Limits to Growth?

How long can we go on like this?

Author of Farming While Black, co-founder of Soul Fire Farm and James Beard Award winner Leah Penniman, shares her thoughts on whether or not growth and extraction can serve our planet into the future in Episode 55 of the Real Organic Podcast.
Watch from 20:48 to 21:34

In Episode 246, Real Organic Project certified farmer Emily Oakley shares her antithetical vision of rejecting the growth that’s been inherently expected of farmers, since the famous “Get Big or Get Out” statement from Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz (1971-1976). Butz encouraged farmers to plant “fencerow to fencerow” after ending a federal program that previously paid corn farmers NOT to plant corn, in an attempt to prevent a glut and price drop.
Watch from 3:23:10 to 3:26:09

In Episode 254, while part of a broader discussion about the work of Joan Dye Gussow, journalist Tom Philpott rebuts Michael Grunwald’s 2024 NY Times article “Sorry, but This Is the Future of Food” which claimed that food systems should focus on pairing chemical agriculture with untended natural spaces that could be “rewilded”. (Watch a debate on the UC Berkeley stage between Grunwald and Agrocecology professor Tim Bowles about this subject, moderated by Kim Severson of the NY Times.)
Watch from 33:34 to 36:59