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Many activists for sustainable farming envision a future of small, local and highly labor-intensive farms, rather than today’s commercial agriculture operations.
But if the goal is to protect as much of nature as possible, larger and more specialized farms can accomplish this goal better than smaller ones, argues Robert Paarlberg, associate at the sustainability science program at the Harvard Kennedy School and author of Resetting the Table: Straight Talk About the Food We Grow and Eat. He says it would be a mistake to rewind to the farming practices of the mid-1900s and forgo the technological advancements of recent years.
In this episode of the No-Till Farmer podcast, brought to you by Bio-till Cover Crop Seed, Paarlberg talks about the research that went into his book, his advice to commercial farmers and farm organizations about advocating for sustainability, what those groups need to do to combat the myths surrounding sustainable agriculture and more.
Paarlberg is also speaking about Resetting the Table: Straight Talk About the Food We Grow and Eat at the 2022 National Strip-Tillage Conference in Iowa July 28-29. Sign up today to join Strip-Till Farmer for 2 days of learning and unlimited networking with thought leaders like Robert, plus dozens of other industry experts and cutting-edge strip-tillers.
No-Till Farmer podcast series is brought to you by Bio Till Cover Crops.
Bio Till Cover Crops, a pioneer and leader in cover crop seed, represent a complete lineup of seeds suitable to a wide range of soils types and growing conditions. Bio Till Cover Crop vendors are committed to your success and provide local resources, education, guidance, and all the tips and tricks we know, to ensure your plantings have the correct foundations for success. The original producers of Bounty Annual Ryegrass, Bio Till Cover Crops continue to add new and improved cover crop and forage varieties, including Enricher Radish, Bayou Kale, Shield Broadleaf Mustard, African Forage Cabbage, and Mihi Persian Clover. With over 30 years of experience in production, processing, packaging, and shipping, you won’t be able to find a better fit for your farm anywhere else.
Full Transcript
Julia Gerlach:
Welcome to the No-Till Farmer Podcast, brought to you today by Bio Till Cover Crops Seed. I'm Julia Gerlach, executive editor for No-Till Farmer.
Julia Gerlach:
I encourage you to subscribe to the series which is available in iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify, SoundCloud, Stitcher Radio and TuneIn radio. Subscribing will allow you to receive an alert about new episodes, when they're released.
Julia Gerlach:
I'd like to take a moment to thank Bio Till Cover Crops Seed for sponsoring today's episode. Bio Till Cover Crops' a pioneer and leader in cover crop seed, represents a complete lineup of seeds, suitable to a wide range of soil types and growing conditions.
Julia Gerlach:
Bio Till Cover Crops' vendors are committed to your success and provide local resources, education, guidance and tips and tricks, to ensure your plantings have the correct foundations for success.
Julia Gerlach:
The original producers of Bounty Annual Ryegrass, Bio Till Cover Crops continues to add new and improved cover crop and forage varieties, including Enricher Radish, Bayou Kale, Shield Broadleaf Mustard, African Forage Cabbage and Mihi Persian Clover.
Julia Gerlach:
With over 30 years of experience in production, processing, packaging and shipping, you won't be able to find a better fit for your farm anywhere else. Learn more@biotill.com. That's B-I-O-T-I-L-L.com.
Julia Gerlach:
Many activists for sustainable farming envision a future of small, local and highly labor intensive farms, rather than today's commercial agriculture operations.
Julia Gerlach:
But if the goal is to protect the soil and the environment, larger and more specialized farms are in a better position to do so, than smaller ones, argues Robert Paarlberg, associate at the Sustainability Science Program at the Harvard Kennedy School and author of Resetting the Table: Straight Talk About the Food We Grow and Eat.
Julia Gerlach:
He says it would be a mistake to rewind to the farming practices of the mid-1900s and forgo the technological advancements of recent years.
Julia Gerlach:
Paarlberg will be speaking at the 2022 National Strip-Tillage Conference. And for this episode of the No-Till Farmer Podcast, brought to you by Bio Till Cover Crop Seed, he's giving us a preview of that presentation.
Julia Gerlach:
Listen in as associate editor, Michaela Paukner chats with Paarlberg about the research that went into his book, his advice to commercial farmers and farm organizations about advocating for their practices, what those groups need to do to combat the myths surrounding sustainable agriculture and more.
Robert Paarlberg:
I got interested in agriculture and agriculture policy because my dad grew up on a farm in Indiana, in Lake County, Indiana during the depression. Not an easy time to be farming.
Robert Paarlberg:
Then he went on and got a PhD in agricultural economics, eventually. He went to Purdue University and then to Cornell. He taught agricultural economics at Purdue and then became a senior government official in the agricultural field.
Robert Paarlberg:
I found his work to be very interesting. Although I only worked on my uncle's farm in the summer times, off and on, I thought that learning a little bit more about agriculture and international food and agriculture could make a good career for me.
Robert Paarlberg:
I went into political science and international relations, instead of agricultural economics. But I had an advantage because I'd grown up with a lot of agricultural economists. I could understand their language, and so they were willing to include me in their activities.
Robert Paarlberg:
In the academic world, agricultural economists tend to dominate agricultural policy. If you can't speak their language, you're liable to be excluded.
Michaela Paukner:
So yeah, like you said, that's a huge advantage to be able to bring another perspective to the table.
Robert Paarlberg:
Yes, very few political scientists study agricultural policy. So, when the economists are looking around for someone to talk to them about political institutions and public policy, they stumble across me. I'm usually at the table, more often than other political scientists would be.
Michaela Paukner:
So throughout your career, what has been some of the scope of your research that you've done?
Robert Paarlberg:
I've actually written 10 books. Some of them grew out of the research and consulting I did with organizations like the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the International Food Policy Research Institute, and U.S. Agency for International Development, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Some just grew out of my own interests.
Robert Paarlberg:
The research was funded by my academic institutions. That was Wellesley College, originally. And then more recently, Harvard University.
Robert Paarlberg:
The first book I ever wrote was about food power. It was about the use of embargoes, like the grain embargo that jimmy Carter announced back in 1980, to try to punish the Soviet Union for invading Afghanistan.
Robert Paarlberg:
Now we're trying to punish the Russians with various sanctions. So, it's interesting how these topics come around again.
Robert Paarlberg:
I did a book on the reform of US agricultural policy, with Chicago University Press. Then I started working on biotechnology.
Robert Paarlberg:
I did a book on the regulation of genetically-engineered crops in developing countries. Then I did a book on agriculture in Africa.
Robert Paarlberg:
I have worked in a dozen or so countries in Africa, over the years and half a dozen in Asia, half a dozen in Latin America. I looked at the particular challenges facing smallholder farmers in Africa.
Robert Paarlberg:
I did a book that compared the problem that the United States has, with excess fossil fuel consumption, to the problem the United States has with excess food consumption.
Robert Paarlberg:
The United States has obesity rates that are roughly twice as high as on the continent of Europe. Our per capita fossil fuel consumption is also roughly twice as high. So, I wrote a book to try to explain all that.
Robert Paarlberg:
I wrote a book that was mostly a textbook, called Food Politics: What Everyone Needs to Know. It's still being assigned to undergraduates, here and there.
Robert Paarlberg:
My most recent book was an attempt to write for a wider audience. This is not designed for academic specialists. It's done through a trade publisher, Alfred Knopf in New York.
Robert Paarlberg:
It was my attempt to respond to the charge that our food system is completely broken. I don't think it is. I think part of our food system is badly broken. That's the food manufacturing companies that turn healthy products that come from our farms, into obesity-inducing, virtually addictive, ultra-processed products, loaded up with too much salt, sugar and fat. But I don't think commercial agriculture in the United States, is the source of our dietary health problems.
Michaela Paukner:
That book is Resetting the Table. Correct?
Robert Paarlberg:
Yes, that's right. That's my latest book. It just came out a year ago.
Michaela Paukner:
Okay. You're joining us at the 2022 National Strip-Tillage Conference in July, to talk about some of the research and things that you've discovered when you were writing the book, Resetting the Table.
Michaela Paukner:
Can you introduce the book, some of the themes that are in it and what you've learned as you've been writing it?
Robert Paarlberg:
Yes. As I say, I wrote the book because I got tired of reading complaints from journalists and activists, that were saying our food system is completely broken. They usually say these problems start on the farm.
Robert Paarlberg:
They complain about today's large, specialized, capital-intensive farms. They advocate a return to small, local, diversified and even organic farms.
Robert Paarlberg:
But in my book, I say it'd be a mistake to turn back the clock on modern commercial farming. I agree that the critics, that our food system is broken, especially in terms of dietary health.
Robert Paarlberg:
We face a dietary health crisis in the United States today. 42% of adults in the United States are clinically obese.
Robert Paarlberg:
We have serious problems with diabetes, heart attack, stroke and cancer linked to obesity. Obesity-related diseases kill 300,000 Americans a year.
Robert Paarlberg:
We consume too little fruits and vegetables. Only one in 10 Americans consumes the recommended daily helpings of fruits and vegetables, while we consume too much meat.
Robert Paarlberg:
These are serious problems, but I don't say they start with our farming system. They originate with the food manufacturing companies, that take the healthy products grown by our farmers and ultra process them and add too much salt, sugar and fat.
Robert Paarlberg:
They do that intentionally. They put those ingredients together in carefully designed combinations, to ensure that these foods will become virtually addictive, to ensure that they hit a bliss point, it's called, in our mouth. It triggers the reward circuit in our brain and makes us want to crave those foods again, even when we're not really hungry.
Robert Paarlberg:
I also include our restaurant chains in doing these things. That includes casual dining restaurants, not just fast food restaurants.
Robert Paarlberg:
So I spend a lot of time on our dietary health problems. I look at commercial agriculture overall, and I look at the charge that it's environmentally unsustainable.
Robert Paarlberg:
I don't think that, that charge can be fairly made these days. People who make that charge are working with an outdated notion of what commercial agriculture looks like in the United States.
Robert Paarlberg:
They're thinking about the farms we had 40 years ago, that did use too much energy and too much land, too many chemicals, resulting in too much soil erosion and too many greenhouse gas emissions, for every bushel that was produced.
Robert Paarlberg:
But thanks to the technical changes that have been made, including everything from drip irrigation to conservation tillage practices to GPS positioning, digital soil mapping, the use of variable rate input applications, robotics, drones, so many innovations have brought much greater precision to farming. The result is a much lighter use of inputs for every bushel that's produced.
Robert Paarlberg:
Most of my students out here in Massachusetts, think that corn production is terribly wasteful. It wastes energy. It uses too much land, too much irrigation water. It sends out too many greenhouse gas emissions.
Robert Paarlberg:
But if you look at corn production today compared to 1980, for each bushel of production, we use 30% less land. There's 67% less soil erosion. There's 53% less irrigation water applied, 43% less energy use and 36% fewer greenhouse gas emissions.
Robert Paarlberg:
We've really become green through the use of much more sophisticated, information-intensive, rather than resource-intensive production technologies.
Michaela Paukner:
The farmers who are listening to this, the strip-tillers and many no-till as well, they know these kinds of things, but it sounds like the struggle is getting the public to be aware of all the things that they're doing to produce the amount of food that we need, while also protecting the environment.
Michaela Paukner:
What would you say are some things that the individual farmer can do to combat that myth, that we need to go back to this labor-intensive, small farms in order to be sustainable?
Robert Paarlberg:
Well, that's a hard question. Hard to think of what one individual farmer can do. From the vantage point of those who think modern farming is unsustainable, probably the missing bit of information that they have is how much more food is being produced today.
Robert Paarlberg:
The United States is producing three times as much in its agricultural sector, as it did in 1948, three times as much. So, it's almost inevitable that significant environmental damage continues to be done. We need to improve farming.
Robert Paarlberg:
But what the critics need to imagine is how much more damage would be done, if we tried to triple production using the antiquated methods of 1948.
Robert Paarlberg:
We'd have to triple land use. We would use far more energy. Far more irrigation water would have to be applied. There'd be far more soil erosion.
Robert Paarlberg:
It's a counterfactual. It's something that people have to work hard to imagine. What would things look like if we produce today's quantity of food, using yesterday's methods? But you have to somehow show them those realities.
Robert Paarlberg:
What I do, I'm here in Massachusetts. We have a lot of farms in New England, but they don't produce very much food.
Robert Paarlberg:
People in New England love these small, local, organic farms that sell produce in a roadside stand or at a farmer's market, in the summer months.
Robert Paarlberg:
When you visit the farm, it's beautiful. They have a diverse mixture of crops. They have goats and sheep and chickens and a few pigs. It just looks lovely.
Robert Paarlberg:
These are friendly, smart, agreeable people. It's a wonderful summer treat to visit these farms. Most of my students think that this is the way all agriculture should look, but they don't realize how little food these farms produce.
Robert Paarlberg:
In my book, I point out that if you look at the farm sales made by all of the farms, large and small in all of New England... and that includes Rhode Island, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont and Maine, those represent only 1% of the total farm sales made every year in the United States.
Robert Paarlberg:
So, this is a lifestyle. It makes summer vacations in New England enjoyable, but it's not a way to provision the food needs of a modern society.
Michaela Paukner:
I also thought in your book, in the beginning of it, when you gave the example of the farmers you worked with in Uganda, where here are these people doing everything by hand and the way that a lot of people think we should go back to, to be sustainable, yet they're having trouble still feeding their kids too.
Michaela Paukner:
So, it was a really good example for me, to kind of picture the gains that we've made with commercial agriculture and how that's necessary to our food production.
Robert Paarlberg:
Yes. I work in Africa. I'm always disturbed to see how little progress smallholder farmers in Africa have made. It's because they don't have any of the things that successful commercial farmers in the rest of the world have used to boost their productivity, the productivity of their labor in particular and to escape poverty.
Robert Paarlberg:
They don't have purchased fertilizers. They can't afford fertilizer. They don't have a good road system, to either get their products out to the market or to bring inputs like fertilizer in, at an affordable price.
Robert Paarlberg:
Most smallholder farmers in Africa live more than two kilometers from the nearest all-weather road. So, their household transport consists of carrying things.
Robert Paarlberg:
They don't have veterinary medicine for their animals. They don't have electricity. They don't have irrigation. Only a tiny percentage of farms in Africa are irrigated.
Robert Paarlberg:
They don't have good rural clinics. They don't have good rural schools. These farmers are living in a poverty trap. They're essentially cut off from modern technologies and from the commercial markets that they need to use to increase their income.
Robert Paarlberg:
It's an irony. Because they can't afford fertilizer or pesticides, they're de facto organic. Because their road system is so, poor food doesn't move around very much. So, their food system is de facto local.
Robert Paarlberg:
People in the United States, some say, we should move from fast food to back to slow food. But they should go to Africa and see how much time it takes women in Africa... and most farmers in Africa are women, how long it takes them not just to plant and harvest their maize crop, but to then strip the ears and soak them and shell them and dry them and pound them. And then finally cook them over a handmade fire, into some porridge for their family.
Robert Paarlberg:
It takes more time than anyone would want to spend. And at the end of all those efforts, a significant portion of their children are still chronically malnourished because the food supply is scant.
Julia Gerlach:
We'll get back to the podcast in a moment, but I want to take time once again, to thank our sponsor, Bio Till Cover Crops Seed, for supporting today's episode. Bio Till Cover Crops, a pioneer and leader in cover crop seed, represents a complete lineup of seeds suitable to a wide range of soil types and growing conditions.
Julia Gerlach:
Bio Till Cover Crop vendors are committed to your success and provide local resources, education, guidance and tips and tricks, to ensure your plantings have the correct foundations for success.
Julia Gerlach:
The original producers of Bounty Annual Ryegrass, Bio Till Cover Crops continues to add new and improved cover crop and forage varieties, including Enricher Radish, Bayou Kale, Shield Broadleaf Mustard, African Forage Cabbage and Mihi Persian Clover.
Julia Gerlach:
With over 30 years of experience in production, processing, packaging and shipping, you won't be able to find a better fit for your farm anywhere else. Learn more at biotill.com. That's B-I-O-T-I-L-L.com. Now, back to the podcast.
Michaela Paukner:
In the book, you're making the case that larger and more specialized farms can do a better job of protecting the environment than those types of small and labor-intensive farms that a lot of sustainable farming advocates are envisioning. We've talked about this already, but why is that, that these larger farms will do a better job of that?
Robert Paarlberg:
Well, a lot of the precision agriculture applications that are doing the most to protect the environment, require sophisticated skills and expensive machinery. Expensive machinery doesn't pay off on a small farm.
Robert Paarlberg:
It only pays off if you have a large farm. That the leading adopters of, for example, variable rate technologies, variable rate application technologies and GPS positioning and soil mapping, digital soil mapping are the larger farms.
Robert Paarlberg:
If we had a nation of small farms, the adoption of those improved methods would lag well behind where it is today. Everyone complains, oh, well, we have a large farm model. 85% of what we produce is being produced by just the 7% of farms that are the largest.
Robert Paarlberg:
That's true. But the fact that 85% of what we produce is coming from large, highly capitalized farms, gives us an advantage in the uptake of these greenest technologies, technologies that use the fewest resources for bushel production and use those resources with the greatest precision.
Robert Paarlberg:
It's hard to make that case to people who've been told their whole life, that the countryside should be filled with a lot of small, local, diverse, traditional farms.
Robert Paarlberg:
People don't realize that our large commercial farms are almost entirely family owned. They don't look like the old, small, local, diverse family farms of the 1920s, but they're still for the most part, family owned.
Michaela Paukner:
Speaking of those large farms having the capital to adopt these things, I think of all that we're hearing right now about autonomous tractors and autonomous machines, that can take on even more of the work while reducing compaction and offering all these other benefits and how it's going to be an expensive practice to adopt, but it could be something that is really good for the environment, in general.
Robert Paarlberg:
Oh, yes. Yeah. There's a chapter in my book that looks at robotics. I don't talk about autonomous tractors, but I talk about a lot of robotic and autonomous equipment, especially for harvesting specialty crops, strawberries, for example, lettuce.
Robert Paarlberg:
These robotic technologies, it's like the rest of our economy. The great thing about agriculture in my view, is that it's becoming a little easier to understand because it's looking a lot more than in the past, like the rest of our economy.
Robert Paarlberg:
The rest of our economy is going digital. Well, so is agriculture. The rest of our economy is highly capitalized, large scale and specialized. Well, so is agriculture.
Robert Paarlberg:
These robotic technologies, like robots on the factory floor, can work 24 hours a day. They don't need a lunch break.
Robert Paarlberg:
A lot of autonomous farm equipment and robotic farm equipment works in the dark. It's no problem.
Robert Paarlberg:
The agricultural population of the past, the farm labor force of the past has already mostly left farming. The result of that was higher incomes for those who left and took higher paid work in town, and also higher incomes for those who remain behind.
Robert Paarlberg:
So, I'm not troubled by that trend. Like the rest of the economy, the most advanced segments of the rest of the economy, are also finding ways to replace labor.
Robert Paarlberg:
Of course, what that means is, you have to make adequate investments in the skill level of your workforce. You need to make adequate investments in education and in training. So that, those who leave agriculture or those who leave farm labor, for example, those who are picking strawberries in California today, who might be displaced by robotic pickers, you have to make sure that they have the educational attainment they need, to get a good employment off the farm, which is what most of them want.
Robert Paarlberg:
There are not a lot of Mexican strawberry pickers in California, who dream that their children will be doing that 30 years from now. They know that there's better work out there. In agriculture, there's better work out there, and they want their children to qualify.
Michaela Paukner:
Mm-hmm. The epilogue of your book, Resetting the Table is titled Straight Talk to Commercial Farmers. And in that section, you're arguing that commercial farming organizations should advocate for reforms to promote dietary health. What kinds of organizations should be doing that, and what should they be doing?
Robert Paarlberg:
I make this argument because I've noticed as concerns with dietary health have increased, too many people blame our poor dietary health on farming and not on the food manufacturing companies, that I think are primarily to blame.
Robert Paarlberg:
But then when I go to big meetings, whether it's a Farm Foundation meeting or a Farm Bureau Association meeting, I see representatives of the food industry there.
Robert Paarlberg:
They usually have a slot among the speakers. They describe themselves as partners with America's farmers. They say, we are the link between farmers and the American consumer.
Robert Paarlberg:
The agricultural organizations in the audience don't seem to understand how dangerous that is. If these food manufacturing companies get away with using the popularity of farmers as political cover, when the companies are criticized in the years ahead, the farmers are going to be criticized too.
Robert Paarlberg:
Farmers are already being criticized for our poor diets, unfairly. We're told that farm subsidies are making us fat. That's absolutely not true. We're told that the products we grow are making us fat, and that's not true either.
Robert Paarlberg:
But until farmers are willing to stand up and endorse improvements in dietary health, even if that means criticizing the food companies that are giving us all of these unhealthy products, the sooner that happens, I think the sooner farmers will be protected from the criticism that's otherwise coming their way.
Robert Paarlberg:
I noticed, for example, during the 2010 debate in Congress, over the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act that reformed school lunch menus, I think that was a good law.
Robert Paarlberg:
I thought that farm organizations should get behind it and endorse it. But instead, every little commodity group that thought they might lose something, fought against it, whether it was potato growers who wanted to keep French fries on the menu or tomato producers who wanted tomato sauce on pizza to be considered a vegetable.
Robert Paarlberg:
It was so conspicuously self-serving and so indifferent to the dietary health of America's school children. I thought those organizations missed an opportunity.
Robert Paarlberg:
I also thought they missed an opportunity by not getting onboard Michelle Obama's Let's Move program, which focused specifically on a childhood obesity.
Robert Paarlberg:
Here, it's funny because even the big food manufacturing companies endorsed that, even though they were at the source of most of the problems.
Robert Paarlberg:
Why wouldn't farm organizations be ready to stand up and agree, in principle, that dietary health is a serious concern, and we want to do something about it?
Robert Paarlberg:
I mean, I studied the SNAP program that was renewed in the 2018 farm bill. The American Heart Association and a few other public health organizations thought we should at least have a pilot program, to see what the health benefits might be if we removed sugar-sweetened beverages from eligibility, for purchase under the SNAP program.
Robert Paarlberg:
I thought that was something farm organizations could get onboard with. The total dollar value of the SNAP program wouldn't go down $1. You'd just be telling people if they wanted to drink sugary beverages, they'd have to pay for it out of their own pocket, rather than at the expense of the taxpayer.
Robert Paarlberg:
Not a single farm organization had anything good to say about even that private program, which was only designed to get better information on what the health benefits might be.
Michaela Paukner:
Mm-hmm. Why do you think that these organizations aren't standing up and taking the side of the healthy option, instead of the unhealthy option?
Robert Paarlberg:
Now, there are a couple of reasons. I look forward to being at the meeting in July, maybe to get thoughts of farmers who know this from a different angle. They know it personally and up close.
Robert Paarlberg:
One reason is the traditional relationship between commodity producers and food manufacturing companies. The food manufacturing companies are your primary customer. They're not the ultimate customer, but they're the primary customer.
Robert Paarlberg:
Most of them are located out in farm country, in the Midwestern part of the US. So, there's a cultural affinity with these food manufacturing companies.
Robert Paarlberg:
Also, our farmers notice that, well, these food companies are being criticized by food movement activists. We farmers are also being criticized by food movement activists. So, maybe these are our natural allies. We should join together with them, to fight back against the food movement activists. I think that's, as I say, a dangerous strategy.
Robert Paarlberg:
There's another reason. For this, I can't entirely blame farmers. Our political system now is polarized, politically. Most food movement activists, of course and most people who are promoting dietary health, identify more with the Democratic Party than with the Republican Party.
Robert Paarlberg:
Meanwhile, most farmers and the executives in most food manufacturing companies, identify primarily with the Republican Party.
Robert Paarlberg:
So, it's politically awkward for commercial farmers and farm organizations who identify with the Republican Party, to reach across the aisle and look for ways to work with the American Heart Association, for example, which like most public health organizations, is more comfortable working with Democrats.
Michaela Paukner:
What do you think needs to happen to get farm organizations aligning themselves with the more dietary helpful side of things?
Robert Paarlberg:
Well, it's frustrating because farmers and farm organizations wouldn't have to change the way they farm to do that. All they'd have to do is start paying a little more attention to the health concerns of public health and dietary health and consumer advocates.
Robert Paarlberg:
Right now, farmers say, well, we're giving you safe food. It is safe when it leaves the farm. We're giving you affordable food. It is more affordable than ever before.
Robert Paarlberg:
But safe and affordable, that's the old story. We solved those problems a long time ago. What we now need is foods reaching consumers that aren't obesity inducing because they have too much salt, sugar and fat, and to listen to those concerns and change the standard recital.
Robert Paarlberg:
The good things farms are doing for consumers, neglects the real source of the trouble, which is I think, that the dangerous things food companies are doing to the products of farms.
Robert Paarlberg:
What's interesting also, is these food companies are not 10 feet tall. They're under a lot of pressure now, from consumers, to clean up their labels, to get mysterious ingredients out of the products, to reduce added sugars, to reduce the ultra processing.
Robert Paarlberg:
They're coming under the gun. So, you can't look at them as a source of protection anymore.
Michaela Paukner:
Right.
Robert Paarlberg:
They're gonna be just as vulnerable as commercial farmers. And unless you can create some political space between you and these food companies, you risk going down with them.
Michaela Paukner:
Was there anything else you wanted to talk about today, that you haven't mentioned?
Robert Paarlberg:
My book just won a prize. It was given a gold award by the Nautilus Book Award organization, which runs an international competition.
Robert Paarlberg:
My book won in the category for green sustainability. So, maybe that'll give me some political cover from those who think that my praise for commercial agriculture ignores environmental concerns.
Michaela Paukner:
Well, congratulations on the award. It is like you said. It's interesting how it's been polarized to want healthy food and food that is produced in a way that's good for the environment and ultimately everybody. Hopefully you can help bring some people together.
Robert Paarlberg:
I hope so. I'll give it a try.
Julia Gerlach:
Thanks to Rob Paarlberg for sharing his thoughts on sustainable agriculture. To listen to more podcasts about no-till topics and strategies, please visit NoTillFarmer.com/podcasts.
Julia Gerlach:
Once again, we'd like to thank our sponsor, Bio Till Cover Crops seed, for helping to make this no-till podcast series possible. If you have any feedback on today's episode, please feel free to email me at JGerlach@LessiterMedia.com or call me at (262) 777-2404.
Julia Gerlach:
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