Episode #207
Will Allen: Chemicals, Cotton and CAFOs in California

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Our Will Allen interview has been edited and condensed for clarity:

Dave Chapman interview Will Allen in East Thetford, VT, Summer 2021:

Will Allen 0:00
Cotton and dairy are linked at the waste in all of the all of the cotton growing states that also have CAFO dairies because they feed out see only on cotton fields, 60% of the yield of a cotton field is cut seed, and so that 60% of that yield has to go somewhere, and used to go into oil, but cotton seed oil got to be very unpopular, and so, like about 80% of that cotton seed gets fed out to dairy cows at 10 and a half pounds a day. So you know, if you go to a big dairy, they all have mountains of cotton seed that they’re feeding out to those cows every day. And so it’s, you know, those two industries are connected. So

Linley Dixon 0:58
welcome to the Real Organic Podcast. I’m Linley Dixon, co director of the Real Organic Project. We’re a grass roots farmer led movement with an add on organic food label to distinguish organic crops grown in healthy soils and organic livestock raised on well managed pasture, all without synthetic fertilizers and toxic chemicals. You just heard from organic farmer will Alan, whose long time organic farming experience starts in California, San Joaquin Valley, and eventually landed him just down the road from our co director, Dave Chapman, in East Thetford Vermont, as you’ll hear. Will’s story is a wild and juicy one, starting out with a short stint in jail, deep involvement in the farm labor movement, insightful data collecting into both chemically grown and organic cotton. And finally, a book called The War on bugs, Will was first drawn to organic food and farming while aiming to provide the most nutritious food he could for his two kids with muscular dystrophy, and he’s gone on to serve as inspiration to a whole generation of organic growers through the practices he and his partners employ at Cedar circle farm.

Will Allen 2:14
Right about the time that I got fired, we found out that my two sons had muscular dystrophy, and and so I had to, had to make a decision. I was going to spend a year in jail anyway, because I we got arrested for burning the Bank of America, which we didn’t burn the Bank of America. All the students had had problems with the bank and and the bank was making tons of money by fleecing these kids, right? And so we found out that the bank was actually one of the vehicles for funding the Pacific fleet. The Money rent went through the Bank of America, and it was funneled to a lot of the stuff that controlled the Pacific Fleet was in the an in department store in downtown Santa Barbara arts department store, and the computer program was in the basement of arts department store. We found out about it, and we found out that the what the bank was doing, and we just, you know, started giving speeches about it, and letting people, you know, people started having demonstrations about the bank, and then people started attacking the bank, and like every day, the windows got broken out, right every day. And finally, I think, they ran out of that big glass and they put plywood over the windows. And it was right at the end of a Crosby Stills Nash and Young concert, and the cops turned off the sound early, and people stormed out of their pissed and they went and pushed a burning Dempsey dumpster into the front of the bank, and it caught the plywood on fire, and the bank burned to the ground. Fortunately, I was coming out of the concert, and I went into a sandwich shop was when I used to eat meat, and I was at order of pastrami sandwich, and that is my alibi, and that was the alibi we used, because the shop owner was there when the guy ran in and said, Oh, well, the bank’s on fire, so it couldn’t have been me. And they said that I had led people down the street, carrying a Viet Cong flag and telling people to, you know, burn the bank, which never happened. And the cop said that they were right across the street and saw all this, right? So they were all perjuring themselves. But you know, they have immunity. They can say anything they want, do anything they want, kill anyone they want, right? They did it then they do it now, right? So they totally lied about it, and they got caught because we got some good lawyers from Bill Kunstler, an old lawyer got us lawyers from UCLA that were just Cracker Jack lawyers. And they said, let’s try it through the American Association. And a university professors, because I was a member, and then we’ll find out we can actually do the same kind of subpoena of any kind of information. We can do discovery, you know, we can do site visits. And that’s what they did. They went on to site visit, and they made the cops come that said that they were across the street, and then they, they questioned them, and they totally busted their story, and then we were, you know, we were free from the burning the bank charge, because that would have been, I’d still be in jail, you know, I mean, because there’s, and there’s no statute of limitations, they could charge you any time. But what happened, basically, is they wanted to get a pound of flesh, and so they got us for inciting to riot and failure to disperse and mischievous mischief, and, you know, a host of little things that added up to two years, you know, but they, they had a certain had me serve it concurrently. So it was just a year. And then I got out some early, because my kids, my kids had, you know, gotten muscular dystrophy and and, you know, I felt like I really needed to be with them more. And so I got it shortened a little bit and, but, yeah, but once they got muscular dystrophy, I realized, you know, like I had to figure out how to feed them better food and make sure that they had a long enough life that they could maybe figure out a cure, right? So instead of going back into the university and teaching, which would have been probably a mistake anyway, I never would have been able to get a full professorship after, you know, being accused of burning a bank, even if you and after being in jail for a year, it’s just like, you know, people don’t want to trust their kids with you. Yeah, you know what I mean. And so, and it’s not just the kids. You couldn’t get research money, right? So I decided, look, I’m gonna go back into farming. And I’d already started doing a bunch of stuff. I’d rented a little piece of ground in Lompoc. So

Dave Chapman 7:13
you’re just rocketing around from from like the Marines to academia, Professor to jail to, like, hand labor in the fields. This is, this is quite a quite a rocket ride now. Now will at this point like, was farming? Were you excited about about farming? Was this like, I want to do this the rest of my life, or was this, just like one day led to another, and the next thing you know, you’ve been farming for five years.

Will Allen 7:46
That’s kind of it. But, I mean, the a lot of it was like, you know, once that community started building in California, right? And once I had gotten married again by that time, and I started working for my wife’s father because he had 3600 acres, and so he did alfalfa and a lot of tomatoes, walnuts, almonds, a lot of peas, lot of dry beans. And so I learned a lot there, you know, just about the whole California ag system in the Central Valley. And we decided that we really wanted to get out of the San Joaquin Valley, because it was getting so polluted with, you know, so much toxic spray all the time. Where we were farming organic, there’d be 25 planes going over our farm every day, you know, and they’re leaking all the time. We knew that, you know, you can see it. And people,

Dave Chapman 8:58
I’ve said this before in the northeast, they actually have no concept of what that’s like to be in that big ag, country. No, it’s like, so chemical. It’s so

Will Allen 9:10
chemical. I mean, the air is full of fertilizer. There’s that much fertilizer. There’s so many cows. I mean, it’s just like, you know, CAFOs everywhere, right? And total water damage. They’ve kicked them out of all of the Southern California counties. They’ve kicked them out. I think they’re on the verge of kicking them out of Bakersfield, and they just keep moving north. And then now they’re moving in North Dakota and Idaho, Minnesota and Idaho. Have friends

Dave Chapman 9:37
in Idaho complain about it. They said it’s California gets stricter. They all come here. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Will Allen 9:42
So we, we did that until we, you know, kind of just got tired of the San Joaquin Valley and wanted to be closer to my kids. And then in 88 late 88 we moved to San. Barber and took their job, and there it was. It was really diverse, with a lot of tree crops, everything from mandarins to Cherry moyas and avocados and peaches and and then a lot of vegetables. And so I worked there for like three years, and I think it was about three years, and it, it was hard. It was hard like working there because it was, it was a difficult farm on, on labor, you know. And I had brought a bunch of labor with me from the San Joaquin Valley when I took the job, and so it’s hard for me to see them not treated like I thought they should be treated. And so I moved back to the San Joaquin Valley and started growing garlic and their vegetables again, and got a place in Patterson and and then I got a job, part time, job with the California Institute for rural studies. And it was started by this guy, Don viajo, who was another UCLA professor that had gotten fired at the same time, and he, like me, decided, instead of, like a lot of our colleagues, either went, you know, and joined the Communist Party, or, you know, this one of The Socialist groups, and we decided we wanted to do agrarian reform, you know. We wanted to focus on, you know, let’s see if we can change ag and see if we can make a difference, you know. And so he helped start a bunch of these organizations. He just helped start CCOF. He helped start ecological farming conference. And those days it was called, what was it? Steering Committee for sustainable agriculture. And, you know, there, that’s what lefties did. They had steering committees, right? So that was the steering committee for sustainable agriculture. Was how it started. That’s what grew into eco farm, yeah. And so biorejo was very influential and really bright, bright guy. He was a physicist like Vandana Shiva, who decided to go into Grand activism, right? And born with physics anyway, so he started this program at California Institute for rural studies. He hired me to be the rural toxics outreach person, and then after we got another grant, he made me the director of that project. And we’ve been studying, trying to figure out, what were the what were the entities in the state, businesses or crops, that were causing the most worker injuries? Right? Because we’re focused on, okay, how do we stop so many worker injuries? And you know, two of them that came to mind, where the nuclear transfer industry, as they’re, you know, transferring all these spent nuclear fuel rods and good, taking them someplace to store them in water somewhere, right? And then the other thing that we’re looking at, and there’s a lot of injuries, because there’s such an enormous turnover of truck drivers, because they get zapped, right? They’re driving these rigs that are peaking the Geiger counter at the third level, right, and so, so we were studying that, seem that was a thing that we ought to be focusing on as a real toxics problem, or cotton. And cotton had by far the most injuries you know, of any crop and of any industry in California. And so we started studying cotton, trying to figure out what we could do to cotton. Were

Dave Chapman 14:14
these injuries from like pesticide exposure, or were these injuries from like knife cuts and things like that.

Will Allen 14:21
No, the most the injuries were pesticide related and fertilizer related. See, because anhydrous ammonia is really, really toxic, and lot of people inhale it accidentally in art don’t have protective gear on. And then there are a high number of pesticide injuries because they’re, you know, like before we started really working on cotton. Cotton accounted for 50% of all the pesticides used in the world, right? And, you know, so we started looking at cotton and trying to figure out, well, what could we do, you know? And we decided, well. Let’s see if we can get some growers to start growing organic cotton, and then see if we can get clothing companies to use it right. So we got some pretty good grants, and then we got lucky, because when I was all the time that I was farming organically, I used the services of this guy, Larry Bowen, who ran Bo bio control, and he taught me how to use beneficial insects to take care of my pests, right? And so one of the things we realized right away is like, Well, I had grown strawberries a lot when I was in Santa Barbara, and the pass on strawberries are a lot the same pests that are on cotton, right? So we figured, oh, we took care of all those, all those pests using beneficial insects on strawberries. Why couldn’t we do the same thing on cotton? Right? So we got Larry Bowen to help us out, and we started going around talking to farmers, saying, Well, you guys be interested in using beneficial insects, and would you guys be interested in having us sweep your fields to see what’s there, so that you know what you need to get, and you’re not buying something you don’t need, right? And so they were interested, and then we got a grant that led us take 30 acres of every cotton growers field, and use that as an example to them. They could grow organic cotton on that we would take care of all the pest control on that. We’d release the beneficial insects, and we would monitor those pests every week, right? So they would knew, knew exactly what was in their fields, and we would teach them what we were finding, right? These are the pests that are in your field. These are the beneficials, right? So we we did that for like, 13 years, but we were able to do it that long because we got some money from Patagonia to do outreach to other clothing companies, and from esprit to do outreach to other clothing companies to try to create a organic cotton market. And so we were able to get a lot of growers because we created a market and or we helped create a market.

Dave Chapman 17:15
Now rose, Michael told me that there was a point at which Yvon Chouinard personally made, the decision that Patagonia was going all organic on their cotton, yeah. And he said it wasn’t entirely popular with with the board, but he had, he had the juice, so that’s what they did, yeah.

Will Allen 17:35
And the way, way that happened is like Marcy Rudolph, who worked for dubbed Doug Tompkins went on a tour with me. I showed her all the stuff that was happening out on cotton and how you could be out there like right now, you know, from now until November, and there would be eight or 10 planes you could see in the air, and they were defoliating cotton in the middle of the day, in the middle of the night, all day, all night, because there were like a million and a half acres of cotton at the time. And so she came out there, and I took her on this tour that we staged, because we created this sustainable cotton project out of the rural toxics project. Started out as a rural toxics project, and then we said, well, it’s more than a rural toxics project, and it’s more and it’s less than a rural toxics project, right? So, so we renamed it and, and that’s what it it became and, and once we started getting into the clothing companies, and we were able to get some pretty good sized grants, and a lot of them were environmental grants that took place for the first time, really, in in terms of, you know, they have all of these pollution controls, right? And the pollution controls are mostly focused on point source pollution, and that’s usually factories or Mills, or, you know, like, you know, fertilizer plants, anything like that is, is a point source pollution up until, like the I the mid 80s, and we know the mid 90s, they didn’t do non point source pollution at all, right? EPA didn’t fund that. And then Clinton was able to get non point source pollution introduced, right? And we got a grant. It was a calf grant. Was about $800,000 a year to try to teach farmers how to control their non point source pollution. And farmers were non point source polluters, right? Just like forestry is, you know, you can’t go find out if that. Three cause this problem. That’s the problem. Did this farm cause this problem? Well, we were trying to say these farms did cause this problem, because we were able to show, look, this is what’s coming off of these farms, because we did a huge study of pesticide use, because California is one of the only states, along with Vermont, that collects pesticide use data, and it’s collected from the farmers. So the farmers have to when they when they buy that pesticide, they they have a pesticide use report right then. So we mined that data and found out how much they were using on cotton. And it turned out, you know, for a T shirt which weighs about, you know, bulky t shirt like this weighs about a pound. It was taking a pound and a half of chemicals to make a pound of cotton, and we just started using that, you know, we found all this data, and we just started using it right, and using it with these companies, right? And then we started doing bus tours. And we did, and Patagonia funded the bus tours, and esprit funded the bus tours at first, and then Nike even funded the bus tours. And Levi Strauss funded the bus tours. And a lot of Levi Strauss foundation money funded us, right, because they wanted to change too. I mean, the people that you know were the ultimate owners of levy Strauss, you know, they then had foundations, and they they were progressive folks, you know, they helped us a lot. So we did that for, for a long enough time where we had 15,000 acres in the program. And we had a staff of 39 and we were actually, you know, like a, we were probably the biggest, like, IPM, biological IPM program in the country, you know, because it was like, you have 39 people working out here all the time, you know, doing biological control, right. And then we got people more and more to do cover crops, right, and and we started doing cover crop research with them. And we got a lot of help from this guy, rich Smith, who was ag extension advisor, and used to be in Stanislaw County. And then he moved to Santa Cruz County and and he became a real important advisor for a lot of organic farmers, especially on cover crops. So so one of the things that started happening is I the price of cotton dropped dramatically. Because the world price of cotton dropped, and even conventional cotton was they you couldn’t pencil it out. World price of cotton at one point got to 28 cents a pound, right? It cost 72 cents to grow conventional cotton and about $1.15 to grow organic cotton at the time, right? So we were trying to get people contracts where they could really make money, because you don’t make a lot of money on cotton. I mean, if you know, you’re lucky, if you pencil off, you actually take home $200 an acre on cotton, right, even. And that’s like three bale cotton, because the price, the costs, are so incredible, right? Of growing it, you’ve got to cultivate that devil out of it, right? And takes a, I mean, a lot of hand labor, right? And so we’re trying to figure out is, well, how do you do you do less hand labor? And we figured out a lot of that. One of the things that we really had trouble with is defoliation, because, you know, they use pesticides. They used arsenic and lead, and they used sulfuric acid, and they used, they used a lot of death, which is an organophosphate and, and so, you know, it’s like that time of the year is like terrible in the San Joaquin Valley. And we were able to dramatize that, right? And and get a lot of people involved in that program. And then when the price of cotton dropped, a lot of farmers went out of business and they started planting pistachios and almonds. Yeah,

Dave Chapman 24:36
now the price of cotton dropped because they’re growing it somewhere else cheaper.

Will Allen 24:42
Yeah. I mean, the See, the thing about cotton is so it’s like international it’s one of the most traded items, you know, and 56 countries produce it and trade it, right? And some of them don’t trade very much, but it’s significant. Part of their, you know, foreign exchange earnings. And so when the price dropped, what happened is the organic companies kind of didn’t keep their promise. They, you know, went to Turkey, and they went to the former Soviet Union, and they got, they got Q, a i to certify stuff for them, right? And Q, AI is still doing it, you know. And, and so they were able to completely depress the price. And, you know, they just flooded, you know, the mills in the United States with all of this foreign continent they could get from much cheaper price and and so a lot of farmers, you know, couldn’t afford to stay in the organic thing. And so, you know, not in cotton. So we advise them, get in other stuff, right? And we kept the program going as a IPM program, and it’s still running now as an IPM program. Caf, California Association of family farmers, took it over after we stopped doing it. Yeah, we transferred it. You know, by design, we thought that they’d want to keep doing it, because they’re not that much. They’re not organic purists, you know. And we wanted the program to be organic, you know, because that’s what we felt like work, because we’d seen so much damage from the chemicals, you know, because, like these, a lot of these guys in these in the cotton gins. Oh, that, you know, the cotton gin is just really a circular saw, right? And that cotton ends goes in between these two circular saws, and those circular saws cut the fibers off that seed, right? And so there are so many accidents with those circular saws, and there’s so many accidents on people’s feet because they stand on the they bring in these 40 foot bales of cotton that are all packed together in a compressor, and they bring that in all at once, and then a guy stands On top of that with a vacuum about five inches in diameter, and vacuums that cotton into the gin. And so he’s standing on cotton that may have had a defoliant on him two days ago. And so a lot of these guys would lose toenails, and then toes, and just an enormous amount of pesticide damage on the farm, at the gin, moving the cotton all around. I mean, it’s just a incredibly toxic product. Still is, yeah. Still is, yeah. So, um, after doing that for 13 years, we got this opportunity to come back to Vermont and and help manage this farm that these friends of ours wanted to put together as kind of a farm that was really focused on building community, or helping community grow around food, right? And so we found out from Ben grubinger, who Kate was working for, working with actually at the time at University of Vermont, he told us about this farm, and Ken and I were actually looking for a small farm, and he told us about this farm, and our friend said, well, let’s do that farm and see if we can, you know, help that farm. You know, transition from chemical to organic. And so we got this place in first of November in 2000 and we’ve been negotiating with the Bob and Marilyn stone for this farm for almost two years and and finally we were able, and he was a tough negotiator.

Dave Chapman 29:20
Bob is famously tough negotiator, and Maryland wasn’t

Will Allen 29:25
far behind. Say that. I

Will Allen 29:28
always said, If I buy something from Bob, I know he’s gonna do well, he’s gonna

Will Allen 29:32
do well, yeah, anyway. So yeah, we got it, and we had a lot of pesticide stuff to clean up here. I mean, every bush hit a can, right? And every cabinet you know, had a bottle or two. And so that was like, you know, and I came here and worked for the off and on for the year before we got the farm, because we kind of agreed that we’re going to get it, but I was trying to talk them into. Using as few chemicals as possible, and that was anathema to them. They couldn’t even think of it right now. Have you written a book by then? No, no, I was writing it. We were writing it. And so we actually hired them part time for the first year to help us with transition, because I didn’t know much about greenhouses. I was a field farmer in California, and we didn’t need very many greenhouses, because the season so long. It’s 11 months, you know, and so, which didn’t make for many vacations in California, you got to be working all the time, almost, yeah. Anyway, so we got this opportunity and and so we took three years to transition it to organic, and then another two years to transition the greenhouses so that they were organically certified. But until that once, we got that together, and it took a long time to build a customer base. When we first got here, the second year, we decided we have a Strawberry Festival because we had a good crop, and we had 300 people at the Strawberry Festival. And the last rugby festival we had about four or five years ago, we had like 1900 people, right? And that consumer base started building, and people, we started seeing a lot more people coming here to hang out. It became like a destination, which is kind of what we had hoped would happen. And it and it happened. And, you know, we had certain people that were a little gnarly when we first got here that had been working for the stones that we kept on, and they drifted away, and we tried to replace that gnarlyness, because I think it’s a bad idea to wear a t shirt says, Don’t bother me. I’m busy. To somebody who’s running a cash register, and that would happen. I mean, that’s just not the way you do a business, we thought, right? And so once that kind of got fleshed out, that was good, that was good, and we’ve been able to hire really high quality people, you know, that really, really, you know, I’ve taken ownership of the farm, you know, and that’s that’s been a blessing for us, and and, and we, you know, after about four or five years on the farm, We realized that we really wanted to start exploring some other ways to do certain things, right. And so we started taking some online courses on different things. And by around 2009 or 10, I think I started hearing about, you know, some of the stuff that Miguel Altieri was talking about, he’s talking about these Brazilian cover crop mixes and and then Gabe brown started using those cover crop mixes on his farm and started feeling like they were really having an impact on the change in his microorganism level. So he started having a lot more diversity of his microorganisms. So we started looking at that stuff, and I went to a couple conferences, and I saw he and Ray Archuleta do and and then Ken and I got a chance to go in 2015 to Costa Rica to the first regeneration International, international conference. And there are people there from 60 countries. I think it was pretty impressive. And the farm we were state we stayed at, had a farm manager, Steve Bowen, and he he said to me, he said, Well, if you’re gonna stick around for a couple days after this conference, he said, I want to take you over to and show you a farm. And so he worked for Tom new heart and and Tom says, Yeah, take him over there and show him that. He think he’d be really interested. So Kate and Ronnie Cummins, and I went with him and, and we got to this guy’s farm, and he was farming a hillside, really, I mean, like, literally, like that. I mean, he had tires. He had to walk up to, you know, find out. Find. Anything in that field, or plant anything, or harvest anything. But I stuck my ground at my arm in that ground, and my arm went up to here, literally up to there. And it was like it was totally alive. Earthworms just pouring out of the ground. And like, yields, super yields, right? And I said, Man, you got something figured out here. And so I said, What are you doing? He said, Well, pointed down to this little spot of forest, little, tiny, little forest spot. Said, I go down there and I collect microorganisms on rice, and then I let that sit for about seven or eight days, and the microorganisms, you know, completely occupy that rice. And then I take that rice and I weigh it, and I add the same amount of sugar as the rice weighs, mix it all up, not I’m careful with it. I don’t want to beat it up because they’re living things there, but I mix it all up so the rice has and all of these critters have all this food, and they eat up all that food, and then they go dormant, he says, and then I can disuse that those microorganisms anytime I want, and last for I’ve had it last for me for two or three years. And then he says, I make all these other things here. I make, you know, this fermented leaf juice off of the fastest growing weeds on my farm, and I just take the tips and early in the morning, and then I I add the same amount of sugar as weight to that, and then I ferment that for seven days, and then I can store that in the refrigerator and keep it for six months and use it. And it’s, you know, I use it as a microorganism stimulant. That’s a has these fast growing microorganisms that are all in the tips of the plants. I said, I do the same thing with unripened fruit, and I use that to, you know, stimulate ripening, right? And then I also use vinegar. And I I make a fish amino acid myself. I also make that out of sugar and fish and and he says, use very little of this stuff. And he says it doesn’t take very much. And he says mostly it’s, you’re just trying to get the biology up. You’re just trying to dramatically increase your biology.

Dave Chapman 37:33
That’s great, yeah. So that’s that’s kind of some of the future from your perspective, if we step back and look, and you’ve got a lot of experience in California, and I don’t, and you were there when it was beginning. It was, I guess I was here when it was beginning, beginning in the east, but, but you really saw it. And you know, when I was out there, I saw the intensity of the agriculture is transformed to the whole culture of California, oh, yeah, in a way that you know Vermont is, is, is not like that. So you saw the beginning of certification, you saw the beginning of CCOF, yeah. And you’ve seen a lot of changes happen. Oh, yeah. So there are a lot of issues. You know, labor is a huge one. Obviously, the parasites are a huge issue, the CAFOs and the hydroponics,

Unknown Speaker 38:36
yeah, yeah. I mean, I just feel like, you know, it’s, it’s alarming when you, you know, see all of this,

Will Allen 38:49
you know, boatloads of grain coming out of Turkey and out of the Soviet Union, right, that are certified by Quality Assurance international. And, you know, they’re, they have no papers that prove that they’re organic, and they’re, they’ve flooded the market. And then, you know, the big boys have figured out how to cheat on the domestic grain market, you know? And QA, I was certifying those guys too, right? So here we are like where hydroponics were using fractionated chemicals to grow your food instead of using Real Organic chemicals in the soil, right? And real critters, you know, feeding your plants and getting fed by your plants, you know. And, you know, sucking up carbon from the atmosphere. I mean, like hydroponics doesn’t do any of that, you know. And, and I mean, with the CAFOs like you. One of the things that we did when we did these cotton tours, since cotton and dairy are linked at the waste in all of the all of the cotton growing states that also have CAFO dairies because they feed out see Alan cotton fields, 60% of the yield of a cotton field is cotton seed, and only 30% is fiber. Another 10% is gin trash. And linter is what they call linters, which are like these little tiny hairs that are right next to the seed. And so that 60% of that yield has to go somewhere. And used to go into oil, but cotton seed oil got to be very unpopular, and so like about 80% of that cotton seed gets fed out to dairy cows at 10 and a half pounds a day. Can’t feed much more than that, because gospel is poisonous to them at a higher level, right? It’s poisoning that cotton has in it and oil poisoning and causes, you know, it’s an aflatoxin and so, you know, if you go to a big dairy, they’ll have mountains of cotton seed that they’re feeding out to those cows every day, you know. And so a lot of them are, like, next door neighbors, not very far to move that cotton seed, you know, yeah, and there’s a lot of the dairies that are right near gins, and so it’s, you know, those two industries are connected. So most of our tours, we would go to a big dairy, we just drive in with a 50 person bus and, you know, go right back to the lagoon, and then the owner would come back and say, Why didn’t I do it here? And we’d say, Oh, I’m farm down up in crows landing. And we’re showing some of these people that wanted to see what you guys are doing on dairy and that you’re using cotton seed, and they’re all interested in cotton. I said, Well, I’ll show you some other stuff. Then. Same thing we would do in crop duster fields. We go to the crop duster field, and where are you going to spray an X? And they tell us, and we’d beat them there, and they show you exactly what they do, and the bus would get sprayed a lot. Yeah, yeah. I mean, because they’re spraying all the time, it’s drifting all over the place, yeah. So, really, I mean, once people see that it, you know, it’s like, you it’s pretty hard to forget, yeah, no, I mean, it’s, and it’s, there’s so many, you know, damaged communities because of it, and now they’ve lost them a huge part of that cotton market that, you know, once those price drops happen, and a lot of that stuff went off shore, because we used to Ship to all these other companies. We used to ship 60% of our cotton out every year, out of the United States, yeah. And now we’re down to about 400,000 acres in California on cotton. We had a million and a half, yeah.

Dave Chapman 43:17
So one of the, one of the big revelations, I think, of the last 40 years has been that the impact of agriculture on climate and the impact of climate on agriculture, we always knew about but but we’re seeing it from the other side now, and I think it’s a big part of the conversation. Can Can you remember, like, how long ago it was before that idea occurred to you?

Will Allen 43:50
Well, I, as you say, I’ve had a pretty checkered life. I’ve gotten to do a lot of things, and one of the things I got to do is after I people started paying attention to cotton. After we were doing the cotton project for a while. In 1993 I got appointed to the Montreal Protocol commission on ozone depleting substances because I was working like I say, using strawberries as an example. And since we were doing pesticide analysis on cotton, we also did it on strawberries, and found out that they were using about 300 pounds an acre of pesticides and another 350 pounds of fertilizer per acre, right? And so one of the pesticides that they were using was methyl bromide, which is a serious ozone polluter, right? Probably the worst ozone polluter, worse than chlorofluorocarbons and and so I got a point. Did that. And I met a bunch of climate scientists during that time, and they kept talking about, you know, it’s not just fossil fuels. It’s like, there are these industrial issues that we really need to look at. One of them is fertilizer manufacturer. Another one is, like, just the movement of Earth, you know. And so I, you know, put that in the back of my head. And, and so I did that for about two or three years, and got to go to several meetings, and really learned a lot. And, and then, what was

Will Allen 45:39
that from about 93 to 2005 and then in 2006 and seven, I had gone to India in 2004 to speak at World Social form. Vandana Shiva had asked me if I’d come over and talk about cotton

Will Allen 46:03
and how we could fix it right, and how we could decrease the water and done it a whole bunch of stuff. And so I went over, and when we started talking a lot when I was there, because I spent a bunch of time with her, and she had already started thinking, like we really need to start pointing the finger at how much damage agriculture is doing to the environment and to how much impact it’s having on climate. And so then, when I after that, I came back, and I thought about that a lot, but I was writing the book The War on bugs, and I finished that in 2006 and then it got, took about two years to get edited, and you know, I had to go through and, you know, I had to fact check everything, and we had to make sure that we weren’t stepping on people, because, you we used all these ads. And so that took a long time to go through all that copyright process and everything. And so during that time, I started really thinking about Climate Change. And then we went to the the Slow Food convivium in Italy in 2008 and Vandana Shiva and Debbie was it anyway, Vandana Shiva and Debbie Barker wrote a paper saying, Look, we think 35% of greenhouse gasses are coming from agriculture, and then in 2009 the next year, two World Bank scientists published a paper that said 51% of greenhouse gasses are coming from animal agriculture alone, right? And this started a furor back and forth, arguing back and forth, back and forth between all these scientists around the world about how much damage was being done with agriculture, right? Well, probably between 35 and 50% of greenhouse gasses are coming from agriculture, and we’re a terrible polluter. I mean, more and more I realized we really needed to write about this. And so I started writing about it, and people started relating to it. And I, you know, got to speak all over the place, and, and, and now I really feel like people, people are really working on trying to, you know, ameliorate some of those problems, alleviate some of this nightmare that we’ve created for ourselves with a, basically a bad egg, you Know, where we too much soil disturbance. You know, you know, too much damage of biology. I mean, we really need to get the biology back to where it was. You know, when the Native Americans were farming it. Because almost everybody knows that we had eight to 10% organic matter, you know, which is your biology. And now, you know, like when I took over this farm, it had 1% and when I took over the farms out in California, they were down to 1% you know, we’ve damaged it badly, and damaged a lot of the life, not just the earth farms, but so, yeah, we’re just learning. We’re learning kind of a microorganism agriculture, you know, yeah, and it’s exciting. I mean, I’ve always been excited about farming, and except when I was a kid. I. Thought it was really a hard job. Now that I’m adult, I know it’s a really hard job, but I’ve been able to do it for, you know, since, really, I started farming before I went to jail and been farming since I got out in 71

Dave Chapman 50:19
dinner must be served just about ready? Yeah, all right, so yeah, well, will Alan, thank you very much for talking tonight.

Will Allen 50:26
Oh, thanks a lot for asking me. I mean, it’s always a pleasure to talk to your neighbor. Now, I get to see you once a while. I hope that you didn’t get a good recording. We’ll do this again.

Linley Dixon 50:38
Thank you for listening to the Real Organic podcast. Our movement is growing because you’re subscribing and sharing these podcasts with your friends. So keep it up and leave us a rating and a review as well, so that others can find us. You can find a video version of this interview on our newly designed website, realorganicproject.org, or on our YouTube channel, and you can join us every Thursday for a new episode featuring voices from the organic movement. See you next time you.