This episode features a conversation between Phil Dillard, Founder of Thruline Networks, David Montgomery, a MacArthur Fellow, and Professor of Geomorphology at the University of Washington, and Anne Biklé, published science writer and public speaker. David and Anne talk about the power of regenerative gardening, the need for conventional agriculture to modernize rapidly, and address the primary issue with current agriculture: monocultures.
This episode features a conversation between Phil Dillard, Founder of Thruline Networks, David Montgomery, a MacArthur Fellow, and Professor of Geomorphology at the University of Washington, and Anne Biklé, published science writer and public speaker.
Together, they’ve recently published: What Your Food Ate: How to Heal Our Land and Reclaim Our Health, a book that builds on their trilogy of books about soil health, microbiomes, and farming.
David is an internationally recognized geologist who studies the effects of geological processes on ecological systems and human societies. He is the author of several textbooks in his field and his work has been featured in documentary films, network and cable news, television, and radio.
Anne draws on her background in biology and environmental planning to explore humanity’s tangled relationship with nature through the lens of agriculture, soil, and food. Her writing has appeared in digital and print magazines, newspapers, and her work has been featured in radio and independent documentary films.
In this episode, David and Anne talk about the power of regenerative gardening, the need for conventional agriculture to modernize rapidly, and address the primary issue with current agriculture: monocultures.
“Most of what feeds the world are not these big, mega farms. It's small farmers, most of whom are women. When you look at things on a global basis, it's not the North American grain farmer. I look at the incredible food waste, at least in North America, and it's like, do we really need to scale up if we're throwing 30 or 40 percent of our food away? And it's not just food we're throwing away, there was a lot of petrochemicals and a lot of agrochemicals and a lot of people's time that went into getting that kind of a yield, and we're throwing that away. That's just wasteful.” - Anne Biklé
“In terms of individual consumer action, you look for the regenerative label in stores. People are starting to label food as regenerative now. A way that consumers can support that movement is to actually start eating that food, see how you like it. If you can connect with regenerative farmers at farmers markets and find out what they're doing and support them, supporting farmers who are doing the right thing by their land is a really good thing to do as a consumer. But it's not always possible to tell that when you go into a grocery store with the signals that we get of exactly how your food was sourced. And so there's also the idea of trying to exert political pressure on elected representatives.” - David Montgomery
(02:18) David and Anne’s current roles
(11:48) Getting involved in their work
(23:04) Collaborating with other scientists
(29:46) Conventional versus modern agriculture
(39:52) Addressing the problem of agriculture: monocultures
(47:53) How to contribute to reforming agriculture globally
[00:00:00] Phil Dillard: Hello and welcome to Thruline to the 4th Sector, where we're exploring fourth sector capitalism and impact investing as an invitation to innovation and changing the world.
This episode features a conversation between Phil Dillard, Founder of Thruline Networks, David Montgomery, a MacArthur fellow and professor of geomorphology at the University of Washington, and Anne Biklé, published science writer and public speaker.
Together, they've recently published What Your Food Ate, How to Heal Our Land and Reclaim Our Health, a book that builds on their trilogy of books about soil health, microbiomes, and farming.
David is an internationally recognized geologist who studies the effects of geological processes on ecological systems and human societies. He's the author of several books in his field, and his work has been featured in documentary films, network, and cable news, television, and radio.
Anne draws on her background in biology and environmental planning to explore humanity's tangled relationship with nature through the lens of agriculture, soil, and food. Her writing has appeared in digital and print magazines, newspapers, and her work has been featured in radio and in independent documentary films.
In this episode, Anne and David talk about the power of regenerative gardening, the need for conventional agriculture to modernize rapidly, and address the primary issue with current agriculture, monocultures.
Now please enjoy this discussion between Phil Dillard, David Montgomery, And Anne Biklé.
Hello everybody, and welcome again to another episode of Thruline to the 4th Sector. I'm your host, Phil Dillard, here today with two amazing special guests, David Montgomery and Anne Biklé. How are you guys doing today?
[00:01:46] David Montgomery: Good. Thank you. Pleasure to be with you. Yeah. Same here. It's a pleasure to have
[00:01:51] Phil Dillard: you with us. It's been a little time coming, but as I said, when we first met, reading your book for me was a big moment and a life changing sort of, uh, experience. And I've shared it with so many different people who have also learned from it.
So I'm very much excited for them to hear the great things I've learned from you guys already. So maybe we can just jump in and get started with what I think is the easiest softball question to get started with in softball questions. And for us, that's, when people ask you, what do you do, how do you describe what it is that you do for a living?
[00:02:24] David Montgomery: Uh, well, I teach geomorphology at the University of Washington in Seattle. And geomorphology is the science of what shapes the surface of the earth. So I'm a kind of geologist who studies things like erosion and sedimentation and what shapes mountain ranges. And that got me into thinking about soils and, and I've been doing a lot of extracurricular work in the last 15 years writing about the importance of soils to human societies.
And a lot of that comes from me being a geologist and I'll let her tell you what she does, but it's a natural fit for what she does and what I do to think about the soil. All
[00:02:57] Anne Biklé: right, so what do I do, Phil? This has sort of been a lifelong question for me in some ways, in that I always seem to be, like, crossing out of my, you know, boundaries or getting out of my box and wandering into some other box and going, oh.
I see connections now that I didn't see before. Academically and educationally, my background is in biology and natural history and ecology. And those are just three fields that I think that's partly why I end up looking around at so many other things, because it all feeds back onto life and biology.
And soil is probably. The biggest example of that, because first of all, the organisms that live in the soil are minuscule to invisible, and so it's, you know, that old adage, you know, out of sight, out of mind, and yet really the reality with soil and soil life is that it's the biology that imbues soils with many, many of its functions, including The ones that we humans really need, which is, you know, the fertility of the soil and nutrient cycling to be able to grow our crops and also to raise animals out in pasture or in rangelands.
So, in essence, I guess I'm kind of a free range biologist who's constantly moving around out there in the, the world, drawing connections between things and going, hey, Take a look over here. This is pretty neat. This matters, and I wish more people knew about it.
[00:04:35] Phil Dillard: Well, that makes a whole lot of sense, and I'm sure more people will learn about it as we're going through this work.
So maybe in the same order, we can ask a different question. How do you describe what geology is, and how do you describe what soil is? Because to me, geology used to be like, uh, people who know things about rocks. And I didn't know what soil was. I just thought everything was dirt. And one I really learned the difference, layers of nuance in both of those things.
And I think a basic foundational definition might be helpful. How do you guys think about those two terms?
[00:05:08] David Montgomery: Well, you know, you're not wrong about geology being mostly about rocks, and that's what I was mostly trained in. So I'm in sort of a corner of geology that's really in the here and now of geology.
How rocks fall apart, how they erode, and how that shapes the surface of the earth. So it's kind of that fringe of geology that borders on biology. Because what soil really is, that makes it different from just dirt, is that soil has organic matter. It has living organisms in it. You can think of dirt as soil that's not where we want it.
You know, on your shoes, tracked into your house, in your car, wherever. But when you think of soil, It's an ecosystem that really involves both physical components in terms of like the clay, the silt, and the sand that makes up the body of it, and that's where the geology part comes from. That's rocks that have fallen apart, but there's also the biology part, which is incredibly important.
The organic matter, the stuff that was once living but is now dead, and then all the organisms that both You know, mine things out of those mineral particles and consume that organic matter and then consume each other right on up to us at the comfortable part of the food chain, that being the top. But soil is really distinguished from dirt by, in essence, life.
And that's where that importance of biology really comes in and thinking about healthy, fertile soils, which is what Anne really sort of helped open my mind to along the way in the series of books that we've written. So that's how I would look at the differences. And you may have different opinions.
[00:06:32] Anne Biklé: Geology. I've always seen rocks and the, the geological world as really a part of the natural world. It's so easy to see geology and it's so easy to see plants and animals interacting with geology. I kind of put this umbrella over the natural world and to me it's the plants, it's the animals, it's the rocks, it's the soil.
And geology is really interesting because We can get our hands on it, we can pick up rocks, we can look at them, you can, one of the most interesting things to do, wherever it is you are, if you're, you know, driving somewhere and you're not in some totally urbanized kind of a landscape, although even there are some opportunities there, it's really interesting to look at the road cuts, and it's interesting to look at the landforms, and as soon as you know a little bit about that, you can sort of see how.
The natural world is made, so to speak, how things like erosion shape landforms. I, my favorite thing is, I just call it the tenacity of life, and it's the way that you will see these trees clinging to cliffs, especially in coastal situations or on really steep hillsides, and their roots are, you know, they're hanging on, and then you learn.
You know, some intrepid person has gone and figured out how old that plant community is and it turns out, Oh, that plant community is, you know, 300 years old. And you're like, Oh my God, you're kidding me. It's living on rocks. So to me, geology is a really integral part of our natural world. And of course, you know, David mentioned rocks falling apart and so forth.
When it comes right down to it, the stuff that is inside of rocks, we don't, most of us, I think, think about that very much, but there's all of these minerals that actually get into our food, our plant and animal foods, and then they get into our bodies. And it's everything from people have heard of, you know, like calcium and magnesium, all the way to these, you know, weirder things like molybdenum, or selenium, or Zinc, and I mean, it's just wild to me to think this came out of our planet, these minerals came out of our planet, they were in rocks, and now they're in us.
I mean, you just sit there some time and think about that, and A, it's really cool, and B, it tells us we are... We are a part of nature. I mean, nature is cycling through us in a lot of different ways. And that's just one way. And so onto the soil part of this, we need, it's no accident that life forms have some of these, you know, elements in common, depending on if they live in a, in a marine environment or on land, but.
It's no accident that what we're made of is what is inside of rocks and what rocks are made of. And what modulates those minerals moving out of, you know, literally the earth and into us is soil. And it's all of the life of the soil that helps get this stuff out of rocks. And into our diet and then into our body.
So to me, it's all just so wrapped around itself and with one another. I tend to, you know, just sort of, I guess, lump it all together into a big boulder. All right. There we go.
[00:09:50] Phil Dillard: I think it's into a big boulder is a great way to land it. No pun intended. But I think it was really interesting is never really thought about it.
Right. Never really thought about what plants eat. You know, you think about basic science when we say, oh, plants get sunlight and CO2 and turn that into oxygen, and they're holding on to things in the ground. Maybe sometimes people say what nutrients they pull from the ground, but people don't really, you know, we never really talk about what goes into the soil, what makes healthy soil, what really is that difference.
And it's also interesting, it made me think of, we learned early science, we talked about difference between animate and inanimate objects, but no one really talked about the fact that All of those life forms, all of those things that create life are part of this whole ecosystem, right? To think that because a mountain or or a wears away, or a hill wears away and we get different types of vitamins and minerals that go into our food, we see 'em on the box.
Alright, in the cereal box. I talked to my doctor about them today saying about the importance of zinc and selenium and iron and different things But you never really make the connection of where that might come from and how it flows into the water How it flows into food and how that essential balance has been growing over a longer period of time.
So at the surface The integration of the study of rocks in biology, it just kind of put a big question mark in my mind. But then when you hear it, it's like, oh, of course, this makes a ton of sense. And it also kind of makes a ton of sense of why some of the challenges of healthy soil and healthy environments Go far beyond, I think, what people think about when they just think about clean air and clean water.
Well, I definitely want to get into that as we get in this conversation, but I always try to start a little bit with learning more about you as people because we hope to inspire people. who are, whatever stage of their lives, who are curious about this, to embrace that part of them that might be a biologist or a geologist and they didn't even really know it.
So maybe in reverse order this time, can you tell us a little bit about how you came to being your great scientific selves today and what drew you into this sort of work?
[00:11:59] Anne Biklé: I think for me, I, ever since I've been a little kid, I've always been really curious about how things work. And. You know, initially that was being outside and, you know, you're a little kid.
You don't know anything, you know, really, and you're trying to figure out more. And I grew up in Colorado in the suburbs of Denver and seasons there are dramatic. So here you are coming out of a winter that looks absolutely dead. It's shades of gray and then the snow and there's just no green. There's nothing vibrant about it.
And then, lo and behold, you know, May and June come around, and the world has exploded with color and with life. And so when I was a kid, I wondered and wandered around the yard, just grooving on everything. Like, why is this like this? And then my dad let me kind of take over this one neglected part of the yard.
And he let me plant anything that I wanted there. That was kind of me dipping my toes, you know, first into gardening and these days house plants are the rage and I think that's a great place to start if that's where you're at with plants all the way up to somebody who's like, I'm going to go be a farmer.
I'm going to buy, you know, 10 acres or a hundred acres and get going. The minute you get your hands, I think into the soil, I will call it dirt affectionately. I don't, you know, I don't mean, you know, your hands in the dirt. I'm using that in a good sense. That's some good dirt. And. You begin to connect with nature and it just keeps, it just keeps going from there.
So always, I've just always been curious about things and then I ended up in natural history because if you're curious about things, you want to be able to like look at things and investigate them. So that's where, you know, binoculars come in really handy and you can take a look at birds and it's like, Oh my God, these birds are all so different from one another and the closer you look, the more you see, the more you learn.
And it's the same way with plants, you know, it's pretty bad, but I've had my botanizing days and you'll be out somewhere and it's really different than like, say, you know, someone who studies cheetahs, you, you know, they're kind of hard to follow around and you can't. Obviously, get your hands on a plant.
People are always pulling up plants and tearing them apart and going, how many stamens does this thing have? And how long are these leaves? And what shape is this thing? It's just always having my hands on things, things that I can see that feed my mind. That's been perplexing, satisfying, frustrating, and mind blowing, you know, all of those things.
All encounters with nature, you will come away changed in one way or another. And it's not always, you know, puppies and, and kittens and stuff like that. We've all been stuck in a storm or been cutting ourselves in over our heads with something and that's nature too.
[00:14:54] David Montgomery: Yeah,
[00:14:54] Phil Dillard: I totally, um, I totally get that as I reflect on that, you know, comparing your cheetahs to plants, they, you know, you have more time with them and over time you can learn more about them and I know that they move at slower paces, but actually the plants have even, I would expect, have an outsized effect on the environment that people might not expect.
from the plants and the networks and the mitochondrial networks and all the different things that are going on and just the ability to understand them in more detail gives an appreciation for the pace at which nature moves in that environment.
[00:15:28] Anne Biklé: Yeah, and it just makes me think, and I just have to say this at this time of year in the fall, it's not as though I didn't notice trees before, but you live in an urban environment and if you've lived, we've lived in our neighborhood for quite a long time and I feel at this point now that When I take my walks through the neighborhood, we're in, uh, Seattle, just north of downtown, to give people context there.
I now am understanding, beginning to understand what indigenous people mean when they say, they talk about the natural world or components of the natural world as being ancestors, as being a part of. Something larger, a part of you. And that is now pretty much kind of where I'm at with the trees in my neighborhood because they're all shedding their leaves right now and I'm seeing their form and their structure and I'm going, aha, that I will remember that one.
That's a really interesting thing. Every single one of these trees is different and every single one of these trees is having kind of different struggles or different kinds of successes. And so I feel like I have a whole family. Out there in the neighborhood, Phil, and I, I will in my mind, or if it's a walk late at night with no people around, I'll talk, I'll talk to the trees and I'll say, I see you now.
And your leaves are even more beautiful. And it's a really. Kind of interesting thing when you start looking around and if you're in a place for long enough, you start to notice change. I know these trees, I know who they are, I know what they're about, and I'm worried about some of them, and I'm happy for others.
[00:17:05] Phil Dillard: Pretty amazing. Yeah, the importance of being connected with nature, the importance of wild spaces. How about a kid? He's grown up in the city and never seen trees change color, never seen the leaves of fall, the beautiful colors of fall in the northeast or the Pacific Northwest. What a sad thing to miss out on.
And how do we get people to engage with those things and be curious about them? I'm curious, David, how did you get sucked
[00:17:28] David Montgomery: into rocks? The funny thing is, uh, I started out in college as a freshman wanting to be a biologist. And the place that I attended, most of the people who wanted to do biology were in it to enter the medical profession.
And the focus was completely different. It was about competition. I was interested in symbiosis and collaboration and learning things and marveling over how, like, a redwood tree gets water from its roots, you know, way up to its crown. I wanted to understand how nature worked. And so I got kind of...
Discouraged by the whole biology program I was in, I took a geology class and it was like, oh, we could like, you know, take field trips, you know, and collaborate on homework and do joint group projects. It combined fun and learning into one. And I got carried away. I ended up graduating with a geology degree.
And then when I got out into the working world after that, I landed a job working on erosional issues. Cause that's what. When you think about geology in sort of urban and suburban environments, you know, you're looking at landslides, you're looking at gullies, you're looking at erosion. I was a foundation inspector for a year.
What did I know about inspecting foundations? Nothing, but I knew about what they were put on. And so I was effective at that. I then ended up going back to graduate school in the field of geomorphology, which is how erosion shapes the land. It's just how that grew out of it. And over the course of a few decades working on erosion problems around the world, I started to notice how, you know, societies that had degraded soil were fairly impoverished.
And I started sort of getting my head up from the, the erosion and the geology I was looking at and starting to look at connections to the biophysical world, to the human world, and thinking about how societies that did not take care of their land, Did impoverish their descendants by degrading their soil.
And that's what really got Ann and I into the book world, is I wrote a book called Dirt, the Erosion of Civilizations, I don't know, about 15 years ago or so, that looked at how the history of erosion, which I was trained to study, had affected human societies around the world through how what I thought I was writing was a history of erosion.
By the time I finished the book, I'd written a history of farming. Because it turned out that it's the way that we farm that has had a tremendous impact, generally unacknowledged and underappreciated, on the ability of the land to support further farming and to provide healthy, nutritious food for the people that are doing the farming and buying that produce.
And that basically, you know, dovetailed, came together for both Ann and I when we bought a house in North Seattle. Right as I finished writing that, that dirt book, we bought a house that had You know, literally dirt for soil. It had a side yard that Anne wanted to garden, and she is a plant whisperer.
She's a very good biologist, can raise, you know, any kind of plant back from the edge of death. I, on the other hand, have the geologist brown thumb. I can watch her as a plant whisperer and appreciate what she does. But when we bought that garden with the really crappy soil that it came with, Anne the biologist was very distressed about that, and she started to essentially bring in organic matter to the yard because We had the mineral part.
We had the geological part of good soil. We didn't have the biology. And so she started composting and mulching and mostly mulching at the start. And over the course of a few years, we started to notice the soil was actually improving and it was getting darker. It was turning into this dark brown to then ultimately rich black.
And the fertility was coming back to the land. It was the opposite of what I'd written about in the Dirk book. So right there in my own backyard, the story of civilizations was being rewritten in a way that was very positive for restoring the soil. And that got Anne and I into thinking about, well, how does it work?
And that led us to write The Hidden Half of Nature, which looked at the role of microbes in the soil and sort of building soil. And then that went on to think about... You know, how we can farm in ways that parallel what Anne was doing to our yard and then ultimately led us to the most recent book, What's Your Food Ate, that looks at, you know, the diet of plants and how that integrates up into what's in our diet and how the way we treat the soil is foundational to really growing an abundance of very healthy food.
So there's this long. Sort of convoluted pathway, and I sort of danced back and forth between geology and biology and the connections between them. Because unfortunately, most scientists are encouraged to sort of stay in their discipline, right? And that's what we tend to train people to do. But there's a lot of really interesting things that happen on the interfaces between disciplines.
And the soil is one of those, right, between biology and geology. And of course, there's its own discipline of pedology, the study of soil science that involves all this stuff. It's a wonderful rabbit hole to disappear down to for a few years. And it
[00:22:00] Phil Dillard: also seems to be a great example of the fact that you guys are living it and studying it and practicing it, doing the work while studying it.
You find some unexpected connections and unexpected things that open up your world to more and more sharing and insights. So I mean, it's really kind of interesting. I was going to ask about unexpected findings, which you kind of rolled right into them. But I'm very curious then where does it go from there?
Where there are certain people or colleagues who came by and said, how is your yard better than my yard or certain other things that open you up into other disciplines? It seems that The part we talk about this, the significance of a society and its land management is critically important right now.
We're talking about regenerative agriculture, we're talking about wildfires, we're talking about invasive species, all these different things. I'm hearing from people around the world how we as a modern humanity, global practices, are not managing our land well and are setting ourselves up for a foreseeable outcome because we've seen it happen before.
So I'm just curious, like, How has the work opened your conversations with other scientific experts in places that you might expect or actually that
[00:23:11] David Montgomery: you didn't expect? The one that really I wasn't expecting back when I was writing the DIRT book about, you know, what happened to past societies and the way they took care of their land is I wasn't expecting to actually end up doing a whole lot of traveling to visit farmers and learn from them about what actually We should be doing to help restore the soil.
You know, I learned a lot from Anne and her example in our yard, but I was out also giving, uh, presentations to farming conferences about the history of erosion and the backstory of civilizations. And I started meeting regenerative farmers who were well along in the transition to really regenerative practices and who had restored the fertility of their land in much the same way that Anne had restored the fertility of our yard.
You know, I was going to these conferences to talk about the past. And in interviewing these farmers and listening to their presentations, I started going, Oh, maybe it's possible to do on farms what ants done to our yard. So I went off and started to visit them and learn from them. And that opened a whole new world into thinking about, um, you know, styles of agriculture, the whole world of alternative agriculture and now regenerative agriculture.
And Anne and I started diving into the science behind all that, what it all means, because it really flowed out of the hidden half of nature and understanding the role of the microbial life that Anne was cultivating in our yard, why that was the agent of change that was really producing an enhancement of fertility.
And it turns out that the story on farms is very similar. Now, the methods and practices one would use on different farms are very different. And that's where, you know, agronomy and soil science is complicated. There's a lot of different kinds of soils in the world, but in terms of the general principles for how you would farm in a way that would leave the land better off.
And as a result of intensive farming, rather than degrading the soil, those general principles, you know, emerged to be pretty simple, pretty clear and pretty generalizable. And they very much paralleled the principles behind what Anne was doing in our garden, what you might call regenerative gardening.
And that led both of us to think that there's some real general truths behind how to think about the connections between life below ground and supporting life above ground.
[00:25:19] Anne Biklé: I guess the way I think about kind of this whole journey that we've been on in some ways is what were some either, you know, I know that, that they were exactly turning points, but they were some pretty, pretty big ahas.
And of course, they're wonderful when they happen, they're, you know, they're few and far between, but I wish there was more of them, you know, one of the things in doing their research and writing for the hidden half of nature. You know, Dave had mentioned, you know, he, he ended up going into geology because biology was, you know, too dominated by medical folks.
And I was always a plants and animal gal. I was not really that interested in, you know, the human body or anything like that. And yet. In writing The Hidden Half, that was a book in which we dealt with both the human microbiome and the soil microbiome. So you start getting into the research and just sort of the basics in both of those areas and you're like, holy crap, this is like the same stuff, but it's just in two different worlds.
And the body, the human body. You know, the equivalent of soil and the heart of the microbiome is our gut. And that's where all this nutrient processing, nutrient transformation, all of these microbial metabolites. So, you know, our diet comes in and our microbiome, you know, bacteria, fungi, other kinds of critters that live in the lowest part of our gut, they get a hold of our diet and they turn it into other things.
That actually our, our body, we have co evolved with our microbiome and we rely on them for innumerable molecules and compounds that modulate so much of human physiology. And then you turn to the ag world and the soil and the plant world and you're like, Oh my God, these plants are not stupid at all.
They might be, you know, so called sitting ducks sitting there in the soil, but they are master, master puppeteers. of the microorganisms that live in soil. They are attracting them to the root system and doing all of this kind of chemistry and feedback stuff. And the microbes are making all these metabolites for plants that they need.
You know, everything from hormones, plant growth promoting hormones. So I always thought Oh yeah, the plant makes everything it needs. It doesn't. It relies on the soil microbiota for a good number of things. And this, you know, as a biologist, this really is no surprise. This is no surprise at all. Life has always depended on other life.
And so where one life form can depend on, or, you know, to put a pun intended, farm out some function to something else, then they're going to do that. And so plants farmed out an awful lot of their wellbeing to. The soil microbiome and we humans have farmed out a lot of what our well being is based on to our own microbiome.
We're a little different, you know, we carry around our microbiome with us everywhere we go. And plants manipulate their environment to get The composition, sort of the ideal composition for their green body. And that is, that's part of why nutrient processing is so important for plants. And it's also why what we do to the soil in agriculture can.
Just really upend how plants communicate with their microbiome.
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com to learn more. And now back to the interview. You know, that's the thing that I'm really glad where you landed there, because I really wanted to pull that thread a little bit, right? When we talk about regenerative agriculture, it sounds like a mystical word to people who aren't familiar with some of the terminology.
And they say, what's wrong with agriculture? We've always done it this way or different things. But I would argue that as you look over a period of time, well, I've seen, we've seen this. You look over periods of time in history, we've seen people learn things and then unlearn things and then relearn them.
And I don't think that we know. My hypothesis is that we don't know, for example, what you just described, all those different interactions, how significantly they're damaged or disturbed because of the approaches that we use with a petroleum based. chemicals for agriculture, for example. How would you simply describe a challenge to the microbiome of plants by using these?
You know, these different fertilizers or different approaches that stray away from things that nature has taught us over
[00:31:03] Anne Biklé: millennia. It's like, so we're having this conversation now, Phil. We're talking English and even though we're here on a computer screen, I can see your facial expressions and hand movements and it would be like we're communicating and this communication is going well and we're reaching a different place and it's a good exchange.
Something drops in from somewhere else that we don't understand and we can't integrate it into this conversation that we're having and it becomes a giant disruption. And all of a sudden, you're turned into some other kind of a thing I don't recognize. Dave is too. Everything starts to break down, the, the quality of the communication, what it is we're giving each other and what it is we're getting from each other during all of this is just upended and it turns into chaos.
Worse, although, you know, we're on computer screens, let's say we were in person in a room somewhere, something enters this room and one of us gets plastered up against a wall or stomped on and then we're dead. And then, you know, the setting is even more... Disrupted. And so that is the whole problem with, you know, whether you want to talk about agrochemicals that are not needed or pharmaceuticals that are not needed or over reliance on various things.
We do not have a very good understanding, or at least not a full understanding of what all of these things. Due to an organism's microbiome. And the soil microbiome is, you know, different species and composition than the human microbiome, but we know there's some fundamental things. That all microbiomes do.
And it, you know, the several things are, all microbiomes are involved with helping their hosts immune function. So whether that's a plant or a cheetah or a dog or a cat, that's a big part of what microbiomes do. And so these days, especially living through a pandemic, and you had mentioned, you know, your conversations with other folks where everyone's talking with you about the challenges that we're facing.
I mean, in some sense. The way we're treating land, we are really messing with Earth's, you know, immune system, so to speak. You know, that's a metaphor. Earth doesn't have an immune system per se, but it's got these global, global biogeochemical cycles, ranging from that of nitrogen to phosphorus to water and carbon and so on.
And we have just Seemed to like jammed a monkey wrench into every single one of those cycles into, you know, the earth's basic functioning. That's the whole problem with when we start doing things, adding things to the soil or to the human food supply that we have incomplete understanding of. You can mess things up pretty badly.
And before writing books and stuff, I was involved in salmon restoration and here in the Pacific Northwest. And we always used to say, at least the folks I worked with. We'd have these long conversations with fish hatchery folks, because they were all for capturing fish, staking them in a hatchery, and then letting the young fish go, and we would always say, what is that going to do if these fish have nowhere to live, if the oceans are polluted, or if they're spawning grounds?
don't exist anymore. This doesn't seem to us to be effective. How about we restore rivers to their floodplain? How about if we revegetate floodplains and let these anadromous fish run up these rivers like they have for millennia? Because they know their habitat, they know what to do in their habitat. So anyway, that's just sort of an analogy, by way of an analogy of, I think we should be looking to support.
The functioning of all of our natural, you know, all of these various natural feedback systems and loops and cycles, as opposed to strong arm them and all of the other ways in which we try to manipulate them. We're just far better off if we try to minimize the disruption. and support their functioning.
[00:35:09] David Montgomery: What we've really gone with modern agriculture is into a regime where we've inadvertently landed on what we now call conventional practices that greatly disrupt soil microbiomes and soil life. And there's sort of two primary mechanisms. There's tillage, the act of plowing. It's kind of like if somebody like came around to your house, pulled your roof off, and stirred all your stuff up with a giant spoon every year.
You know, it's not a very safe habitat to be inhabiting. You'd move. Think about life in the soil when a plow goes through it. Think about what happens to earthworms. It's not a pretty picture. It's very disruptive to their basic ecology and their life. But also, the growing use of, uh, synthetic nitrogen fertilizers also has greatly disrupted soil microbiomes, not by eliminating soil life, but by changing the community composition.
Because there'll be different organisms that make up that community, and ones that are regularly fertilized with synthetic nitrogen, than, say, ones that are, um, Fertilized with compost, organic matter, or out in the forest floor somewhere where the leaves falling are what does that fertilization. And a lot of the unintended side effects in terms of disrupting soil life from modern conventional agriculture, you know, grew out of us not really being aware in the 1930s and 40s of what is the role of soil microbiomes.
We were still figuring out, you know, that, oh, there's bacteria in the soil. We were getting, you know, getting a few antibiotics out of them, not really understanding. The basic ecological system that our crops were actually part of in terms of partnerships with the soil. And so one might ask the question of, well, what led to the modern reliance?
You have a lot of agrochemical use and a lot of mechanical tillage for farming. And a big part of that was we'd already degraded our land significantly in Western Europe and North America by the early 20th century. And you could get a big boost in yield by dumping a lot of nitrogen on a freshly plowed field.
You could grow a lot of biomass. And that was viewed as success because we were prioritizing agriculture in terms of yield with a concern about feeding the world, which is a very legitimate concern. But we didn't know. a lot about soil microbiomes and the biology underpinning the diet of plants, soil fertility, and how it is that things like minerals and vitamins get into plants and how they make these compounds known as phytochemicals that I'm sure that Anne will have more to say about, that are, you know, compounds that plants make for their own defensive and communication purposes, but that when they get into our bodies, they actually function as anti inflammatories, antioxidants, things that help benefit our health.
So we're in the position Today, where conventional agriculture is forgotten, as Phil, as you were sort of setting up, some of the key lessons that were learned in traditional agriculture, things like cover crops, things like crop rotations, practices that were used historically in regions all over the world because they worked to help sustain fertility.
So, the challenge that we have today, and really what the foundational piece and thing about regenerative agriculture is, is how to take some elements of that ancient wisdom of things like cover crops and crop rotations and traditional practices and bring that into modern farming systems with the technologies and the abilities that we have today that our, that our ancestors lacked in terms of, you know, the amount of energy they have at their disposal and the amount of technology they have to work with.
But those basic principles of cultivating the life in the soil, trying to actually promote the beneficial organisms in agriculture, really boil down to three key principles. Minimize disturbance, both chemical and physical, keep plants growing in the, in, in year round to actually produce what are called exudates, compounds plants exude out of their roots to feed their microbial partners and recruit partners, and then growing a diversity of crops.
Uh, which helps support an ecosystem functionality. And an ecosystem with one key plant is not really an ecosystem. It's a monoculture and they tend to be fairly unstable ecologically. So this minimized disturbance, cover crops, and diversity happen to be just about the opposite. of what we've taught in conventional agriculture for a hundred years, and yet when you understand the role of the soil microbiome in maintaining and building fertility, those are the practices that you would put on the front line for trying to rebuild and maintain fertility.
Fortunately, it's possible to integrate all that into a highly productive farming system. That's where the whole regenerative agriculture thing comes in. We wrote about that in Growing a Revolution, the book before What's your food Ape? And it turns out that when we do adopt practices like that, it appears that we can grow food that actually has a better health profile for those who eat it as well.
[00:39:45] Phil Dillard: There's a whole lot there, right? Key points that come out to me. I said, you know, I was thinking. What's the value of biodiversity? And I think the answer I heard is it gives security and vibrancy to the ecosystem so that there's a lot of activity going on and lots of healthy partners in there. And then I was thinking about the counter I heard from Big Food.
You know, I talked to regenerative agricultural farmers in Nebraska and in New England and they said, you know, these small family farms have, we've done no till for a certain period of time and we're learning how to do this and, and it's great. But, people at Big Food say, well, you can't do it at scale and it's not going to feed a bunch of different people and so on and so forth, which I don't think I believe because there has been a whole lot of, a whole lot of, a whole lot of societies that seem to have done this.
But I'm curious how you respond to that question. And also, I guess to the one of, you know, what do you do when you've stuck yourself in a monoculture? Or what do you do when you are, you know, a victim to an invasive species that is? Eucalyptus look nice and they smell nice, but they're choking the water, choking the life out of California and South Africa.
Right? First, how do we get people to understand the significance of the biodiversity in the invasive species, and then what do we do to address
[00:41:03] David Montgomery: it? Let me address the scale issue first, and then maybe I'll hand off to you for the biodiversity issue, but the scale issue is one that keeps coming up, and I think there's a couple ways to look at it.
The way I initially look at it is when I was writing Growing Our Evolution, and... wrestling with the question of can regenerative agriculture scale and could we go global with it? You know, the biggest farm I went on that I would call regenerative that had rebuilt the health and fertility of its soil was 20, 000 acres.
It was not a small farm. Now, we've been on plenty of small subsistence farms and small family farms that have adopted regenerative practices and for vegetable production, you're probably talking small scale is better for regenerative systems. But for things like grains, I've been on 20, 000 acre farms that have impressively enhanced their soil.
They need different equipment and John Deere is happy to sell them the equipment that you need to do that. But it's really a different way of thinking about the land. And so I don't actually see real problems with scaling this up. Cause I've seen giant farms that have done it, but there's actually two ways to scale things up.
You can have a whole lot of small farms, or you can have a few really big farms, and you can scale up to the same production. So, there's fundamental questions in terms of how we want rural landscapes to be, and whether we want our subsidies and tax dollars to be supporting really large farms or small farms.
are policy questions. I actually think that the problem of scaling up is eminently solvable, and the regenerative is perfectly capable of feeding the world. And I would assess that based on every regenerative farmer that I've interviewed who has completed the transition and sort of gone to, you know, worked through the problem of transition, which is a real problem.
But those that have worked through it are as productive on a per acre yield basis as their conventional neighbors. Which means that, you know, I don't see a yield penalty coming out of it in terms of the way people tend to think about or talk about those things. So, I'm confident that it could scale. I'm less confident about our political system doing the things that would help to encourage that scaling.
And I'm less confident about, you know, currently profitable interests being interested in changing enough to facilitate that scaling. Those different questions on whether it can scale.
[00:43:09] Anne Biklé: Somewhere along the way, we in North America... Decided we should be the ones to feed the world. And that's a big question to think about.
And so 200 years ago, we didn't decide, you know, that we needed to feed the world until industrialization came upon us. And there were all these products that we could apply to the soil and use in agriculture to churn out these, you know, massive yields. And then it was like, well, what are we going to do with all this food?
Oh, let's go sell it to other people. So, I start with that question of, why did we take it upon ourselves to feed the world, and how is that going? Well, in the pandemic, there were some supply chain issues, right? It was some of these larger... Entities that began to have problems because they were so large that you take out, you know, a link in the chain here or there, and they just kind of came to their knees.
So I don't know that big is always better. And I look at what the weather and climate Is doing with the planet now. And I think maybe a better strategy for resiliency and for adaptation is do we scale up or do we adapt to the hyper local things that are coming at us, whether that's flood or drought or whatever's going to come this next summer, you know, we don't know.
And I think in some ways, all bets are off with. The uniformity that, say, the American Midwest maybe experienced, you know, 50, 60, 70 years ago. Because it's, it's all different everywhere now. It certainly is up here in the, um, Pacific Northwest. It's, I question the scalability thing and the need to do that.
And the fact is, most of what feeds the world are not these big, you know, mega farms. It's small farmers. Most of whom are women, around when you look at things on a global basis. It's not the North American grain farmer. So there's just a lot to think about there, Phil. The other thing is, I look at the incredible food waste.
At least in North America. And it's like, do we really need to scale up if we're throwing 30 or 40 percent of our food away? And it's not just food we're throwing away. There was a lot of petrochemicals and a lot of agrochemicals and a lot of people's time that went in to getting that kind of a yield and we're throwing that away, that's just wasteful.
That's just wasteful. And then on the biodiversity thing, I'll just kind of pivot to that. Now, I had said earlier about sort of these aha moments that come in writing the books, and one of the aha moments for What Your Food Ate was that You know, David and I, we read over, write around a thousand papers in all these different fields, agronomy, immunology, all this stuff.
And one of the things you come across with a lot of dietary and food research across the human population is some is replicatable. And some is not. Nutritionists are, you know, constantly dinged because it's like, you people don't really have data. All you're doing is these questionnaires and how are we going to be able to tell what diet does to human health if we can't really get any data?
And yet you look across these studies, and the same in agriculture, and I suddenly understood Why things are not replicatable and why all the time, sometimes they are, but also why there's this variability in the response of people to, say, a, you know, quote, plant based diet versus people's response to a more animal based diet.
So there's all these human diets out there, and we're trying to figure out, well, what's the best diet for people? Here's the deal. There is no one diet for all of humanity. It's just like that for a plant. There is no one magic, you know, fertilizer or anything else that we should be applying to all of our crops.
And the same goes with animals. And the whole reason for that Has to do with evolution and evolution has always been driven by variability and by the fact that we're all different, all plants, all animals, all people, and that is its very strength, that is how things adapt, that is what resiliency is all about, and so we don't want monocultures, not in our communities, not in the human population, not in anything.
It just weakens us. Monocultures. That is the whole problem in agriculture, trying to standardize plants and animals, and then one little thing, a hot summer, a certain pest comes through, and then we got to run for the chemicals to try and kill off nature to save. You know, the one thing that we think is really important.
And so variability is actually a very good thing to have. It's the motor of life.
[00:48:29] David Montgomery: Wow.
[00:48:30] Phil Dillard: You got two great singers there at the end, right? No one died for all humanity and variability. That's really great. If we could go on for another hour or two for sure, I feel like we just got started. There are more great questions.
And then we have time to answer it, but I got to respect your time and, um, encourage everybody to come back for a second round. So I'll hit you with this parting shot question. We're always trying to figure out how to activate people. So if you were to say, what's the most important thing that people could do, whether it's to influence governments or corporations or communities or non profits, whichever.
What are most, the most important things you encourage individual people to do to try and move themselves forward or to move our society forward towards a better footing?
[00:49:20] Anne Biklé: That's a big question, Phil. We all want the answer. And I think getting people activated on anything, I think it really has to, and especially these days, it needs to begin with learning enough about the thing that you care about or think you care about so that.
You have accurate information to work with. You're not dealing with misinformation, and you're not dealing with unhelpful things. So, getting educated enough on whatever it is you, you know, a person cares about, and of course we're talking here about agriculture and food and the health of the planet, and so I would urge Reading books, listening to podcasts like yours, so that then you build yourself a foundation for beginning to talk with your friends, your family.
Most of us, I think, are, you know, more comfortable dealing with, not all the time, and it depends on the issue, but in general, we're not going to go up and talk to a stranger and say, Hey, I've got all these ideas about food and the human diet and how we, how we raise our crops and animals. And I'd like to tell you about that.
No, you start with your family and your friends, or if you go to a farmer's market. You're going to talk with other people about that. Or you might, you know, talk with somebody in the produce or meat section of a grocery store about that and just see, well, where are they coming from? And what can we really do here?
That would be the one thing that I would say is sort of critical from the beginning. And then my experience has always been that the deeper I dig into something, there's always more to find. And after, you know, Some time of digging into something. I find myself in a different place and better positioned to be contributing in a productive and positive way.
I also think I've talked a lot with Dave and I both have talked a lot with folks in the regenerative movement. And especially like if you find a regen farmer out in the Midwest or in the South somewhere, they feel like they are. Isolated, you know, you know, they feel like that when they start telling you, my neighbors think I'm crazy, you know, no one will, you know, and it's like, well, yeah, actually, you're not crazy.
You're just not quite in the right group yet. And so there's a way of, of finding other people to connect with. And I'm always a big fan, especially for folks who live in a city. And maybe someone who's not a farmer is getting. outside and doing something like a tree planting project or community garden project.
Because then there's something for me anyway, I'm as much a mind and intellectual person as I am a hands on and a doer. And I learn when I can combine those things. I love thinking and doing. I love mind and hand. Kind of things. So that's the other piece of advice I would give is if you think you want to, you know, get more into this, try both some of the practical and experiential as well as just getting a good handle on like, what are the facts here?
What are the basic things?
[00:52:30] David Montgomery: Yeah, and obviously a good way to get educated about, uh, the basic facts and the basic things around all this is, uh, we've written books on the topic, obviously we'll recommend our own books as good ways to actually get into that, but when you think about, there's sort of three levels of action that could be, you could think about sort of individual consumer action, there's sort of how to influence farmers, and there's governmental action, and so in terms of individual consumer action, you look for the regenerative label in stores, people are starting to label food as regenerative now, a way that Consumers can support that movement is to actually start eating that food, see how you like it.
There's, uh, as Anne's suggesting, there's, um, you know, if you can connect with, uh, regenerative farmers at farmers markets and find out what they're doing and support them, supporting farmers who are doing the right thing by their land is a really good thing to do as a consumer. But it's not always possible to tell that when you go into a grocery store with the signals that we get.
You know, of exactly how your food was sourced. And so there's also the idea of trying to exert political pressure on elected representatives. The sad truth is today that our leaders tend to follow and the people kind of need to lead. And so if people want to see farming reformed and they're interested in eating healthier food, We need to encourage our politicians to essentially modify our systems and subsidies and regulations to reward and encourage the kind of behavior you'd like to see in agriculture and to stop subsidizing the practices that degrade the land and that produce, you know, not very nutritious, not very healthy food for us all.
There's lots of levels that one could pitch in on this at different levels. Our niche is obviously to think about it and write about it and, you know, tell people about it. Both the history and the positive avenues going forward. We could reform agriculture over the next few decades. It's not going to happen overnight.
What I think our vision would be, would be that, you know, by 2050, well, 2030, be an optimist or 2050, you know, geologically, they're almost the same date. When we think about that date, it would be wonderful if what we call conventional agriculture 20, 30 years from now is what we call regenerative agriculture today.
To make regenerative the new conventional could really be a mission that could be accomplished, but it's going to take us all pitching in at all levels to do it. Because it's going to take a
[00:54:42] Phil Dillard: real change to the system, right? It's going to take a change of that mindset that says we have to feed the world versus we work together to make sure that everyone has food that's healthy and nutritious.
It's not wasted. It doesn't need to be shipped halfway around the planet. If you're either. Eating a local diet from what comes out of the ground and maybe supplementing with some of the phytonutrients you need from stuff that you can't grow in the ground. I mean, you're not going to grow, you know, uh, broccoli in Boston in February, right?
But you know, you need it. So, you know, greenhouses are great. solution for that, right? And efficient use of, of certain technology to supplement the diet for health when the seasons don't work in your favor. It seems to be a smart thing to think about. And then how do you change the ecosystem, change the economics of the, of the, of the system such that different things are valued and different things are rewarded so that we're getting better, better health and addressing some of these issues.
That's what I'm, I'm sharing for you. It makes a lot of sense. Again, I know we could keep on going for a long time, and I really, really appreciate your time, and I hope we get enough out of this for folks to start thinking about it. I tell just one anecdote, I told you about the book, and I told you about how afterwards I went down to my farmer's market in San Francisco, and I asked everybody how they grew their food.
And there were five booths there. The first two people looked at me like I was crazy. They said, we stick it in the ground and put water on it. The next two people said that they're moving towards being, uh, organic and fully certified organic. These things are organic practices, but they're not fully certified or this and that.
And I went to the, to the last person who was the newest woman, woman named Lupita. She's amazing. And she started talking about. Regenerative practices and how she was thinking about how people are not being healthy during the pandemic and she changed her business and became a regenerative farmer and started doing this and that and the other and talked about how she protects her cauliflower from aphids with cayenne pepper because aphids don't want to eat cayenne pepper.
She talked about how she was experimenting with, with strawberries and on and on and on. She was talking and I was like, well, how do you do this one and how do you tell healthy that one? And she was just so amped about regenerative. I get a bag of groceries for her, a bag of vegetables, shopping bag full for like 23.
Which is ridiculous in San Francisco that I could have weeks worth of food for that. I literally have a full week's worth of vegetables for next to nothing. And, um, they're tasty and whichever, she's the most popular person in the area by now because people have caught on that her stuff is better and that everything...
And her story and her passion behind it is interesting. So there are people out there who are green shoots. You may not hear about them every day, but there are people like Lupita are doing it. And I think that you just need to find more, encourage more stories. And those people who say, yeah, I've always wanted to do that, get out and do it because the world needs more of them and more folks like you. So thanks so much for who you are and what you do.
[00:57:43] Anne Biklé: Thank you, Phil. Yeah, this has really been wonderful. I'm glad you're glad you've got your podcast going.
[00:57:50] David Montgomery: Thanks. Yeah, no, thank you. It's a pleasure to talk to you.
[00:57:53] Phil Dillard: Well, thanks for being such great guests and thanks everybody for tuning in and listening. We'll see you again next time in our next episode of Thruline to the 4th Sector. Please take a moment to rate and review the show and join us each week for a new episode. Thank you for listening.
Thank you for listening to this episode of Thruline to the 4th Sector. I'm your host, Phil Dillard. If you enjoyed the show, please leave a rating and tell a friend. To learn more about the four sector economy, visit ThrulineNetworks.com. That's T H R U L I N E networks. com. Thanks again, and we hope to have you with us in the next episode.