Episode #300
Tim Bowles + Michael Grunwald: Can We Feed the Planet Without Eating the Earth?

Tim Bowles and Michael Grunwald debated on stage at the Saving Real Organic Conference at Churchtown Dairy on September, 19 2026:

0:00
JEANNE MERRILL: My name is Jeanne Merrill. I’m the executive director of the Berkeley Food Institute.
0:05
And we are very pleased to host today’s important conversation.
0:10
Today, we’ll highlight timely and urgent questions about the future of food in the face
0:16
of the climate crisis, rising inequalities, and a biodiversity crisis.
0:23
Some of the questions we’ll address this evening range from– if the goal is to feed 10 billion people,
0:30
shouldn’t we ask the fundamental questions about what are we going to feed them, and at what cost to their health, their communities,
0:38
and the planet’s resilience? Our sustainable and healthy food systems that conserve natural resources and support
0:46
thriving communities, a pipe dream, or a necessary radical shift.
0:51
What is the role of government in securing a healthy and sustainable food system?
0:57
We will discuss the latest science and practice of agriculture, as well as the policy and politics that shape
1:06
our food and farming system. Today’s speakers and our moderator, a science writer,
1:12
a scientist, a national food correspondent will no doubt use words this evening
1:19
that are now on the list of words that can no longer be included in US Department of Agriculture Research
1:25
and Education grant proposals without risk of frozen contracts or losing funding.
1:31
These words include equitable, diverse, climate science, carbon
1:38
sequestration, and many more. But tonight we don’t discuss federal funding.
1:43
Tonight, we discuss more fundamental questions. And we’re grateful for our speakers joining us
1:49
for an open dialogue about our most pressing climate challenge, how to achieve a resilient, biodiverse, just healthy
1:59
and nourishing food system. I have just a few notes for us this evening.
2:05
If you have a question you’d like to ask, we’ll be passing around. If you didn’t already grab one, we’ll
2:11
have index cards where you can write down your question, and then you’ll be able to hand that to a Berkeley Food
2:17
Institute staff person, who will be sure to get that to our moderator. We do ask if you could just take a moment
2:23
and silence your cell phones if you haven’t already done that. We are recording this evening’s conversation,
2:31
and that recording will be posted on the Berkeley Food Institute website following tonight’s event.
2:38
I also want to thank our sponsors. The UC Berkeley School of Journalism has been a wonderful partner.
2:43
Casa Sanchez, the Nell Newman Foundation, and the TomKat Ranch Educational Foundation.
2:50
And next, I’m very pleased to introduce our speakers. We have Mike Grunwald, who’s a best selling author
2:57
and former staff writer for The Washington Post, Time Magazine, and Politico Magazine.
3:03
This summer, Simon & Schuster will publish his third book, We Are Eating The Earth– The Race to Fix Our Food System and Save Our Climate.
3:12
We also have Dr. Tim Bowles, an associate professor of agroecology and sustainable agricultural systems
3:18
in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management, and lead faculty director for the Berkeley Food
3:25
Institute, author of over 50 peer-reviewed articles. His research focuses on how increasing reliance
3:31
on biodiversity can create productive, healthy, and resilient agricultural systems, drawing
3:37
on agroecology, soil ecology, and biogeochemistry. And our moderator, Kim Severson, is a national food correspondent
3:46
for the New York Times, previously the New York Times Southern Bureau Chief. She has won four James Beard Awards,
3:53
was part of the New York Times team that won the Pulitzer Prize for coverage of sexual harassment in The Me Too Movement, and received the Casey
4:01
Medal for Meritorious Journalism for her work on childhood obesity. Please join me in welcoming our speakers and moderator.
4:07
[APPLAUSE]
4:15
KIM SEVERSON: OK, thank you. Thanks for the introduction. Thanks for having us.
4:20
We still do use those words in the New York Times, though. So, so far, so good. I’ll let you know how that goes.
4:27
[APPLAUSE] Yeah, people are busy. Very busy. So I find that this is such an interesting time
4:35
to be having this panel. And I never thought that I would be living in a time in which the RFK love and MAHA mom’s
4:46
and Alice Waters shared a tiny little spot in the Venn diagram. But here we are. And you may be a MAHA mom before we know it.
4:53
We don’t know Alice. So yeah. So it’s a very interesting time. I think it’s a really interesting time
4:59
to be having this discussion. Things are– we don’t know where things are going. And in times of great disruption,
5:07
good change can happen. All kinds of change can happen. And so I think what you two are bringing to the table here,
5:13
and the discussion we have hopefully will be part of us keeping our eyes open a little bit,
5:19
our minds open a little bit, and also standing up against bullshit that would just to use your word.
5:25
So anyway, here we are. But anyway, speaking of which, Mike, speaking, no.
5:31
I know it’s like this, like Rumble in the jungle here, but it’s not going to be that bad. The polite discussion at the university
5:37
is really what it’s going to be. But it’s you’re the visiting team. So I think each of these gentlemen
5:47
are going to present a framework and then we’ll just jump into questions. So you’re up to bat, my friend.
5:53
MICHEAL GRUNWALD: Yeah, so I’m definitely the away team. Well, no, I’m thrilled to be here in the lion’s den.
6:02
Look, I get it. Industrial agriculture sucks. It abuses animals.
6:09
It overuses antibiotics. It poisons our air and water. And I didn’t come across the country to defend any of that.
6:17
I’m just going to try to make a few points. And the first, I’m glad it was mentioned.
6:23
You can all smash that preorder button. But we are eating the Earth.
6:30
Really agriculture is eating the Earth. It now covers two of every five acres on the planet,
6:37
and those are acres that used to be forests and wetlands and savannas that stored a lot of carbon
6:42
and sheltered a lot of biodiversity. And the thing is, agriculture has always eaten the Earth ever
6:50
since it started 12,000 years ago, long before it had giant tractors or toxic chemicals
6:56
or factory farms. And natural land is great at storing carbon. It’s great at sheltering biodiversity.
7:04
It’s not so great at feeding humans. That’s why humans began converting it into farmland.
7:09
They cleared a South America worth of wilderness before the Industrial Revolution even began.
7:16
So you look at the ice cores and ancient pollen samples. They show that pre-industrial pre-pesticide pre-feedlot
7:25
agriculture and the deforestation that made room for it. It contributed to early global warming that actually
7:32
helped avert an ice age. So I think maybe because Michael Pollan writes so damn
7:39
beautifully, there’s a lot of nostalgia for these small bucolic farms that America
7:45
had before the Green Revolutions, GMO monocultures,
7:51
and Haber-Bosch fertilizers. I think we all want to romanticize those proto regenerative farmsteads,
7:58
like the ones Aldo Leopold wrote about in Sand County Almanac. But Leopold wrote pretty damn beautifully, too.
8:06
And Sand Country is an elegy for the amazingly biodiverse natural prairie that those quaint farmsteads like his
8:14
replaced. It’s true there are some environmental costs from turning those kinder and gentler and more diverse
8:21
farms into big industrial farms, but they’re nothing compared to the environmental costs of converting nature into farms in the first place.
8:29
So sorry. So we got to stop agriculture from eating the Earth.
8:36
It’s now replaced three South Americas worth of wilderness. And that’s a crisis. We can’t keep expanding Agriculture’s footprint
8:43
and shrinking natures. Not if we want a stable climate and a biodiverse planet.
8:49
We can’t keep tearing down a soccer field worth of rainforest every 6 seconds for agriculture.
8:55
But we also got to eat. So we’re going to need to make a lot more food without a lot more land.
9:02
We’re going to need high yield ag, even higher yield ag than we have today.
9:07
The math is really ugly. To feed nearly 10 billion people by 2050,
9:12
agriculture will need to produce about 50% more calories in protein. And if current trends continue, even
9:20
if yields keep growing at the same rate they’ve grown since the Green Revolution, we’re going to have to deforest another dozen California’s
9:27
worth of land. If yields don’t grow at all, we’ll have to deforest three dozen California’s worth of land.
9:36
So it’s not a pretty picture. And in general, big industrial agriculture
9:42
is high yield agriculture. For all the problems with factory farms, one thing they’re really good at is manufacturing lots of food.
9:50
That’s what factories do. Now, I’ve written about how some regenerative practices can
9:55
contribute to kick ass yields, and that’s awesome. I’m all for that. But when Sri Lanka tried to go all organic,
10:03
its yields crashed and its government fell. I keep reading about how the future of grain
10:08
is regenerative Kernza, but its yields are one third wheat yields, so it would need three times as much land to grow
10:16
the same amount of grain. It would eat three times as much of the Earth. All right, one last point.
10:22
Some of you are probably thinking, look, we don’t need more food. We just need to distribute it better or waste less of it,
10:29
or eat less meat, or stop using valuable land to grow biofuels. And we should absolutely do all of those things,
10:37
but we haven’t done any of them yet, and I don’t love the idea of assuming
10:43
we’re going to start doing all of them to justify low yield agriculture. A little more math.
10:49
Even if rich countries eat 50% less meat, even if the world wastes 50% less food,
10:56
even if we stop using biofuels, these are pretty ambitious ifs, we’ll still need more food by 2050.
11:04
And yield growth will still need to grow even faster than it’s been growing since the Green Revolution.
11:10
Not if we don’t want to eat more of the Earth. So I personally suspect that we’re
11:16
going to need more industrial ag to do that. My hope is that it’s a reformed industrial ag that
11:21
can make even more food, but with much less mess. So with that, we start the conversation.
11:28
[APPLAUSE] KIM SEVERSON: It’s a thought.
11:34
All right, now batting for the home team.
11:41
TIM BOWLES: Well, starting out with a little poll for the audience here. Has anybody ever heard of a taco beef stick before?
11:49
OK, I got one. A couple over here. OK, a few people have heard of taco beef sticks.
11:55
I had not heard of taco beef sticks before, but I was helping out in the cafeteria of my son’s
12:01
first grade class a couple of years ago, and I was there with the kids. I was helping them sort out their green waste
12:07
from their trash and taco beef sticks were on the menu. And back in Kentucky, where I grew up,
12:13
a lot of these phony food items were common on our lunch menus. But I was naive to think that maybe here in California things
12:20
would be different. And so taco beef sticks better, for better or worse,
12:26
have been on my mind a lot recently because I really think they represent what industrial agriculture does
12:34
really, really well. It produces an overabundance of calories
12:39
that have the illusion of being cheap calories.
12:44
But if we look ahead to 2050 and we don’t want widespread crop
12:50
failures, and we don’t want soil to be so degraded that it becomes unfarmable, and we don’t want
12:57
to continue this crazy duality that we have when there are 2 billion people in the world
13:03
that still suffer from malnutrition and hunger, while at the same time we’re spending $4 trillion
13:09
annually on the effects of diabetes and obesity. And if we don’t want to give a pass
13:16
to multinational agribusinesses while they continue to siphon profits out of rural communities,
13:21
then we can’t be doubling down on industrial agriculture.
13:27
Doubling down on industrial agriculture is, in my mind, like the definition of the sunk-cost fallacy.
13:35
And there’s reasons for it. These reasons go back to policy choices
13:42
that have been made time and time again. These policy choices, we could trace it back
13:48
to plantation agriculture, the roots. And these policy choices really took off in the 1950s and ’60s.
13:55
And these choices were bad for most of us. But a handful of companies have profited handsomely from them.
14:02
And these choices continue today, because in the US alone,
14:12
the Food and Agriculture Industry spends more on federal lobbying than the oil and gas
14:17
sector and the defense sector. So there’s a reason we keep making these choices.
14:23
It’s using the same playbook that the tobacco industry used for years while it was killing people for profits.
14:31
Now, I do appreciate a lot about Mike’s arguments. Actually, I think he has correctly
14:38
identified that expansion of agriculture into rainforests, into peatlands,
14:44
into other natural ecosystems is devastating for the climate, and that is not something that we can do if we
14:50
want to tackle climate change. We also agree on a number of other things.
14:56
How problematic biofuels are. But what I want to offer is that I
15:02
think where we disagree is really three pillars of the argument. First, that we actually need to increase yields by 50% by 2050.
15:11
Two, that industrial agriculture doesn’t currently feed the world and that we can’t expect it to in the future.
15:17
And three, the idea of land sparing or the idea that if we intensify yields with industrial agriculture
15:25
here, it will spare land over there that at best it’s really complicated, and at worst, sometimes it’s a fallacy.
15:34
And I do understand these are complicated topics. And it can feel overwhelming.
15:42
But I want to offer a different paradigm for how we can approach this.
15:47
And agroecology is this different paradigm that can offer a pathway to climate
15:53
resilient, productive agriculture that nourishes people. And it’s already happening all over the world.
16:00
What hasn’t been happening is the political will to make it the foundation of our food system.
16:06
So what is agroecology? I want to offer agroecology in three examples. Agroecology is Iowa farmer’s Dick and Sharon Thompson,
16:15
who started Practical Farmers of Iowa number of decades ago, and since then they’ve been working with researchers
16:22
to develop innovative cropping systems that can reduce toxic inputs by 90% while increasing
16:27
yields of corn and soybean. We can move across the world into Kenya, where also for years, farmers and researchers
16:34
have been working together on how to deal with extremely challenging pests and disease
16:40
problems without the use of toxic inputs. And they do this through really clever ways of companion planting in a system called push-pull.
16:47
And the farms of the 350,000 farmers who have adopted this, yields have tripled.
16:52
Coming back here to California, agroecology is when 1.6 million school children are eating lunches that
17:03
are not taco beef sticks, but fruits and vegetables and whole grains are supplied by California farms that
17:11
are using climate smart agricultural practices, supported by state investments and building
17:17
on the successes of an organic agricultural industry that is currently $11 billion.
17:22
This is big. And so the question is then what would the future look like
17:29
if we really doubled down on agroecology instead? And what we would find is that it would look like dramatic reductions in greenhouse gas
17:37
intensive inputs, dramatic reductions in pesticides like chlorpyrifos and methyl bromide,
17:44
and many others that have harmed farm workers and their families and rural communities for years.
17:51
We would be supporting the biodiversity, the birds, the bees, the microbes on which we all depend while helping
17:59
rural communities flourish. And we would be able to produce the food that nourishes people on agriculture’s current land base.
18:07
So that’s what I want. Hopefully we can understand what’s the pathway towards that over the next hour.
18:14
KIM SEVERSON: All right, I’m going to just say it’s tied so far. [APPLAUSE] I’m going to declare it tied.
18:22
But you obviously say some provocative things in your book like organic, local grass-fed beef
18:30
is usually worse for the environment than conventional beef or imported beef or feedlot beef.
18:36
Do I have that right? MICHEAL GRUNWALD: The climate. Definitely, yeah. KIM SEVERSON: For the climate. Just dig down into that for me a little bit.
18:43
MICHEAL GRUNWALD: I mean, the main thing is for one thing feedlot beef they are fed a lot faster.
18:52
So they’re alive a lot less long. So they spend less time burping and farting.
18:57
And so there’s a lot less methane. And it’s just– and again, this is like I alluded to,
19:05
I’ve seen some regenerative grazing practices that have been incorporated. And you see, particularly in Brazil
19:11
where you see some incredible yields. And that’s awesome. It’s usually not pure. It’s not usually.
19:17
It is not purely grass-fed. They’re fertilizing the pastures. They bring them to feedlots, but they’re
19:23
doing a lot of regenerative practices and that’s been great. But the main problem is a land problem
19:31
where they’re using more land and therefore they’re eating more of the Earth.
19:36
And so much of these, the number is like land ends up overwhelming because forests are awesome.
19:47
Wetlands are amazing. Not just for the bugs and bunnies that love them, but for the carbon that they store.
19:55
And if you have lower stocking rates,
20:01
if you’re making less beef per acre, you’re going to need more acres to produce beef.
20:07
KIM SEVERSON: Do you have a counter thought to that? [LAUGHTER] TIM BOWLES: Well, I do.
20:12
And I think we can’t talk about the efficiency of beef
20:22
production without asking why are we eating so much beef?
20:28
And I’m not going to sit here and say it’s going to be easy but– KIM SEVERSON: It’s delicious. TIM BOWLES: It is, it is.
20:33
So trust me. But look– MICHEAL GRUNWALD: I cut out beef for climate reasons. I did just I did.
20:39
TIM BOWLES: I’ll start out by saying, and Robin, my stepmom, if you listen to this later, I would say this to you if you were here.
20:45
But my stepmom is a person who’s like a charred filet and potato
20:52
kind of person. It’s going to be tough, I get it. But look, if we defend factory farms as the only way
21:02
to meet demand for meat is, I mean, it’s like saying,
21:07
don’t we need Wendy’s and McDonald’s and Burger King
21:12
because people like burgers? It’s cravings don’t come from nowhere.
21:19
Demand is in many ways created through marketing,
21:26
through subsidies, and through convenience. And so in many ways, I don’t think
21:32
this is it’s not about feeding people. It’s about feeding this business model.
21:37
And I get it. It’s going to be hard. And I know Mike you’ve dove deeply into this World Resources
21:47
Institute report. I know it’s been a lot. If we look in there, if folks cut 30% of beef
21:58
around the world and shift to plant protein, those two India’s that you’ve mentioned or however 12 California’s, I think, we eliminate the need
22:07
to expand land in that way. So I just don’t think we can get into the nuances
22:13
of the efficiency of beef production without naming I guess, the cow in the room or something
22:19
whatever. KIM SEVERSON: I like that. Well done. That’s good.
22:24
I mean, you should have my job. And you had– I think you quoted a survey or a 2014 study that
22:34
says that carbon farming essentially is very good for the soil, and it’s complete bullshit when
22:40
it comes to climate change. Excuse me? I just realized there’s a kid in the room. I’m so sorry. Go back to your taco beef stick.
22:48
It’ll be OK. AUDIENCE: –heard it before. KIM SEVERSON: I know. I’m sorry. I just looked up when you– like it’s really bad when you cuss.
22:53
You look up and you see a child. So explain this.
22:59
And I’m actually interested in hearing both of you talk about numbers. Because for those of us who try to figure it out,
23:05
we’re like, so if we put this much carbon back in, it’ll save this percentage of greenhouse gas.
23:11
And it’s this elaborate formulas that I frankly feel are made up, maybe because I don’t understand them.
23:16
MICHEAL GRUNWALD: You’ll see. KIM SEVERSON: So let’s talk about that. You guys base– you’re throwing out a lot of numbers.
23:23
Let’s talk about carbon renewal now or carbon farming. What gives?
23:30
MICHEAL GRUNWALD: Mostly bullshit. I think has been my take on it. Well, look, if you see Kiss the Ground,
23:40
they were, Woody Harrelson in his stoner voice. He’s like, dude, I want to kill myself.
23:46
We’re all going to die. And then he’s like, no, but it’s great because we’re going to reverse global warming by storing
23:53
all this carbon in the soil. And literally the argument of this movie, which was also the argument of the group four per 1,000,
24:01
which was endorsed by the World Bank and the UN and 40 nations
24:08
was just by just improving the way we farm,
24:14
we’re going to store all the carbon that all the world’s fossil fuels have put into the sky.
24:23
It was based on some absurd Rodale Institute Science
24:29
and even the regenerative advocates have backed off that.
24:36
Look, I don’t say that it’s going to be that there is no way to store any carbon in the soil.
24:44
But it’s really hard to store much. There’s been a lot of focus on you can’t measure it.
24:53
And that is true. It’s really hard to measure it. It’s like it’s different from farm
24:58
to farm, from country to country, from 5 feet apart on the same farm.
25:03
And how do you sample it all? The measurements are a mess. There’s the problem of if you keep it in the soil,
25:10
does it stay in the soil? There’s the problem of if you’re moving cows to poop over here.
25:19
And so there’s more carbon in that soil. But then what happens to the carbon over there? And this guy’s getting paid because there’s more carbon,
25:25
but that guy doesn’t have to give up the money because there’s less carbon. And then the main problem is there’s these studies done out
25:32
of Australia that basically show that the only way to store more carbon in the soil is to put more nitrogen in the soil.
25:39
And it’s basic stoichiometry, which I say as if I knew what stoichiometry was before I
25:45
started reporting on this book. But it’s a thing. And there’s a fixed ratio of carbon to nitrogen in soils.
25:53
And you can put more nitrogen in the soil, but that’s a problem.
25:58
Remember that’s fertilizer. That’s nitrous oxide emissions. That’s the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico.
26:05
That’s the algal blooms in Florida Bay. It’s a lot of bad stuff.
26:11
So yeah, I think there’s been a lot of crazy hype.
26:16
There’s been a lot of really sloppy science. And there’s really good ways to store carbon
26:24
that we can see it’s above ground. They’re called trees. Wetlands also do it really well.
26:30
Soil carbon remains a kind of unicorn.
26:36
KIM SEVERSON: Professor. TIM BOWLES: I’m so excited to talk about stoichiometry.
26:41
KIM SEVERSON: I was hoping someone would bring it up personally. Yeah.
26:47
MICHEAL GRUNWALD: I’m amazing at parties. KIM SEVERSON: They’re like, I got to go get another drink. Yeah.
26:54
TIM BOWLES: I actually want to start by saying, I think this is, at least on some points, this is an area where Mike and I were talking beforehand,
27:00
and I think we have some points of agreement here. I mean, particularly in I think some of the overhype that has actually
27:06
harmed the real potential.
27:11
That Rodale Institute study was extremely problematic. There’s been a number of other studies
27:17
that haven’t looked at key constraints, whether it’s nitrogen, whether it’s just
27:24
the sociopolitical potential.
27:30
That being said, so let me just say we have to get real about the potential for soil carbon
27:38
sequestration as a climate change tool, as a climate change mitigation tool.
27:45
I want to just provide one more bit of context, which is that the IPCC has made it very clear
27:51
that reducing emissions is not enough. Right now we actually have to have what
27:58
are called negative emissions. We have to be removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere in order to not make
28:05
climate change go just way beyond what we can deal with,
28:13
and it’s already at that stage. So these natural climate solutions, whether it’s forests or soils, peatlands, wetlands,
28:21
they have to play a role. And we have to know how much. So I’m not going to get into every single point.
28:28
But I want to get into a couple.
28:34
KIM SEVERSON: Do you want us to get that? Sure. OK.
28:40
TIM BOWLES: Let’s just take– I’m going to make, let’s see, maybe two or three points here on the nitrogen question because this is an important one.
28:47
Let’s do some math. I know, Mike, you’ve said you’re a math guy. I like math.
28:53
The ratio of carbon to nitrogen in soil is about 10 to 1 on average. Let’s just say this for simplicity.
28:58
For every 10 atoms of carbon, there’s about one of nitrogen on average.
29:04
And I’m rounding some numbers here, but we apply about 0.1 gigatons of carbon, excuse me,
29:10
of nitrogen annually in agricultural systems. It’s a little more than that. But let’s just say 0.1.
29:17
About 2/3 of that is lost to the environment. It ends up as N2 emissions.
29:22
It ends up as nitrate leaching that fouls waterways, et cetera.
29:27
So we have a tremendous amount of nitrogen that actually is just leaving.
29:33
So if these agricultural practices can soak up that excess nitrogen, which
29:38
is what a lot of them do really, really well, like cover crops, for instance, then even if let’s say we captured half of that,
29:48
we’re capturing about a third of the nitrogen that’s lost. Let’s say this gets us to about 0.3, 0.4 gigatons of carbon
29:59
annually. And emissions this year are, rounding again,
30:07
about 15 gigatons. KIM SEVERSON: On total math. TIM BOWLES: No total. It’s gigatons of carbon, not gigatons of CO2.
30:13
Sorry. KIM SEVERSON: Thank God I was– TIM BOWLES: Yeah, I know. Everybody was on the edge of their seats. It’s about 55 gigatons of CO2.
30:20
KIM SEVERSON: We’re OK. TIM BOWLES: Woo. I know. The math here is– the point is– getting to it, I promise.
30:30
Point is, it is not a negligible amount. Even with the nitrogen problem, it’s not a negligible amount.
30:35
The one more point that I’ll make is that there’s a synergy between increasing soil carbon and dealing with some of the challenges of climate
30:43
change, weather extremes like droughts and floods. In my own labs research, what we showed
30:49
is that increasing carbon with cover crops actually also leads to yield increases
30:57
when soil carbon is low, which is often happens on degraded agricultural land. So there’s also this synergy between increasing soil carbon
31:05
and dealing with this yield problem. So we do have to get real about it. But there is potential.
31:11
KIM SEVERSON: Let’s switch for a minute from our math lesson to our civics lesson.
31:16
So let’s talk about the government’s role in some of this and policy because we obviously
31:23
are in a time of great change when it comes to the direction of the government and these kinds of issues.
31:30
And I think the partnership for Climate-Smart Commodities
31:36
Program, which was about a $3 billion program, just got slashed. And I think the idea was that would have removed maybe
31:45
60 million metric tons. It helps 60,000 farms. Well, again, the Green New Scam.
31:53
So is this your position? Was that a good move to remove that money?
32:00
MICHEAL GRUNWALD: I mean, it’s funny. When I was working on this book, of course, I didn’t know who was going to be the next president.
32:05
And I’m writing about some of this climate smart ag stuff.
32:10
And to answer your question quickly, there’s actually some really good stuff and some
32:17
that, yeah, I think is mostly bullshit. Mostly the soil carbon stuff that’s, by the way,
32:23
mostly being run by Archer Daniels Midland and JBS and Tyson, and then they’re putting their happy Seal of Good
32:33
Housekeeping from the USDA. Like we’re climate smart beef and things like that. Yeah, I think a lot of that is bogus.
32:39
I should say there’s a lot of really good stuff in there, including, by the way, measurement, a lot of money
32:44
for measurement that we desperately need because so much of this is just people talking out of their butts.
32:51
But also there are really good. There’s good stuff in there for reducing nitrogen and methane
32:56
emissions. Like I talked to a rice farmer who got the grant,
33:06
did the practices of basically changing the water management on his land, and has reduced his methane
33:11
emissions by half. And there are like, is it 400 million acres of rice fields in the world?
33:19
And that’s 10% of agricultural emissions. That would be a really big deal. But of course, so that’s the sort of thing you want.
33:26
We want to be climate smart. So I don’t like the idea of somebody coming out and saying this is a scam.
33:33
Why would we care about agriculture being climate-smart? That said, I think Tom Vilsack was obsessed
33:40
with this idea of soil carbon. And I write in the book about how there were actually
33:45
some people in the Biden White House who were like, hey, we know how to do nitrogen and methane. Focus on that instead.
33:52
They didn’t really win that fight. KIM SEVERSON: Do you want to jump in there, too? I mean, were you– do you think, I mean, he was quite a hero
34:02
to the movement and to farmers in a way. Tom Vilsack was, I mean, for old white bureaucrat,
34:10
but I think it moved the needle. And so obviously, you think government,
34:16
like our government now can actually help or hurt what’s happening out there.
34:21
So before we get to you. So you’re the new ag secretary. Where are you going to spend $3 billion?
34:29
I mean, what would you do? MICHEAL GRUNWALD: I mean, of that particular money. I think the idea of–
34:34
KIM SEVERSON: Any three. I’m just saying where would you spend? MICHEAL GRUNWALD: No. But I mean, the idea if you’re just, I think, focusing on methane.
34:40
Its a lot of unsexy stuff where you’d want to do a ton of research into better manure
34:45
management, biological nitrification inhibition. Like I’m really the coolest dude around.
34:51
And there’s just all this turning like can we turn crop residues into usable animal feed
35:00
so that we don’t have to use as many acres to grow? I mean, these are things that can really move the needle.
35:06
But instead, I think too much of it was going into soil carbon, anaerobic digesters.
35:16
I talked about how there are 20 different ways to manage manure that can really, in pretty cost effective ways,
35:23
reduce your emissions. And one that is pretty clearly not. And that’s the digesters. And of course, that’s the one that’s getting all the funding.
35:30
So I think there really is it’s not that this is all crap like the government,
35:36
why should the government be involved? We know how to– I’d like to see Brazil do even more for more intensive pastures
35:46
to– they have degraded pastures where you cut down huge swaths of the Amazon, and then you just hardly
35:52
have any cows on them. If you have four times as many cows, you need one fourth as many land. I think those are the kind of things
35:58
that with not that much money, you can really move the needle. KIM SEVERSON: OK, so now you’re the ag secretary.
36:05
How do you feel about the way money is getting? They just I think, paid $10 million to bail out the farmers who are getting
36:11
screwed on the trade deal. That’s a lot of money. And they cut, I think, a million for the local food
36:17
initiative that was happening with a lot of farm to school. TIM BOWLES: Billion. Billion. KIM SEVERSON: I meant billion.
36:22
Thank you very much. I’ve got this. I really. Trust me, I did mean billion.
36:29
So now you’re the ag secretary. What are we supposed to spend our money on? TIM BOWLES: I’m going to flip it around a little bit
36:36
and say what we need to not be spending our money on. The biggest subsidy for industrial agriculture
36:42
is crop insurance. And it’s crop insurance for commodity crops.
36:48
By and large, it is the biggest giveaway. It has grown in size 500% in cost since the early 2000s.
36:57
About $20 billion in subsidies. Without crop insurance for commodities
37:03
like corn and soybean, this industry would not be able to farm the way that they do.
37:09
In many years, they depend on these subsidies.
37:16
We are going to have increasingly stressful weather. We can point 2012 was the enormous drought.
37:26
Yields declined by, on average, 25% to 30%. There’s a $60 billion economic impact.
37:34
2019 massive floods. These are the types of things that are going to get more and more common.
37:40
In my own work, we’ve done modeling to show what’s the claims rates? And in the future, what are they going to look like?
37:47
The insurance claims rates, they’re going to go up substantially. This is going to continue to be a taxpayer burden.
37:53
And for me, it’s the tool of wonky tools
38:00
that’s going to be a big leverage point. And the industry will have to take measures to reduce risk
38:08
in other ways. And those ways of reducing risk are what they can bet their money on the best
38:15
is things like tried and true things that you and I know about because we
38:20
know that we shouldn’t invest all of our money in one thing. Maybe you bought Tesla stock last fall
38:26
and you did really, really well for a while. Now you’re not doing so well. So agroecology–
38:32
MICHEAL GRUNWALD: Nobody here bought it last fall.
38:37
KIM SEVERSON: Know your audience, brother. TIM BOWLES: Yeah, that’s true. You’re right.
38:42
Yeah. MICHEAL GRUNWALD: Yes. TIM BOWLES: Yeah, that’s it. Agroecology emphasizes a diversity of crops
38:51
so that when something happens, you can spread that risk.
38:56
We know that agroecology can build soil health. That’s a sure way to reduce impacts of droughts and floods,
39:05
even some of the practices that we’re talking about. Recent research that’s just coming out, showing that cover crops prevented
39:13
a lot of economic damage during the 2019 floods. I could go on and on.
39:18
But if we remove the subsidy for– basically taking all the risk away
39:24
from these extremely risky systems, we’re going to have a big change. KIM SEVERSON: Do you want to answer?
39:29
MICHEAL GRUNWALD: It’s funny. So that’s great. So we are so in touch on–
39:35
I just wrote an op ed in the New York Times not that long ago about how, basically, Elon
39:42
should go rip up USDA. And crop insurance was my exhibit A. It’s a total boondoggle.
39:47
Where we really do, though, disagree is that I think if they got rid of crop insurance tomorrow, a lot of farmers, they wouldn’t get
39:56
to buy a new F-150 every year. And a lot of really rich farmers would be made
40:02
less rich on an annual basis. And I do think there would be some marginal land that they would not farm as much, knowing when the river floods again
40:13
and they’re just going to collect their money– that, I think, would change. But I don’t think it would really change practices that much.
40:19
I think the middle of the country is still going to be amber waves of grain, and it would look pretty similar.
40:26
KIM SEVERSON: Do you want to jump in or– you talk about technology and technological changes
40:31
helping a lot. You talk about vertical farming.
40:38
And I’m actually interested in this. I’m just going to indulge me in a side note. So hydroponic farming, vertical farming,
40:45
they’re growing plants in this water full of nutrients, right? Do you think it can be labeled as organic?
40:53
It’s just my personal thing. I’m just–
40:58
MICHEAL GRUNWALD: Sure. [LAUGHTER] KIM SEVERSON: Just give me a minute. We’ll get back to the program. But I’m just curious. MICHEAL GRUNWALD: Bankrupt organic companies, yes.
41:05
I think they are organic. KIM SEVERSON: Do you think that organic is not– the soil is not inherent in the phrase organic.
41:12
Well, what do you think? TIM BOWLES: Yeah, I don’t think so. I think it can be called pesticide free.
41:17
And I think that– KIM SEVERSON: You could not call it organic because it– TIM BOWLES: No, I don’t think– KIM SEVERSON: –doesn’t have soil. TIM BOWLES: No. Yeah, exactly.
41:23
I think it’s counter to both the philosophy and the practice of organic agriculture, to which the continuation of soil
41:32
and its regeneration is really at the core. MICHEAL GRUNWALD: I’ll defer. TIM BOWLES: So pesticide free is–
41:38
MICHEAL GRUNWALD: I’m with you then. KIM SEVERSON: OK. OK, so they agree. Do you think that technology and things like vertical farming,
41:45
CRISPR, gene-editing technology– I’ve seen some great examples of some gene-editing technology
41:51
that makes blackberry bushes without thorns that can grow taller.
41:56
They don’t take as much space. You can get apples that have some sort of built-in sunscreen
42:01
for Washington apple growers who are dealing with climate change,
42:06
having to put tarps over all their– so is technology a way out of this? Like, how we grow food, can we stay ahead of it
42:14
if we’re going to– we see that it’s obviously coming. It’s changing how we farm. How important is trying to stay out
42:21
in front of all of this through technology, either how
42:27
we farm and also the actual gene editing? TIM BOWLES: Technology can play a role,
42:32
but it has to be the right technology, right? Agroecology is not anti-technology.
42:39
CRISPR is the nuclear fusion of technology.
42:46
It promises the world. And it is always 10 or 20 years in the future,
42:51
especially for complex traits, like drought resistance.
42:56
Also, the return on investment is very, very uncertain.
43:07
It’s a tremendous amount of private capital that goes into it. Why? Because these are patentable This is patentable.
43:13
KIM SEVERSON: Like cellular meat, same sort of issue, right? TIM BOWLES: Yeah, in a different way.
43:20
We have to look at the economics for a farmer.
43:26
And right now– I understand some farmers might be getting rich. But, look, the median income of farmers from on-farm income
43:34
in this country is $0. All right? And yeah, there’s a long tail.
43:39
Some folks are getting rich. But we can’t divorce the technology
43:45
from the economic impacts it has on farmers. And so why pursue something that is going to cost them more
43:52
and that actually decreases biodiversity? We have tried-and-true ways that have great return on investment
43:59
for producing crop genotypes, crop varieties that are the ones
44:04
that we need in the future. We can do this through technology-assisted breeding,
44:10
through participatory breeding with farmers. So I could go on. But I want to just make the point
44:17
that it has to be appropriate technology. It has to be technology that actually enhances
44:24
farmers’ autonomy from input suppliers so that they can make more money.
44:31
And we could go into examples of that.
44:36
But I’ll pause there. MICHEAL GRUNWALD: Certainly, I think
44:41
it depends on the technology. I was crapping on vertical farming back when they had these
44:47
billion-dollar valuations and JD Vance was on the board and with– KIM SEVERSON: Martha Stewart.
44:52
MICHEAL GRUNWALD: –Martha Stewart. Yeah, exactly. And I was just like, this is absurd. It might be good for lettuce, but it’s not going
45:00
to solve the food problem. And I think vertical farming is interesting in that it’s
45:09
a solution that illustrates the problem. Like, you want to do it indoors because the outdoors is
45:14
such a mess. It’s so hard to farm outside. It’s like, there’s night. There’s weather.
45:22
The birds poop on the crops. You can see, this is why farming is really hard. But vertical farming is not the answer.
45:30
CRISPR, I think that’s really exciting. You look at what they’re doing at the University of Illinois,
45:39
where they’re trying to reinvent photosynthesis. And they’ve got a superconductor that
45:46
has recreated the 170 steps of the photosynthetic process. And I remember they were telling me
45:52
that a NASA contractor was trying to debug their model and said it was literally much more complicated
45:58
than rocket science. KIM SEVERSON: Doesn’t photosynthesis already exist? I don’t mean to be– MICHEAL GRUNWALD: Yeah, but it sucks.
46:04
It sucks. KIM SEVERSON: So what are they– when they’re reinventing photosynthesis– MICHEAL GRUNWALD: Photosynthesis is amazing at doing stuff like supporting all life on Earth.
46:12
It’s good at that. But– KIM SEVERSON: No one likes a smart ass, my friend. MICHEAL GRUNWALD: No, it’s really good. It is really good.
46:18
But it’s incredibly inefficient. KIM SEVERSON: And what are they going to do with it? So what’s the MICHEAL GRUNWALD: So an example is, when a cloud comes overhead,
46:27
photosynthesis kind of shuts down, and it’s very slow to start up again. It’s kind of like when you’re in the bright lights,
46:35
and you come out of the dark, and your eyes are slow to adjust. And they’ve found the genes that get it to basically get
46:45
going again faster. And that’s very exciting. The best example is that RuBisCO–
46:51
it’s the protein that’s in photosynthesis. It’s the most common protein on the planet.
46:57
But it’s kind of hapless. It sort of grabs it grabs carbon from the air.
47:03
But about one in every five times, it messes up and grabs oxygen by mistake–
47:09
not so good. So they’re trying to make it so– they haven’t been able to get it to stop doing that.
47:14
But they’ve gotten it to recover from that mistake quicker. KIM SEVERSON: So this is– MICHEAL GRUNWALD: So these are things that they can–
47:20
and then you can get crops to grow better. And again, you’re right. KIM SEVERSON: [INAUDIBLE] MICHEAL GRUNWALD: It’s like 10 years away, right?
47:27
But those are the kinds of things where, if you can do it, you can grow a lot more food in a lot less land.
47:32
And I do think– I know I end up sounding like the bad guy.
47:37
I’m not talking about rural communities. I’m not talking about a just transition. Remember, climate change sucks for the poor.
47:47
It’s a disaster. And it’s not going to be felt as much in Berkeley as it’s going to be felt in the floodplains of Bangladesh.
47:55
So I think these are really important– this question of how we can feed the world,
48:02
feed 10 billion people without expanding agriculture’s footprint are– these are questions of equity and justice
48:11
that matter at Berkeley. TIM BOWLES: They do matter. And that’s why I think, on these questions–
48:19
and maybe if I have a minute, I’ll circle back to photosynthesis, which, by the way, has been subject to 500 million years of evolutionary pressure.
48:28
It is hubris to think that we will re-engineer these plants in ways that there aren’t profound trade-offs.
48:36
[APPLAUSE] And these are very smart folks. I know Steve Long, and I know others at the University of Illinois– very smart folks.
48:43
And I would just love to see us investing in things that we already know work.
48:49
Right? SPEAKER: Yes. TIM BOWLES: Now, on this question of just transitions
48:54
and feeding the world, I want to listen–
49:01
it’s something to be a white guy sitting up here in Berkeley, talking about how to feed the world. I think we can probably agree on that.
49:08
So let’s listen to the 200 million farmers around the world
49:15
who are part of the biggest social movement that exists, La Via Campesina. These are farmers who are farming in some of the toughest
49:24
environments, some of the most marginalized people on the planet. And they have identified–
49:29
they coined the term food sovereignty, which is the right to decide how your community’s food is
49:36
produced. And they have identified agroecology as the pathway to achieving food sovereignty.
49:42
They have used their political organizing
49:47
and their social organizing to gain a seat at the highest levels of the FAO to get agroecology
49:53
on the map of international ag development. So I want to listen to them.
49:59
What do they think is the way to feed the world? When we’re talking about feeding the world, it’s not just the overconsumption
50:07
in high-income countries. It’s also the 850 million people who
50:15
actually are suffering from energy deficiency and hunger, not to mention another billion that suffer from malnutrition.
50:21
KIM SEVERSON: Thanks. I know that there are question cards out around. Have you been passing them in?
50:28
Where are they? Should we start asking some– there’s so many. But I’ll try to just hit the highlights.
50:35
Is this OK? MICHEAL GRUNWALD: [INAUDIBLE] KIM SEVERSON: You sure? SPEAKER: I’ll get them to do that. KIM SEVERSON: Oh, we’re going to be edited, so that’s OK.
50:41
[LAUGHTER] See? Censorship, man, on this very campus. Are you fucking kidding me? [LAUGHTER]
50:48
I should be able to read whatever question I want to read. [LAUGHTER] SPEAKER: What’s your reason?
50:54
KIM SEVERSON: Thank you. See? [CHEERING]
50:59
Thank god. I could do this show at Harvard. [LAUGHTER] OK.
51:05
All right. MICHEAL GRUNWALD: Better hurry. [LAUGHTER] KIM SEVERSON: That’s right, no stipends there.
51:13
OK. If you guys could be any animal, what– no, that’s– [LAUGHTER]
51:20
Thank you. SPEAKER: I’m happy to– KIM SEVERSON: Yeah. I’m sure you can do [INAUDIBLE]. See? Now I’m sorry. [LAUGHTER]
51:27
OK. There’s fiction in the agroecology community about the use of digital technology.
51:33
What would appropriate digital technology– oh, I think we already just answered that. I’m sorry, Hannah.
51:39
It was a good question. We already answered it. We all agree, consensus? OK. [LAUGHTER] Hannah’s like, but I like my– it was a good question.
51:47
So biodiversity, where does biodiversity fit into this picture, particularly with regard to certifications, like the Rainforest Alliance?
51:55
Do you think that’s just dancing on the grave here, or does certifications matter?
52:03
MICHEAL GRUNWALD: Do you want to go first? KIM SEVERSON: They didn’t sign it.
52:08
TIM BOWLES: I think good governance matters when it comes to the expansion of agriculture.
52:16
Regardless of if we accept Mike’s position
52:23
that land sparing is a thing, it depends on good governance.
52:30
It depends on governance in the rainforest, in these areas to actually prevent agriculture
52:39
from expanding. And much of this expansion– some of it is smallholder farmers, often after they’ve–
52:47
a lot of it is land grabs. And a lot of this is actually fueled by the very system
53:00
that they’re in. So, yes, I think certifications, if it
53:07
has good governance associated with it, I think that’s important.
53:14
Yeah. MICHEAL GRUNWALD: Yeah. One thing I will say is that these are complicated. It’s a wicked problem.
53:21
You increase yields for a Brazilian farmer.
53:27
And his first instinct is like, great, now I can go tear down more rainforests– and make Grunwald look like an idiot
53:35
because he’s saying we need higher yields to save the rainforest. But what I will say is that–
53:40
so, yes, governance is really important. But in the global scale, there is a huge demand and supply
53:49
issue. And I don’t have great faith in– like, if there’s going to be demand for land,
53:58
the forests are going to come down. We saw it in– I remember the first time I went to Brazil in 2008
54:03
after the US passed its crazy biofuel rules. And everybody was like, awesome.
54:08
Grain prices went up. And they were just like, tearing down the forest. I think limiting the demand on the demand side
54:18
is a prerequisite to protecting that biodiversity. And then the other thing I would say about biodiversity
54:25
is that there’s on-farm biodiversity, which is important. And a lot of the things people say about pesticides,
54:35
the indiscriminate use– they’re wiping out the microbiome
54:40
and you’re hurting on-farm biodiversity. But I do come back to, again and again, the thing
54:46
that really screws biodiversity is that initial change from nature to great Michael Pollan farms.
54:55
That’s when most of the diversity is lost. And I do think that’s where we need
55:00
to focus on, on protecting biodiversity is in nature, not just on farms.
55:06
KIM SEVERSON: And I think a couple of questions here were about this. Maybe we need to– like, a lot of local food
55:13
gets grown and sent to school. We have systems that kind of work. I can get– and this was not going to be true 20 years ago.
55:21
But I can get local, Georgia-grown satsumas at my Publix, which, I think when all this–
55:26
we were reporting here 25– I couldn’t have imagined that that could happen. And it’s thriving. So there are these food systems that are working,
55:34
the ag in the middle sort of thing. There are people growing– maybe they’re using some pesticides.
55:39
Maybe they’re not. They’re truck– But they’re growing pretty good watermelons in Florida. And then they move up and grow them
55:44
in Indiana as the weather changes. And some of this is working pretty well. So it seems to me that we’re talking about big system changes
55:53
and looking at this. But isn’t it really like we were talking about a little bit more, like blockchain? Like, don’t we need to look at lots of different food systems?
56:00
And some of these are working. Why can’t the system that gets me local satsumas at my Publix
56:08
work all over the place? Why can’t local food just work?
56:13
Why not take that model and just make it work in communities everywhere? [APPLAUSE]
56:18
MICHEAL GRUNWALD: Well, because we’re going to need 21 quadrillion calories in 2050, right?
56:26
And I get it, that it’s sort of like, we just need to do a better job distributing it.
56:31
We need to waste less. But it’s sort of like, oh, we don’t need to stop smoking.
56:37
We just need to get more exercise. It’s like, we got to do all the things. And part of that is, we’re going to need more food.
56:45
It’s a little bit like the nitrogen thing. It’s like, yeah, we know that half of it is wasted every year.
56:51
But it’s like advertising, right? We just don’t know which half.
56:58
It’s like that underpants gnome thing, right, where it’s like, dot, dot, dot profit?
57:03
We don’t know how to get to the dot dot, dot. KIM SEVERSON: I can’t even go with the underpants gnome, but OK.
57:09
MICHEAL GRUNWALD: It’s like– KIM SEVERSON: If we keep talking about underpants, we have to go to human resources, young man.
57:14
So– MICHEAL GRUNWALD: Well, no. I’m just saying, it’s great. First of all, no, I don’t think–
57:21
if you can get local food to produce incredible yields, then awesome. But it’s sort of like, we got to do that.
57:30
And it’s true. It’s like, if you can do it without fertilizer, fantastic.
57:35
But Michael Pollan has, in The Omnivore’s Dilemma, which is amazing, in his whole screed about corn,
57:44
he has this little paragraph, a to-be-sure paragraph where it’s like, well, to be sure, nasty chemical fertilizers
57:51
are the reason that half of us on Earth are alive. And that’s a pretty big deal.
57:57
Four billion lives, we kind of want them fed. So I just think you can’t just hand wave it away.
58:06
I’m excited when I hear Tim talk about some of these programs
58:13
where you’re seeing, basically, better soil health, producing better yields. But that’s not true on a global basis.
58:20
In general, there’s a yield drag for most organic farms. And I hope we can fix it because–
58:27
TIM BOWLES: Yeah, I want to respond to that part in particular. KIM SEVERSON: Yeah, go ahead TIM BOWLES: To get to your point, just very briefly,
58:35
I think what you’re noticing in these little– I’ll call them seeds of success, seeds to build on.
58:41
And the evidence for the yield lag in organic is complicated.
58:54
Let’s first recognize that that yield gap, when it’s been documented, it’s
59:02
actually quite remarkable it’s not bigger. And here’s why. There have been hundreds of billions
59:09
of dollars of research and development in these conventional systems to make the genotypes,
59:17
to make the chemicals, to optimize these systems for incredible yield. You know how much support organic agriculture has gotten?
59:26
Virtually none. I have a story.
59:31
We were working with organic farmers in the Central Coast here in California. I was trying to get them involved in a project.
59:37
I went to one very large organic grower, one of the biggest grower shippers in the Central Coast,
59:43
extremely successful farmer. And he said to me, why the hell would I work with the UC system?
59:50
You all have not done shit to support organic agriculture. And this was his experience over decades.
59:58
This has been true globally. So we can’t say that organic has an inevitable yield
1:00:06
lag with conventional when there’s been virtually no research to go into it.
1:00:11
Secondly, when we look carefully at the studies that have compared organic and conventional yields, what
1:00:19
we find is that that yield gap goes from about 20% to about 5%
1:00:26
when we look at the actual practices that are being used. When those organic farms are using more complex crop
1:00:35
rotations, are using polycultures et cetera, that yield gap declines substantially.
1:00:42
If you compare monoculture to monoculture, conventional and input substitution organic, yeah, there’s a yield drag.
1:00:50
That does not exist when we use principles of agroecology in these organic systems.
1:00:56
KIM SEVERSON: A couple of more– let’s just get it. This one to ask, on behalf of Marion Nestle,
1:01:01
has Mr. Grunwald received any support, financial or otherwise, from any agribusiness or petrochemical companies
1:01:08
or associated think tanks representing the perspectives he expresses in his writing? MICHEAL GRUNWALD: I wish.
1:01:14
[LAUGHTER] No. KIM SEVERSON: Good question, though, and always a good question to be asking
1:01:20
in all these conversations. TIM BOWLES: For the record, I haven’t, either. KIM SEVERSON: I was going to say, where’s your funding coming from, friend?
1:01:26
MICHEAL GRUNWALD: The organic guys aren’t taking care of you? [LAUGHTER] TIM BOWLES: Well, it used to be the USDA, but they’ve–
1:01:32
KIM SEVERSON: Yeah, no more. Seriously, so you don’t get funding from the USDA or any– do you get government funding?
1:01:38
TIM BOWLES: I do get government– I do get USDA. KIM SEVERSON: What government funding do you get? TIM BOWLES: In my lab, we get funding from the USDA AFRI
1:01:46
program, which is Applied Food and Research Initiative, and it’s a flagship USDA research program.
1:01:52
And you know what? If I applied for those grants now, they would get sorted out. Because they have climate, and they have diversity, et cetera.
1:02:00
KIM SEVERSON: Right. So let me just do my work for a minute. Have you gotten any indication that they’re
1:02:06
going to take your funding? TIM BOWLES: Not in my own lab. However, at the Berkeley Food Institute,
1:02:13
we were part of a large transitions to organic partnership program grant that has been frozen.
1:02:21
KIM SEVERSON: How big was that grant? TIM BOWLES: It was, Janie, maybe $30 million to the whole consortium?
1:02:28
JANIE: $300 million nationally. TIM BOWLES: $300 million nationally. JANIE: And your slice [INAUDIBLE]. TIM BOWLES: Yeah. We’re a small slice, but we’re also basically a nonprofit that
1:02:36
operates in the university. So it impacts us quite a bit. KIM SEVERSON: Yeah, of course.
1:02:41
Of course. All right. TIM BOWLES: I could keep talking about grant– KIM SEVERSON: Yeah, no, I just was curious. OK, I’m going to switch back to an international perspective
1:02:49
here. So somebody asked about Sri Lanka, used that as an example of terrible field experiment.
1:02:56
What do you think are lessons to be learned? Was there something to be learned from what
1:03:02
happened in Sri Lanka? How did that advance the cause? TIM BOWLES: Yeah. I’ve been thinking about Sri Lanka.
1:03:08
And I’ve been thinking about it in a way– what came up for me is chemical dependency.
1:03:17
One of my best friends from childhood,
1:03:22
like probably many of us in the room, has an opiate addiction.
1:03:29
And he has struggled on and off to quit that. He’s currently sober and has been sober for a long time.
1:03:37
But when he would try to go cold turkey, it didn’t work. And I think that’s been the problem for a lot of folks.
1:03:45
So in Sri Lanka, the story is more complicated.
1:03:51
Sri Lanka was facing a huge trade deficit.
1:03:57
They were facing an economic crisis before this happened. The president stopped imports of fertilizer
1:04:04
to reduce the trade deficit, not from a philosophical commitment to organic agriculture.
1:04:09
So farmers had no off ramp. They quit cold turkey from fertilizer.
1:04:16
Any organic farmer will tell you, any organic certifier will tell you, it’s a three-year transition period minimum.
1:04:24
You have to transition these systems. And so to me, the Sri Lanka example doesn’t say much at all.
1:04:32
An example that does say something to me is, I think, one of the most very fascinating and, admittedly, complicated
1:04:40
movement in India right now called the Zero Budget Natural Farming happening mainly
1:04:45
in Andhra Pradesh. Indian farmers since the 1990s have faced 300,000 suicides.
1:04:57
It’s devastating. And these suicides are based on cycles of debt,
1:05:04
as these farmers are forced to purchase inputs to grow commodity crops, in which case
1:05:10
they’re subject to global economic demands. They get in these cycles of debt, and they can’t pay.
1:05:16
So what the Zero Budget Natural Farming movement was about was, let’s not purchase these inputs anymore.
1:05:22
If we use locally available resources and principles of agroecology, we can have a zero-budget farming.
1:05:28
We’re not purchasing inputs. 600,000 farmers have adopted this system, and it’s growing.
1:05:34
The state is committed to it. And so this is an example that I would point to around like, this is what happens when there’s
1:05:41
a movement in place, when there’s institutional support, when it grows over time, when there’s
1:05:46
farmer-to-farmer knowledge sharing, when it’s locally adapted.
1:05:51
So we can’t be using strawmen to talk about what
1:05:58
is the potential here. [APPLAUSE] KIM SEVERSON: Do you want to rebut the–
1:06:04
MICHEAL GRUNWALD: Yeah. KIM SEVERSON: –Sri Lanka [INAUDIBLE]? MICHEAL GRUNWALD: Look, I think there’s a little bit of a “communism hasn’t failed, it’s just never been tried”
1:06:12
to some of this. And it’s also true, right? I can pull out examples.
1:06:19
Like Zambia, they did a conservation farming effort that the farmers just didn’t like and abandoned.
1:06:27
But I’ve heard that they didn’t do that particularly right either. This stuff is hard.
1:06:32
One thing that we haven’t talked about in the big picture– there’s an underlying current, and you talked about it
1:06:38
with the dependency, that the Green Revolution was a mistake,
1:06:44
that the GMO seeds, first, the hybrid seed, the fertilizers,
1:06:51
the chemicals, that it was a mistake. But we do know that it did triple yields. It tripled crop and livestock yields.
1:06:59
So we do know that before it, people were predicting that there was just going to be perpetual famine.
1:07:04
And it didn’t happen in the way that it was predicted. There were bets made, and the bets were lost.
1:07:12
Look, and it hasn’t solved anything. And agriculture and industrial agriculture makes a huge mess.
1:07:18
And it’s like a water pollution mess and a water shortage mess. And so we’ve gone through a lot of the messes.
1:07:26
And there’s still deforestation, despite all these yield
1:07:32
advances. But I do think if we hadn’t had the yield advances, we would have had 3 times as much land that we’ve
1:07:39
used since the beginning of the Green Revolution. And we would have had a lot more hunger. So I do think the Sri Lanka–
1:07:48
and I’m perfectly willing to believe that this was done in a haphazard way. And I’ve seen regenerative practices
1:07:54
that are as part of a system, not a purely regenerative system, but that
1:08:00
absolutely were part of a very robust yield, very productive farms.
1:08:05
But since I’m really focused on, how are we going to stop this eating-the-Earth problem,
1:08:12
how are we going to feed the world, I’m really nervous about well, we’re going to start by something that does historically
1:08:20
have yield drag. KIM SEVERSON: OK. All right. You get. And I have one last question, but jump in there for a minute.
1:08:27
And then we’re– MICHEAL GRUNWALD: There’s so much to say. KIM SEVERSON: Right, right. Just pick one thing and say it. Yeah.
1:08:33
[LAUGHTER] TIM BOWLES: Look, we cannot accept that the only inevitable
1:08:39
course of history was the Green Revolution. The Green Revolution happened because of choices. It happened because we did the Green Revolution in this way,
1:08:49
because we were coming out of World War II, and chemical companies and needed somewhere to sell their products.
1:08:55
The munitions companies, instead of making bombs, they needed to make fertilizer.
1:09:01
War machine companies needed to make tractors. There was a reason we intensified in this way.
1:09:06
We could have had a different path that would also have led to yield gains but in a very, very different way.
1:09:13
And so we cannot accept the historical trajectory as the only inevitable one.
1:09:20
KIM SEVERSON: All right. So this is a little bit of a bigger shifting-gear question
1:09:26
to end on here. And you talk about the intensifying farming in Africa,
1:09:35
for example. It becomes very much extractive. It becomes a new colonial sort of thing.
1:09:42
They’re extracting, they’re getting– at the expense of local food and local farmers. And I guess what I’m trying to say
1:09:48
is, the idea that if we just farm more to make more calories does not necessarily mean all that product
1:09:55
is going to feed people, right? I mean, this is an inherently unbalanced system. So the question to both of you–
1:10:02
is there a moral imperative here to do this differently?
1:10:07
Maybe culturally, there is. But certainly, are we obligated to look at agriculture
1:10:13
and look at the impacts of all the things you’re talking about from what is right and what is just?
1:10:18
How much does that play into this equation? We’re talking about food, right? There’s nothing more spiritual than feeding ourselves
1:10:27
and feeding each other. So where does that bigger question fit in?
1:10:33
TIM BOWLES: I think it’s clear. How could we not make a moral choice?
1:10:41
It’s going to be hard. There’s no doubt about that. I think that’s something we can probably all agree on,
1:10:46
is the future of agriculture and food is tough.
1:10:52
But the notion that we accept that the clean coal
1:11:00
of agriculture is our future, that we can make this system a little bit less bad–
1:11:06
while we know that it’s still going to be doing what it always has.
1:11:11
It’s going to be fouling our air and our waterways. It’s going to be impoverishing rural communities.
1:11:18
And so to me, the word agriculture,
1:11:23
it has culture embedded in it. Agriculture is a mirror to us, right?
1:11:30
What do we want to look in the mirror and see? KIM SEVERSON: And I know that, usually, the home team
1:11:36
bats last. But since you’re the guest– and then I think this will be our last comment.
1:11:41
I think we need to wrap up. But tell us– MICHEAL GRUNWALD: Everybody’s been very nice, I should say.
1:11:46
I saw all the Berkeley against– SPEAKER: So far. [INTERPOSING VOICES] SPEAKER: So far. MICHEAL GRUNWALD: That’s fair. That’s fair. I saw all the Berkeley against hate signs outside.
1:11:54
And I was like, oh, thank god. [LAUGHTER]
1:11:59
For me, this is moral too.
1:12:04
And Africa is currently on a path where, if yields don’t increase in Africa,
1:12:12
they’re on a path to have enough deforestation just there to push us past 2 degrees.
1:12:19
And I talk about feeding the world without frying the world. But they’re both moral imperatives.
1:12:29
And honestly, I have more confidence in our ability to feed the world than I have in our ability to do it without frying the world.
1:12:36
So yeah, I wish there was a way to snap my fingers
1:12:43
and say, OK, you’re going to have your feedlots, and you’re also not going to dump the poop in the river.
1:12:49
And also, just like everything we’ve been talking about, that will be hard.
1:12:54
But I think we need more food, we need to feed people,
1:13:01
and we need to do it in a way that doesn’t just expand the footprint. And I just haven’t seen a better way to do it.
1:13:09
I hope we find it. KIM SEVERSON: All right. Let’s give it up for these gentlemen.
1:13:15
[CHEERING]
1:13:27
And that’s it. It’s a wrap. Thanks, everyone, for coming. SPEAKER: Thank you.