23:50
There’s that incredible disconnect between people’s understanding of “Well, this is high-yield, this is modern agriculture,” versus “We need to get off this train if we want to be able to feed ourselves into the future.”

Dave Chapman 24:19
Let’s talk about some of the costs of being on that train. A lot of pesticides are used in America, and, of course, in the rest of the world too. But America’s got to be somewhat special. I think we’re well over a billion pounds of pesticides annually now.

Dave Chapman 24:41
I’m curious if you could explain, Kendra, because you know more about this than most people I’ve ever heard, and I have heard you talk about it, the different ways in which those pesticides damage us and our planet.

Dave Chapman 24:58
There’s the impact on soil and the organisms in the soil. There’s the impact on insects, both friend and foe, and there’s the impact on mammals, including us. They’re all real. Those are all real impacts. As you say, we almost take it for granted. Certainly, those farmers – at the moment, we’re talking about the commodity farmers, the people who are growing the feed that feeds the animals, mostly in confinement.

Dave Chapman 25:31
We can talk about, say, California in a minute because that’s a whole other farm ecosystem. But what are the costs of using all those pesticides? By pesticides, just to say, for people who aren’t completely familiar with it, we’re talking about insecticides and fungicides. The one that has most exploded in the last 20 years is herbicides. The sales of herbicides have gone through the roof.

Dave Chapman 26:03
Could you talk about some of the problems with these substances being poured on our food and on our land?

Kendra Klein 26:11
I’ll start with human health because that’s really what brought me into the work, concerns about human health. I think it’s what brings a lot of people into some understanding of food and caring about how it’s grown. We’re seeing right now such a powerful wave of – I won’t say a wave of interest or concern about pesticides and health because that has long been there – pesticides and health being a prominent part of our national conversation.

Kendra Klein 26:12
People are really talking about pesticides and health. I could give you the long list of health problems that pesticides are associated with. When I say associated, I mean mountains of scientific evidence – enormous bodies of scientific evidence – linking pesticides to neurodevelopmental harm in children.

Kendra Klein 26:16
Increased risk of ADHD, learning disabilities, and autism; to fertility problems and troubles with infertility; to declining sperm counts; to birth defects; to neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s; and, of course, to cancers.

Kendra Klein 27:45
Many commonly used pesticides, still commonly used in the U.S., we know are associated with increased risk of cancer. Just to name one recent study, it found that people living in regions with intensive pesticide use have an increased risk of cancer on par with smoking. These are real and I can list all this… Pardon?

Dave Chapman 28:14
Could you repeat that?

Kendra Klein 28:15
There are people living in areas with intensive pesticide use. So many communities in Iowa, as you’ve named, have an increased risk of cancer on par with smoking. But this is not a chosen risk. You can choose to smoke or not, but most of us can’t up and leave where we live because we’re in an agriculturally intensive area. Childhood cancers are on the rise. That’s been linked to pesticide exposure.

Kendra Klein 28:51
Then one other thing in my long list, which is kind of divorced from the actual human, lived emotional and physical cost of it. I do want to just touch on that: endocrine disruption. We could call it hormone disruption. These are the chemical signals that travel through our bodies – the hormones at incredibly small levels – that control our metabolism and our immune system. They’re really regulating so much of how our bodies function.

Kendra Klein 29:21
What we now understand is that many industrial chemicals, including over 50 pesticides, are endocrine disruptors. They can mimic, block, or scramble our own hormone messages and therefore disrupt our body’s healthy functioning. I’ll give you just one example. This is very simplistic, but estrogen is a hormone that tells breast cells to divide. There are pesticides and other industrial chemicals that are estrogenic – xenoestrogens, fake estrogens in our body.

Kendra Klein 30:08
You may get too much of that message: divide, divide, divide, divide. What is unchecked cell division? That’s cancer. Just a very simplistic look at why we’re very concerned about hormone disruption. It’s also linked to increased risk of diabetes and obesity. So many of the health problems that people are increasingly struggling with are associated, in part, with possible exposure to pesticides.

Kendra Klein 30:45
Again, I just want to say we can talk about it in the abstract, but just to think about people in our lives, and not to say, for example, that my mother’s cancer has anything to do with pesticides. I don’t know that. But we each know in our families and in our lives that this is not an abstract problem.

Kendra Klein 31:08
I think that’s why we’re seeing this incredibly vocal anger about pesticides in our food system, because it’s taking an enormous toll on people, and it’s one that we did not consent to or benefit from.

Kendra Klein 31:22
There are companies that are literally poisoning us for profit. I always hesitate to say that because it sounds hyperbolic. But it’s true when you step back that we are being poisoned through our daily food and, for people in rural communities, farmers, and farmworkers, through their livelihoods, for distant companies’ profit, because the science is very clear on the harm.

Kendra Klein 31:54
There are over 70 pesticides that have been banned in other countries, including the European Union, Brazil, and China, because the science is clear, that are still being used in the U.S. and being used in large amounts. Tens of millions of pounds of pesticides banned in other countries are being used on our food.

Dave Chapman 32:20
We’re in trouble when we’re behind China on banning toxins in our lives because it’s a pretty polluted place. So many places to go here, but one that I want to make sure that we do stop by and visit is children. I heard a podcast, “Doctor Mike,” and he had a woman, Dr. Love, who was a researcher. Maybe you’ve heard of her. She writes nasty things about people like me, and probably about people like you.

Dave Chapman 33:03
She was very convincing that there is no science to back up the things that you just said, that this is just people trying to scare other people. In fact, she was critical about the health risks of the amount of anxiety that what you just said could create, and that’s bad for people’s health. I think that that’s such an industry dodge to say we shouldn’t be talking about this, and that the research is confusing, and we shouldn’t be misled.

Dave Chapman 33:36
But it’s not confusing. It’s just there’s a lot of it. There’s a lot of research, and it is uncomfortable to learn that these things that are, as you say, ubiquitous in our environment are dangerous to us and our kids. Let’s talk about our kids.

Dave Chapman 33:56
I told you I had a conversation with Chuck Benbrook. He’s talking about the incredibly greater sensitivity of a young person, never mind somebody who’s in utero, to these pollutants, these toxins. Could you talk about that?

Kendra Klein 34:14
Yeah. I want to call out that it’s related to a couple of dodges – I like that word – that happen. One is, it’s a very small level. Like the residues on food, they’re very small. Number two, EPA says they’re safe.

Dave Chapman 34:34
Those are the two things she said. You got it right.

Kendra Klein 34:42
Let’s talk about all that. Chuck is right. Chuck is a leader in this work, and someone I have learned from, along with many other scientists who have looked at the incredible sensitivity of infants in utero and young children to chemical exposures. We talk about this as windows of exposure that matter differently as we age. Adolescence is another very important window of exposure.

Kendra Klein 35:15
During these windows, our bodies are developing so rapidly and are responding to such intricate chemical signals from mom, for babies in utero, and in our own hormonal systems as we develop. Such infinitesimally small levels of exposure can result in lifetime impacts. Those windows differ.

Kendra Klein 35:48
One of the bodies of research – let’s just take chemicals out of it – that has really clued people into these windows of exposure is on hunger and famine, and looking back retrospectively at women who were pregnant at particular stages of their pregnancy during a famine and how that had lifetime impacts on their children’s metabolism.

Kendra Klein 36:15
The same is true for many chemicals, where, during particular windows of exposure, small exposures can really matter. They can derail that developing system. That addresses, “Okay, it’s small.” Another point there, and this ties into why our safe levels set by the EPA are really problematic, is because none of us is exposed to one pesticide at a time. Those safe levels, what’s allowed on our food, are determined one pesticide at a time. That’s how they determine it.

Kendra Klein 36:54
Yet we’re all eating a toxic cocktail. There are over 40 different pesticides used on apples. This is U.S. Department of Agriculture data that shows us this. I’m not saying a given apple has 40 residues on it, but yes, a given apple, or a given strawberry, will have multiple residues just on that fruit. Then you think about a person’s entire diet.

Dave Chapman 37:24
Something that I think Chuck told me is that when the EPA tests, they’re not testing a pesticide; they’re testing one active ingredient. They’ll test glyphosate, but then there are all these carrier agents, these spreaders-stickers, these things that help it disperse, and they’re not testing the effect even of the actual labeled pesticide on human health.

Dave Chapman 37:50
They’re testing, “Okay, does glyphosate have this?” But some of the things that are part of that formulation can be worse than the actual active ingredient itself. Never mind the combination of this pesticide with that pesticide and that pesticide.

Kendra Klein 38:06
Exactly. The so-called inert ingredients that are not in public view in any way, shape, or form. Yeah, there’s so many levels to the limitations of EPA telling us what is “safe.”

Dave Chapman 38:25
What’s with the EPA? They are scientists. Don’t they understand that all these formulations have an impact? It’s not just one ingredient, that they’re cumulative often, and that your body is storing them and storing different chemicals. Why is it that our regulatory agency is so lame?

Kendra Klein 38:46
What’s with the EPA? There are scientists at the EPA who absolutely get it. Do they have the power to do anything about it? No. Folks could check out the book “Whitewash” by Carey Gillam. It’s a true account of Monsanto’s influence over the EPA and over science, and of manufacturing doubt about whether glyphosate is safe or not. Really, it’s such an excellent look, through the story of glyphosate and Monsanto, at answering that question, “What’s with the EPA?”

Kendra Klein 39:30
Another report folks could check out is called “Merchants of Poison: How Monsanto Sold the World on a Toxic Pesticide.” The primary author is Stacy Malkan at U.S. Right to Know, and Friends of the Earth and Anna Lappé also helped contribute to that. There’s so much good work that’s been done, including investigative journalism by Sharon Lerner, answering what’s wrong with the EPA.

Kendra Klein 39:54
The answer is industry influence. It’s an incredible influence. This is the fox guarding the henhouse. We know the revolving door between these companies and the top regulators. Not the career staff who are likely there because they want to do the right thing and do good work, but the folks who are calling the shots and making the decisions. There’s just such an unholy marriage, really, between the EPA and the industries that they are supposedly regulating.

Dave Chapman 40:36
Kendra, I talk to lots of farmers, and a lot of them are angry and have the pitchforks and are storming the castle. But one of the responses, and it’s been my response sometimes too, is, “We’ll just do it ourselves, and it’s fine.” I can actually choose to eat an all-organic diet if I’m very careful and if I go out of my way to try and source that. It’s actually pretty hard to do an all-organic diet.

Dave Chapman 41:08
But my point is that we’re still constantly exposed to the impacts of what everybody else is doing. We’re part of a food system, and our kids are part of it. My kids have left home, and they’re out there buying this food, and there’s no place to hide.

Dave Chapman 41:29
If we’re going to try and make this right, it won’t be enough to make it right for each one of us personally. We really have to work together to change our social organization, our social agreement, our precious community.

Kendra Klein 41:50
Friends of the Earth has a website that is OrganicForAll.org. That’s something else folks could check out. That’s work that I have really been doing: how do we flip the script? Because it’s really such a disservice to all of us to think about organic as elitist, which I think is a trope in many people’s minds because it is more expensive.

Kendra Klein 42:16
But that gets it exactly wrong because the people who have the most to gain from a food system that is not dependent on toxic chemicals are the families whose wells are laced with pesticides, the children who are going to school next to fields that are being sprayed, and the farmers and the farmworkers who are suffering much higher risks of all of those health concerns that I talked about because of their exposure.

Kendra Klein 42:44
How do we talk about working towards a food system in which we all can walk into the store? In one of the wealthiest societies in history, the fact that people walk into a store and have to have enough money in their pocket to choose between food with toxic pesticide residues and food without them is an absolute injustice.

Kendra Klein 43:12
This is a human rights issue. This is a food justice and environmental justice issue that we all have a stake in working towards in that future food system. I think that does really take some undoing in people’s minds. Like, organic is over here; it’s for the people who can buy it and protect themselves. We all need to be working to flip that.

Kendra Klein 43:39
Just as another example, I do think it’s very beneficial for individuals who are on a budget to decide, “Okay, what are the highest-risk foods? The berries, the tomatoes, and the green beans – I’m going to choose those organic.” But those lists of the Dirty Dozen and whatnot are limited because they’re not capturing that full exposure.

Kendra Klein 44:03
I choose the organic avocados, and I can afford to. I choose the organic pineapple. They’re never on the list, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t farmworkers and farmers, or soil, birds, and bees on those farms that are also at risk from pesticides.

Dave Chapman 44:23
Absolutely. Before we go to the next place we must go to, I want to just check in on those farmworkers. In the Midwest, yes, the farmers themselves, the people who own the farms, are the ones who are getting exposed. Those are places with huge tractors, big equipment, and not a lot of hand labor in the fields.

Dave Chapman 44:45
In California and in Mexico, places like that, where you’re growing vegetables and berries, and in Vermont, for that matter, we’re not growing a whole lot of corn and soy, relatively speaking. The organic people are growing a lot of vegetables. Wonderful. We feed the people.

Dave Chapman 45:05
But for those people who are working in a big industrial chemical system in the Dakotas and California, it boggles your mind, the scale. We’re all getting a taste of the scale from the recent food safety problems with the Taylor Farms greens. We see that thousands of people have gotten sick. Some have died.

Dave Chapman 45:31
It’s in, I can’t remember how many states now, 26 states, and it’s coming from one company that sells under numerous brands. You can’t even say, “Well, I’m not going to buy from Taylor Farms,” because many supermarket house brands are doing that. Taco Bell was just one of many fast-food places using their stuff. The people who are growing that – in this case, the lettuce came from Mexico, but there’s plenty of that grown in California – are exposed to a lot of pesticides.

Dave Chapman 46:12
So are their families because they cannot afford to live in the really nice parts far away from the fields. They live very, very intimately with the fields. What is their exposure? What are their health consequences? Should they be worried? Should we care?

Dave Chapman 46:31
When you get those wonderful Driscoll’s strawberries every day that come from all over the world, should we not only worry about what we’re putting in our bodies, but also about the people who harvested them?

Kendra Klein 46:45
Yeah. On the backside of every food that we grab off the shelf is an entire supply chain, a story, and people’s lives, and every strawberry is not created equal. The data is very clear that not just farmworkers in the field, but also their families, are at higher risk of a huge range of all of those health problems that I talked about.

Kendra Klein 47:17
They have higher exposure. They’re taking pesticides home on their clothes. For pregnant women working those fields, of course, there are higher risks for their children.

Kendra Klein 49:45
There’s a study called CHAMACOS out of UC Berkeley that has been tracking farmworker families and rural families now for over two decades. They enrolled pregnant women. They tested those women for levels of certain pesticides in their bodies. They’ve been able to track their birth outcomes, their children’s developmental outcomes, now for a long, long time as their children grow up.

Kendra Klein 47:43
The evidence is very sobering that those kids whose mothers had higher levels of pesticides in their bodies also had a higher risk of autism, a higher risk of ADHD, behavioral and other learning disabilities, lower IQ on average, and poor reflexes. These are children. This is the very real cost of the system.

Kendra Klein 48:31
They are the bodies of evidence. We talk about scientific bodies of evidence; these are the bodies of evidence that tell us that this system is deeply broken and deeply unjust. Absolutely, I think that people need to understand that justice connection.

Kendra Klein 48:56
I’ll say, I used to talk to a lot of college classes, and I was really heartened that making that connection is actually what brought students into an understanding of the value of organic more than anything else. That understanding that my choices as a consumer can impact these families very far away was very inspiring to them.

Kendra Klein 50:07
I would add to that, of course, that we can act as consumers, but to really change the system, we need to act as citizens. This is about the policies that are setting this game, and that feels so overwhelming. As someone who has a front-row seat to how intractable making progress on pesticides is in federal policy, it is difficult to maintain hope that our engagement matters.

Kendra Klein 49:56
But I also will say we are seeing things change right now. This very large public outcry about pesticides and health is actually changing the politics of pesticides federally because, for the first time, we have senators and members of Congress who are standing up on behalf of people’s health against pesticide companies.

Kendra Klein 50:15
We had a vote on the House Farm Bill where 280 members of the House voted to strip an amendment that would have given pesticide companies legal immunity, meaning people could not sue them for health harms linked to their products.

Kendra Klein 50:45
Quite a number of them were Republicans. Those are folks going on record for people’s health over the pesticide industry, and that is not something that we have seen historically.

Dave Chapman 50:55
I have to ask, Kendra, because I feel that there have been a lot of people in Congress standing up. They just haven’t had the numbers. Now you’re seeing people from both sides of the aisle actually come together for the first time. But I think that a lot of members of Congress, Democrats, senators, and people in the House, have fought for that.

Dave Chapman 51:21
Chellie Pingree spoke in front of the Supreme Court, and so did Thomas Massie, the day that they were hearing that case about protecting Bayer from liability for lawsuits. Here you had a progressive and a libertarian, and they were hand in hand, and they agreed. I agree with you. That was something really new, and it’s wonderful to see. But as Chellie said, “I’ve been fighting this for a long time, and I so welcome this new wave of support.”

Dave Chapman 51:56
It’s great to see that this is coming. Cory Booker was there. He spoke that day, and so did Del Bigtree, who is a strong backer of Kennedy. Kennedy wasn’t there because he didn’t support that. That’s a podcast in itself, or several. That’s a complicated conversation.

Dave Chapman 52:19
But I think that the Supreme Court thing, and yes, the House did vote to take that out of the Farm Bill, but the Senate has not voted to take it out. We’re waiting to see what happens next.

Kendra Klein 52:34
It’s not in the Senate version. To your point, there have always been champions, but they have been like lone champions, and what’s shifting is that they now can pull more people into that fold. I think that people on both sides of the aisle – again, this is from my policy counterpart, because I’m not on the Hill having these conversations – there’s such a wider swath of policymakers right now who understand that pesticides are an issue they should talk about. This matters to their base.

Kendra Klein 53:07
People, I just would say, keep up the noise. If you haven’t been making noise, let’s all make so much noise so that they continue to understand this matters. This matters for their success and whether or not we are going to reelect them.

Kendra Klein 53:27
On the Senate Farm Bill, Cory Booker right about now is introducing an amendment to undo the Supreme Court decision that granted pesticide companies immunity from certain lawsuits. That’s the moment right now. I don’t know when you’re going to air this. If it’s soon…

Dave Chapman 53:49
Not in time.

Kendra Klein 53:50
Okay, not in time…

Dave Chapman 53:52
This issue is not going to go away. This is a huge issue. It’s amazing to me how little coverage it’s really gotten in the media because it’s a huge issue. We’re talking about giving all of these chemical companies this privilege. You can’t sue them in state court. If the EPA said it’s okay, then regardless of the evidence, we’re going to say you can’t sue them. It’s a really big deal.

Dave Chapman 54:16
It’s going to have a huge impact on our health. It has a huge impact on their profit, which means their ability to control our government. Their stock price went shooting through the roof the day the Supreme Court made that ruling. So did the stock price of Bayer-Monsanto. This is a big deal, and I want people to be aware of it and get riled up.

Dave Chapman 54:46
That case was explicitly about glyphosate. It was overturning a state court decision that had awarded a large payment to a farmer who got cancer – non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. The Midwest cancer, as they call it. Although I’ve interviewed somebody in California who got it too, because her husband went out and spot-sprayed all the poison oak on their farm. Their fields were unsprayed, but he was doing this to keep it from creeping in, and it literally killed him.

Kendra Klein 55:28
Just to wrap that up, talking about “Whitewash” and “Merchants of Poison,” this is an indication of not just the hard power of the pesticide industry in Washington, but their power over the narrative, that they successfully convinced an entire nation that Roundup was safe, despite knowing themselves that it was not. There’s a lot of work to be done for people to understand the stakes, really.

Dave Chapman 56:01
Yeah. I interviewed Amy Westervelt recently, and she’s a real investigative journalist who has done a lot of research on greenwashing and the power that has. I’m going to interview Carey Gillam next month. That’ll be great. You have talked about the impact of glyphosate on the life in the soil.

Kendra Klein 56:02
I think that this does not get talked about enough. We understand that there are health consequences for us now. Many people understand this and know that, in fact, it is not safe to just cavort with Roundup. But could you talk a little bit about its impact on the soil, the life in the soil?

Kendra Klein 56:55
This is, like I said, the way in which pesticides really highlight the interconnectedness of life, that the same pesticides that harm us harm the life in the soil. That is the heart of regenerative agriculture. To talk about truly regenerative agriculture, we need to talk about reducing and eliminating toxic pesticides. That has to be the basis of it. There are two meta-reviews looking across hundreds of studies.

Kendra Klein 57:30
One is a meta-review of pesticide impacts on invertebrates: the beetles, the nematodes, and the earthworms, that Friends of the Earth and the Center for Biological Diversity co-authored with a researcher from the University of Maryland. We found that, in 70% of the cases, looking at a pesticide, an organism, and the end result, there was significant harm to those organisms.

Kendra Klein 57:59
There’s an analogous meta-review out of Europe looking at the microorganisms, the bacteria and fungi, the microbial bridge required for carbon sequestration. Again, we think about soil health and regeneration, and the climate benefit of soil carbon sequestration. If you want to achieve that to the full extent, you need to eliminate the pesticides that are killing the soil.

Kendra Klein 58:26
Again, to your point, pesticides as an umbrella includes the fungicides, which obviously are killing the fungi in the soil. Fungicides, herbicides, and insecticides. As we think about that connection, healthy soil is connected to healthy people. A piece of that is also eliminating the chemicals that are harming both of us. Some of the evidence around glyphosate’s harm to the soil is in earthworms.

Kendra Klein 59:04
Field doses, doses you might use in actual agriculture, not just in the laboratory, can impact earthworm reproduction, mobility, and behavior. Again, there’s hundreds of studies that tell us that if you want healthy, living soil, you need to reduce the use of commonly used pesticides.

Dave Chapman 59:31
I wasn’t really going to go there, but here we are, so I’m going to go there. Let’s talk about regenerative for a minute. I understand, in the context you were talking about regenerative, you meant the word regenerative, as in to regenerate. It’s the way Paul Hawken would talk about it and the way John Fullerton would talk about regenerative economics.

Dave Chapman 59:55
He’s talking about economics in which there is regeneration, and it’s self-organizing, and it’s growing, and it’s moving towards life and away from death. But there is a political battle going on, and I’m not talking about all the wonderful small farmers who call themselves regenerative, many of whom I respect and love, and I know that they’re doing a great job.

Dave Chapman 1:00:21
I do have some disagreements with their use of the term because it’s also a term that is actively embraced by Bayer, Syngenta, Cargill, Pepsi, and McDonald’s. They love this term because, finally, they can stop being the scoundrels in the public eye and say, “We love soil health, and we’re doing everything we can to encourage it.” Then they’ll say very quietly, “with the responsible use of inputs.”

Dave Chapman 1:00:59
These are companies who make their living selling chemicals. They’re not talking about getting out of their business. They’re talking about changing the story, not about changing their practices. Now, some of the farmers are very much talking about changing the practices.

Dave Chapman 1:01:16
The thing that bothers me about this, and I used to be quite supportive of what we all called regenerative agriculture. I thought, “Well, they’re not ready to go organic, but they’re moving in the right direction.” But in recent years, they’ve become active in attacking organic and quite successful. They’re attacking it among the general public, and they’re attacking it among their fellow farmers, and they’re attacking it among our representatives, our politicians, and quite effectively.

Dave Chapman 1:01:48
You see, organic has become sort of a bad word in Congress. If you go and talk to members of Congress, they go, “Oh, organic. We’re interested in regenerative.” When I talk to organic farmers, they go, “Oh, regenerative is being used as an excuse to do all kinds of bad things.” It means very different things to different people.

Dave Chapman 1:02:08
But the people with the big microphones definitely do not mean the cessation of chemicals or even the reduction of chemicals. I’m curious. I know that you’ve done a lot of research on this. What have you got to say about the things I just said?

Kendra Klein 1:02:25
Yes, I agree entirely. There is no standard definition of regenerative, so it is what people want to make it, and that’s the pitfall. It’s wide open as a term and therefore wide open to co-optation. I do think that the most vocal companies and people at this point around regenerative are using it more as a cover for business as usual.

Kendra Klein 1:02:59
We released a report last year called “Rethinking No-Till” because, in many people’s minds, there’s been a lot of information out there connecting no-till to regenerative, as if it’s a one-for-one. Either that no-till in and of itself is regenerative, or that regenerative requires no-till, which has been used as an argument for why organic farmers cannot be regenerative, because many organic farmers depend on some level of tillage to manage weeds.

Kendra Klein 1:03:32
In “Rethinking No-Till,” we dug into the USDA data to see what no-till corn and soy actually look like in the U.S. Over 90% of it is dependent on herbicides like Roundup, genetically engineered seeds, and neonic-coated seeds in the case of corn, an insecticide linked very closely to the decline of pollinators. This is business as usual. This is conventional, industrial, chemical-intensive agriculture that is being called regenerative.

Kendra Klein 1:04:02
When you see regenerative commitments from very large food companies, often, when you dig beneath the surface, which can be hard to do, it’s conventional no-till, maybe with some cover crops. That’s degenerative. Conventional no-till is degenerative. There’s no question about that. For the data backing that up, folks can look up that “Rethinking No-Till” report.

Kendra Klein 1:04:38
I think, therein are some of the stakes and why I’ve been talking a lot about regenerative and busting myths, and what do we really mean by this. Because when we’ve got a definition of regenerative that discounts the value of organic, for example, by saying you need to be doing no-till, then you are discounting what is really one of the most regenerative forms of agriculture that we have, that should be being held up to show us the way.

Kendra Klein 1:05:07
I talk about it like, you know, the regenerative train has left the station. It is speeding down the track. In so many ways, the organic farmers who should be driving the train have been left at the station. They’re not even on the train. Some of how I think about my work around regenerative is like, “Okay, how do we at least get the organic farmers on the train, and how do we work towards being clear that they should be driving that train?”

Kendra Klein 1:05:42
I have so many thoughts about this term, and it’s kind of like redoing the sustainability of the ’90s, where it just means whatever you want it to mean. But I think there’s more money behind it, and there’s more at stake because we’ve got enormous food companies investing in regenerative. We’ve got public policies claiming they’re backing regenerative without ever talking about reducing pesticides and synthetic fertilizers, and that’s a huge problem.

Dave Chapman 1:06:17
Often they are talking about it; they’re just not doing it, so that’s another huge problem. I’ve talked to people who have gone through trainings about how to be regenerative. I said, “What about the herbicides?” They said, “What do you mean?” I said, “For no-till.” They said, “What do you mean? I never heard of that.” They’re quite naive about agriculture and about how it works.

Dave Chapman 1:06:49
I think it’s a very complicated conversation because there are people who identify with that who are genuinely wonderful farmers, and they are regenerative. They’re even organic, even if they’re not certified, and they’re to be only admired. But I see that they’re permitting themselves to be publicly aligned with some of the worst companies in the world.

Dave Chapman 1:07:17
It reminds me of the debate that we’ve had in organic. I don’t blame us, but part of the problem that we have is that organic has struggled also with corporate takeover, and so we’ve got the majority, for sure, of certified organic eggs coming from complete industrial confinement operations.

Dave Chapman 1:07:34
They should not be certified as organic, but they manage to say, “Well, we’re feeding them certified organic grain,” and the majority of the grain that is being fed to many of these confinement operations is also not organic, even though it’s certified. There are real problems, and people are right to criticize it.

Dave Chapman 1:07:48
I’ve been very critical of it. That’s why we have the Real Organic Project, to say not everything that gets certified is real, and not everything that isn’t certified is not real. There are non-certified crops that are definitely really organic. But I still think organic has accomplished so much, even with the problems.

Dave Chapman 1:08:31
The hydroponic invasion is another huge problem. Nonetheless, we’ve made so much progress. We should not abandon this baby with the bathwater.

Kendra Klein 1:08:47
To put a fine point on really what’s at stake, I talk to sustainability teams at many of the largest U.S. food retailers because Friends of the Earth has what we call the Bee-Friendly Retailer Scorecard. This is essentially a pesticide scorecard. How are these companies doing on pesticides? Of course, supporting organic supply chains is a huge part of what we’re pushing them to do.

Kendra Klein 1:09:21
Over the past five or six years, multiple company sustainability experts have told me point blank, “Regenerative is better than organic.” They believe deeply that organic is not regenerative. They tell me regenerative is better. This is what set me off on doing work like the “Rethinking No-Till” report, the work on pesticide impacts on soil health – how do we build this body of evidence to debunk those myths in people’s heads?

Kendra Klein 1:09:55
Again, not to dismiss, like you’re saying, that segment of farmers who are truly, deeply regenerative, but not certified organic. They’re doing the good work. But really, the bulk of what is being called regenerative that has money behind it is actually degenerative agriculture.

Kendra Klein 1:10:20
I think absolutely there is a huge need right now for us to tell good organic stories, to lift up the science – the decades of science showing that organic farming systems produce regenerative outcomes.

Kendra Klein 1:10:18
We’re in a moment where we need companies, we need consumers, we need policymakers, and everybody to really understand that because regenerative is a shiny new penny. Folks either get distracted by the shiny new penny, which is, I think, the case for many folks and consumers, or they see the value in waving that around and saying, “Okay, then we’re going to ignore really what’s happening.”

Dave Chapman 1:11:12
All right, Kendra, thank you. There’s more to talk about, but that might be enough for one day. Thank you very much. I really enjoyed this conversation.

Kendra Klein 1:11:23
Thank you so much. Yes, enjoyed it very much.