Episode #302
Dave Chapman + Linley Dixon: Saving Organic Through Activist Science

Dave Chapman live on stage at Churchtown Dairy, September 19, 2026:

Dave Chapman 0:02
Thank you. I’m better in a conversation. Okay. Dartmouth, Mother Dartmouth. I live in the Upper Valley, about 10 miles from this picture. It was in 2020, just before COVID shut down the world, and we were having this conference at Dartmouth. It was the second time that we were going to be at Dartmouth, and Paul Hawken was coming as our keynote.

Dave Chapman 0:35
We had an amazing two-day conference, and a lot of the people who are speaking today and yesterday were speaking there. Chellie was coming, and Tyrone Hayes was coming, and Hugh Kent was coming. A lot of people. It was an exciting thing. We had been given the biggest hall at Dartmouth, which seats 900, and I was appropriately intimidated that we would be able to fill the hall for Paul Hawken on Saturday night.

Dave Chapman 1:14
So I was meeting with various academic departments to see if I could inspire them to bring their students. In a meeting with the Environmental Studies Department, the co-chair of the department looked at me at one point. He was a bit agitated by what I was saying, and he said, “Of course, you know that organic is worse for the climate than conventional agriculture.” And I said no. I didn’t know that, and it just didn’t make any sense to me.

Dave Chapman 1:57
I learned that he was referring to an article by Tim Searchinger that had come out in a big academic journal, and it said exactly that. We’ll get to hear a debate, Michael and Tim, and we’ll talk about that. But I’m talking about my own start on this journey of trying to figure out and understand: was that right? Because I didn’t think it was.

Dave Chapman 2:30
So yes, I’m sorry. For some of you, this is too creepy. But the cobra effect is something that they refer to. It’s about unintended consequences. In the days of the British Raj, Delhi was swarming with venomous cobras, and the authorities, in order to deal with this, put a bounty on cobra skins. They started to get a lot of cobra skins, and they thought this was working smashingly.

Dave Chapman 3:06
They had warehouses filled with cobra skins, but the number of cobras wasn’t going down at all. What they discovered is that some industrious citizens were breeding cobras. They weren’t stupid, and this was a good way to make money, so they had little cobra farms going, and they would kill them and skin them and bring them in.

Dave Chapman 3:38
When the authorities figured this out, they were very despondent. They canceled the program, and so the breeders released the remaining stock on the streets. This was an example of unintended consequences. When we look at agriculture, we have to ask ourselves what is the purpose of this system. One question is, is the purpose of the system to have the highest yield possible per acre?

Dave Chapman 4:15
I would say that is not the purpose of agriculture. The purpose of agriculture is to feed us and to make us healthy and sustain our lives. And really, at its highest level, it’s also going to build healthy communities and even, I dare say, at its very best, healthy democracies. So we have to understand what the actual goals are.

Dave Chapman 4:46
Ah, yes, the goal. This book happens to be one that really inspired my life as a farmer. It’s not about farming. It’s about thinking. It’s about problem solving, and I’m not trying to sell the book. But the goal is a big question. What is the goal in any system? Sometimes we don’t know what the goal is. We find out the system has its own goal.

Dave Chapman 5:19
It’s not what you think it is or what I think it is. A system has a goal, and it will drive towards that goal. For example, if the CEO of a large corporation is losing money, they will lose their job because they are not meeting the goal of the system. So Paul was going to be our keynote speaker at that conference.

Dave Chapman 5:50
I’ve gotten to talk to him a lot, and he’s a wonderful mentor for me. One time when I was visiting, he said, “David, you’ve got to be thinking bigger.” And I didn’t know what he meant, of course. I thought about it and pondered it. I was driving down to do another interview in San Francisco, and I was crossing the Golden Gate Bridge, which is a beautiful experience in January for a Vermont farmer.

Dave Chapman 6:21
It was just breathtakingly beautiful. I get a call, and I put on my headset, and it’s Hugh Kent. “Hey, Hugh.” And he said, “I’ve been pondering this, and I think we’ve got to think bigger.” I swear, it was like 12 hours after Paul had said that, and I thought, okay, the universe is talking to me.

Dave Chapman 6:45
What does that mean, to think bigger? I think it means looking beyond the symptoms for the real problems, the real causes, and seeing if we can address those. So this book is something that I’ve discovered in the last year, “Limits to Growth.” This is the 30-year update. It first came out in 1972, the year after I got out of high school, and it’s still true.

Dave Chapman 7:14
It’s been a powerful book. It sold over 30 million copies in the world, and it’s changed a lot of our thinking. But it has not changed our systems, so the authors are not feeling real optimistic about their life’s work, but they keep trying. The main author of this was Dana Meadows, and she died in 2001.

Dave Chapman 7:38
I knew Dana. She lived in the Upper Valley. She taught at Dartmouth, and she was in the Environmental Studies Department. And she had a very different vision – that’s Dana – a very different vision of how we should deal with agriculture. This was from the book: “Surely no sane society would pursue an agricultural technology that increases yields while destroying food…” While destroying land. Sorry, that’s an important difference.

Dave Chapman 8:13
Dana was a pretty wonderful person. She was very bright, and I had not read her book when I knew her back then. She taught at Dartmouth, and she gave a lot of talks, but she also started a co-housing project, and she also started an organic farm at that co-housing project. For her, this was walking the walk.

Dave Chapman 8:37
This was being the change that she believed we needed in order to live within the limits to growth. I’m going to go back one. So there were four conditions that Dana listed in the book for a sustainable system. I’m going to list them. I’m sorry, it’s a little bit technical. Every renewable resource must be used at or below the rate at which it can renew itself.

Dave Chapman 9:06
Think of living soil as a renewable resource. You have to keep it living and replenish it and feed it for it to continue as a resource. Every nonrenewable resource must be used below the rate at which a renewable substitute can be developed. Think of coal and oil. Every pollution stream must be emitted below the rate at which it can be absorbed or made harmless.

Dave Chapman 9:35
There are many examples of this, but CO2 might be a good one for today. If we’re releasing CO2 at a higher rate than the ecosystem can absorb it and render it harmless, then… These are all problems that make the system unsustainable. The fourth one that Dana listed was that to be socially sustainable, land and money must be equitably distributed and sufficient to provide a good life for everyone.

Dave Chapman 10:07
She considered the first three completely noncontroversial, and she thought the fourth one was also noncontroversial, but she knew that there was a lot of controversy around it. She stressed that the fourth point, about having equitable social systems, was not about being a good person. It wasn’t just about doing the right thing or the ethical thing.

Dave Chapman 10:35
This was a practical way of building a sustainable system that we live in, and if we don’t have that, the system will be unsustainable. It will be unstable, and it will ultimately fall apart. So these are the limits to growth, and when these limits are exceeded, we go into something called overshoot.

Dave Chapman 11:00
Harvesting fish faster than they can reproduce is an example of overshoot, and if you stay in overshoot too long, you go into what they call collapse, which is what it sounds like. The Grand Banks fisheries off of Newfoundland are an example of this. They were fished beyond the ability of the cod to reproduce, and ultimately the whole population crashed.

Dave Chapman 11:30
They had to close the fishery for 30 years, and it’s just slowly being reopened now. Our history is filled with examples of overshoot and collapse, and if you ever get a chance to talk to Allan Savory, he will tell you that several times. So, okay. Now we’re going to talk about Hans Herren. How many of you have heard my interview with Hans Herren? Oh boy, what a missed opportunity!

Dave Chapman 12:02
Good, this is great. All right. So Hans is a wonderful Swiss entomologist, and he lives in California, just a few miles from Full Belly Farm. The story that he told me was that Africa was suffering a giant invasion of a particular mealybug that there was no biological check on in the system. There were no predators or parasites that would control it.

Dave Chapman 12:32
So we got to see that kind of exponential growth, which is horrifying if you’ve ever experienced it in a greenhouse. I have, with aphids, because my greenhouse was a fairly isolated system, and I didn’t have the benefit of a large biodiversity supporting it. Helen Atthowe has talked with me about how maybe we could establish that with a lot of diverse plant species, so that we mimicked what’s happening in a really good system outside.

Dave Chapman 13:09
It was not happening in Africa. They tried all kinds of terrible pesticides, and they didn’t have any success in controlling the mealybugs. So, somewhat in desperation, they turned to a group of entomologists to try a nonchemical approach. This was before they had the internet, and Hans realized that this mealybug was unusual for Africa.

Dave Chapman 13:38
He had to fly to Washington, D.C., to the giant insect collection and try to figure out which mealybug of the many mealybugs in the world this was. He did find it, and he realized that it came from one of seven areas of Central and South America. So he equipped a little lab in a little van and drove down, and it took him till the seventh area to find the mealybug.

Dave Chapman 14:09
He had a lot of exciting adventures. He’s kind of an Indiana Jones character, a swashbuckler, and he was held up at gunpoint at border checks. It was a wild time politically in that area. He finally found the mealybug in Ecuador. It was not a problem there. It’s kind of hard to find because it was in perfect balance with its ecosystem.

Dave Chapman 14:38
So he found some of the predators and parasites for this mealybug, and he took them to England, figured out how to breed them, and then took some to a field in Africa covered in mealybugs and put them on the edge. It was about the size of a football field, and by the afternoon he could find the new beneficial insects on the far end of the field. So he said, “Okay, this is working.”

Dave Chapman 15:10
So they set up insectaries, bred them at volume, and started to dispense them across Africa. The mealybugs were in 27 countries, and they were flying along in low planes with the cargo doors open, literally just shoveling them out. He talked about working with a pilot who was also a bit of a buccaneer and had flown for the CIA in Cambodia and liked adventure.

Dave Chapman 15:41
So they did this, and it worked, and the mealybug problem was solved, unbelievably. The project went on for many years, and I think the final price tag was about $20 million. It saved billions and billions of dollars of crop loss, and millions and millions of lives, because this was a staple crop in countries where they depended on it to survive.

Dave Chapman 16:11
Spraying them was what I would call the science of death. The same thing is happening right now in Florida. They have a mealybug, they don’t know what to do, and so they’ve gotten permission to use prohibited pesticides to spray a lot of Florida, and it is not likely to work. It did not work in Africa. But what Hans was doing was the science of life.

Dave Chapman 16:41
It’s a very different approach to solving our problems. It was enormously cost-effective. The science of death tends to have a lot of unwanted side effects. People get sick. In Africa they didn’t just eat the cassava itself. They ate the leaves too, and the mealybugs would get under the leaves, and the sprays made the leaves curl. So basically you were poisoning your food.

Dave Chapman 17:13
This is the tiny parasitic wasp. I have to try and pronounce it: Epidinocarsis lopezi. This saved many lives. That’s a mealybug at the bottom corner getting eaten. He got the World Food Prize, and interestingly, that’s Norman Borlaug giving it to him. Norman Borlaug invented the World Food Prize and was on the committee that selected Hans.

Dave Chapman 17:43
He also got to hang out with presidents. This is Jimmy Carter celebrating what he did, and Bill Clinton. It was a big deal, and it was an amazing example of the science of life. And yet right now in Florida, the immediate response is the science of death. Organic is still small potatoes in America, and I wanted to say why.

Dave Chapman 18:11
On the left of this, the blue column is the amount of money spent on research for organic by the USDA, and the red column is a combination of the amount of money spent by the USDA and the amount of money spent by the industry. I will say that with the industry, you can say, well, they’re spending their profit on that. Their profit comes from us.

Dave Chapman 18:41
They’re completely propped up by an agricultural system that’s paid for with taxpayer dollars. This is not an open market. This is a rigged system. So they’re taking the money that we give them and spending it to learn how to do it better, and this is a difficult race. What if we doubled the amount that we spent on organic and took it away from chemical agriculture? This is what it would look like.

Dave Chapman 19:15
Can you imagine if we doubled our research budget for organic? It would be a revolution. What if we did it tenfold? That’s what it looks like. You see how crazy this is. We are putting our money into the wrong place, and that money has an enormous impact and effect. Even without any research money, the farmers that you’re hearing here, and many of you who are farmers that we’re not hearing from here, are figuring this out yourselves.

Dave Chapman 19:53
You’re figuring it out, not with their help, but with their active opposition. So I think it’s amazing to see. I look at people like Eliot, who started so much of this in America. I look at the people who have picked up that torch and carried it forward, and I’m very impressed. Chellie is going to speak later. This is her at an early rally of ours.

Dave Chapman 20:24
I was at a meeting at Abby Rockefeller’s house, and Chellie was there with a handful of people, 10 or 15 people, talking about the Green New Deal. Chellie gave a beautiful talk about what the Green New Deal was and what it meant, and after she was done, I put up my hand and said, “Yeah, but this can’t work unless Chellie has an army behind her, us.”

Dave Chapman 20:54
We are the army, because no politician can do this without support from the people. We’re going to hear about Bayer today and the ways in which they are subverting and twisting our science and our government. We’re going to hear about Driscoll’s, which is doing the same, and there is an opposition. There is something happening.

Dave Chapman 21:22
There’s the People vs. Poison rally, which I did not know about because I didn’t read Max’s newsletter when I should have, so I wasn’t there.

Dave Chapman 21:35
But I would have been if I’d known about it. Some of the people I’ve interviewed were there, and Chellie and Thomas Massie were there, and they spoke. This was a real bipartisan thing coming together. There are three lawsuits against Driscoll’s right now, and there is one lawsuit by Driscoll’s against a tiny company that they’re trying to crush like a gnat for saying bad things about them.

Dave Chapman 22:07
These are all part of something that’s happening. People are waking up, and all we can hope is that this turns into a fire. Right now, it’s more like smoldering embers. There’s also a film I just wanted to call out. Hugh is in it. It’s gotten 7 million views in two weeks. It’s about Driscoll’s, and Austin Frerick is in it as well, and Dan Barber, with some interview we did with him.

Dave Chapman 22:40
So if you get a chance to see that, please do. One thing that happened is this guy got fired. He was the CEO of Driscoll’s, Soren Bjorn, and he got replaced by the daughter of the last CEO before Soren. It doesn’t matter. I mean, it’s fine. But my point is, we need to change the system, not the CEOs.

Dave Chapman 23:05
It’s fine that we change the CEOs, but we need to change the system, because no CEO, it doesn’t matter who they are or what they want, can do this without us. I’ve talked about Emmanuel Faber before, who was CEO of Danone, and he really wanted to create change. I’m completely convinced of that, and he was very eloquent, and he failed. They had a down quarter, and he was fired.

Dave Chapman 23:37
All the change that he was trying to pull off was thrown out. So we need to change the systems. This is László Barabási. I interviewed László a few weeks ago. You all want to hear that interview? Boy, is he interesting! Every time I talk to somebody who really knows anything about human nutrition, they say, “You interviewed László? Can you send that to me?”

Dave Chapman 24:07
He’s kind of a hidden rock star. He’s a physicist at Northeastern and at Harvard Med School, and you go, what’s a physicist doing with nutrition? But his field is complexity theory and networks, and he’s the one who coined a term in nutrition, “nutritional dark matter.” That’s the 130,000 compounds that we don’t even have names for. They mostly have numbers now, and he thinks there are far more than that.

Dave Chapman 24:41
They’re the things in food that are not on the label, but that are critically important to your health, and we don’t understand them. These are complex living systems. We’re far from the science, and he’s the first to say that. He says we’re not anywhere close to being able to tell whether something is nutritious. We can tell whether some things are not nutritious, and we can certainly tell whether they have poisons on them that are bad for your health.

Dave Chapman 25:20
But to really understand nutrition, it’s very complicated, as Joan Gussow said. She said, “We don’t know. We don’t know.” And she called people who think they do know… nutritionism. She made a religion out of it. Like, okay, if we just put some of this in, then it will be healthy, and it just doesn’t work out. I’m out of time.

Dave Chapman 25:47
“Nature is not more complicated than you think. It is more complicated than you can think.” Beautiful. Egler was an ecologist. I want to end with this. It’s a lovely picture of Dan Barber and three people that we’ve lost in the last year and a half: Joan Gussow, Fred Kirschenmann, and Wendell Berry.

Dave Chapman 26:13
These are heroes. They were mentors. They were courageous people who thought things that you weren’t supposed to think. And I wanted to dedicate today’s conference to Wendell Berry. I’m just going to read two sentences that he wrote, or he spoke. “We don’t have the right to ask whether we’re going to succeed or not. The only question we have a right to ask is, what’s the right thing to do?”

Dave Chapman 26:46
“What does this Earth require of us if we want to continue to live on it?” Thank you.

Dave Chapman 26:56
I can never remember the name of the film. That’s why I didn’t say it. Hugh, do you know the name of the film? He’s not saying. I will find it, and we will say it later. Forgive me. Yes, it’s “I Tracked Down the Company Ruining Fruit.” It’s made by More Perfect Union. It’s a 15-minute film. It’s gripping. You won’t regret watching it, I promise you.

Linley Dixon live on stage at Churchtown Dairy, September 19, 2026: In Defense of Scientific Activism:

Dave Chapman 0:00
Our last workshop of the day before we go to breakouts is my co-director, Linley Dixon. Linley and I talk pretty much every day, and she’s in Colorado, so I almost never see her, except when we come to things like this. She’s a true partner in running the Real Organic Project and in guiding it, and I genuinely would feel lost without her.

Dave Chapman 0:39
Occasionally, she’s gone for a day for some reason, and then I just fritter away all day. I can’t make a decision without talking to Linley first. So, Linley, come on up.

Linley Dixon 0:59
It’s a tough act to follow, and it’s tough to be at the end of a long day, I know. While we have two politicians here, I just want to say, please start using the O word. It’s a bad word in Washington, the organic word. Everybody loves to say regenerative, but organic has a definition, and we worked really hard to get that definition, and do not be afraid of it. Enough of the R word.

Linley Dixon 1:26
It goes without saying that it’s pretty backwards for me to spend $2,000 to get certified organic on a teeny tiny farm. We farm an acre and a half of vegetables. It’s highly productive. We produce a lot of food off of that acreage, but it costs us $2,000 to prove that we’re not spraying harmful chemicals, and that is so backwards.

Linley Dixon 1:50
We need to be inspecting the chemical farmers when they purchase the chemicals – that they have the proper training to use them right, and that they aren’t poisoning all of us. None of this is my speech, but I’m going to keep going. I’m sick and tired of the fact that we have to fight one chemical at a time in Washington.

Linley Dixon 2:13
There’s all this energy around glyphosate right now, but atrazine is just sitting there, and we know that’s even more toxic. In Europe, they banned atrazine. And what did we hear from Tyrone today? There’s just something else right there on the counter doing the exact same thing, the exact same pathway. So we need to go after all pesticides. The same thing happened with PFAS. What did we ban, two of the thousands?

Linley Dixon 2:44
I mean, come on, guys, enough. These chemical companies are just laughing at us. They’re like, “Look at them. They’re all busy. They’re still trying to figure out how to save glyphosate.” We’ve got to support organic. We fought for this, and we’ve got to go after the pesticide companies as a whole. We’re not going to win one by one. All right, now I’ll give my speech.

Linley Dixon 3:10
I run a small vegetable farm with my husband and brother, who are busy working. They went to the farmers market today, so it’s a real privilege to be here with you all. We’re on par for one of the driest seasons of all time out in Southwest Colorado, and we’ve heard in the news that we’re not the only ones. It’s happening in France. It’s happening across Europe.

Linley Dixon 3:36
It seems to be either feast or famine in terms of water. It either floods the fields, or it didn’t rain for four months on our farm this summer. That’s just unheard of. The reason why this is happening is because we are burning up hundreds of millions of years of stored photosynthates in the ground. We’re burning it up in the span of 150 years. I’m sorry, but that is human-caused climate change. That is not just climate change that’s happening naturally. So enough.

Linley Dixon 4:10
Our soils are spongy. When it rains a lot, they absorb that water, and they hold onto it during the dry periods. When it finally rained on our farm after four months, there was the most intense smell I’ve ever smelled. I looked it up. I was like, “What am I smelling?” It was gorgeous. It was this beautiful smell, and it’s called petrichor.

Linley Dixon 4:35
So look this up. It’s made of thousands, hundreds of thousands of chemicals. We don’t even know all the chemicals. These are volatiles that life is producing when it wakes back up. We have so much organic matter, so much compost on our farm, that it was just so intense. One of them is called geosmin. I don’t even know how to pronounce it.

Linley Dixon 4:59
At five parts per trillion, our nose can sense this chemical. That means our nose can smell this chemical 200,000 times better than a shark detects blood in water. We evolved with the land, and the reason why we can smell this chemical at such a low concentration is because we had to figure out where to go to find that green grass that was popping up, so we could find game. That’s how in touch our bodies are with the evolution of the land. Okay, next slide.

Linley Dixon 5:33
That’s France, by the way. That’s the drought in France. Can we advance? There we go. Okay, so mollisols. I just learned about these from interviewing… How many people listen to the podcast? Okay. So Cassidy was one of my favorite interviews, and he talked about mollisols.

Linley Dixon 5:51
I grew up on the East Coast here, and when I drove across the country with my family for the first time, I cried because I thought, “Where are all the trees?” Well, once you hit the 100th meridian, which is the divide between the dry area of the country and the wet area of the country… and that is becoming the 99th meridian now, because desertification is happening.

Linley Dixon 6:17
Mollisols are the most fertile soils in the world, and they actually were formed on grasslands. I didn’t know this. You’d think forests create these fertile soils, but no, it’s grasslands. Grasses have what we call a growing tip, but it’s actually at the base, and when grazers come through and nibble off the top of the grass, the roots actually put a ton of their energy up to create more leaves for photosynthesis.

Linley Dixon 6:45
Then the roots die back, because they’ve put all that energy into the top growth. It’s called pulsing. As soon as that happens, there’s more leaves to grow, and then photosynthates go back down into the bottom and create more roots. That death of roots and then regrowth of roots is what creates these deep, deep soils, and I get to farm in these gorgeous soils.

Linley Dixon 7:10
These are in semi-arid environments, and actually, if the grasses aren’t grazed in these dry climates, the grasses choke themselves out, because the plant matter doesn’t decay. It just sits on the soil surface. So you actually need an animal that’s brought water from the waterways through the saliva, the urine, the manure. It actually starts digesting this stuff that otherwise would kill out the grass.

Linley Dixon 7:37
So these are smart systems, and because it hardly ever rains, our soils are so highly mineralized. These are all the different kinds of mollisols. That’s just one category of soils, and they’re the most fertile soils in the world. James Cassidy taught me that power and mollisols go hand in hand. It’s kind of like oil reserves. Wherever there’s a lot of mollisols, you have a lot of power.

Linley Dixon 8:04
So our power is in these soils, and we have to make sure that we’re actually using them right, that we’re taking care of the grasslands, because Glenn Elzinga showed us it just becomes sagebrush if it’s overgrazed. There he is. That’s a good one. Most of the biomass in a forest, 80% of it, is above the ground, and you can see in this image here, these are grasses. Look at how deep those roots are.

Linley Dixon 8:31
So you’d think in this very rich country in mollisols, we’d be able to feed ourselves, but we actually run a $50 billion deficit in our agricultural trade. This is StarWalker Farm, Justin and Kristin, and when I interviewed them, I asked them about the land sparing question. They have a farm in Northern California, and it’s one of those Noah’s Ark farms where they’ve got cows and pigs and chickens.

Linley Dixon 8:59
They grow all their own feed, and they rotate them on the land. I asked him about this idea of rewilding, and he said, “Well, you’re welcome. You’re welcome for all the rewilding we’ve done on our farm, because it actually takes a steward. If I were to just walk away from my farm right now, it would be Canadian thistle.

Linley Dixon 9:21
“And what do I do? I go out there. Instead, in the newspapers, what’s published is that to be a good steward of the environment, you go out and you spray the Canadian thistle. I’ve got all these eco friends who are out there spraying their thistle, thinking they’re doing a good thing for the environment, and all you have to do is, at the right time of year, just stab a shovel underneath.”

Linley Dixon 9:48
Our bodies can do this work, and our bodies were meant to move. I mean, my back has never been worse than since I started working behind the computer. People want to do this work. It’s really rewarding. Okay, this is Anna Jones-Crabtree. I love this podcast with her. Talk about who’s doing the work of restoration.

Linley Dixon 10:09
They farm 15,000 acres in Montana, and they have restored 600 acres of native tallgrass prairie. If you look at their farm from above, it’s like a carpet. It’s not like land over here is preserved and land over here is farmed. They actually have these 240-foot strips of their crops, and then 30-foot strips of restoration of the tallgrass prairie.

Linley Dixon 10:33
These are native plants, pollinator plants. She says when the tractor runs through the 240 feet of crops, she can see that the animals can run, and they have a place to hide from the tractor. There are all these nesting birds. They are Xerces certified in terms of the number of pollinators they’ve supported, and that is a human who came in and restored those native plants.

Linley Dixon 10:59
That’s not going to happen anymore. With how much of the land we’ve destroyed, we actually need the human care to reestablish it. The pollinator strips are kind of controversial for nonorganic farmers. Should they put them in and attract the wildlife, and then poison them? So the scientists don’t even know if they should tell the chemical farmers whether to put in pollinator strips or not.

Linley Dixon 11:27
Emily Oakley is one of my all-time heroes. I actually asked her to come today and speak, so I feel like I need to represent her farm. I love this image of growing fertility in place. Francis first taught me this saying, of how we have taught cows to stay in one place, and then we grow corn and move the plants about, and he said it should be the opposite. You should grow the fertility in place and make the cows move around and collect the grass. That’s climate smart.

Linley Dixon 11:59
Emily Oakley does the same thing on her veggie farm. She grows all the fertility right in place, and she’s got all these chicken CAFOs all over her community that she’s fighting, to make sure that the groundwater stays clean, because it’s getting polluted from them, and it’s also drying up. Their aquifers are drying up because of how many chicken CAFOs have come in.

Linley Dixon 12:25
So her other job, besides farming and producing this clean food for her community, is to fight the chicken CAFOs. She doesn’t use the pelletized chicken manure on her fields, because she knows that there are chlorates from the washing chemicals, and arsenic. There’s all kinds of heavy metals in that. So she is growing her fertility in place. That’s what cover cropping is for, and that’s what tillage is for.

Linley Dixon 12:53
In Washington, this no-till chemical stuff is what everybody’s saying is climate smart. I’m sorry, it’s climate smart to grow your own fertility in place and incorporate that into the ground for the next crop. I have to read, because I’ve got a Wendell Berry quote. Okay, so most of us in this room have a really special place in our hearts for Wendell Berry, and of course we need to talk about him today.

Linley Dixon 13:21
I often quote him by saying, “Be joyful, though you’ve considered all the facts,” and I know that’s what we’re doing on our farms. So it’s 50 years now, but for the 30th anniversary of “The Unsettling of America,” Francis Thicke was on a panel with Wendell, and he held up his book. How many people have read “The Unsettling of America”? This is an epic book. Really read it. It is dense.

Linley Dixon 13:48
Okay. So Francis joked that he was on page 26. That’s where his bookmark was, with Wendell right there, and he said, “But I haven’t given up. I found a quote for today, from page 27.” Later, when Wendell signed Francis’s book, he said, “On to page 28,” to Francis.

Linley Dixon 14:07
So I don’t know how you’re doing, Francis, if you ever made it through, but this is a really important book. I went and got my copy of Wendell Berry’s book out of my bookshelf, and I thought, okay, I wonder if I can read page 27 and guess what Francis might have thought to be quote-worthy. So here’s what I found. It’s really surprising.

Linley Dixon 14:29
This is right before the conference, and page 27 is the start of his chapter on land sparing, but he doesn’t call it that. He calls it kindly use. Okay, so Wendell says – this is on page 27 – conservationists divide the country into land that they wish to preserve and call wilderness, and land that they consign to use and therefore to destroy.

Linley Dixon 14:52
He says disaster results from this division, because with 8 billion people on the planet and growing, most of the land needs to be used. So if we’re only preserving the land that we can set aside untouched, and destroying the rest, there won’t be much land that is spared.

Linley Dixon 15:10
Wendell goes on to explain that kindly use is our only option, so that the land can keep on giving. He says it depends on intimate knowledge, the most sensitive responsiveness and responsibility. And this part is really important: kindly use becomes more complex as it approaches action. This is because land is too varied, with different climates, soils, slopes, orientations, and histories, to conform to a generalized industrial treatment, which would destroy it.

Linley Dixon 15:41
How incredible that that was on the page that I decided to check out right before this conference. I want to take a look at this southern region of Spain. This is an example of what can happen when only yield is prioritized. This region is known as the Sea of Plastic, and it’s the largest concentration of greenhouses on Earth.

Linley Dixon 16:03
It spans 100,000 acres, and it’s in one of the driest climates, in the south of Spain. This is mostly hydroponics. It’s how they produce vegetables for Europe during the winter months. They’re growing tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, and melons mostly in this, and it generates over 300,000 tons of plastic waste each year. It’s depleting the local aquifers, and it relies heavily on exploited migrant labor.

Linley Dixon 16:30
This is just a closer look at it. When it rains on top of acres and acres of plastic like this… There are people in California that rent out to Driscoll’s, and I’ve learned not to rent to any type of production that is going to cover hundreds of acres like this with plastic, because when it rains, it creates gullies that you can drive cars through. There’s footage of this on YouTube, of the erosion that happens off of this. And look at that plastic use. It’s pretty disturbing.

Linley Dixon 17:02
So Wendell’s vision requires highly knowledgeable individuals instead, who understand local ecologies. These are Real Organic farmers, but they’re also foresters who selectively harvest. I got to interview Suzanne Simard this year, and she talks about responsible forestry. She doesn’t call it kindly use. She calls it a lighter touch, so that the land recovers and we can harvest again.

Linley Dixon 17:28
But it also calls for mushroom hunters. He calls for people to harvest from the sea responsibly. We need a lot more of us under this vision. I have a Gen Zer. She’s 16, and they’re starting to reject technology. They want to get back and have purpose. They’re facing climate change, because it’s experiential right now, and they’re trying to figure out, “What can I do?”

Linley Dixon 17:53
When we were young, we were like, recycle, and that didn’t work out so well for us. So a lot of them are really trying to figure out how they can get on the land and have purpose in their life’s work. I think that is our responsibility as land stewards, to actually get this next generation doing the work, because a lot of them want to do it.

Linley Dixon 18:15
Inherent in kindly use, and Liz Carlisle brought this up, is the concept of enough. In our never-ending quest for more, we’ve lost how much happiness can be found when we only take what we need. But it’s not about deprivation.

Linley Dixon 18:31
There’s so much meaning and purpose in our life’s work when we can do it together. I’m sorry, we discounted beauty for a little while, but I spend my evenings and my mornings with my parents and my family watching how much wildlife comes onto our farm. We have a meadow right in the center, and it’s mostly my flower garden that I abandon halfway through the summer because life gets too busy.

Linley Dixon 18:56
I can’t tell you how much wildlife is attracted to that center, and it truly does. I remember reading the Rodale journals when I was young, and I was like, “Yeah, right. If you leave aphids on a plant, there’s no way that the ladybugs are going to find it.” And then you garden, and you realize if you just leave the pest alone, stuff shows up and eats it.

Linley Dixon 19:19
It’s the coolest thing ever to watch this on a farm. So this stuff works, and we need to get people back on the farm, seeing how much it works. Okay, so I come from a very different vision of what we were taught as organic farmers here. I actually come from academia, the University of Florida, Beltsville. A lot of the academic research and the USDA research goes to Big Ag.

Linley Dixon 19:43
At the University of Florida, while I was there, $25,000 was given to one of my professors for biotech communications, and he would go on podcasts and drink glyphosate and stuff like that. It’s not just that the money was given to him to communicate to the world that this stuff was safe, but it was the way it was funded, so that it was totally hidden, and he got caught. He was hiding the money because he knew what he was doing was wrong.

Linley Dixon 20:11
One of my other professors, while I was there, went down to a banana plantation that was organic, and it would transition in and out of organic production, because Panama disease is a really bad disease there, and they could spray systemic fungicides onto the soil. And I thought, okay, this is the worst of the worst, because my experience was very different with organic.

Linley Dixon 20:35
She told our class, “Farming is hard. There’s lots of pests and diseases out there, and we just need these tools.” And that was her message to thousands of students in ag by the time she’d been through her career: farming is hard, and we need pesticides. It was the worst example of organic, of something that never should have been certified in the first place, rotating in and out of organic production.

Linley Dixon 21:01
But I was experiencing something different. I’d worked on organic farms, farms that were really highly productive, with very knowledgeable mentors, and I saw that actually this stuff works. It does seem fantastical if you haven’t experienced it, but it truly works. So I did study disease-suppressive soils, and this was brought up yesterday by Chuck Benbrook as something we might be able to measure as an outcome.

Linley Dixon 21:28
I do think there are certain outcomes that we can measure that are good, like does this have pesticide residue? I think that’s a simple yes or no that we can test for. I do think there are things that are too complicated to measure. Nutrient density is one of them. Soil organic matter, we’re trying, but it’s complex. Disease-suppressive soils…

Linley Dixon 21:51
Has anybody seen “The Lord of the Rings”? That part where Galadriel hands Samwise this box of magic soil that, after the Shire is destroyed, he’s supposed to sprinkle on the soil to recover it? That’s what disease-suppressive soils are. Basically, you don’t get diseases there, even though the pathogen is present. Scientists have been studying this for 100 years, and they have no idea how this works.

Linley Dixon 22:17
They’ve been trying to isolate the individual microorganisms to see if they can get the same effects, to figure out what this magic organism is that’s doing this. It’s really only when they take the whole microbiome, the whole soil, and put it in the pot and introduce the pathogen that they see the effect. So it’s this really complex microbial mix, and it happens all over the world. It’s not one magic mix of microorganisms. There are disease-suppressive soils all over the place.

Linley Dixon 22:50
Here’s Beltsville. Here’s where I did my postdoc, and it’s getting shut down right now. I have friends who have devoted their entire careers to public research, and their husbands have a different job in Washington, D.C., and some of them are being told to relocate to Iowa or wherever, to be closer to the field. But their kids go to school there. Their spouse has a different job.

Linley Dixon 23:17
I did really important research while I was here. Francis Thicke has worked here before. If we pull public funding of research… That’s one of the only ways that we can study something simply because it matters to people, not because there’s a way to make money. So I’m really concerned about the only kind of research being what is funded by someone who wants to make money or create an input. If we pull out of public research, that’s all that’s going to be left.

Linley Dixon 23:49
This is ecologist Stuart Hill. If you haven’t heard this podcast, it’s one of the earlier ones. Go back and listen. We have come so far since people like Stuart Hill. He was a professor who was for organic back in the ’80s, and he says his colleagues would cross the hallway so they wouldn’t have to interact with him. He was that kooky guy that believed in organic.

Linley Dixon 24:15
We have come so far, and that’s why it’s so devastating for the organic community to see this new word, regenerative, rise up, and we’ve done all this work to actually create a definition for what organic is. So we have to remember. We have to hear these stories and remember what we’ve been through to get here. What a privilege!

Linley Dixon 24:37
I love Suzanne Simard. If you haven’t read “Finding the Mother Tree,” please do. The names she’s been called, because she is taking on a $27 billion Canadian forestry industry, and she’s saying we don’t need herbicides to kill the understory, and we need to leave the forest so that it can recover on its own.

Linley Dixon 24:59
Because clear-cutting it and then planting trees that are grown in a nursery from somewhere else, they’re not going to survive like the trees that… If you leave the mother trees, they will sow themselves. So we need to harvest from the forest with a lighter touch, she says, so that the forest can recover. I’m married to a marine biologist. It’s the same thing in the oceans.

Linley Dixon 25:25
This concept of kindly use, lighter touch, it’s beyond farming. It’s how we interact with the earth. I just want to thank Friends of the Earth, because they wrote this really important report that no-till means chem no-till, and they’re just leaving that chemical off. A lot more herbicides are coming. In Washington, they love to point their finger and say organic farmers are bad for the climate: “You all till.” So thank you, Friends of the Earth, for this report.

Linley Dixon 25:58
So I had to quit farming in order to buy farmland. How backwards is that? I just want to point out that the National Young Farmers Coalition has really raised awareness about this issue of how difficult it is. There are a lot of young farmers who I’ve seen come and go over the years, and they’re good farmers, and they produce a lot of food, and we’re failing them, because there’s no long-term place for them to farm, and there are also really unstable markets.

Linley Dixon 26:30
An established farm like mine, we can go to the farmers market, we can get into the grocery stores, but there’s not a whole lot of room. We’ve got our restaurants that we work with.

Linley Dixon 26:43
Another farm coming into that region has a really hard time breaking into that scene. And what I’ve seen in my community, local farms are starting up all over the place, because people want to do this, and they are not succeeding. So I want to thank the National Young Farmers Coalition for raising a lot of these issues, and this is why it’s important to acknowledge all these other groups.

Linley Dixon 27:11
In Europe, what they did was they got together. It was the organic movement plus the Sierra Club, the conservation groups, and they fought for organic. Not regenerative, but they fought for organic. And what they got was transparency. We eat out 40% of our meals. I think it’s even more now. I think that was an old stat. People are eating out more than they’re eating from home.

Linley Dixon 27:38
When you go out to a restaurant, you basically have to consign yourself to saying, “I’m not going to get organic food.” It’s really rare that you get organic food out. What they did in Denmark is they partnered with the conservation groups to say organic is what we need to defend here, and we need transparency: who’s buying organic. It needs to be labeled in the restaurants and the school cafeterias and all the hospitals.

Linley Dixon 28:09
They have to say what percentage they purchase, and then there’s a lot of peer pressure from their customers to do better. So I think we need to gather and have these greater coalitions in defense of organic. I have a great interview coming up with Seth Kroeck. Is he still here? He’s got incredible carrots that he’s growing in Maine.

Linley Dixon 28:33
We know that with a tasty carrot, you just don’t go back once you’ve had a real carrot. If it’s not grown in those sandy soils, but you’ve actually got some organic matter, there’s a real difference. I can’t eat a carrot from the grocery store anymore. But he was noticing signs in his Hannaford that said, “We’re out of carrots. Sorry, guys, there’s no carrots to be had here.” And Seth’s like, “I’ve got carrots. Can I sell them to you?”

Linley Dixon 29:05
He’s still working to try to get local carrots, and local food in general, prioritized at Hannaford. I think this came up yesterday. That is something that organic farmers used to have. We used to be able to get onto the store shelves, and we’re losing that. So here we are. This is Liz Graznak’s farm stand. Liz is an incredible farmer. We’re so lucky to have her on our team.

Linley Dixon 29:32
But we are being forced as farmers to sell direct and manage these. Hugh Kent and Lisa Kent had to shift their whole model. Five acres of blueberries is actually like eight semi trucks of blueberries that used to go onto the wholesale market and onto the store shelves. And I’m sorry, but we’re always going to be on the fringe if we have to sell this way.

Linley Dixon 29:58
It’s a beautiful thing, but even a small farm like mine, we can’t sell it all at the farmers market. We need to get into the grocery stores. And I’m lucky. I do have three independent grocery stores that carry our products in Durango, but it seems that it’s only the co-ops and locally owned grocery stores that work with us, and it didn’t used to be that way. Okay, I’m almost there.

Linley Dixon 30:25
So this is how much everybody wanted our lettuce this summer. The cyclospora outbreak brought people to the farmers markets in the same way that they brought people to our stands when COVID hit, and they’re kind of mad at us when we run out of lettuce. They’re like, “Don’t you know we want lettuce?” And then I have to explain. In the winter we buy our seeds, and then every week we do a new resowing, but it takes two months for that lettuce to be fully harvestable, and in the winter we hire a crew, and I have to explain how this all works.

Linley Dixon 31:05
We can’t just push a button and reorder lettuce when there’s a crisis, and people just don’t understand this anymore. “Why aren’t you bringing more lettuce to market?” And it’s like, I needed to know last winter that there was going to be a cyclospora outbreak. This is how out of touch people are with farming. They’re coming to the farmers market, and they’re only buying our lettuce. So if you want us here when there are crises, you have to support us when the system is working too.

Linley Dixon 31:36
There are so many of us that want to do this, and we are failing this next generation. This is going to be the 50th anniversary of “The Unsettling of America.” That’s too long for the world to still be debating Wendell’s message about kindly use, to be ignoring Suzanne Simard’s message of having a lighter touch, to not understand that land is something that we belong to, that we evolved with.

Linley Dixon 32:02
That our noses can still sense petrichor and delight in the feelings that it elicits, that our bodies need to interact with healthy soil microbiomes, and that our bodies were made to move. Our challenge after we leave this barn is to get really good at telling the stories that you heard today.

Linley Dixon 32:21
If we each convert 10 people to understanding that Real Organic principles are actually something that work… Because we know that there are thousands of ag students to this day still being told that organic doesn’t work. That is real. I was part of that system. So if we can each go out and just convince 10 people that Real Organic works, and they convince 10 people, that is the real math that’s going to change the world. So please get out and share your stories.

Linley Dixon 32:51
Thank you so much for being here today. I really want to thank Abby. What a special place to be having this conference. The Churchtown team did so much work to get us ready for this conference. The Real Organic staff over here is absolutely incredible. Jenny Prince, my partner, thank you so much for all your work, and Dave Chapman, who volunteers every single day for eight years. He hasn’t given up. And thank you all for coming.