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Episode 7 | Dr. Lisa K. Johnson
68 Plays1 year ago
Dr. Lisa K Johnson is a leader in food loss and waste research focusing on agricultural production. Her research aims to understand the loss of edible vegetables, and she emphasizes the importance of incorporating growers' perspectives in her work. Dr. Johnson has worked with numerous organizations, and her work has been recognized by multiple publications such as Forbes, Huffington Post, and American Vegetable Grower magazine.
Visit her website, https://lisakjohnson.com, and find her on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/lisa-k-johnson/.
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Transcript
Introduction and Guest Welcome
00:00:03
Speaker
you
00:00:39
Speaker
All right, here we are again. This is the Ag Show podcast. I'm your host, Johan, a.k.a. Doc Buck.
Dr. Lisa Johnson's Background
00:00:46
Speaker
Thank you for joining us here today. And I have another special guest. Well, they're all special. Joining me this morning is Dr. Lisa Johnson. Hello, Lisa. How are you?
00:01:01
Speaker
Hi, great to be here. Thanks for having me. I'm fine. Yes. And thank you for accepting the invitation to join me for an episode of the Ag Show podcast. And Lisa, you are in Raleigh, North Carolina, correct? That's right. OK. And are you from North Carolina originally? I like to think of myself as a generic southeastern person because I've lived all over the southeast. OK. And were you born in North Carolina or were you
00:01:30
Speaker
No, I was born in Tennessee and spent significant time in Texas and Georgia before settling in North Carolina.
Focus on Agriculture and Food Loss
00:01:39
Speaker
Okay, okay. And it's Dr. Lisa, and Dr. Lisa is focused on food loss. That is the topic of our conversation today, which I think by and large, and Lisa, to give you and the guests an understanding of the podcast, it's kind of an eclectic podcast.
00:02:02
Speaker
We focus on agriculture, and the message is to the agricultural community, however, have friends and family and many other listeners. You never know who's listening, and a lot of them are not involved in agriculture. I'm kind of speaking to two separate groups. We're speaking to the ag community, the producers and those involved in agriculture.
00:02:23
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day in and day out, and our consumers, the end users, and we're all end users. We may need a doctor or a lawyer every now and again, but we need a farmer at least three times a day. So it's very important that I approach this podcast as I'm communicating to that group to help them educate them as well. And the topic of today is something very important that maybe many of us don't think about, or when we do, say the layperson might be thinking about it, that by 2050, we will need to feed 9 billion people.
00:02:52
Speaker
I think that's probably the most commonly spoken about phase when it comes to food and yield, etc. However, there's a big component of that that may be overlooked. It's certainly one that I overlooked until I was standing in a lettuce field early in my agricultural career with a lettuce grower looking at a field that the previous day was full of harvestable lettuce that they simply tilled under.
00:03:20
Speaker
And when I asked the grower, why on earth would you till under all of this lettuce? And he said, the market, it's going to cost us more to harvest this lettuce than what it's worth. And that kind of blew my mind for a couple of reasons. One, I thought, what a waste. And on a personal note, having grown up in a point in my life and my childhood when my family relied on food stamps and food banks,
00:03:45
Speaker
I thought, oh my goodness, there are so many people out there that could use this food. And on one hand, I understand the economics and the business aspect of it. I get that. On the other hand, still, there's that part of me that's like, oh my goodness, what a waste. And fast forward until, oh, I know a few months ago, scrolling through LinkedIn, and I start seeing, thank you, LinkedIn algorithm, I start seeing these posts by Dr. Lisa on food loss. So I start paying attention to it.
00:04:15
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putting out a lot of great content and I think really bringing awareness to food loss.
Discovery of Horticulture and Academic Role
00:04:23
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And I immediately thought, oh, my goodness, I need to have Dr. Lisa on the podcast and talk about food loss. And she accepted. And here we are this morning. So again, welcome. Thank you. So, Lisa, how did you get your start in agriculture? Did you grow up on a farm or did you find agriculture by some other means?
00:04:42
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Well, it was the second, actually. I've always been really interested in food more than anything else. And I grew a garden with my mom, but it was decidedly in suburban Houston, Texas. And I had several relatives that had preventable diseases.
00:05:03
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And so I got interested in food, and that was the thing that I wanted to indulge in whenever we traveled, to taste the food of the region, that kind of thing. But when I got into college, I really had no idea of what to study. And so I was an undecided major for the first
00:05:24
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I don't know, five years of college. And then I really had to pick something. And so I went through the majors and I had tried out dietetics and food science and those weren't exactly for me. But once I learned about horticulture or horticultural science,
00:05:44
Speaker
I found out that it sort of combined a love of food and food production and really describes how food is produced and how it gets to our plate. I think a lot of people understand horticulture as more of a
00:05:59
Speaker
study of flowers and flowering things. And it is, but all of our fruit and vegetable crops flower too. So all of our fruit and vegetable crops fall into horticulture. And once I got into it, I realized that I had a deep and enduring love for horticulture. And I took some more breaks from college along the way, but I eventually went all the way through and earned a PhD in horticultural science. So I have three degrees in horticulture.
00:06:29
Speaker
Wonderful. Are you a faculty member anywhere? Are you at North Carolina State or are you focused solely on your consulting business? Well, I'm focused 95% of the time on my consulting business, but I am considered by North Carolina State University to be an adjunct assistant professor, which is more of an honorary title. If you're an academic, you would sense right away that that doesn't mean too much.
00:06:57
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But I do guest lecture pretty frequently at NC State and other universities ask me to guest lecture now and then too, which I really love. I love being with the students and answering all of their questions, but then not having to grade all the papers. So it's kind of the best of both worlds.
00:07:15
Speaker
Yeah. Now, is that prevalent at North Carolina State or universities in general? And the reason why I ask is I have a colleague, Dr. Paul Zorner, who's also an adjunct professor at NC State. Do you know Paul by any chance? I met Paul a long time ago, many, many years ago when he was giving a lecture to a professional development group that I was a part of.
00:07:40
Speaker
And he's doing some exciting work in the world of Ag and he's really a great person. But there are adjuncts at pretty much every university. Many are paid and it's sort of a part-time lecturing position. And so, yeah, there are adjuncts all over the country, maybe even further afield, but
00:08:02
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There are adjuncts. My best friend was an adjunct for a while. My brother was an adjunct for a while. It is a popular thing now. For someone like myself who also has a PhD but didn't go the academic route for a multitude of reasons, how does one become an adjunct professor? Do they post these job offers or do the universities recruit individuals?
Research on Food Loss
00:08:26
Speaker
Well, it means different things in different scenarios. So an adjunct professor that's on the payroll at NC State would be like a part-time professor, and they do advertise for those positions. Oftentimes, adjuncts are not offered benefits, and so it's a challenging place for people to be in, to be in charge of a whole group of students.
00:08:51
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yet sometimes they don't have office space or a way to have meetings with students. So it's a challenging place, a challenging development for universities in the past several years. So many people feel different ways about that position. For me, it's more of an honorary or affiliation type title. So I don't have any position, so to speak, at the university, but I am affiliated.
00:09:21
Speaker
Gotcha. And so coming back to your academic pursuits, what at what point did you become familiar with food loss or what was it that kind of sparked that interest that led you to what you are doing today? Yeah, this is a great question. Well, I was at the University of Georgia for my bachelor's and for my master's. And during my master's degree, I was working in
00:09:49
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basically plant physiology, molecular biology type lab. And it was really exciting work, really fulfilling. I loved it. I did a lot of PCR and gels for those of you who know what those things are. And I was in a lab all the time. I had great coworkers, really enjoyed my projects there.
00:10:09
Speaker
And in my spare time, I mean, you know, grad students don't have a lot of spare time, but I was reading books about our food system. And I don't know if you read books about our food system, but sometimes I do. And knowing what I know, I tend to see a lot of red flags. And so I read Wasted by Tristram Stewart, who's a British author. And I read American Wasteland by Jonathan Bloom, who's an American author and lives in North Carolina.
00:10:40
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And these books were so compelling because they talked all about food waste and how big of a problem it is. Each of them had a chapter or so on agricultural production or fruit and vegetable crops in there. And what they said was so alarming and I just needed to know a lot more. So these chapters basically didn't have enough information for me.
00:11:07
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started to dig further into food loss in agricultural production in my ever shrinking spare time. And I called federal agencies and other universities and charitable organizations to find out who has data on how much food is left in the field.
00:11:30
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how much food is left in the field that never gets harvested and never leaves the farm gate. And as it turns out, there was no data for the US on this portion of the crop. And so I thought, well, I have to do it myself, right? And so I got through my master's program and designed a doctoral program to tackle just those questions.
00:11:54
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So that was my focus when I reached North Carolina State University was to try and understand how much food we're leaving on farms and why. Why is that happening? As I went through school, I took a lot of classes on post-harvest. Post-harvest techniques, handling, technology, etc. is a big deal for the fruit and vegetable industry. The issue of post-harvest loss of specialty crops
00:12:23
Speaker
came up a number of times, but very often it was presented as an issue that developing countries have that we have largely solved in the United States. You could look at it that way, absolutely. In developing countries, they really struggle with infrastructure such as refrigeration, storage, transportation, and packaging.
00:12:48
Speaker
of fresh produce. And so there are a lot of losses for them in the middle of the supply chain. So there's not a lot left on the farm and there's not a lot that's wasted at the consumer level. But in the middle of the supply chain, there are so many constraints and challenges that there's a lot of losses. Those are the types of issues that we have solved in the US. We have excellent cold chain maintenance. We have
00:13:14
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Great refrigeration, storage facilities, excellent packaging, excellent transportation and roads, which make a difference when you're transporting fruit and vegetables. What we hadn't looked at or what wasn't talked about is the losses in agricultural production that don't get into a box or onto a truck. And so I was really the first person to start putting some numbers onto that because of my research at NC State.
00:13:44
Speaker
I'm going to think about that for a moment. What did you find through your research? Is there a number? I'm going to say a number and let's see how accurate it is. I've read or heard 20 to 30% on average. Never leaves the field. Is that accurate?
00:14:00
Speaker
Well, I would say that that's low ish. Unfortunately, the only estimates that we've had for a very long time have been sort of at the continent level like North America. And the numbers that we have seen over time have been reported as about 20% is lost in production.
00:14:24
Speaker
So as a function of being a super nerdy doctoral student, I traced all of those mentions back through the literature to find out that that 20% actually came from a plant pathologist that was looking at a field back in the 1960s and said, oh, well, 20% is lost in production. But of course, didn't publish anything about his methods, how he came to that figure, anything like that.
00:14:54
Speaker
So we've been relying on that figure for a long time. When you add to that the fact that most enterprise budgets coming out of university extension services and resources that growers rely on, they also say once you put in all these inputs to your crop, about 80% of the crop will be marketable.
00:15:15
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So this 20% figure shows up a lot in agriculture, and it is often seen as sort of the cost of doing business in fruit and vegetable production. So really unfortunate. When I've asked growers, how much do you think is left behind in the field? Only half of the ones that I've asked that have been able to give an answer, but the other half say somewhere between zero and 20%.
00:15:41
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And some other research has shown now that growers do underestimate what's left in the field for a variety of reasons. One being shame. Unfortunately, I don't want to quote the researcher, Brene Brown, but shame is a big factor here. When there is losses in the field, even though those losses were likely driven by some constraints in our marketing,
00:16:09
Speaker
system, growers feel like they have failed in some way, even though they have produced at their highest capability. If they haven't sold all of it for one reason or another, it feels bad to them, unfortunately.
Understanding Food Loss vs. Food Waste
00:16:24
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This is a very difficult issue to talk about with growers because most of the time when this issue is directed at them, they are blamed for wasting food. You can see this in
00:16:38
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articles on the front page of the newspaper that say, you know, well, growers waste X amount of food. You know, they didn't choose to waste that. That food loss showed up in their operation because of decisions and behaviors made further down in the supply chain. So difficult, difficult answer to a tough question.
00:17:00
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Well, I'm glad you brought up shame and Dr. Brene Brown. I've read several of her books and was introduced to Dr. Brown through a friend of mine who highlighted that as part of... He's a...
00:17:17
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leadership trainer and his style, his focus is on the art of storytelling and the shame and courage. I may post a link to one of Dr. Brown's videos because I think it's
00:17:34
Speaker
Should be anyone that only we all feel shame but it really helped me understand shame and courage so i'm glad that you brought that up and i think it's very important for farmers if you're bringing this up that they feel this the shame they should watch that because it's so powerful watch that you know but
00:17:52
Speaker
The reason that I share so much about this issue is simply that because farmers are not to blame for massive amounts of food loss in their operations. Very likely it's because of something going on in the marketplace
00:18:11
Speaker
that has led to that. It's nothing that they did or didn't do. Our growers in the US are so talented and they really optimize everything they do to produce the best quality products that they can. And so, you know, it's my feeling that we're really failing growers when we don't, you know, when we don't support the sales of their products into the marketplace.
00:18:38
Speaker
So this is a sensitive issue and I wanna bring up to any farmers listening, I am one of the people shouting out that this is not your fault. And further to all any growers listening, every grower experiences food loss in their fields. It's not just you, it's not anything you're doing. It happens because of the whole rest of the supply chain that's linked to producers.
00:19:07
Speaker
Let's jump into that, starting with what is food loss? It sounds straightforward. I've heard you pick up that it is experienced throughout the supply chain. I imagine the supply chain would be from the field all the way to the grocery store shelf and what gets thrown out in the trash. Anything that is not consumed, is that a nutshell food loss? What is your definition?
00:19:34
Speaker
This is a great question and there's not a very clear answer. The definitions of food loss and food waste are not agreed upon around the world or around the country. My definition could be different from yours. There are some definitions that I like better than others, but the easiest way that I've seen people explain the difference is that
00:19:59
Speaker
they divide the supply chain at a certain. So food loss happens in agricultural production, in storage, in transportation or distribution, right? And so this happens because of technical limitations in agricultural processes or other limitations in storage or even marketing. So it's outside of the control of growers. Food waste, in contrast,
00:20:28
Speaker
happens at retail, restaurant, and consumer levels of the supply chain. It's more likely due to a behavior or decision when perfectly fine food is discarded for whatever reason. It's clear as mud. It's like the definition of local food.
00:20:49
Speaker
there's not really one clear definition of it. And mine could be different from yours. But that's the clearest way I can describe the difference is if you just break the supply chain in half. Got it.
Drivers and Impacts of Food Loss
00:21:03
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And your focus on the whole... Got it.
00:21:07
Speaker
spectrum of food loss. Are your focus on the entire issue itself from across the spectrum or with primarily at the grower level and what's going off the farm?
00:21:21
Speaker
My focus has always been what happens in agricultural production, what remains in the field, what is sorted out in packing. And so when a forklift destroys a pallet of cartons of fresh broccoli during distribution,
00:21:41
Speaker
Of course I care about that, but it's not something that I'm tracking actively. There are tools and methods to track that. It's just, you could say it's, there's more known about that. There's more information about that than there is about what food is never even harvested.
00:21:59
Speaker
So that's always been my primary focus. And since I'm a horticulturist, I think purely about fruit and vegetables and I don't think too much about grain or meat or milk or any of those things.
00:22:12
Speaker
Understood. So you have and I'm going to plug your website here, which is Lisa K. Johnson dot com. A lot of good resources and LinkedIn as well. I was really surprised at one of the figures I found. I think I found it on your website. Food loss on farms and all the different contributing factors or possibilities of food loss. And I if I counted these correctly, I counted 30.
00:22:41
Speaker
Yeah, there's a few missing, I'm sure. Yeah, and I recall in one of your LinkedIn posts, you said, oh, I'm sure I'm forgetting some. Holy cow, 30. Wow. But of those 30, because you have everything from market power, ag tech, climate, farmer mental health, shelf life, some of these are obvious. If you were to say, what are some of the top five or three, what are some of the leading causes of food loss?
00:23:08
Speaker
Wow. Well, I hope you can share this figure with your audience because it's really important. And I honestly, I just created this figure maybe a week or two ago because I'll tell you why, because every day people are reaching out to me with their solutions for food loss on farms.
00:23:29
Speaker
Well, food can be frozen, it can be gleaned, it can be processed into fuel, you know, you can compost it. There are all these other things that you can do with food loss. And those solutions are awesome and brilliant and they are working to some degree.
00:23:45
Speaker
But in reality, I want to look one level up and make sure that we all understand that the issue is not that food loss happens on farms. The issue is that
00:24:00
Speaker
The food system we have created that has evolved over time has an element of losses in it that we need to change. If we fix one region's food loss by gleaming, that's great. That's incredible because it's a direct action people can take.
00:24:19
Speaker
But it's sort of a band-aid on a symptom, right? We need to really be treating the disease of, you know, a broken system that leads to all of these losses when concurrently we have a lot of people who are not able to access fresh produce. So I would say the main drivers of fresh produce losses on farms
00:24:43
Speaker
are market related, unfortunately. We also have a lot of losses that are weather related, which can be affected by changes in our climate. But the shorthand answer that I've always gotten from farmers when I have asked
00:24:59
Speaker
What led to this food being left here has always been the price that I was offered did not cover my harvest cost. And so we have here a huge variety of specialty crops in the US, maybe 400 varieties. It's not easy to harmonize the way they're all treated or develop equipment that handles all of them properly because they're so different.
00:25:28
Speaker
Most of the produce that we see in grocery stores, a lot of times in food service too, is hand harvested. And so this sort of ties into a lot of those issues that you saw on the figure. Fresh produce growers are not subsidized.
00:25:47
Speaker
They often don't have great options for crop insurance. In other words, they're not very well supported. So they have to handle all of these costs on their own. Many times growers will self-insure by planting a few fields concurrently so they know they have another harvest coming right behind the last one because there aren't great options for crop insurance. Or they have to time their harvests
00:26:16
Speaker
to keep their crew busy because their crew is already contracted for. So, you know, labor ties into this issue very directly. But that's the shorthand answer I always get. The price doesn't cover the harvest cost, which is a real challenge. But there are also sort of more hidden drivers too. You know, the quality that our growers are expected to ship out from their
00:26:43
Speaker
operation is extremely high. Typically, retailers expect a higher level of quality than USDA number one. So what they are expecting and what is being shipped to them need to match up.
00:26:59
Speaker
or what happens, that truckload of food that has taken a lot of inputs to produce can be rejected, can be sent to a landfill. And so there's a lot of hidden risks involved that also contribute to losses on farm. So if
00:27:18
Speaker
If you can lose that fruit or vegetable on the farm rather than putting it in a box and shipping it to a retailer that might reject it, it's actually a lot cheaper and even a lot less environmentally damaging to lose it on the farm.
00:27:36
Speaker
So unfortunately, the system we have created means that the best of the worst outcomes for food is to leave it on the farm because it's not very, it's not worth very much economically speaking. And it's not as environmentally damaging as if it went through the entire supply chain and got into a landfill.
00:28:00
Speaker
So, you know, on the flip side of that, what that means is there's a huge amount of social impact potential available on farms. Unfortunately, you know, people don't pay as much attention to issues that have a purely social outcome. And so, you know, it's a very tricky problem.
00:28:21
Speaker
I'd say. Oh my goodness. Yeah. You have your work cut out for you. I know. It's one we have to solve. A grand challenge or a wicked problem, right? Which is the types of problems that people like you and I get interested in. It's so multifaceted. It's so complex that it takes a lot of effort to turn it around.
00:28:44
Speaker
Absolutely. And I'll put on my consumer hat for a moment and come to the kind of flipped over to the food wayside. The behavior is and I check and I try to check myself on this. Don't always do it. We have become so accustomed as consumers in the United States. I'm sure elsewhere.
00:29:01
Speaker
that we want the perfect looking apple. We want the perfect looking produce. If it has scratches, scratch and dance scars, or it doesn't look perfect, we're like, oh, no, I don't want to eat that. And I'm starting to get to the point where, you know what? OK, all right. So what if this apple has a little puncture? I'll just eat this apple first when I get home.
00:29:18
Speaker
That way, it doesn't try to spoil. I can't buy all of these apples, but I'm going to buy some apples. Maybe I'll buy some of the ones that are maybe passed up by others. What can we do to help solve some of these issues? That's a big issue. I bring this up because one of your photos,
00:29:40
Speaker
showed the different categories of marketable produce. You have your top quality ones that look perfect or nice and straight, but if it's too curved, it doesn't sell as high. I'm like, oh my goodness, really? It's 100% true. Yeah.
00:29:57
Speaker
Yeah, so there is a direct action that consumers can take and it relates back to what I asked growers in interviews, you know, what would have to happen for all of this fresh produce to get out of your field?
00:30:14
Speaker
and into the supply chain where it could reach someone that would eat it and they gave me several answers for this but one of the ones on top is to increase consumption of fresh produce and unfortunately
00:30:30
Speaker
I started studying dietetics and the chemistry was just way too much for me. So moved into horticulture. But the fact is, we as Americans consume one to two servings of fresh produce every day. And we're supposed to be consuming eight to nine.
00:30:49
Speaker
So I feel like that's on us. If we ate more fresh produce or frozen or processed in some way, wow, that would really support growers, wouldn't it? I don't know if you remember what happened a few years ago when
00:31:05
Speaker
I guess celery juice became a hugely popular thing and suddenly growers were getting insane prices for their celery. So, you know, if we can have more influencers, more trendsetters,
00:31:20
Speaker
you know, pushing fruit and vegetable consumption, I think that would be fantastic. Not to mention all the dieticians, all the school nutritionists, you know, everyone needs to be eating more and more and more. So any effort to increase consumption is going to reduce food loss on farms. Are you active on any other social media platforms like Instagram or do I dare say it, TikTok?
00:31:47
Speaker
Am not I'm seeing a lot more farms do that and I think it's working and that the reason why I bring that up is I'd encourage you to to do that even even just Instagram because Instagram is nice because you don't have to do the reels you don't have to do the videos you can do a
00:32:03
Speaker
the photos, but to reach a broader and younger audience to help support the education. I'm surprised that I'm seeing more and more influencers in agriculture, thank goodness, like, it's Meyer or Myers, I'm not sure from, I think he's in Idaho, a lot of onions and asparagus. Do you know him or follow him? Yeah, I've seen his post on LinkedIn. Yeah. Not otherwise.
00:32:30
Speaker
Yeah, and I think of Caitlin Thornton, I believe fourth generation orchid orchard ist. I think she's from Washington. So I'm seeing a lot of farmers young and seasoned, I'll say maybe.
00:32:46
Speaker
my age on those types of platforms and with really big followings. And I think, yes, okay, great, we need more of this. Because one of the things we don't think about are onions, for example, and Jay posts a lot about onions and the economics behind onion production, asparagus, and even walks through
00:33:10
Speaker
Similar to what you were saying, and he lays it out, this costs us about X number of dollars to grow an acre of this produce. And so therefore, and so on down the line, I'm thinking, great, we need more of this. I'd rather see more of that on those platforms than the silly, goofy, non-educational content.
00:33:33
Speaker
This is this is really important. If we're going to change consumer behavior, then guess what? You got to get eyeballs on that content. And where are the eyeballs? They're scrolling through TikTok and Instagram. It's just just the way it is. They may be seeking it out on YouTube, etc. And LinkedIn is more for professionals. But if we want to increase consumption, we got to get eyeballs on the content of the people who consume it that are not involved in the industry.
00:33:59
Speaker
That's a good point. I'm not an early adopter, so that might be one of my shortcomings.
Efforts to Measure and Reduce Food Loss
00:34:05
Speaker
I should probably hire a young person to do that kind of work for me. You might, yeah. Yeah. To build the, my wife is really active on that through her business, completely separate from agriculture, but she's really done a lot of research on what it takes to be successful on platforms such as Instagram, and you really need to
00:34:26
Speaker
be posting a lot and doing a mixture of reels and posts, et cetera, et cetera, using hashtags and oh goodness, okay, yeah, so it might be good to have a marketing company, but to start, start is the best thing to do and you're covering such an important subject that I think it would really impact a lot of people if they knew that. I just don't think people realize that because they go to the store and they see all this abundance of food
00:34:53
Speaker
And you think, oh, well, we have plenty having no idea of what's going on. And again, I find it challenging. Yeah, my family, I like to think that we consume quite a bit of produce. But again, we're probably at one to two servings a day. Maybe some fruit during breakfast, maybe lunch and then a vegetable at dinner. All right. So that's what, three servings?
00:35:15
Speaker
How do I do that? Then I would say, okay, not only educate people on food loss, but now we need people to chefs or whomever is in food preparation to say, okay, what can you do creatively with zucchini or sweet potato or beets? I want to come back to you for a moment.
00:35:38
Speaker
Because I think you're are you working on a project currently on sweet potatoes or beets? That's what I wanted as my next question is what are some of the projects you're working on regarding Well, I you know being an independent consultant I have the privilege of being able to pick and choose what I work on and who I work with and I love that especially coming out of academia There weren't you know professor roles out there for me because this is a relatively unexplored area, right?
00:36:10
Speaker
And you can get into the amount of research funding that goes to specialty crops and then a subset of that goes to post-harvest research. So there aren't that many post-harvest professors in general and they have their own focus areas. But being an independent consultant means I get to work on projects that really excite me or projects that I have dreamed up as long as I can find funding for them.
00:36:36
Speaker
So some of the projects that I'm working on now involve working with nonprofits in order to leverage gleaners who are in the field to do measurement of loss that's happening. So over time, I have worked with a number of nonprofits. The three that I continue to work with that do gleaning are Boston area gleaners,
00:37:02
Speaker
the Society of St. Andrew and Uproot Colorado. All of these organizations put volunteers out in the field to collect what's left over for charitable purposes, right? So that food is then donated into our emergency food system. So what happens in those types of projects
00:37:23
Speaker
is those volunteers are in the field at exactly the right time to collect data on how much food is left in fields. So I do training and show them how to do measurement so that when they're out there in the field, they can do that. And then they can use that data, particularly nonprofits, can use that data in their fundraising or in their development work. So if they say, okay, well,
00:37:51
Speaker
Farmer Joe offered me 10 acres of produce that was left unharvested. And with the five volunteers I had, we could harvest, you know, half an acre. They can then go to their funders and say, we really need to build capacity. We're being offered so much food. We can't collect it all because we lack
00:38:15
Speaker
volunteers, we lack trucks, bins, forklifts, whatever it is. So that data can become really useful to groups like, so I like working with nonprofits a lot. We recently finished a project working with World Wildlife Fund that used my techniques for measurement and trained growers out on the West Coast.
00:38:39
Speaker
to measure their own losses so that they could see what opportunities they had for further marketing or further use of that product. And that was really successful. It sort of empowered these growers to do a look back at what happened that year. It's really fascinating because
00:39:00
Speaker
When you look at data from the field, I'm interested in what was lost and what quality it was. But growers see many different things in that data besides what I see. They see that too. So when they look at that data, they can see, okay, well, there are two more truckloads left in that field.
00:39:20
Speaker
If I know somebody that wants it, I can pick up the phone and call them before I send my labor crew out there to harvest it, before investing money and time in that harvest. I can see if somebody wants that produce. So that's great. But they also see differences in different soil types or different cultivars they've chosen, or even the efficiency of their crews.
00:39:46
Speaker
Basically what they see is things that they can tweak on their end to make a difference in loss. But the fact is growers are working to reduce food loss the entire season all the way back into planning. And that's something that's sort of unrecognized when we see so much loss at harvest time.
00:40:07
Speaker
So we have to understand that growers are working on reducing loss when they choose a cultivar that's highly marketable, that has highly marketable qualities, or when they install a really optimized irrigation system. You know, growers use custom fertility packages and they're strict with their pest and disease management.
00:40:28
Speaker
because they're trying to reduce losses the entire way up to harvest. It's just at the harvest time that they've done everything right. And then suddenly there's so much left that it's hard to get. The other project that I'm working on in North Carolina, this was a long answer.
00:40:45
Speaker
But we have started to use drone imagery and an algorithm to try and understand how much is left behind without getting out there and physically measuring it. So we can fly a drone over and take images of what's left on the field and then quantify that using software. So it's like artificial intelligence, machine learning,
00:41:11
Speaker
all of those buzzwords. And this has been a proof of concept project to see if we could do that. We in fact can do that. And there will be a couple of articles coming out on that in American Vegetable Grower magazine. And that's been a great collaboration between me, the Consortium for Post-Harvest Innovation and Food Waste Reduction out of Iowa State University, and Geovisual Analytics in Colorado.
USDA Initiatives and Market Solutions
00:41:38
Speaker
I look forward to those articles and I'll be sure to share them as well. There's a video on my website. There is. Right. Yes. Good point. Yes. Yes. At LisaKJohnson.com. Two more questions that should give us enough time as I know you have another engagement here in a little while. The two things. One, coming back to the marketing and distribution of food.
00:42:01
Speaker
I just learned about this the other day, saw something about the USDA's involvement in some regional food centers or distribution centers. Are you involved in that or are you familiar with what those are? One of the things I saw was something about market opportunities and to me that thought, oh, okay, maybe an opportunity to reduce food loss.
00:42:18
Speaker
Yeah, you know, I think so. I have read about these regional food business centers or regional food centers that are supported by the USDA. I think they're putting 12 of them maybe around the country, you know, and I want to stress that, you know, often growers are really talented and they don't anymore need so much support in production because they're already doing very well with that. But where they need support is finding markets
00:42:47
Speaker
marketing their product. And I think that any effort that's going to help with that is going to be really great. So I'm glad that they're tackling this issue at the market level rather than at production. I mean, I think we have so many tools, so much help through extension services and other stakeholders on production that I'm glad to see that they're focused on marketing.
00:43:13
Speaker
Growers want to market their entire crop. They want to sell all of it. And sometimes it takes expanding the buyers you're working with who might accept a different range of product quality than the ones that you already have.
00:43:29
Speaker
If you're a huge farm, you have a sales and marketing team. If you're a mid-sized farm, it's very likely you work with one broker. And if that broker doesn't have connections to everybody in the whole world, you might need some help. And so I really appreciate the fact that they're getting into this. It sounds like a really good program.
00:43:51
Speaker
Yeah, I'm curious to know more about it because I agree with you. We are very good in this country at producing food. And that's where I kind of fit in. And I see there's so many tools. We do a really good job. It's the marketing. And so I'm curious to know more about what does that mean for them? What are the details on how they're going to do that and how much of the program is geared towards the marketing of those producers or opening up different markets, so on and so forth.
00:44:20
Speaker
So, yeah, something that sounds like a fairly new endeavor for them, and I'm curious to learn more. Yeah, and see how it evolves. I'm hopeful. I'm optimistic about it. Yeah, me too. And it sounds like it may be even geared towards some lesser served areas, which is great, because that's another that is a market that there are underserved markets when it comes to consumption of fresh produce and vegetables, you know, food deserts, if you will.
00:44:49
Speaker
Lastly, I'm curious, do you have any upcoming events or speaking engagements where people can, if they're in the area, come and listen to what you're working on? Well, I'm glad you asked. I am going to two conferences this week, which is very exciting. One is the Refed Food Waste Solutions Summit in St. Louis.
00:45:16
Speaker
This year, it's in different locations every year. I have been going to that conference since it started up. I was a speaker when it was in Cambridge many years ago, and they have a panel that is going to be discussing on-farm food loss.
00:45:33
Speaker
which is great, and I wish I could be there, but I've got to go to in the middle of that conference. I'm leaving for the Sustainable Produce Summit in Palm Desert, California, and I'll be a panelist at that event. There is a panel on food waste and sustainable solutions.
00:45:55
Speaker
It's at three o'clock Pacific time on May 18th. So that's coming up next week. And there's a great group of panelists that are working on solutions for food loss as well. So, you know, I'm hopeful that people will get excited about that. The Sustainable Produce Summit is in connection with the West Coast Produce Expo.
00:46:19
Speaker
which is happening immediately after. And so I'm going to walk that trade show and meet some people and have some fun. So I'm looking forward to all of that this coming week.
00:46:28
Speaker
Okay, well then I know I'll be getting my... My goal is to get this episode published by Monday, so that should give enough time. It takes some time to edit and turn things around, but it's what, the 12th today. So yeah, it gives me time to get that out on Monday because I'd love to have this out ahead of your speaking engagement.
00:46:49
Speaker
And do you know, I was unaware of that event and I'm curious, do you know if it happens to be available virtually? Can people register, view it online if they can't be there in person? The Refed Food Waste Solutions Summit is available online. I am not sure about the Sustainable Produce Summit.
00:47:08
Speaker
I am not sure about that one. It's provided by Farm Journal. It's a nice event from Farm Journal. And so, yes, definitely listeners could check that out.
Conclusion and Call to Action
00:47:20
Speaker
Okay. And I'll go back and listen for those books because I do read books and, of course, my wife accuses me of buying too many books.
00:47:28
Speaker
Can't see the other books that are over here on this wall and so I have plenty of books to read both audio and ebooks and in physical books But I am curious about the books on food loss because no I had to answer your question from earlier I I haven't read any yeah any literature on food loss, but the two books that you mentioned I'll try to drop a link for those as well. Yeah, very interesting Yeah, it sounds like it. I'll look forward to adding those to my collection and
00:47:56
Speaker
So we're coming up, I think, on the time. But before we go, I want to give you an opportunity to is there is there anything that I didn't ask that you thought I should have asked or is there anything else you want to cover?
00:48:10
Speaker
Well, I mean, I could go on about this all day long. I promise. I told you beforehand that there's never enough time you get into it thinking, oh my goodness, we have to fill 45 minutes and we could fill two hours easily. Yeah. Yeah. One thing that I want to say is it is big picture. You know, you mentioned at the beginning of our conversation that there are concerns about producing enough food for our population going forward.
00:48:38
Speaker
And I just want to share, you know, there are some studies or some statements that have been made that say we need to double fruit and vegetable production in order to provide for our population. The other way to increase yield is to reduce losses. And so we could have probably 20, 30, 40 percent more fruit and vegetables today if we just accepted everything that was fresh, healthy, nutritious,
00:49:07
Speaker
mature right now into the marketplace. So we don't have to do a whole lot more production. We don't have to convert a lot more land. We don't have to put down a lot more chemicals. We're already using those resources and we're already producing so much food that it can't all be used. So I want people to consider when they hear we need to produce more food.
00:49:37
Speaker
Well, wait a minute. We have a lot of food already. We're just not using it as effectively and efficiently as we can. And so I think I'll leave it there. That's a big point to sit on for a while.
00:49:49
Speaker
I agree. I think we'll leave it there as well. My only parting comments would be to the audience is that if you like this podcast, subscribe and share it with everyone you know, and be sure to go to Lisa's website and learn more about food loss. If you're on LinkedIn, reach out, connect, and hopefully she'll join LinkedIn or some point or hire someone to spread the word. I love LinkedIn, but the other ones I haven't gotten to yet.
00:50:18
Speaker
No, understandable. So with that, again, thank you, Lisa, for joining us today in sharing your knowledge and experience with food loss. Look forward to following your progress and research and maybe collaborating as well at some point, who knows? And again, thank you and thank you to the audience for listening. And I'm going to cut out here in a moment. Lisa, don't go anywhere before we hang up. Okay, thank you so much. All right, everyone, take care.
00:50:49
Speaker
you