Transcript
Speaker: I always like to say we think we're masters. We're not. We're members, not masters of nature's communities. What we do to them, ultimately we do to ourselves. Only by nurturing them can we nourish ourselves. And we do that, I think, by declaring love, not war, on one another and the landscapes that we inhabit. I really believe that.
Speaker: In Season 2 of Agrarian Futures, we're starting with a simple question. How did we get here? Farms are disappearing. Land is getting harder to access. Rural economies are hollowing out.
Speaker: But there are people building better ways forward. Join us as we investigate what's broken in our food system and what it looks like to build something better.
Speaker: Welcome to Agrarian Futures. I'm your host, Emma. Today, I'm excited to be joined by Fred Provenza. Fred is a professor emeritus of behavioral ecology in the Department of Wildland Resources at Utah State University and a pioneer in the field of behavioral ecology. His work explores livestock's nutritional wisdom,
Speaker: their innate ability to heal themselves and the landscape through biodiverse grazing. He's the author of over 300 scientific publications and influential books, like the one that I have with me today, Nourishment, and his work explores the deep links between soil health, animal behavior, and human well-being.
Speaker: But today, I'm excited to talk with Fred about the broader philosophical side of his journey. I'm excited to explore the limits of modern science and industrial knowledge, how we can understand the crossroads we face today, and whether traditional peasant and ecological knowledge could be an antidote to the shortcoming of today's modernity.
Speaker: So welcome, Fred. I'm happy to have you. And I'm very happy to be with you, Emma. Looking forward to our conversation. I am too. To get us started, you grew up in a small rural town of Salida, Colorado, in a small house with your extended family.
Speaker: Looking back, how do you see that upbringing influencing the person that you are today? i think one of the primary things reflecting back that that strikes me was the sense of community that was there in those days.
Speaker: As you say, we lived in a tiny little 1,100-square-foot house, my parents and my four sisters and I. So seven of us in this 1,100-square-foot house, tiny little house.
Speaker: Material things weren't so much of a big deal in those days, I think, as they are now. We didn't feel any want for anything. Our house was filled with love, of kind, loving parents.
Speaker: And then, you know, we had aunts and uncles and cousins that lived in the community, and then great aunts and grandmother. And, you know, we felt the love of the extended family.
Speaker: And then beyond that, everybody knew everybody else in this little town of Salida, for better or worse. Sometimes it was for better, sometimes for worse, depending what you were doing as a teenager. but But you just felt this deep sense of community. And looking back, I think that's something that we've lost, by and large, in the country.
Speaker: When I was growing up in Salida, we were told there's no future for you here in this little town. There were really two kinds of broad work there. People worked in the mines, there was agriculture, and then were there were the many, many small shops, you know, before the days of the Walmarts and Costco's and the Amazons and all that. That was an important part of those communities, all those little shops.
Speaker: But, you know, as kids growing up, they said, there's really no future for you. Here you're going to have to leave. I remember all of the older people telling us that. And truth is, by the time I'd finished high school, I was ready to leave Salida. You know, been here, done that, it's time to blast out.
Speaker: There were some good things that happened. in my life as a result of that. But reflecting back on that, I think you know that's what all of us did. And the sense of community that was such a part of those little towns got lost in all that.
Speaker: And when we go back to that little town and drive around, all those old houses are still there. It's just amazing, tiny little houses. And big fat tiny houses, big families.
Speaker: But then there's been a huge amount of development because it's such a beautiful place, recreation city. i mean, if you like the outdoors, you can't find a better place for hiking, skiing, floating rivers, and so forth. So tremendous amount of people have moved into the region. Huge houses, two people live in them. And I'm not necessarily criticizing, it's just reflecting.
Speaker: The other thing that strikes me, and I think back to the grandparents' generation, you know, many of them were coming from Europe in one place or another, right? There was Little Ireland and Little Italy, and, you know, depending on which which country people were coming from, they they settled in different parts of this little town.
Speaker: But all those people had big gardens, and they knew how to garden, big, beautiful gardens. They typically would have chickens. They'd have a hog. And that was just a part of what they had grown up with there in the countries. For instance, my ancestors came from Italy where they grew up.
Speaker: And it was amazing to see that, to see what that meant and the quality of food, right? I mean, the quality of food that they were eating was was incredible because of that.
Speaker: As we went to my parents' generation, fewer and fewer people were raising gardens. Then you get to my generation, And nobody really was much into that. So just reflecting on the changes that have occurred. But, you know, no question, you're influenced by the environment where you're born and raised and grow up. And that had a big influence on me. And I think throughout my life and the older I get, the more i reflect back with with deep sentiment about that death.
Speaker: Old people do, I guess. And could you paint a picture of the economic situation in this town when you were growing up? Because you said a lot of miners, a lot of ranchers. But it sounds like it was also a time of flux already, because you say people were telling you that there's no future in this town.
Speaker: What was happening with respect to kind of how things were changing even back then? Yes. When I was a senior in high school, I started working on that ranch. My full-time job in summers was working in a greenhouse. And I had a friend who said, you want to earn some extra money in the evenings and on the weekends? I said, sure. He said, we can work at Henry DeLuca's ranch hauling hay for eight cents a bale. We'll split it four cents apiece. And sounded great to me.
Speaker: And so I did that. I loved it so much. Then when I went to college, Henry needed summer are help. And so basically from May through September, I would work on the ranch. But I remember him saying, there never has been any money in ranching and there isn't any money in it now.
Speaker: And that really took me by surprise. you know I had no experience of ranches and ranching until I went out there, but I thought they were all rich. you know I just had this And in terms of land, they were, in fact, rich, right?
Speaker: The land that they owned was worth a fortune, and it got even more so as time has gone on. But it it really surprised me to hear Henry say there never has been a bit of money in ranching.
Speaker: But I remember thinking, and we used to talk about this all the time, How can something that's so fundamental to a society, the need for wholesome, quality food, how can something like that be so neglected when it comes to the money that ranchers make, that farmers and ranchers make? It it was a conversation topic all the time for us.
Speaker: And it's crazy because, yes, it's exactly that today. And today, if you don't somehow inherit land or something, you're never going to be able to afford it from a farming or ranching income. But it's crazy to think that that was already the case in the 1960s.
Speaker: When do you think that started to be true? Because, I mean, obviously for a lot of our history, like 60% of Americans were growing food in some capacity. When did it stop being...
Speaker: economically viable? You know, it's a good question. and ah And I don't know that I know the answer to that. But the fact that Henry would always preface it by saying there never has been any money in ranching.
Speaker: And I have a photo of Henry well some of the pioneers. it's It's a classic, absolutely fantastic photo that would be fun to share with you. Henry's 16 years old. So he was born in 1900.
Speaker: He's there with his father, Giuseppe. who was born in the middle of the 1800s and came over from Italy. But the fact that he said there never has been any money in ranching, that takes you back to the first part of the 1900s, right? And it would be interesting to talk to him. I remember him saying he and his wife Rose,
Speaker: that they would never want to go back to to the days when they were first here in this country and working because every last thing was done by hand. And they said the amount of hard work that they did was incredible. They weren't getting rich on that. There was an interesting article just published in the New York Times titled, Why the Kids Won't Farm by Brooks Lamb. I don't know if you saw that. Did you see it?
Speaker: I did not. I'll send it to you as material that you can include with this podcast if you if you want. It's so interesting to read what he says. I'll just quote you shortly here of reasons why you know why people aren't, even nowadays, the young kids. And that was true in my day.
Speaker: I knew many of the kids that were from ranches and ranches that were adjacent to where I was working. They couldn't wait to get off of the farm. actually should you you know They wanted to to leave.
Speaker: And Henry had brothers that had also inherited ranches in the area, and they all left. Henry said, you know, every one of them went to town and went to work for wages. He said, he used to say, you know, they all sold their places, moved to town. Now they don't have a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out.
Speaker: which was true in in one sense. You know, so that's been going on for a long time, right? These kids leaving the farm. In this article, he says, for one, young people are often told that farming isn't a worthwhile profession. Many farm kids are encouraged by educators and even their own parents to leave small towns where economic opportunities are limited. That's exactly what I was telling you we were told right back Many, many years ago in America, transience and mobility are rewarded while settling in a rural community is sometimes seen as settling for something less.
Speaker: I can relate to what he said. And then you think, well, we've moved all over the place, you know, maybe gotten good jobs. I had a good job my my whole life, no question.
Speaker: But then I wonder, what have we lost? And then are there ways Are there ways to try to strengthen rural communities? And in this article, the end of it, he talks about possibilities for how we might be able to strengthen rural communities. There's another article, and I'll send this to you, Emma, if you want. I'm not meaning to bear you. oh I love it It was published in an outlet called Choices, the Magazine of Food, Farm, and Resource Issues.
Speaker: And the title of this article is Town and Country, Linking Agriculture and the Non-Farm Rural Economies. To me, it's an amazing article. There's a lot of data that are presented in the article, but it paints the picture of what's happened here in the United States since the times we're talking about when Henry's ancestors were coming over. The number of farms in the United States back when Henry's ancestors were coming, there were 4 million farms.
Speaker: That peaked to 7 million farms in 1935, and now there's like 2 million farms in this country. And what's happened is that the size of the farms have gone in two directions.
Speaker: The mid-sized farms and ranches like I was on have virtually disappeared. There's been huge, huge decreases in those.
Speaker: There's been a big increase in tiny little acreages, one to 10 to 100 acres or so. Huge, huge increase in those. And then there's been a huge increase in the monstrous kind of industrial industrial farms and ranches. The sad thing is that fits with what Henry says. Historically, farms and ranches were the backbone of rural communities. And people appreciated that. What's happened, though, since those days and is present nowadays, is that rural communities, vibrant rural communities, are the only way that farmers and ranchers can survive because four out of every five dollars they make come from working in town.
Speaker: Four out of every five dollars. Think about that. So then you think about, I think about, What we used to do on the ranch, everything was done by hand, basically. I mean, there were machines there, certainly. It wasn't like when Henry was a kid and everything was by hand.
Speaker: But we irrigated grain and alfalfa by hand. We didn't use pivots. We hauled hay by hand. We didn't have machines to do that.
Speaker: We moved cattle that lived in extended families and we could talk about that more later on. and And I think you wanted to get into that, that lived in extended families. We moved them on horseback. We didn't use virtual fencing.
Speaker: And I understand about those kinds of things. But a point I'm wanting to make is that you can't love what you don't know and have intimate relationship with. And we had deeply, deeply intimate relationships with water, with soil, with plants, with the animals. We nurtured them, and they nourished us.
Speaker: It was amazing. And all these things I was learning about, I didn't realize, you know, but i was I'm out there on this ranch, and and absolutely, absolutely loving the hard work, the hard physical work, and those relationships. We grew big gardens.
Speaker: We hunted. We foraged, too, in the hills. And I've never felt so grounded and centered physically and spiritually as I did in those days, the deep, deep level of connection with all of those things. And I don't know that you can have that when technology is what's primarily running the shop. I don't know how you can you can love the machines, I guess. You know, the deep level of observation and knowledge that you acquire when you're out there all day long, every day, and being involved with what you're doing, and the art the art of that goes into so many of those things of how, if you're irrigating alfalfa fields, how you make a good setting, not how you turn your pivot on, but how you make a good setting.
Speaker: and so forth and so on. That's a perfect segue maybe into some of what your work and research has focused on. You've talked about kind of the power of the experience you had working with Henry DeLuca and kind of seeing his intimate knowledge of his ranch and of the place and of the animals and the ways in which that is perhaps missing in a lot of the modern industrial agriculture today.
Speaker: And I'm curious if you could also maybe tie that arc back to some of the research that you've done in academia, looking at the relationship of livestock to the land and to the soil and to the people as well.
Speaker: Absolutely. Absolutely. I'd love to. You know, so when I was on the ranch, I was also going to school at Colorado State University. i was in wildlife biology, which was a natural for me. I absolutely loved.
Speaker: the outdoors and all the creatures. I remember taking a class when I was a sophomore there in college, the animal science class. it was elective. And they're talking about genetics and the importance of genetics and breeds and so forth and so on. When I went back to the w ranch that summer, I told Henry about that class.
Speaker: And I said, Henry, I know that you always keep your own replacement heifers. You don't ever bring them in from the outside, other, you know, different kind of breeds. And he was a Hereford guy. He loved Herefords.
Speaker: And I said, why why do you do that? And he said, I'll tell you some stories. I'll tell you some stories. So here's the personal experience. that links into everything we did in research over the years. Here's his personal experience. He said, you know, I've brought replacement heifers in from other places in an attempt to better my herd.
Speaker: And he said, you know how when in the spring, how we start to move cattle up into the high elevation country, the ranch itself was at about 8,500 feet elevation and the livestock would go up to 10,000, 11,000 feet in these big mountains that were around there.
Speaker: But we'd move from the ranch onto the Bureau of Land Management administered land and then on to Forest Service administered land. And there were huge pastures up there. I don't know if you can picture, you know, tens of hundreds of thousands of acres across these monstrous mountains.
Speaker: And you've got to go find your cows up there, right? You've got to know where they are. And you've got back in those days, we were on what's called rest rotation grazing. And you would move animals across these big landscapes and put them in different pastures. And you'd do that every few weeks. You'd go up and make a move.
Speaker: And he said, you know how when we go to, let's say, the droney pasture, just as one specific, we know that we've got to go check many different places up there because the cows aren't in one big herd. That's a misnomer, actually, an important misnomer for wildlife and for livestock. They don't just stay in a big herd when they're allowed to move. In our case, they were separating into their little family units and they'd go to different places. They'd disperse across the landscape, which is actually a very effective way. It's called hefting in the U.K.,
Speaker: where they learn about their animals and their relationship with the landscape, and they select their animals for broad distribution across the landscape. Does that make sense what I'm saying? It's totally different from the modern day, okay, let's put them in a little tiny bunch and let's move them from pasture to pasture and see how many jillion pounds per unit area we can get.
Speaker: And you can accomplish just as much this way, but it's a different approach. So He was reminding me of that and how as we go in all the pastures, you need to know where the animals are in relation to to each of those different different places. And I knew all that because we'd we'd been doing that on horseback. And he said, when you bring animals in here that don't know the range, you don't know if you're going to find them. You don't know where you're going to find them on these monstrous mountains. And one thing you can count on when you bring them down in the fall, they aren't going to be bred. The bulls would breed the cows up there. And I remember some of the bulls. Henry did still buy bulls occasionally. And I thought, you know, Henry, that's our real waste because those bulls probably aren't breeding a single cow. They were the ones that were staying in the riparian areas and not moving around or doing a thing. Anyway, so Henry was telling me stories like that. And he said there was a time one year when there were some issues with Forest Service allotments. He said, I had to move my entire herd to a new environment, South Park, in the central part of the state. said it was the summer from hell, the summer from hell. We never had such a hard time. Cattle were fighting the fences, constantly riding the fences. And, you know, in behavior literature, people say, well, they're exploring the range. I have another explanation. We don't know where the hell we are, and we're going to get the hell out of here. We want to go back to where we came from, if that makes sense to you. So anyway, he summed it all up by saying, you know, the problem is the cows just don't know the range.
Speaker: And when I think of the work that we did over the years, every bit of it had to do with what does it mean to know the range, starting with experiences in utero,
Speaker: And early in life, epigenetics, this whole field of epigenetics where genes are being expressed as a function of the environment where the animals are conceived, born, and reared in their lives, all those are linking animals to landscapes. Now, Henry wouldn't have been able to talk to you about epigenetics and in utero learning and all the kind of things that we got into.
Speaker: But he understood. He understood the big picture of it. What's it mean to know the range? And that animals that are born and raised on the range know the range. So, you know, that's linking linking back.
Speaker: And it just tickles me to think that, that actually everything we ever studied in one way or another, 300 papers that we published on that and nourishment and all that,
Speaker: and It was the seeds were there in those years on the ranch. Henry understood the big picture of that, and he understood what it meant for his management, for how how he needed to manage to be successful on those landscapes.
Speaker: Basically, the modern bred livestock is not adapted to the intricacies and complexities of his landscape. I would argue that that when you're buying animals, moving them all around, and I know that's common nowadays, and so i'm going to sound like the critic. I don't mean to be that, to a stalker animals and so forth, and people get by with that, and they use stalkmanship to try to settle them in and so forth.
Speaker: But I would argue that there's whole levels of of local adaptation that can relate to everything from the productivity of the animals themselves, their ability to...
Speaker: thrive in those landscapes, right on through to to the implications for climate and climate change of animals that are locally adapted, working on a paper with with some people in Botswana and in New York.
Speaker: We're talking about local indigenous breeds and that their carbon footprints are much smaller than animals that aren't locally adapted to to their landscapes. So there there are many, many implications. Then you can go beyond that. to This is really the mind-boggling part to the fact that if you let cattle, sheep, and goats go farrow, just let them go wild, they end up in extended families. That's that's how they live And, you know, we've gotten so away from that.
Speaker: Let's go back to where we started. We don't even have that in our own experience now, right? Everybody flies the nest. And so you don't have extended families and communities.
Speaker: But that's that's what animals do. And it's in their their best interest to do that. Now, I know some people who have really gotten interested in that.
Speaker: and are raising their animals. One case, it's cattle in the eastern U.S. Another case, it's sheep in Tasmania. I'll just mention Nan Bray, who is the lady in Tasmania who's raising sheep. She was an oceanographer by training. Got very interested in her early experience in Idaho and going back to some of that, about land in Tasmania.
Speaker: And it's just amazing to hear her stories. Perhaps we can put a link or She's been interviewed extensively on what she's doing, but it's amazing to hear her regard for the welfare of those animals and her stories about how calm they are, how it is when when you have mother and grandmother and great-grandmother and siblings and stuff, family units.
Speaker: And then she talks a lot about the nutritional wisdom of these animals and how that gets passed from generation to generation and the dynamics of that.
Speaker: I met Nan probably back in about 2010. I used to teach a two-week short course for Natural Resource Conservation Service. Very hands-on, the kind of things you and I are talking about, we were working with, hands-on, looking at that.
Speaker: Nan attended that short course and really took to heart all the business we talked about on extended families, young learning from mother, um nutritional wisdom, and all the feedbacks that we got into on how does the nutritional, is there a nutritional wisdom of the body? If there is, how does that wisdom work?
Speaker: She just took all that to heart and has just done a phenomenal job and growing absolutely top quality wool that she ships around the world to places in New York and Rome and so forth.
Speaker: And with this accent on the welfare of the animals, welfare and well-being of the animals, the land, plant diversity, and so forth. It's ah it's quite amazing. So there are a lot of good reasons why people got away from all that we're talking about.
Speaker: But I'm always hopeful, too, that people will have a think about what we're talking about in relation to how do we nurture animals,
Speaker: considering their well-being and how they experience being on this planet. They're all sentient beings. There's no question about that. So their welfare becomes an important issue as it is nowadays.
Speaker: I'm not a science person. So could you tell me if this broadly makes sense or if not, kind of what I'm missing? But if you take a lot of your work and the 300 academic papers, the books you've written, the collaborations you've done with other scientists,
Speaker: Broadly speaking, a lot of your work is looking at the ways in which livestock kind of inherit this kind of instinct around what to eat in the landscape that comes, that is both like genetic epigenetic and also is like learned behavior from being raised in these large extended family networks.
Speaker: Is that kind of an okay summary? Yes. Yeah, absolutely the case. Absolutely the case. And so in the past, historically, people in animal science, evolutionary biologists and ecologists really focused on genetics, ah genetics, genetics, genetics.
Speaker: And I think what's been the real revolution, and it came at the time a little after the work that we were doing, is this whole field of epigenetics, that genes aren't static. They're not set. They're being expressed.
Speaker: as a function of the environment or the animals being conceived, born, and reared, which makes all the sense in the world. If you think of the fact that environments are constantly changing, how can you continually adapt? So what does that mean, epigenetics?
Speaker: If you think of morphology, how animals are built, and then physiology, how they function, that's how epigenetics starts to play a role, enhances how the body is For instance, you know, we did studies looking at liver and kidney function.
Speaker: We looked at the size of the paunch of the rumen of the animals as a function of how they're... All those kind of things are changing in form and their ability to function as a function of the experience of the animal. it's It's amazing to see that, and it makes all the sense in the world. So I'm just elaborating a little bit, Eman, what you were saying, but You know, that's what's happening is how the animal's built and how its body functions becomes in tune more with the environment it's reared in.
Speaker: We had a 10-year program called Behave. The last 10 years, I was at Utah State, 2000, 2010. And what we did was to work with the most innovative ranchers and farmers we could find from around the country.
Speaker: It was amazing. So we first talked about the research we'd been doing for 25 years. And then we said, look, we we would like to work with you. And the different projects that we got involved in were amazing. But you know what those ranchers were interested in? How do we cut costs? How do we cut costs of operation? They weren't necessarily interested in increasing production. They said, you know, that's been the focus of universities all the time. How do we increase But they say to increase production a lot of times, you've got to increase your costs.
Speaker: And it doesn't pencil out. So how do we cut costs? How do we cut costs? In the West, where we were, the most expensive thing was feeding livestock hay during the winter.
Speaker: Feeding them hay during the winter period. Because you had all this expense agriculture. irrigating, cutting, baling, hauling hay during the summer, and then feeding it during the winter. So we got involved with people that we were thinking about, well, on the land that you have, can cattle winter on those landscapes, just like wildlife might.
Speaker: It didn't work for everyone, but it worked for a lot of people. And it was amazing to see what happened with that. Well, we were doing studies at the same time showing that if a young animal When it's in the womb, if its mother is eating a poor quality diet, you know, not highly digestible, not high in protein and so forth, a kind of a winter diet, it was much better at surviving on that kind of diet during its life. that make sense? Yeah. That's all genetic kinds of things. It's changing in form and function.
Speaker: They were better able to digest those diets. They were able to eat more of those diets compared to an animal that had been raised on ah on a high-quality diet. So I'm just trying to make some of that come real. It's not ooey-ooey kind of stuff. It's very tangible Shifting gears a little bit, you spent 35 years in academia, but you described hitting a wall in terms or a limit in terms of what you thought scientific reason could explain. Could you describe a little bit that boundary and the wall that you came to see with respect to kind of the limits of science and what it could and could not explain?
Speaker: Yeah, for sure. You know, there are limits to everything, ah limits to human knowledge, limits to our ability to to fully understand what's going on.
Speaker: And certainly that's the case with science. I think a couple of things come to mind. And I was a scientist my whole career, right? So I'm not trying to say throw it out.
Speaker: But it's to recognize, like like Winston Churchill said, you know, democracy is the most horrible kind of government you can imagine until you look at all the other ones, right? Well, it's the same thing with science. At least it gives a way to try to explore.
Speaker: But the reductionist approach, for instance, is one thing, looking at the parts, parts, parts. Well, you reach a limit to that. For instance, you know, we we did a lot of studies looking at feedbacks.
Speaker: And the role that feedback plays in changing liking of animals for food is feedback that's really, that's driving those responses. We think, well, we like it, they like it because it tastes good. It tastes good because of feedback. And that feedback is coming from cells and organ systems in response to the chemical characteristics of the the biochemical characteristics of the foods, you know, energy, protein, minerals, vitamins, all these phytonutrients, as people call them now, or so-called secondary compounds, phenolics, terpenes, carotenoids, on and on and on and on, all those sorts of things. Well, you know, so we did a lot of studies with those those kinds of compounds, let an animal eat some worthless kind of food, straw, for instance, and then infuse
Speaker: infuse them with with an energy source. They come to love straw. They think it's good that's kind of what happens with humans with all this ultra-processed food, the same thing. But when you start to look, when we ingest a meal, or they and just say they ingest a meal with 30, 40, 50 different plant species, there are literally hundreds of thousands of compounds that have been introduced into their body.
Speaker: Hundreds of thousands. Now, the body knows how to deal with all of that, but you're never going to study that. How are you going to study 100,000 compounds one at a time and then the interactions with them? So it's a limit, right? That's a limit that that you reach, just to use one example. But yet the body is integrating all that information in a way. It's like that cartoon I used to see there on the blackboard, and then it says, and then a miracle happens, right? And it says, go to the next stage, however that is.
Speaker: But that that's amazing. You know, another thing that I think is so interesting is we like to think in science that we're objective observers, right? We set up the study and we're objective observers.
Speaker: But in fact, we're not. The fact that we even ask the question means that we're interested, right? We've got an interest in that particular question. And so there's already, in a sense, a bias that's getting brought into that I think if you want to read in literature that blows your mind on that, you get into the the area of quantum caught physics.
Speaker: Because what those people came to realize is that by participating, they were influencing the outcomes of all of their experience. You had to cross out that old word observer and put in its place this new word participator. By participating, they were influencing outcomes.
Speaker: And that that study they do where they're the slot study and they're shooting photons through the slit. And if if you look, it's a particle. If you don't look, it's a wave.
Speaker: And you know that sounds maybe simplistic, but as they thought about that and realized what that meant, it was mind-boggling. There's been book after book after endless book written about those kind of things. But But science has limits, you know, and I think when, ah you know, science and any field, any endeavor is simply working hypotheses, so to speak.
Speaker: You never prove a theory. You can only disprove them. And that's a healthy way of looking at things. It means that it's a humility to say we really don't understand. We know a little bit and our data are consistent with this hypothesis, but get another way of looking at it. And that's the history of science. But what happens, what's bad, is when people concretize their belief in science and they start hiding data, and there's many good examples of that in the human human nutrition literature of where people did that, and then there's
Speaker: horrible downstream effects on on what we're eating nowadays, you know? I talked about that a bunch of nourishment, and other books have been written about that, but you can come to believe too much in what you do to the point where you just start burying data that aren't consistent with your hypothesis, where what you need to be doing is saying, okay, you know, we did this study and didn't fit with our hypothesis ah My wife used to really give me a hard time back in the day when that would happen ah in a study.
Speaker: you You invest a lot of time and a lot of energy in setting up a study and running that study. And then all of a sudden, in this case, I'm thinking about the animals aren't doing what you think they should be doing, right?
Speaker: And I used to be so frustrated. And she said, well, you're about to really learn something new now, aren't you? huh And that's the fact of the matter. But you have to follow You have to follow where where the outcomes are taking you, not predetermining them. So anyway, those are, you know, there's, and we could go on and on, but it's just to say that there are limits to to everything. And then you get to a whole other realm that you may or may not want to go there today, but the whole spiritual realm of being and what that implies, that doesn't lend itself to reductionist science,
Speaker: and to experimentation in in in many senses. And yet that's every bit as real as what Henry DeLuca was talking about when he said the cows don't know the range.
Speaker: I think a lot about that. I think about this whole idea of consciousness. What is consciousness? I didn't dwell on that during my career. We looked at other things, affective and cognitive processes is what we focused on.
Speaker: These feedbacks are not cognitive. When you eat a meal, do you sit and think about which enzymes to release to digest the meal you ate? You probably don't. That's right, Emma. Most people don't. I used to tease when I was giving talks. Occasionally, a person would raise their hand just to tease, but we don't do that. Those things happen automatically. That's the wisdom of the body.
Speaker: The cognitive part is recognizing, okay, this food's different from that food and so forth, and I'm digressing. But this whole Business of consciousness. What is consciousness? What is consciousness? There's been a lot of thought given to that.
Speaker: And I love this book that I read many years ago, written by a neurosurgeon. So he's trained classically, trained in reductionist science, medicine, hardcore. You know, he's hardcore scientist and way into do all of that.
Speaker: And he had done many, many surgeries, and he'd had his patients tell him amazing things that had sometimes happened. If they died on the table or something, you know, and then they brought him back.
Speaker: And he was a skeptic, a true skeptic. And then he had a near-death experience of his own. He was in a coma for a week. And all the explanations, I won't go into detail, all the explanations he used to use and that were common in the medical community for why that wasn't real didn't work in his case. They absolutely didn't work.
Speaker: And so he he writes about that, but he talks about consciousness. And he says, you know, when I was in medical school, and this was pretty much what what I had been taught too,
Speaker: We thought that consciousness arose from the billions of neurons all interacting with him. That's what consciousness was. He said after his near-death experience, what he realized is that that's not consciousness at all. The brain is a reducing filter that allows us to survive during our moment on this planet.
Speaker: That's what it is. When you die, as he did, It's consciousness that leaves the body. It's the consciousness that moves on. And consciousness rejoins consciousness. And then the unconditional love, the at-oneness with everything. But it's the consciousness that survives. And it's it's separate from the body.
Speaker: Anyway, i don't know if you want to go down those paths. That's beyond the realms of science, right? We tend to become very secular. well, how can that be? And yet, if you look, prior to the 17th century, the predominant worldview was one of the spiritual, organic, living universe. it' deeply mysterious in some ways, but in other ways, there was a deep, deep physical and spiritual understanding that was every bit, if not more, relevant than the scientific understanding we have today. They complement one another, let's say. But I think oftentimes, from a scientific standpoint, we throw the baby out with the bathwater when it comes to to our spiritual nature, which I would say is our true nature.
Speaker: You know, we come here for a visit, right? Mm-hmm. Did you ever see the movie Meet Joe Black? No.
Speaker: Brad Pitt plays in it anyway, and he plays death in this movie. And so death wants to come to earth. Death inhabits a body. This guy gets gets killed. And he said, I needed a body. Well, if you want to visit Earth and have an experience as a human, you need a body, right? So consciousness takes on that form anyway.
Speaker: Yeah, it's very relevant to this conversation. Well, first, I think having read your book, Nourishment, I feel like it's very much not a typical book written by a scientist because it's like very, very holistic. You integrate lots of wisdom from a really broad range of subjects and writers and thinkers which I think is often missing in the pure reductionist scientific approach to things that is, as you said, a very useful tool, an essential tool, but fundamentally limited. i think when it comes to agriculture and food systems and understanding ecosystems and managing ecosystems, we're dealing with obviously very complex, mysterious processes that are interrelated.
Speaker: And science can only partially help us understand that. And perhaps like a more, I guess, spiritual, i don't necessarily have the right language, indigenous way of knowing or knowledge is also needed.
Speaker: And I'd be curious to hear from you having like looked a lot at like shepherding in a way similar to the rancher that you mentioned, Henry DeLuca, but like some of these more kind of indigenous holistic basis of knowledge, you know, what can we learn from that that is perhaps missing from like the modern scientific worldview?
Speaker: Yeah, such a great summary, Emma, and um great question relative to that. I think it goes back to what I was saying earlier on. I think the shepherds, for instance, their intimate, intimate knowledge of landscapes and animals' relationships with those landscapes. So if you think of, you know, that you've got got sheep and you've got tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of acres that you're going to range over,
Speaker: The nuance with which they are able to move those animals is just beautiful. It's just stunningly beautiful. I have a friend, Michel Mireille.
Speaker: He's in France. Speaking of machines, we text each other each day. It's a deep friendship that we develop. He was working with shepherds in France. He was studying what they do. He was studying their behavior and the behavior of sheep. He was learning that when they move across those landscapes each day,
Speaker: They start out with an appetizer phase to the meal that sets up the next phase, which is the main course of the meal, which then sets up the booster phase, and then they end the day with a dessert phase.
Speaker: And when you learn what they're doing with that, it's absolutely amazing. It's not only increasing the productivity of the flock, but but it's maintaining the biodiversity of those landscapes. They don't just eat the best and leave the rest and say, well, you know, that habitat type over there is really pretty junky, so we're not going to touch that. They figure, you know, it's disgusting or whatever. I'm thinking back to some conversations with the shepherds.
Speaker: And they don't know, they don't study the chemistry of this, but that they think about what can we offer those animals that will help them to utilize habitat those plants that are are disgusting or not so good.
Speaker: And see, we were studying those kinds of things from a biochemical standpoint. We were learning, for instance, that an appetizer of plants like bird's foot trefoil, which is high in tannins, which the shepherds don't know or care about, which is high in tannins, can really help animals to eat plants like endophyte-infected tall fescue, which is very high in alkaloids. Why? Because the tannins bind up the alkaloids. Now, they don't know that.
Speaker: Going back to Henry, they don't need to know it. They figured it out empirically. Does that make sense? Trial and error and watching the animals. They let the animals teach them how how to do these different stages. And I could give you lots of examples of these complementarities. So we were studying those kind of things and showing for sheep and cattle both that, wow, you could get them to utilize plants far better that they might ah might avoid. And I remember just another example. So we went over there and spent time with Michelle and with the shepherds up in the the pre-Alps and living in the cabins. It was wonderful, you know, just wonderful to go out there and roam around with them. and and just learn from them. And then we went to dairies. There were a lot of sheep and goat dairies, and they did the same thing. And I remember one goat dairy, it was in the evenings, and they watched, they're going to turn them out,
Speaker: And he said, they're going to turn them to to the alfalfa first, no more than 10 minutes. It's just going to be short. And then they're going to go to the oak brush. And we were we were learning that the tannins in oak can be a deterrent to feeding. But if you have a good protein state, if you're in a good protein state, which you'll get from eating the alfalfa, that sets them up to utilize the oak. And so they go in the oak and they eat it like mad, on and on and on. But it's that nuance that We wrote a paper, and this is a scientific paper, it's a review paper, when science and art meet, or art and science, I forget which way it was, but talking about the shepherds and then talking about the research that complemented that. I'll send that paper to you, Emma.
Speaker: But to me, it captures you so much of those things can complement one another, but the knowledge and the nuance, and I'm thinking back to this story, this paper that was in the New York Times, you know, a lot of them leave the ranch or the farms and ranches because it's not seen as, as you know, a high-profile kind of career or whatever.
Speaker: But I'm telling you, the knowledge that people have to manage animals and plants and landscapes and then to manage the economics of all that, that's quite, it's incredibly sophisticated. And just the shepherding alone, I don't mean just,
Speaker: But when you read what those shepherds do and their knowledge and then how to use the desert stage and how how to work with the behavior of animals, it's just, to me, it's incredibly, incredibly sophisticated kind of knowledge. And if all you're relying on is scientific understanding, then you miss all that. You can miss all that.
Speaker: Plus, as I was saying earlier earlier, When you're out there with the animals and the plants, whatever it is that you're doing, and you're observing, observing, observing, that's experiential learning, right? That's that's powerful kind of learning. I value that incredibly.
Speaker: And then the whole spiritual part ah of the mystical experiences and the near-death experience. This gets passed down from generation to generation to generation.
Speaker: and And those kind of of spiritual ways of indigenous peoples far predate the modern religions, Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, but they totally complement them. Depending upon how you depending upon your your views and the way that you interpret what you've been Another big theme in a lot of your writings that I really liked and I think relates to science and modernity and the industrial system that we're in today is this concept of command and control that you have in science and also of today's kind of industrial society, this like obsession with having things in kind of fixed ways.
Speaker: commodities as opposed to recognizing a system that is constantly in flux and changing. and I'm curious if you could talk a little bit about that.
Speaker: You know, that whole thing that you're raising is so, so interesting to me. So when I started out, you know, you're trained in a particular way, right? That's what I think all the time. We get trained in particular ways and all that's culturally inflected in time and space.
Speaker: change the time, change the place, and the inflections all change. Does that make sense? We kill each other over cultural inflections. We cling to those inflections like they really matter when, in fact, all these all these things are being culturally inflected. So I got trained in particular ways of reductionist science when I was in grad school. And You know, this idea was if we could just be like those damn physicists. Man, you know, they're able to predict the orbits of things around, them you know, planets around the the sun and blah, blah, blah. The emphasis on if you understood, you could predict and you could control then, right?
Speaker: Prediction can understand, predict, control. And that went out of me over time. One little step at a time, it went out of me. Of just, you know, observing animals, observing the complexity of things, observing the dynamism of the interrelationships.
Speaker: And it was like, you know... Prediction and control isn't what it's about at all. It's about ongoing creativity in the face of that dynamism, participating and creating. Animals are involved in the world, which allows them to evolve with the world.
Speaker: And so it moved more and more and more into this idea of of dynamism, uncertainty, creativity. And, you know, I didn't quit using the word adaptation, that animals are adapting.
Speaker: It was to me much more, no, they're participating. And and by by participating, they're creating. They're creating. And I used to love to show little video segments. There was one I used to used to show of ah of a green heron that has this piece of bread, and it's there by a body of water, and it's putting that bread out, kind of fishing with it, throws it out, and then grabs it in its beak.
Speaker: throws it out, grabs it speak, back and forth, back and forth, and to the point where you're kind of wondering, and then all of a sudden throws it out, bam, grabs a fish, huh? It's learned to fish. How do they do that? do you know what I'm saying?
Speaker: That's what I love. And you're not going to see that unless you're spending time out there with those animals all the time, right, observing. That's what happened to me with the goats in southern Utah.
Speaker: where we had goats on six different pastures. Goats in one of those pastures started to eat wood rat houses. And you think, why on earth would you do that? And then you realize, oh, they've discovered a resource that's incredibly valuable. It's like a protein block, let's say, you know, that that vegetation soaked in urine. So that whole dynamism. And then this notion of self-organizing systems. I don't know if you've heard that term before.
Speaker: started to read in that chaos theory self-organizing systems quantum mechanics is about the notion that chance is playing a role in the evolution of all this and so then you start to think dynamism dynamism dynamism and creativity and you think not only is each individual unique why is it unique genes being expressed in ever-changing environments and at the molecular level Let's add a pinch of chance there, brownium movement that's happening at the molecular level to ensure that no two creatures have been or ever will be alike on this planet. That's amazing.
Speaker: So to me, that's what really started it that's what And I thought, you know what it's about for me is understanding principles and processes. How does it work? And then you try to use that understanding to manage in the best way that you can.
Speaker: But uncertainty, creativity, all that becomes the amazing part of it. That's what becomes cool about the whole thing. And so it's like, you know, painting a canvas and how you're going to paint the canvas. And if you're if you're a farmer or a rancher and Your understanding is going to enable you to play the game, to participate in the game. You know, what in grad school, I loved it. I'll go back one step. When I finished undergrad, i loved I loved wildlife biology, absolutely loved learning about all those things. But when I finished, I thought, you know, I think I've had enough formal education for a lifetime. Then I went out on the ranch and ran the ranch for two years and came to realize there's no way, going back to what we said, my wife and I, Sue and I loved it, but there's no way we can afford to buy one of these things. We're going to have to think about it. I had an old friend there that I used to talk to, and he'd run ranches for people his whole life. He was still living in a trailer. This isn't to say negative, but it's like, you know,
Speaker: That could be us 50 years down the road. Is that what we want to do? So decided, well, maybe I saw other people that that actually had some time off. I mean, on the ranch, it was seven days a week, 10 hours a day.
Speaker: I like to tell people the first summer I worked on the ranch, I made $250 a month, and I was working 10-hour days, six days a week. If you do the math, that's $1 an hour is what I was making. So you start thinking about, you know, i was thinking about those sort of things. I thought, well, I'll go back to grad school because I did love that.
Speaker: So I was learning all these amazing things. And I started thinking about, well, what's something that ties all these together? What's something that just transcends all of them, all of this? And then I thought, you know, the only constant in life is changed. That's what is common to every single thing that I'm learning about is that notion that the only constant life is changed.
Speaker: Then when I got into reading a ton about Buddhism, that's that whole notion, impermanence. that's That's what they're talking about. Don't cling to anything because there's nothing that lasts. Not you, not me, nothing. It's impermanence. It's like, well, yeah, they already were there. but i you know And then it made sense to me, all these things we were learning. And then I started to think, so often we try to go back to the way things were.
Speaker: In cinecology, which is plant community ecology, people would say, well, how were these plant communities prior to European arrival? And that's what we want to manage for. It's like, well, it makes sense in a way because we degraded a lot of those communities. But if you go back a thousand years, 10,000 years,
Speaker: 15,000 years, all you're going to see is it's constantly moving and changing. So I used to say things never were the way they were and they never will be again. It's in movement. And that's gives you, in a way, to me, a nice philosophy. The whole notion of impermanence, you know, that's an important part of Buddha. But it gives you this note, don't cling, don't cling, you know, embrace change, figure how you can participate in the game and so forth and so on. So, yeah, and so we wrote a lot of papers about self-organizing systems and environmental management. and That whole notion that you raised is just so worthwhile.
Speaker: Drawing on that philosophy and bringing it back to the modern economy that we have today and maybe also the modern agricultural system that we have today, how would you think about incorporating that philosophy into the world that we're in today?
Speaker: you know, I would definitely think that at the broader scale, we need to be moving away from fossil fuels. because they're limited.
Speaker: And I think we need to be hooking into the sun, for instance, and and wind in terms of You know, think about how to constantly create your way into the future, not to go back to the way things used to be, but to move to move and and continually evolve is one thing. I think, too, and I've read read books recently about what you're talking about, the you know, the modern era, the machine, we're we're so into the machines and all those sorts of things, and yeah. How much have we become so hooked on all the materialistic kind of things? I don't know if that's in that paper I sent you, Cosmic Dreaming.
Speaker: I wrote a part there. i said European conquerors despise Native Americans for their poverty and simplicity. But as Charles Alexander Eastman Oyesta points out in The Soul of the Indian and Interpretation, quote, They forget, perhaps, that his religion forbade the accumulation of wealth and the enjoyment of luxury.
Speaker: End quote. To them, the love of possessions was a snare and a complex society, a source of needless peril and temptation. I think a lot about, you know, where have we gone and where might we go? That belief kept their spirits free from envy, pride, and greed.
Speaker: And then I also talked about Robin Wall Kimmerer's essay, The Serviceberry. And I can send that to you too. That that is such a good serviceberry. But she notes that gratitude links us physically and spiritually as our bodies are fed and spirits nourished by a sense of belonging to people and place, not the materialistic things.
Speaker: While we no longer live in small, insular societies where generosity and shared gratitude organize our relations, we could create such webs of interdependence outside the market economy.
Speaker: Communities of mutual self-reliance and reciprocity based on a currency of sharing may be the future, as manifest in the movement towards local food economies, which are not just about freshness, food miles, carbon footprints, and soil organic matter.
Speaker: Notably, they're also about the desire for connection with one another and the land that nourishes us. And that's where I think these local kind of movements that are taking place, you guys are participating, no about we see those springing up. Those are fabulous kind of things because they start to link us back with one another. I think it's in incredibly valuable ways that that are physical and spiritual both. I think the love that...
Speaker: When people die, have these near-death experiences, and come back, the first thing they say is, we didn't want to come back. It's to the unconditional love and the at oneness with all, and ah the tremendous ah opening up of consciousness. to We don't have a clue. We don't even have a clue. In that book I was telling you about, Proof of Heaven by Eben Alexander, a neurosurgeon's journey to the afterlife, the neurosurgeon.
Speaker: I'm going to try to tell you in this book what it's like. And they all say this, but it's impossible to put into words. It cannot be put into words. But he says, by analogy, imagine that a monkey became a human for a day and it learned everything, everything that humans have learned in their time on this earth.
Speaker: And then it goes back the next day and becomes a monkey again. And it's going to try to tell its monkey friends. He said, that's how I feel. It's impossible. It's impossible. So none of them want to want to come back. you know But this notion of love and and the the importance of love and the love that we can share when we're in relationship with with one another and with nature's communities, I always like to say we're members, not masters. We we think we're masters. We're not. We're members.
Speaker: not masters of nature's communities. What we do to them, ultimately, we do to ourselves. Only by nurturing them, i think, can we nourish ourselves. And we do that, I think, by declaring love, not war, on one another and the landscapes that we inhabit. I really believe that.
Speaker: You know, i I'm thinking of another book. Embraced by the Light, Betty Eadie's Near-Death Experience. So I read these books over over my career, over not all at once, just at time. And this was the first I read.
Speaker: We come to earth to grow spiritually. That's the whole point. And she said, when you look back, your hardest times are when you grew the most. And compared to eternity, it's just a blink of the eye that we're here. you know But this notion of love and trying to To love your enemies, which i have I'll admit I can have trouble with. you why That's a big challenge, right? But that's the challenge of the now, and I try to work on that, but I'd be a liar if I said I met. mastered the love your enemies part of the whole thing. but you know And that's where I think some of these traditions, ah and none of us are that far from our indigenous ancestors. The fact is, you know we're all indigenous. I love to read in their their writings. They're powerful, powerful in terms of physical and spiritual facets of those things. And of course, Robin Wall Kimmerer writes writes beautifully and in that sense.
Speaker: Well, Fred, I think that was the perfect way to end this podcast. Really beautiful. And thank you so much for joining this conversation and for your incredible breadth of knowledge.
Speaker: And yeah we'll definitely link a lot of the essays and works that you mentioned in this podcast. in the notes. I want to thank you for your big smile and for the work that you and Alex and all your crew do. You know, I think so worthwhile. So You know, it's those those ways that we link with one another and link with with others here, hot which is a a little bit of a precursor to what they talk about, how everything is intimately, intimately linked with everything else when you leave this dimension and you realize everything you ever did, everyone you ever talked to everything you ever touched.
Speaker: It's all intimately linked. It's amazing. Amazing tapestry. So thank you for all you guys do. You, Emma, this and Alex with the help and so forth. Thank you.
Speaker: Agrarian Futures is produced by Alexander Miller, who also wrote our theme song. If you enjoyed this episode, please like, subscribe, and leave us a comment on your podcast app of choice.
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