Episode #293
Liz Carlisle: Land Sharing Is How We Feed the Future

Liz Carlisle makes a compelling case for land sharing as an alternative to the increasingly influential idea of land sparing. Rather than accepting agriculture as inherently destructive and concentrating production into industrial sacrifice zones, she points to Indigenous food systems, organic farms, agroforestry, perennial crops, and integrated grazing as evidence that people can feed themselves while sharing landscapes with other species. Carlisle also challenges the assumption that feeding a growing population requires ever-higher yields, arguing that food waste and weak regional food systems are far bigger obstacles to food security.

Agroecologist Liz Carlisle’s’s interview has been edited and condensed for clarity:

You can subscribe and download episodes of our show through your favorite podcast app, our YouTube channel, or stream the audio-only version here:

Linley Dixon interviewed Liz Carlisle via Zoom in summer 2026:

Linley Dixon 0:00
Great, Liz. Thank you so much for being here on the Real Organic podcast. I want to start by saying I have so much admiration for you because you seem equally at home in academia and with farmers, and you can talk policy. It feels like your tentacles run everywhere. I’m so excited to talk to you today.

Liz Carlisle 0:23
I’m lucky to have a real variety of brilliant people in my life, so it’s wonderful to get to bridge some of those realms.

Linley Dixon 0:31
When I was getting ready for this, I went back because “Grain by Grain: A Quest to Revive Ancient Wheat, Rural Jobs, and Healthy Food,” and “Lentil Underground: Renegade Farmers and the Future of Food in America,” are two of my favorite books. You write an incredible introduction for “Lentil Underground,” where you talk about being a country music singer. You said something that kind of hit me. You said you felt like you were propagating a lie of some sort.

Linley Dixon 0:55
Can you describe that moment? First of all, you must have amazing pipes. If you open for an NFL game for the national anthem, which is not an easy song to sing, and LeAnn Rimes, and stuff like that. Congratulations, but what a huge shift for you. Can you talk about that shift?

Liz Carlisle 1:12
I know it was an NFL game, because at the time that league was famous for you had to do it live, no recording, and no assistance. I didn’t have earbuds either, so I heard the echo in the stadium. I’ll never forget that.

Liz Carlisle 1:30
My story in agriculture really started with my grandmother and her being really generous in sharing with me her experience of losing the family farm in the Dust Bowl, but also sharing all of herself with me, and this incredible, grounded, wise woman that she was, in many ways because of this deep connection that she had to land from her childhood, really growing up not just on land, but really with the land.

Liz Carlisle 1:58
I had always been interested in other people’s stories about their land connection and connection to the food system. So as an undergrad I studied folklore and mythology, and I went into this career as a country singer, really with a lot of idealism about “we’re going to tell these stories that are going to revitalize this agrarian spirit of connection to land and feeding healthy food to our communities.”

Liz Carlisle 2:25
But that line in the “Lentil Underground” about living a lie was about actually crisscrossing rural America and not finding a lot of food there, finding that people were in this structural environment of growing commodities that often, unfortunately, didn’t involve feeding their communities.

Liz Carlisle 2:43
Being in this humongous stocked full of Clif Bars, rolling around talking about land connection to the food system, and gradually realizing, as I heard remarkably similar stories from farmers all over the country about the barriers that they were facing to growing healthy food for their community, that maybe I needed to turn my attention not just to what is the food system that we want – there were a lot of people who could articulate that – but how do we remove the barriers in the way of the food system that we want.

Linley Dixon 3:17
What were some of the biggest barriers? I know there’s probably a million that are in your brain. What ultimately ended up causing a neighbor to buy up the other neighbor’s farm, and not even realizing that they were kind of next in line – this consolidation of land?

Liz Carlisle 3:36
Yeah, it was those years traveling as a country singer when I learned this pair of four-letter words: Farm Bill, and realized a lot of taxpayer support to agriculture, but it’s not reaching really the agriculture that feeds our communities, for the most part. That so much of that on the ag side of the Farm Bill is really just going to a handful of commodities that go to ethanol fuel and livestock feed in many cases.

Liz Carlisle 4:07
This organic farmer from my home state, Jon Tester, ran for US Senate, super inspiring campaign. From a town of 300 people, he’d been a schoolteacher and then in the state legislature, and he unseated a three-term incumbent talking about how organic farming helped save his family farm, and how we needed to move to renewable energy, and how this is how our state’s economy could move from extractive industry to these more renewable ways of living.

Liz Carlisle 4:33
I made this big career shift at 24 from country music to working for US Senator Jon Tester as a legislative correspondent for Agriculture and Natural Resources, because I saw that he had ideas about how to remove these barriers to people stewarding land and growing healthy food for their place.

Liz Carlisle 4:54
That’s really when I got to know the group of farmers that I ultimately ended up writing about, working with on “Lentil Underground,” and then my second book, “Grain by Grain,” as well.

Linley Dixon 5:04
“Lentil Underground” came first. I read them in the opposite order, so I just assumed that was the order you wrote them. Then at some point you went and got your PhD from Berkeley as well, and somewhere I thought maybe you even worked under Michael Pollan or studied under him. That’s an incredible program. Was that all part of it?

Liz Carlisle 5:28
It was all part of it. I’ve just had extraordinary mentors, and I’m so grateful. I was working in the Senate office, I was getting to know this extraordinary kind of underground, under-the-radar movement of organic farmers that had together figured out what were the rotation crops, what were the processing facilities they needed in order to transition.

Liz Carlisle 5:51
I’m talking like hundreds of people across the central and eastern parts of the state of Montana, and they kept saying, “Come see my farm,” and “I want to show you my four-crop rotation, my 10-crop rotation, my 24-crop rotation.”

I was in the office in DC, and eventually realized, “You know what? I think I need to actually do this, and I think the way to do this is a graduate degree.”

Liz Carlisle 6:11
I went to Berkeley for the PhD, but my dissertation project was in Montana, and ultimately became “Lentil Underground.” Then I got to know Bob Quinn really well while I was out doing my fieldwork.

It was actually on a farm tour after “Lentil Underground” came out when he was like, “Hey, Liz, I’ve been thinking about writing about the experience I’ve had converting our family farm to organic and working with heritage grains and whole wheat, and would you want to team up on a book?”

Linley Dixon 6:39
I love, too, that probably working for Jon Tester, so much of the organic movement is made up of people who are politically just all over the place across the spectrum. I imagine that’s what Jon Tester’s followers were like because, especially being in Montana, it’s a more of a red state. What was that like? How do you think he was able to get the vote?

Liz Carlisle 7:08
There’s that old adage, “All politics is local,” and Jon came from the localist of local politics, like a tiny school district. He came from this family that had this really strong ethic about public infrastructure and public service at the most local level. That was what was so magical about being in that office – this is how we approach things.

Liz Carlisle 7:33
Part of it was maybe the luxury of having a smaller constituent base than I have friends now who’ve worked in California Senate offices, where you can’t just pick up every constituent phone call quite the way we could. There was a little bit of that ethic coming from Montana, with about a million constituents at that point.

Liz Carlisle 7:51
It was very practical, and it was very much about economic issues. It was very much about “How do we build a robust local value-added agriculture sector that will allow people to earn a living with a family farm,” and adjacent things too, about our state’s renewable energy industry, and really focusing on what are the things that allow people to earn a livelihood, have a way of life, and build a community that they want to see, as opposed to being up here on the conceptual level.

Liz Carlisle 8:23
I think he built a lot of trust with people because those things made a difference in their daily lives. I swear I talked to people every single day who would be on the phone or on emails or something, being like, “I’ve never voted for a Democrat, but…”

Liz Carlisle 7:13
That’s a lot of what “Lentil Underground” and “Grain by Grain” as projects were about – how inspiring it was for me to see people with different viewpoints coming together around the practical work of establishing a really viable local organic farm sector, and being able to hold those differences and say, “We disagree about this and this, and we can also work together to create infrastructure, a knowledge base, and a thriving local farm sector in our community.”

Linley Dixon 9:10
Have you kept in touch with people in the office? The loss of his office was devastating to me. Do you know what happened? How that happened, what went on there to get us here.

Liz Carlisle 9:25
Yeah. I really know the public story, not so much the behind-the-scenes. His chief of staff for many years was actually a person I worked with briefly in the office, but also grew up three doors down from and have known for a long time. I’ve been in touch with him a little bit, and I know that…

Liz Carlisle 9:43
Another thing I learned through “Lentil Underground” and “Grain by Grain” is that movements and institutions and organizations have these moments when they come together in a particular formation that are really magical and that transform those of us who participate in them.

Liz Carlisle 9:59
In almost every case, historically, the specific organization or institution or movement dissolves, but that through-line of our relationship and our connection to the idea – to this sort of, like, prefigurative space, to use a sociological term, of the kind of world that we’ve caught a glimpse of and want to build – continues.

Liz Carlisle 10:21
I think that everybody who participated in the Tester office magic during those years knows something about what’s possible in gathering people across ideological differences that we can never forget. I’m sure if somebody could write a book in 10 or 20 years about where all the Tester office alums are and how they’re moving this idea forward in the world.

Liz Carlisle 10:45
I know that work will find various expressions. I know Jon himself is doing all kinds of great things as a podcaster, among other things, to carry forth his public leadership. But it’s really sad that we are in a different political moment now in 2026 than we were in the summer of 2012 when I was researching “Lentil Underground,” or 2015 when it came out.

Liz Carlisle 11:13
In a way, now that book for me functions as something that helps me remember what’s possible and what’s still out there in various places in our society that we need to reassemble in some form, so that we can productively build positive things in our community.

Linley Dixon 11:32
I didn’t intend to go here, but it just relates so much. Have you been following the MAHA movement and seen how it really did kind of shock me, how many Democrats said, “These are my issues. RFK is speaking to my issues”? They were talking about pesticides, the chickenization of organic, as we call it, like needing antitrust laws. The vaccines issue was very divisive. I don’t think the MAHA movement is united around that one, but the food issues. It was just like, finally, someone is talking about the things that I care about.

Linley Dixon 11:56
Have you been following how it’s kind of been getting fragmented by what’s happening? Because it was such an odd pairing to see. The first Trump administration did not believe in any regulations. What you need are regulations of the industry in order for this to work, so it seemed like such a mismatch.

Linley Dixon 12:35
I’m seeing that the people who really believed in it and thought that they could see change because people were actually speaking to their issues are realizing how difficult it is to get regulations under the Trump administration.

Liz Carlisle 12:49
I think it’s just a huge disconnect between the messaging wing and the action wing. I think that’s very disappointing when you hear a message that resonates with you, and you feel like, “Oh yeah, those are my values, or that’s something I want to see action on, or I feel seen.”

Liz Carlisle 13:07
It feels like a terrible bait and switch when you realize that there’s not going to be a connection between this message and action, or whoever the messenger is isn’t even in a position, maybe, to be on the implementation team or the policy team.

Liz Carlisle 13:24
But hopefully we then can sort of come together and say, “Okay, well, what is it that we want going forward?” If this didn’t turn out to be a vehicle to move forward regulation of Roundup, for example, how do we come together and create a stronger movement of collective voices demanding that whoever is in leadership next, again at all the levels – local, state, and federal – take seriously the fact that we’re a big group of people that wants to say no to Roundup, for example, in this case? Or maybe it’s something around dietary guidelines or school food or things like that.

Linley Dixon 14:05
We’ve got this Farm Bill that’s eight years or something like that since we’ve passed the last one. It’s way behind. I saw that the bedfellows of people – what has come before the House now is, and I think they tried to slip it into the Farm Bill to not allow, and this was just this week – to keep the corporations from liability, and it was around glyphosate and Roundup.

Linley Dixon 14:33
It was such an interesting bedfellow of people who voted. I’m in Lauren Boebert’s district, and she voted kind of with all the Democrats, so there were Republicans in there too, not wanting to shield these massive corporations from liability. Anyway, it reminded me of MAHA, and how we actually might be able to bring both sides together around organic issues.

Linley Dixon 15:01
To me it’s exciting, and we haven’t quite nailed it yet. To me it’s like speaking opportunity. Do you see a way to get this right in the future?

Liz Carlisle 15:11
Yeah. I would definitely recommend to future folks seeking national office that I think this is an issue where you can be on the right side of history and also on the right side of polling, because I agree with you that there are a lot of people who are on the left, on the right, and apolitical who don’t want to see chemicals in their food supply or potentially harming their kids or in their drinking water or things like that.

Liz Carlisle 15:37
So I’m with you. I think it’s an issue that people can win on. Obviously, the challenge is just that these corporations have a lot of money and a lot of lobbying power, and you can see people there again on both sides of the aisle who fold to that from time to time.

Liz Carlisle 15:52
But I think that the grassroots energy around these issues of chemicals in the food system has been kind of on a steady upward trajectory in terms of people’s awareness. I think you’re right. I think the time is ripe for people in the political sphere to recognize that and make a promise they can keep.

Linley Dixon 16:14
Okay. I’m picturing country music, and they say corn popping up in rows and things like that. We picture corn, and what the Farm Bill subsidizes. A lot of people picture just corn-soy rotations, but Montana is really different.

I had to learn, with the Real Organic Project travels, what dryland fallow was, for example.

Linley Dixon 16:36
That you’re a grain farmer, but you’re not growing corn and soy, you’re growing wheat. Talking to some of the organic farmers, like you said, 24-year rotations. I don’t think I ever heard that high, but I definitely heard 14-year rotation.

Linley Dixon 16:52
Imagine how many years of farming you would have to go through before you actually see the whole thing through. Shifting your rotation based on observation would take a really long time. Organic farmers, they think differently.

Describe the landscape in Montana and how lentils kind of played into this whole food scene there.

Liz Carlisle 17:17
I think the two key things geographically about Montana are that it’s pretty arid, and it’s also not very warm. Those are reasons why corn and soy – and the incredibly productive corn and soy fields of the Midwest – don’t make sense in Montana, and why wheat, as a crop that grows fairly well in marginal conditions with not very much expense, has worked well for Montana as a commodity crop.

Liz Carlisle 17:42
But what hasn’t worked well is that it’s often been grown sort of alone, or just wheat and barley. Historically, there’s been more integration of livestock, just like other places in the country. Those two kinds of enterprises have been separated in recent decades, so a lot of farms just sort of have wheat and barley and not a whole lot else.

Liz Carlisle 18:02
“Lentil Underground” was this story of a group of farmers that came together in the ’80s and ’90s and said, “We don’t want to be dependent on chemical fertilizer or chemical herbicide,” especially because they’d been through the farm crisis when those things were expensive and the commodity grain prices were really low. Instead, they wanted to grow food without chemicals and sell it based on quality, and grow things that people wanted to eat.

Liz Carlisle 18:27
They started trying to figure out what the nitrogen-feeding crop was – because you’ve got a nitrogen-feeding crop in wheat, so what is going to be the nitrogen-fixing rotation crop that would work in an arid, marginal environment like Montana? They looked around the world at similar environments and saw that lentils, for thousands of years, have been a great rotation crop in these arid places, and chickpeas as well.

Liz Carlisle 18:51
They started experimenting with each other on each other’s farms through something called farm improvement clubs that a nonprofit, now called Abundant Montana, got going, along with some scientists who were at the time kind of out there on the fringe and willing to work with organic farmers. They created their own protocols for when you seed these things, which varieties, spacing, how you inoculate the lentils, and so on.

Liz Carlisle 19:19
They crowdsourced a processing plant so that they could find consumers who were interested in plant-based protein and high-quality products where they could identify where it came from and who grew it. Chefs really loved the black beluga lentils that looked just like caviar.

Liz Carlisle 19:39
This allowed a group of people who had been sort of dependent price takers in commodity markets to instead be growing these higher-value crops that were organic, high quality, and specialty crops, and to have a whole different kind of income stream, and a lot of pride in their work as well.

Linley Dixon 19:58
Would you describe what happened? To me, it’s sort of miraculous when farmers come together and say—because grain farmers, in particular, have a hard time direct marketing. They can’t go to a farmers market because you need mills, and there’s this whole supply chain to actually get it to the final retail shelf space. They realized they had to come together.

Linley Dixon 20:21
Was it Timeless Seed? Was that what it’s called? I don’t know if it still exists or anything, because the book is older now. Kind of tell us about Timeless Seeds, how it started, and what’s going on with it now.

Liz Carlisle 20:32
Yeah. It literally started with four farmers in, I believe, 1987: Dave Oyen, his cousin Tom Hastings, Bud Barda, and Jim Barngrover. They all had different reasons for being very sure that organic was the way they wanted to farm.

Liz Carlisle 20:50
Jim had had a family experience with chemical exposure and health issues, and his family had actually lost their farm because of his dad’s health issues, which he believed were connected to pesticides. He was a landless farmer who had been working on anti-pesticide campaigns.

Liz Carlisle 21:06
Dave had just come back to his family farm but knew he wanted to do something really different. He’d gone to school and learned about solar energy, and originally came home to put solar panels on the roof of his parents’ barn.

For a variety of reasons, they were just sure that the way they wanted to farm was organic, and that they needed this rotation crop to do it. They started experimenting with land that they had access to.

Liz Carlisle 21:31
The key moment when this expanded was when they started, through these farm improvement clubs that Abundant Montana – formerly AERO, the Alternative Energy Resources Organization – was doing mini-grants for farmers to start these farm improvement clubs to ask sustainability questions and experiment with each other, with help from a technical assistant.

Liz Carlisle 21:52
A bunch of these got going around legumes – lentils and chickpeas – and also sowing cover crops and things like this. This parallel effort in the nonprofit sector really helped boost this small company as they crowdsourced a processing plant, working with friends who were eaters and sort of concerned community members, and some people in academia, who all pitched in to get their first processing plant.

Liz Carlisle 22:19
Then ultimately, I think in 2008, they got a really nice new food-grade processing plant that was built to spec for newer food safety regulations, so that they could sell to regional distributors, but also chefs and kind of little fast-casual chains around the country, and just massively expanded the lentil acreage and organic lentil acreage in Montana as a viable way for family farmers to supplement their income.

Linley Dixon 22:48
Does Timeless Seeds still exist?

Liz Carlisle 22:51
Yeah. Mad Agriculture in Colorado actually bought the processing plant, I want to say a year or two ago. The next generation of Timeless Seeds continues under the Mad Agriculture umbrella as part of their sort of family of processing infrastructure to try to make regenerative transitions more possible for people across the West.

Liz Carlisle 23:15
Dave Oyen is finally retired. He had kind of been thinking about it at the point I interviewed him in 2012, and it took longer than he expected to get the company in a position to be transitioned to the next generation.

I know you guys on this podcast talk a lot about some of these challenges around succession: a first generation of organic farmers who, in many cases, just poured all of this sweat equity into the work they did, and how to make these things viable financially for the next generation.

Liz Carlisle 23:58
But yeah, it seems like they figured that out with Mad Ag, and it’ll be fun to see what the next generation of Timeless Seeds looks like.

Linley Dixon 23:58
Do they then market under a certain brand name that I could find?

Liz Carlisle 23:59
Yeah, it’s still marketed under Timeless Seeds. Timeless Seeds is out there in the market.

Linley Dixon 24:03
Great. I’ll have to keep an eye out for it. It’s just such an incredible success story.

I think we need models like this, because the same thing is going on with livestock, just not having all the steps that it takes to get to… It’s just a complicated story with livestock and processing. It’s called a slaughterhouse. The slaughterhouse issue is very similar to the mills. So we need a lot of examples of how to come together and make this work.

Linley Dixon 24:37
There was a weed, like a yellow mustard – was it black medic? Is that what it was that you wrote about?

Liz Carlisle 24:46
Yeah, in the early days, Timeless Seeds was named when those four gentlemen thought what they would do is start a company to sell cover crop seed to organic farmers. This is 1987.
As Dave Oyen likes to say, none of them had gone to business school, so they quickly realized that their customer base was probably only about eight people at the time. But that was their original experiment, which was with George Black Medic.

Liz Carlisle 25:14
A scientist at Montana State University, Jim Sims, had been doing some research with it. He was like a super alternative scientist at the time who was interested in organic practices, and so it was really helpful as a soil builder. But ultimately they realized that to have a viable company and to help farmers earn income, they needed to have nitrogen-fixing plants that could be sold as crops, so they started shifting their energy towards pulse crops.

Linley Dixon 25:44
Okay, because that was just part of the rotations, then to include that black medic.

Liz Carlisle 25:49
It was for many people, although over time a lot of people started working with different cover crops. Black medic was kind of a quirky one that would self-seed and sort of come up.

I remember Dave Oyen telling me a story about the first year – they were all excited about it. They planted a bunch of it, and then the next year was a drought, and so it didn’t come up.

Liz Carlisle 26:08
Everybody thought, like, “Oh, it’s gone, there it went.”

Then, many, many years later, there was a rainy season, and all this black medic came shooting up.

Linley Dixon 26:18
The seed survived for a long time.

Liz Carlisle 26:21
Yeah. It didn’t turn out to be as easy to sort of manage and control as some of the farmers who ultimately were part of the Timeless Seeds supply chain were looking for, because a lot of mid-scale family farms that were really counting on a consistent and significant income ultimately got involved, which was exciting to see that kind of diversity of scale and economic models.

Linley Dixon 26:46
The first place that I actually learned the term land sparing was reading, I think it’s early on in “Lentil Underground.” You talk about it.

This is a topic that, to be honest, I wrestled with for a long time. It was published recently – it’s probably been published in a lot of places – but on the cover of Nature, which really gets to me, because you feel like academia has a lot of sway and a big microphone when it gets on the cover of Nature.

Linley Dixon 27:17
They were just talking about how, because organic is lower yielding, we need to use inputs in order to have higher yields and then return land back to nature. That concept is called land sparing.

Your books – actually all of your books – tackle this issue really well. I would really like to dive into it because it haunted me. I thought, are they right? It made me question everything I believed in about organic.

Linley Dixon 27:51
Farming does have a footprint on the land, and I don’t want to pretend that my farm wouldn’t be better if it was returned to whatever was here before me. How do you respond to this criticism?

Liz Carlisle 28:05
Yeah. It’s a great question, Linley. This has been a kind of perennial debate among environmental scientists who are interested in agriculture for at least a couple of decades now, if not more. I would name the debate as being about whether we should take a land-sparing approach or a land-sharing approach.

Liz Carlisle 28:25
I think you articulated very well this idea about land sparing, which essentially takes a very dim view of what farmers and our society are capable of. The land-sparing argument says we just have to accept that agriculture is environmentally damaging, and the best that we can do is to limit the amount of the Earth’s land surface on which we practice agriculture so that we can spare other land for nature and for the ecosystem services that we all need to survive.

Liz Carlisle 28:56
That sort of creates these “sacrifice zones” of industrial agriculture, similar to the way pollution is distributed. It generally involves sacrifice zones in communities of color that have environmental justice issues that they’re dealing with. It’s a very similar idea in many ways: land sparing assumes there are going to be these sacrifice zones of industrial agriculture, which we know are going to harm the people who work there and the people who live around them.

Liz Carlisle 29:25
It’s also just a very dim view. It’s like sad to be like, “Okay, well, apparently we as a species can’t figure out how to feed ourselves in a way that also sustains other species,” even though every other species on the planet has figured out a life way like that.

Liz Carlisle 29:41
I’m much more attracted to the land-sharing argument, which says that Indigenous communities around the world have figured out ways to build food systems into the natural environments that they live in, in ways that do not destroy those natural environments.

Liz Carlisle 29:57
Whether you’re looking at Mayan agroforestry systems, or you’re looking at buffalo prairies in the Great Plains of the United States, or incredible wetland farming systems with rice and ducks and frogs and fish in parts of Southeast Asia and East Asia. We could go on.

Liz Carlisle 30:13
There are thousands of years of human history of people feeding themselves and their communities, including very densely populated communities. The population of Hawaii during its Indigenous period was huge, and people were feeding themselves from their ecosystem in a sustainable way.

Liz Carlisle 30:31
That, I think, is the idea that we should be carrying forward. As contemporary farmers, land stewards, and eaters who care about our food system, how do we move towards a food system where we are land sharing, where we, as people who are raising our food in this environment, are sharing that land with other species in a way that also allows them to live?

Liz Carlisle 30:54
I think John Vandermeer and Ivette Perfecto, in their book “Nature’s Matrix: Linking Agriculture, Biodiversity Conservation and Food Sovereignty,” do just an extraordinary job of describing the ecology underlying this, and how a well-managed organic farm is an ecological matrix with plenty of habitat for other species to migrate through, whereas an industrial farm doesn’t have any of that. Species sort of get stuck and can’t transit between their habitat areas.

Liz Carlisle 31:19
There’s a lot of great ecology underlying land sharing, but it’s also sort of a vote for what we want as human beings, and what we believe people are capable of, and what we demand that our governments and our society do, rather than just settling for, “Well, the best we’re going to get is an agriculture that pollutes water and doesn’t have any habitat.”

Liz Carlisle 31:40
I’m a really firm believer that we’ve got to go for land sharing, because the problem with land sparing is that the idea that nature is saved for nature if we limit the footprint of agriculture is actually just conceptual. We don’t have any proof that that actually works, and in practice most of the studies of attempts to do land sparing show that, if you give industrial agriculture free rein to farm in very intensive and damaging ways in small parcels….

Liz Carlisle 32:15
How does capitalism work? They’re just going to expand and expand and expand way beyond the need for those foods and commodities.

It’s called the Jevons paradox. Land sparing isn’t honestly even an option that we’ve proven is possible.

Liz Carlisle 32:29
I think the only way forward is land sharing, and the good news is that also asks us to develop ourselves as sort of denizens of our own places.

Linley Dixon 32:40
Wow. I feel like I need to stand up and give an ovation. That is the best answer I’ve heard. I’ve asked this of a lot of people on this podcast – that was really well thought through.
It makes sense, Liz, because “Healing Grounds: Climate, Justice, and the Deep Roots of Regenerative Farming” and “Living Roots: The Promise of Perennial Foods” are loaded with stories of how this works.

Linley Dixon 32:59
I feel like it’s a language that’s forgotten, and we just need to lift up these stories and share them so that we can understand and remember that all of this is possible as a human species here – that we actually know how to do this.

Linley Dixon 33:16
So would you share some of these stories? It’s also like, what are we valuing here? And if we only look at yield, maybe we lose, but there are so many other things to value. You actually have a lot of examples of where that’s not the case, where maybe that whole idea that these systems are lower-yielding is false, because you might stack enterprises, or we’re getting better at it, or even with Kernza, it’s like maybe you’ll get two harvests instead of one.

Let’s start sharing some of these stories and help us believe that it’s really true.

Liz Carlisle 33:53
I would just say the way I think about yield is partly… There have been some great review papers about this. Loren Peniciel did one, gosh, like a little over a decade ago. She found that there’s a very small yield gap.
She looked at a bunch of studies that had compared organic and conventional agriculture in sort of methodologically robust ways.

Liz Carlisle 34:16
But she also looked at what kind of organic it was: was it just minimal organic, where they’re not using any of the disallowed chemicals, or was it actually soil-health-building organic?

If you looked at soil-health-building organic, that yield gap was actually really small, and it wasn’t even there in certain crops.

Liz Carlisle 34:34
She and her co-authors made the point: “We’ve invested all this R&D in figuring out how to do the commodity thing, and we’ve invested a teeny percentage in figuring out how to do the soil-health-building, organic, regenerative thing.”

Probably if we really, to your point, Linley, focused on getting very good at that, we might even close that yield gap further. There’s that. The yield is not that big.

Linley Dixon 34:59
What happens in a drought year? What year are we looking at? Because that’s where organic systems really thrive if the soil health is taken care of.

Liz Carlisle 35:08
Yes, and sort of broadening your gaze to the entire world, and where people are growing food, and whose yields do we care about. Some of those high-yielding varieties that require fertilizers and herbicides, and a lot of access to irrigation, are literally of no use to the many, many, many people who live without access to those chemicals and without irrigation, and maybe in a highland area where they don’t have the same kinds of growing conditions.

Liz Carlisle 35:34
You’re right. If we care about food security, we care about getting enough food on a regular basis, rather than a bonanza this year.
I think that’s the other point too: how much yield do we need? Do we have to maximize it all the time, or can we think about what it means to have enough, and then also, at the same time, to be taking care of the ecosystem services that ensure that land will be arable for future generations?

Liz Carlisle 36:02
That seems like the better way to think about it, and the more land-sharing perspective. We don’t have another continent to go to. That’s a sort of colonial perspective. It’s like, “Let’s just maximize our yield right here for now and get our quarterly earnings, and then when this land is no longer farmable, of course we’ll just go steal someone else’s.”

Liz Carlisle 36:21
We’re done with that period on Earth. It was a bad idea in the first place, but we also just can’t do that. We only have so much land, so we need to take care of where we are, and think less about these tiny little percentages of more yield today, and way more about how we sustain an environment that will feed people for a long period of time.

Linley Dixon 36:43
Okay, Liz. I’m going to keep pushing. You and I come from very kind of drought-prone, marginal lands that maybe might not be great for cropping. Should we take those lands out of agriculture? Would that be better for the world and only focus agriculture in places where there’s more water and good soils, like maybe in the Midwest?

That’ll be a separate question. We can answer this one first.

Liz Carlisle 37:11
I think about the Indigenous communities that have lived in the desert Southwest for thousands of years. What’s now southern Arizona, southern New Mexico, and northern Mexico.

Liz Carlisle 37:11
There was a great research paper that a group of researchers, led by Gary Paul Nabhan, who’s one of the contributors to this recent book, “Living Roots: The Promise of Perennial Foods,” put out about an arid American model. They looked at what plants people have eaten in this place for all these thousands of years when they had successful civilizations here, and which of these plants might also be important crops in contemporary food systems.

Liz Carlisle 37:11
There’s a lot of people, I think, who would speak back to the idea that an arid environment is not a place where you can sustainably grow food. I love nopales. There’s all these amazing chili peppers. Mesquite is an incredibly protein-dense crop. There’s a lot of examples – tepary beans – of things that people have grown that fit into an arid environment.

Liz Carlisle 37:11
I think it’s a terrible idea that we’re growing so much alfalfa in the southern California desert. We definitely should not be doing that there.

Linley Dixon 37:11
Ruining aquifers.

Liz Carlisle 37:11
Exactly. But I don’t think that necessarily means there shouldn’t be any food growing there. It just means we need to think more about what kinds of plants have historically thrived and will make sense in an era of climate change. As the co-authors in that other paper talked about, growing these desert plants in guilds allows the ones that need more shade and are getting dried out to have their canopy layer to help them out, and their nurse plant.

Liz Carlisle 37:11
People have raised food in a really wide variety of environments, but we need to do it in a way that’s adapted to where we are.

Linley Dixon 37:12
Is this hypothetical? Are there examples of where people are making a living doing this?

Liz Carlisle 37:40
Yeah, it’s a great question. I teach at UC Santa Barbara now, so I just keep going to more and more arid places as the climate warms and they get more arid. I think I really have to think about this stuff. One of the places that my students and I go on a field trip is Condor’s Hope, which is a small family dry farm that Steve Gliessman and Roberta Jaffe run in their “retirement.”

Liz Carlisle 37:12
As you know, no small family farm is actually retirement, but they taught for many years at UC Santa Cruz and wanted to experiment with exactly what you’re saying: “Can we make this work as a business?” They do olives and wine grapes. They’ve done a little bit of experimenting with agave, and are doing this as proof of concept that you can have a five-acre dry farm using very little supplemental irrigation, only to mimic the normal amount of rainfall when they have a really, really dry year.

Liz Carlisle 37:27
They’re selling through a CSA-style model, basically direct marketing in a very community- and experience-based way, where people come to the farm and participate in community harvests, bring their families, and camp in the vineyard, and things like this.

Liz Carlisle 37:27
There’s an example of a small family farm that…. This isn’t a family that had to earn their whole lifetime of income off this enterprise, but they are running it as an enterprise that covers its costs, and modeling, “Here’s one thing that we could do in this very dry place.”

Liz Carlisle 40:46
But there’d be a lot more opportunity if more of us would eat carob and mulberries and mesquite, or get interested in these things. I think there’s that side of it too: the cultural and culinary work around seeing the foods that are all around us in a landscape like Southern California.

Linley Dixon 41:07
Let’s go back to the 10 billion people, which is what people often throw around. Maybe that’s where our civilization’s population will peak, and then, as the Southern Hemisphere gets more and more developed, birth rates will start to go down, and we can stabilize somewhere lower than that.

Linley Dixon 41:31
But are we currently producing enough food for 10 billion people, or is this some scary thing that’s going to hit us in 2050, where we can’t feed that many people?

Liz Carlisle 41:44
It’s an important question. I appreciate you raising it. I think Jahi Chappell did an absolutely brilliant job of answering this question in his book, “Beginning to End Hunger: Food and the Environment in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, and Beyond.” It’s a case study about a program in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, from the previous Lula administration, where they had major public programs that paid small-scale organic farms to supply food for food security programs in urban areas.

Liz Carlisle 42:14
It’s sort of like if we, in this country, were marrying the farm side of the Farm Bill – really pro small organic farm – with the food side of the Farm Bill, and actually paying people on the farm side to supply the food to something like SNAP. They did it in Brazil, and they reduced child malnutrition by an extraordinary amount and childhood diabetes. Jahi has all the figures and all the stories, but he also wrote this really brilliant introduction about this kind of global question.

Liz Carlisle 42:43
A couple of really important points are about the tremendous amount of food that’s wasted in our current food system. About 40%, more or less, globally doesn’t make it from the farm to someone’s plate. In our part of the world, that happens to be more in our homes and at the last step in the supply chain, because we like to have produce in the grocery store look pretty, things like that.

Liz Carlisle 43:09
Whereas in other parts of the world, it has to do with not having enough cold storage on the farm or on the way from the farm to the distributor or to the market. But 40% of the food is getting wasted, and then there’s also kind of an equivalent amount of energetic or caloric waste happening with our concentrated animal feeding operation system, where we’re putting all these inputs into growing feed grain.

Liz Carlisle 43:34
Where if we used some of that land to grow food for people instead, it would be tremendously more efficient in terms of having food for people to eat.

Liz Carlisle 43:43
Jahi makes the point that solving those two problems would do so much more for food security than the suggestion of land sparing, or that we need to move away from organic. We really shouldn’t be afraid of the fact that the population is going to grow a little bit. We should be afraid of these two problems in our food system, and the distribution problem that underlies it, which is ultimately that people’s lives are not being valued as much by our global food system as the profits of the companies that benefit from a commodity food system.

Liz Carlisle 44:14
I’m going to stand here forever and say it’s a distribution problem, not a total volume problem, in terms of whether we in fact can feed the world. That phrase just assumes that we’re going to be sending food globally and that’s how everyone’s going to access it.

Liz Carlisle 44:29
When in fact, I think the better question is: are communities set up to feed themselves, and do we have regional resilience and food sovereignty, which I think is the real question underlying people’s actual day-to-day experience of food security.

Linley Dixon 44:44
That last point totally leads into “Grain by Grain,” because that was Bob Quinn’s mission. He produced oils, and then he was going to put it in his tractor, and then he realized that the school ended up wanting to use it. They could deep-fat fry so many more times because it was such a higher quality.

Linley Dixon 45:06
Then you looked into juices. Instead of orange juice, you should be drinking cherry and apple – I can’t remember all the things.

But why hasn’t that vision happened, and could we have a farm bill that really supported that vision? If that was the goal of the Farm Bill, what sort of policies would you see in place, and would there be chaos in trying to get there?

Linley Dixon 45:31
Do we have to ease off a little bit? How do we go about this, assuming we ever get a supportive administration to look into this stuff?

Liz Carlisle 45:39
As you know, the farm bill is immense, and I’ll admit that I haven’t even read all of it. There’s a lot of little places where I think we could make differences, and people will need to do that. We will need to get into the weeds when we have the sort of political will for that scale of transformation.

Liz Carlisle 45:55
But I’ll name three things that I think would be really important in allowing farmers to transition from growing commodity crops to this sort of local food provisioning without making an economic sacrifice that, in some cases for people, is just not feasible right now.

Liz Carlisle 46:12
The first one I’ll name is crop insurance. We know that it really advantages the current commodity system right now. You got your 10-year of yield history for your corn and soy. That’s what your crop insurance payment is based on. You can’t move those acres into something else because you would lose that critical 10-year average yield. That’s actually what’s making you whole more years than not, with the kind of unpredictable weather and the vulnerability of that cropping system to the current climate.

Liz Carlisle 46:38
We need crop insurance that is just as lucrative if you have a diversified farm, but, by the way, is probably more resilient to climate disasters. We need crop insurance that actually incentivizes people to take steps to make their farms more resilient to extreme weather, rather than this kind of perverse disincentive to move away from the commodity crops that really get the lion’s share of the crop insurance money. That’s one – crop insurance – and that’s the biggest share of the money in the farm bill right now. That would be a big deal if we move some of that money around.

Liz Carlisle 47:09
Another one is infrastructure. There was a little bit of this during the Biden years, of money to build the infrastructure that we need for regional food systems. We need a lot more of that, and we need it on a longer, ongoing basis, because that’s the other barrier: so many commodity farmers have an elevator to take stuff to that’s not that far. They know exactly what they’re getting when they go there, even if maybe they don’t agree with all the stuff that the elevator doesn’t take, or says is chaff. People have a routine around their buyers that works in the commodity system.

Liz Carlisle 47:45
Folks who are in regional food systems – and “specialty crops,” which is really just most of the crops – are driving hours and hours to their nearest processing facility and going through all these extra steps. We need to invest in the infrastructure. The commodity crop infrastructure has benefited from a bunch of public money. That’s why it’s there, and so we need an equivalent public money investment to develop that infrastructure for diverse crops.

Liz Carlisle 48:12
Then finally, to Jahi Chappell’s point about what Brazil did in Belo Horizonte in the first Lula administration, the food side of the farm bill also needs to invest in these diverse regional food systems. We need to pay way more money per student for school lunch, school breakfast, and summer feeding programs.

Liz Carlisle 48:31
These are some of the best nutrition, public health, anti-poverty interventions we have access to. There’s amazing research on this, so it’s a great investment that has an ROI far beyond the amount that we’re spending. We need to use a bunch of that money to actually do targeted procurement of diverse regional crops.

Liz Carlisle 48:50
I think if we focused on those three things in the farm bill, those are areas where we can make big change, and then we can think about all the other parts of the farm bill that we need to move as well.

Linley Dixon 49:01
I have to say, my dad does Meals on Wheels, and I look at those meals, and it’s a lot of just price processed corn. It seems really unhealthy. What about, “It costs more money?” I guess there are two points that people make there: “That’s more expensive.” They also talk about poverty and people just not being able to afford good food. How do you kind of combat those issues?

Liz Carlisle 49:28
Yeah, I agree. I don’t think we change our food system just by asking people to pay more for quality or to vote with their dollar, because we don’t all have the same number of dollars to vote with. Since I’ve been around the food movement, which is about 15 years, there’s way more income and wealth inequality in this country than there even was 15 years ago.

Liz Carlisle 49:50
That “vote with your dollar” strategy is even more inequitable. I don’t hear it very much in our community anymore for that reason, because such a significant share of the public is struggling to make ends meet. It makes no sense to have a consumer-only driven strategy.

Liz Carlisle 50:07
That’s why I think things like public procurement are really important, along with… I’ve been really glad at various junctures to see people involved in sustainable agriculture teaming up with folks who are fighting for a higher minimum wage for people that work in fast food, for example.

Liz Carlisle 50:25
We should be thinking about how the average person’s purchasing power is related to whether we can have quality food, and whether people have the ability to pay the real cost of their food. I think a movement like ours that relies on the individual actions of a whole lot of people is undermined by a society that is so deeply unequal.

Liz Carlisle 50:48
I think we can, in the near term, focus on what our public institutions can do, and in the longer term focus on how everybody can be a sort of choiceful, empowered consumer because they have the income to choose high-quality food. It’s just bananas. You look at the total percentage of the wealth in this country – or income in this country – that’s spent on food, and it’s tiny. It’s way smaller than Europe, or here several decades ago.

Liz Carlisle 51:17
We’re not spending a lot of our total income on food, but at the same time, for some people, for a lot of people, they feel like they’re spending more than they can afford. How can those two things exist at once? Well, because most people don’t have access to most of the money to spend.

Liz Carlisle 51:35
It’s sort of a larger project of making more of the wealth in this country available to people to meet their basic needs in dignified ways, rather than just being held in the hands of these like couple hundred insanely wealthy people.

Linley Dixon 51:50
I so agree with you that this vision of how the farm bill could really help us out in a much bigger way. I love how Marion Nestle was like, “This isn’t revolutionary. We are already putting billions of dollars into one system. Let’s talk about putting it into the system that we really want.”

Linley Dixon 52:07
Two programs that were part of the Inflation Reduction Act were the Local Food for Schools program and the Local Food Promotion Act (LFPA). LFS and LFPA got cut. This was under MAHA’s watch. I was so shocked that nobody from MAHA. I did not hear that voice. This is exactly what we’re talking about: supporting organic food getting into the mouths of our children, and there was not a MAHA reaction to those programs getting cut.

Linley Dixon 52:40
It was literally the same week there was a $10 billion gift to commodity ag because of the tariffs that Trump is putting in. It was just like, “Where is the reaction to this?” I think it was early on, and so I hope that if it happened now there would be more awareness.

Linley Dixon 53:00
There’s a huge outcry about glyphosate, but I want to say it’s the same outcry for the loss, and I want to see these programs back, because we grew our farm, and so many farmers grew their farms because there was opportunity, literally, for the food. This is food that we’re producing: vegetables and livestock. The meat was in burgers at school. It felt so right to put that good nutrition in.

Linley Dixon 53:28
I have a pig farmer who wouldn’t use the slop from a school because they said they wanted their pigs to eat better than the food that we’re feeding our children. This is just outrageous. You are so right on that. That was the very beginning, the first time that I was seeing policies since farm-to-school started, and that is such small amounts of money. And they were cut. That’s part of my vision too. I’m excited to hear you say that.

Liz Carlisle 53:59
I guess the good news is we’ve got data from that now. Think about everybody who advocated for those programs for years and years and years, the staffers and people who took a chance on implementing those programs. The next round of asks that we make, we have better data now because we tried it and it worked. We have better numbers on, “This is exactly what we’ll get from these investments.”

Liz Carlisle 54:23
Those weren’t in vain. Not only did they make a huge difference when they happened, but they set us up, I think, to now have a sort of proof of concept that we get a lot out of that investment in just exactly those kinds of programs.

Linley Dixon 54:37
Not only did the farms that we want to see thrive really expand, but nutritionally, our children were just getting better food, and that should really matter. That should matter more than it does.

Liz Carlisle 54:48
Absolutely.

Linley Dixon 54:49
I want to share some stories. You give so many in “Living Roots: The Promise of Perennial Foods.” You open with Leah Penniman, and she’s got this beautiful story. Leah is amazing. She just always has the best stories of tossing up the soil and some of these traditional practices. Would you kind of maybe talk about some of your favorite stories from “Living Roots” and in writing this book?

Liz Carlisle 55:13
This has been wonderful. This is my first time as an editor, so my friend Aubrey Strike Krug and I co-edited this collection of 30 personal essays and four poems, with incredible illustrations from the artist Emmy Linscheit, from people – farmers, Indigenous land stewards, researchers, chefs – who all love perennial foods.

Liz Carlisle 55:33
Everybody kind of focuses on one or a kind of cropping system. The whole first section of the book is about agroforestry, and Leah leads off with this incredible essay about the four-and-a-half-acre agroforestry system at Soul Fire, and how she’s been inspired by agroforestry in Haiti, and all these amazing histories of agroforestry and Black liberation.

Liz Carlisle 55:57
I didn’t know that Harriet Tubman planted an apple orchard at her house of freedom in Auburn, New York, and had always wanted to, that she’d been forced to plant apples when she was enslaved but didn’t get to. All these incredible stories are in Leah’s essay, and a bunch of other agroforestry systems, too.

Liz Carlisle 56:13
Gary Paul Nabhan writes about the cactus forest. There are incredible essays about berries and foraging, and also hazelnuts, and some of these crops that the Savanna Institute has been working on in the Midwest to start to bring some of these woody plants back into corn and soy monocultures.

Liz Carlisle 56:42
That’s the forest section at the beginning. Then there’s a grassland section in the middle that’s both about grassland foods, including perennial root foods and berry crops on grasslands, but also animals who are raised on perennial pasture. There are some beautiful essays about buffalo food systems from Elsie de Bré, Mariah Gladstone, and Rosalyn LaPier.

Liz Carlisle 57:12
Paige Stanley, who’s in Colorado, writes about regenerative grazing of cattle from her perspective as a researcher who’s worked closely on farms to document some of the soil health benefits of adaptive grazing.

Liz Carlisle 57:26
Then the whole final section is about perennial grains, some of which have been around a long time. Jacob Birch, who is Aboriginal Australian (Gamilaraay), writes about these native Australian grains that people have been harvesting for thousands of years that his community is working to revitalize.

Liz Carlisle 57:44
Then there’s a bunch of essays from plant breeders, many of whom have connections to the Land Institute, who are working on Kernza, perennial sorghum, and silphium. We also hear all along the supply chain. Wendy Johnson talks about growing Kernza, and Beth Dooley talks about being a chef working with some of these perennial foods.

Liz Carlisle 58:06
We hear from a bunch of different geographies and people who’ve been doing this for decades, people who are new in this work, and a lot of different cultural backgrounds as well, and cultural connections to some of these perennial foods.

Linley Dixon 58:21
One of my favorites was the flooding that happened in the East, into the perennial pasture. It reminded me of when we had, in North Carolina – I forget which hurricane it was – but when hurricanes do hit that region, there are so many CAFOs that manure kind of spreads everywhere.

Linley Dixon 58:45
I just appreciated that they were saying that with perennial pasture, there’s just not as much runoff, and it recovers so much more quickly. Maybe talk a little bit about that story. That one really stuck with me.

Liz Carlisle 59:02
Yeah, that was super moving to receive that. Actually, I first heard the story… We had Zoom calls with about two-thirds of the authors before pen went to paper. That’s when I first met Piyush Labsetwar, who’s the author of that piece, and he leads the farm at Grow Food Northampton now.

Liz Carlisle 59:20
But he hasn’t lived in that area for a long time. He’s originally from India. He spent some time in Illinois, spent some time at the Land Institute, and then moved to western Massachusetts following his partner when his partner got a job at Smith College.

Liz Carlisle 59:34
In the essay, he’s thinking a lot about being a migrant, and these foods and plants that are migrants, and how to be a migrant in a way that strengthens the place where you are, which is such a powerful story in this time. He talks about how he’s got this little plot at Grow Food Northampton, right by the river, which he knows has been flooding in recent years.

Liz Carlisle 59:59
He’s doing the experiment in flood-resilient perennial agriculture, and he has experience with currents of perennial grain and some perennial wheat, so he plants that. But he interplants it with pawpaw trees, which are native to the North American continent.

Linley Dixon 1:00:15
I’ve never eaten a pawpaw. Describe what that is.

Liz Carlisle 1:00:19
Some people, I think, call it a custard apple. Maybe in the essay, Piyush Labsetwar gives a really good sense-based description of it, like it’s a cross between this and that. I think it’s like a mango crossed with something. At one of the events, he was like, “I come from a place with mango, so I understood this fruit right away.”

Liz Carlisle 1:00:38
It’s not the kind of thing that would be shelf-stable in a grocery store. It is the kind of thing that you would preserve if you were going to actually market it commercially, probably. But it’s just perfectly ripe, right off the tree, and kind of custardy.

Liz Carlisle 1:00:53
Anyway, so he plants these things thinking, “If some flooding comes along in several years, once these plants are mature, I think they might be able to handle it well.” Of course, it doesn’t go that way. The floods come really early, right after just a year, and he comes to the farm. They’re covered in five feet of water, and he’s like, “Oh my gosh, are these going to survive?”

Liz Carlisle 1:01:13
But then in the middle of the essay, he sort of cuts away to, “Wait, the flooding part is actually normal. These floodwaters were something that Indigenous communities lived with. The weird thing is the way we’ve channelized this environment.”

Liz Carlisle 1:01:28
Because he comes back and he sees, “Okay, yeah, there was a bunch of floodwater, but it brought in all of this silt.” Because these plants were resilient to having water around for a little while, they actually benefited from the fact that the floodwaters brought silt. I got to see, when we did an event at Smith, I got to go see these pawpaws and Kernza plants. It is really remarkable to see them thriving after they were flooded twice like this.

Liz Carlisle 1:01:58
He kind of shares this lesson that sometimes change and things that migrate can bring renewal, in the way that the silt from the flood did, and that the plants – as transplants, just like he is – are there to try to create more protection and slow down the water. They’re on the edge of this farm where a lot of other migrant and refugee farmers are growing food.

Liz Carlisle 1:02:22
It’s a beautiful meditation on the way that we can be important to place even when we’re in diaspora, and a pushback on more nativist ways of thinking about local food systems or agrarianism – as if it’s static, and one group of people is in a place and anybody who shows up otherwise is a threat to that culture. Instead, it’s about a kind of dynamic resilience.

Linley Dixon 1:02:51
I think it speaks to one of the challenges: how long it takes for these perennial systems to produce food. Which book was this, where you were talking about how everybody embraced fertilizers – and maybe herbicides too, I think it was herbicides – because they could now go to the lake. They had all this time on their hands.

Linley Dixon 1:03:15
I’m wondering, as you’re speaking, it’s like it might be really hard to get there because it’s going to take a little while for these systems to mature and produce food. But if we do, are we going to have a lot more time to go to the lake? Will they sort of take care of themselves more and produce food for a long time without having to, every year, till and plant seed and harvest all these things that we do?

Linley Dixon 1:03:45
I feel like we’re going to be forced out of that system just because it isn’t as sustainable as the land-sparing argument makes it seem. As we try these new things, I’m worried about that workload. Of course, I’m making a living too, but do you have some stories where it’s like, “Yes, this workload is hard for these years, and then it really pays off?”

Liz Carlisle 1:04:11
Yeah. I think about both Keith Keeley and Wendy Johnson talking about farming projects that are over a decade in, and all the challenges they faced at the beginning, even having perennial farms be viable in a market. They both grow agroforestry crops. Wendy also does Kernza and small-scale pastured meat, and it’s sort of getting to a point where they can see more of that.

Liz Carlisle 1:04:41
I guess there’s resilience in the cropping system itself, but also, I think, more broadly, it’s about a larger social support network. Keith talks about getting really excited about agroforestry as a young person and planting these rows of fruit and nut trees into a hay field with a bunch of his friends, thinking he was going to make it as a farmer, and then realizing, “Oh crap, this Midwestern agricultural system is set up for corn and soy, and there are all these barriers.”

Liz Carlisle 1:05:06
He goes off to graduate school, gets involved with the Savanna Institute, and now he’s in a position to try to create the markets, the technical assistance, and those kinds of supports for a whole farming community, rather than just going in on his own at the beginning.

Liz Carlisle 1:05:25
His essay ends with him going back to that original planting, and it’s still there. He looks across at the neighboring farmer, a commodity corn and soy farmer, who has started planting some perennials. It’s kind of about how, when you create some of these support structures, it becomes more viable for other people to look over the fence line and say, “Oh, that appears to be working.”

Liz Carlisle 1:05:46
We’re still in the early stages, I think, of creating those support structures, but some of those early adopters and risk-takers show us what can happen because their cropping systems are more mature, and you can see, “Oh, if we did have the public programs to help people get over the hump of those early years, this is some of what we could realize down the line.”

Linley Dixon 1:06:10
It reminds me, too – I don’t know if you know Glenn Elzenga – but I wonder how many people want to do this type of work. He’s saying, “We’ve figured out a system. The land thrives with us producing beef on these public lands, but I’m not seeing people adopt it because it requires them to live out on the land.”

Linley Dixon 1:06:35
They have this herding system where they fence them up at night, then bring them back to cow camp, and then move cow camp. It’s just so much work. Do you see that people are wanting this way of life, and to adopt some of these systems?

Liz Carlisle 1:06:53
I will say, my job would be a lot easier if young people were totally uninterested in field experiences in agriculture. I wouldn’t have any wait lists. I wouldn’t have to send emails to people being like, “I’m so sorry, the class is full.” I see a tremendous amount of interest. I think it is our policies and our structures that have disadvantaged these careers and these ways of life.

Liz Carlisle 1:07:19
Health insurance, for example – man, did that come up over and over when I was doing my dissertation research – from people across the political spectrum who were like, “We would do more organic acreage. We would take that risk if it weren’t for the fact that we have all this other risk over here because we don’t have good health insurance.”

Liz Carlisle 1:07:39
Just running a small business means you’re in a totally different situation. There are things about our social safety net that make small businesses and rural life so much harder. Then also the kind of disinvestment in public infrastructure and community and public institutions also makes real life less exciting.

Liz Carlisle 1:08:00
Bob Quinn, in “Grain by Grain”, talks about when there was a jam and dance hall in Big Sandy, and people were up into the wee hours…

Linley Dixon 1:08:08
I know. I was nostalgic for that time. I just wanted to go back and party with him all night, in that town. They had such a sense of community that I feel is lost now with screens and stuff.

Liz Carlisle 1:08:21
That’s also part of it. It’s like, yeah, in the farm bill we need investment in local food procurement and infrastructure, and we also need investment in rural cultural institutions. That was part of the New Deal as well. I think if we’re going to have another Green New Deal – if anybody’s still interested in that language – and if we’re going to have another big investment in our communities, that needs to be a part of it too.

Liz Carlisle 1:08:46
Because I think if we weren’t telling young people that they had to sacrifice some really important things that make life good in order to farm, I think many of them are totally interested. Especially now, Gen Z, so done with technology, would love to get out of the office and off the screen and do something with their hands and feed their community.

Liz Carlisle 1:09:08
I think it’s on us as a society to not tell people, “Hey, if you want a farm, you have to take a huge pay cut, you’re not going to have health insurance, and there will be no community or cultural institutions within driving distance of you.” I think those are problems that we can actually solve.

Liz Carlisle 1:09:25
It’s not the fault of rural communities for not having those things. I think it is very much the economics of commodity agriculture that have bled those kinds of things away from rural communities, and so we need to reinvest.

Linley Dixon 1:09:39
Beautifully said. Liz, I’ve kept you way over, but you’re endlessly interesting. You are such a beautiful writer. I really encourage everybody. I had all these quotes picked out because you’re just so eloquent. You spoke so well today. I really appreciate the time you’ve given, and I’ll encourage everybody to read these books because we’ll need to go back to them again and again. There’s so much in there. Thank you so much, Liz.

Liz Carlisle 1:10:05
Oh, thank you, Linley. It means so much to hear that coming from somebody who does the work in such brilliant ways. Thank you for everything you’re doing, and to everybody in this community who is doing the work on the land, and in the advocacy realm, and in the community. I appreciate you all so much.

Linley Dixon 1:10:22
Great, let’s chat again soon.

Liz Carlisle 1:10:24
Let’s do.