Farm to Taber Podcast

Farm to Taber is back! We've moved to Acast because it's easier to do certain podcast-y things there. Farm to Taber's now on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, Spotify, and all the usual podcast outlets. Patreon & Kofi followers get monthly bonus episodes. RSS: https://feeds.acast.com/public/shows/63d97cdef2393300101e05e2 Website: https://shows.acast.com/farm-to-taber Patreon: patreon.com/farmtotaber Kofi: https://ko-fi.com/farmtotaber

Today we're going to talk cleaning up the food system. If you've been listening to Farm to Taber long, you probably know I think a lot of the "save the world" branding in the sustainability industry is just greenwashing. I think the Equitable Food Initiative is legit. We're going to talk about how it works.

Rebecca Seidel is a young farmer, making a way for herself to stay in agriculture by making cheese. Making cheese, butter, and other dairy products at the farmstead level has been women's work for hundreds of years. In addition to cheese, Rebecca serves up info on dairy life, economics, and what dairying has to do with feminism: a LOT. This episode split into 2 parts (even though I said I wasn't doing that anymore) because the whole thing is too long to post to Patreon in one piece. Rebeccca's on twitter! You can find her at @casein_micelles.

Rebecca Seidel is a young farmer, making a way for herself to stay in agriculture by making cheese. Making cheese, butter, and other dairy products at the farmstead level has been women's work for hundreds of years. In addition to cheese, Rebecca serves up info on dairy life, economics, and what dairying has to do with feminism: a LOT. I know I said I wasn't splitting the episodes into multiple segments anymore, but this one went so long that it had to be split to fit onto Patreon. Rebecca's on twitter! You can find her at @casein_micelles.

Tamar Haspel is a journalist, oyster farmer, and fellow traveler on the "looking past the PR into what really happens in agriculture" road. This one was so fun to do.

Josh Specht is a historian of beef. We talk about how ranching started out dominated by corporations & family ranches took over later, the rise of the Chicago meatpackers, and how the beef industry is still shaped more by what it's used to doing thanks to its history than by what makes sense today.

Jordan Hoewischer is a multigenerational family farmer & works for the Ohio Farm Bureau, working with farms to conserve soil and protect local watersheds. Some of his work can be seen here at the Ohio Farm Bureau website.

Deb Krol is a journalist from the Xolon (Jolon) Salinan tribe of Central California. Now based in the US Southwest, Debra covers a lot of indigenous agriculture. That includes the traditional scale that most folks would probably think of, but there are also a lot of larger Native-owned modern operations that make up a major part of the US food system. Debra has so many great stories and insights about this huge part of the US food supply that usually get overlooked.

Fifth & final segment of the interview with Travis!

Part four of 5 in the interview with Travis!

Travis Higginbotham has an extremely niche job: he's a trainer for cannabis growers. It's a pretty straightforward plant to grow in a backyard or closet. But as the crop legalizes and greenhouses and indoor grows get larger, normal crop issues like IPM (integrated pest management), worker safety, and sustainability come to the fore. So in the interest of making larger-scale crop knowledge accessible, Travis & I got together & nerded out about running cannabis grows. This interview was super long, so it's divided into 5 parts. The first two are here on Soundcloud, and the next three will post once a month. If you Must Have The Whole Thing immediately, the full 5-part series is available on Patreon at the $5 level as well: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=5610560

Part two of the interview with Travis! The rest of this 5-episode series will post monthly, or you can listen to all 5 right away on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=5610560

Travis Higginbotham has an extremely niche job: he's a trainer for cannabis growers. It's a pretty straightforward plant to grow in a backyard or closet. But as the crop legalizes and greenhouses and indoor grows get larger, normal crop issues like IPM (integrated pest management), worker safety, and sustainability come to the fore. So in the interest of making larger-scale crop knowledge accessible, Travis & I got together & nerded out about running cannabis grows. This interview was super long, so it's divided into 5 parts. The first two are here on Soundcloud, and the next three will post once a month. If you Must Have The Whole Thing immediately, the full 5-part series is available on Patreon at the $5 level as well: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=5610560

Caitlin Rosenthal is a former McKinsey consultant turned historian of business practices, teaching at UC-Berkeley. Her recent book Accounting for Slavery traces how US business culture and practices were not born in the Industrial Revolution and northern factories as commonly believed, but on Southern and Caribbean plantations. She can be found on Twitter at @CC_Rosenthal .

Caitlin Rosenthal is a former McKinsey consultant turned historian of business practices, teaching at UC-Berkeley. Her recent book Accounting for Slavery traces how US business culture and practices were not born in the Industrial Revolution and northern factories as commonly believed, but on Southern and Caribbean plantations. She can be found on Twitter at @CC_Rosenthal .

Patrick Wyman is a historian and host of the Tides of History podcast. He grew up in eastern Washington doing a lot of construction & farm jobs. Hope you have as much fun listening as we did comparing notes on rural bosses throughout the ages.

Patrick Wyman is a historian and host of the Tides of History podcast. He grew up in eastern Washington doing a lot of construction & farm jobs. Hope you have as much fun listening as we did comparing notes on rural bosses throughout the ages.

Joe Swartz is a 4th generation farmer who started using hydroponics back in its early days—the 1980s—to help keep his family’s small farm open. Some thirty years later, it’s the longest-running hydroponic operation in the US northeast. Joe’s main job now is training new growers. In a hydro industry that’s full of hot new tools, Joe’s a great witness to how they’re still just tools. Running a good operation is still about making sure those tools serve the plants, and the humans on deck have all the training & support they need to use the tools properly.

Joe Swartz is a 4th generation farmer who started using hydroponics back in its early days—the 1980s—to help keep his family’s small farm open. Some thirty years later, it’s the longest-running hydroponic operation in the US northeast. Joe’s main job now is training new growers. In a hydro industry that’s full of hot new tools, Joe’s a great witness to how they’re still just tools. Running a good operation is still about making sure those tools serve the plants, and the humans on deck have all the training & support they need to use the tools properly.

Mike McGolden is an engineer who builds equipment for making biochar. We talk about the drama of getting new green technologies ready to use, and the additional drama of convincing people to use it once it’s ready.

Mike McGolden is an engineer who builds equipment for making biochar. We talk about the drama of getting new green technologies ready to use, and the additional drama of convincing people to use it once it’s ready.

Chris Summers is Global Director of Food Safety and Compliance for Mission Produce—an avocado company. Every organization needs people like Chris in them to, as we say in the world of safety professionals, make sure shit doesn't get crazy. Some companies use that person better than others. I’ve done some work with Mission and liked what I saw, so today we’re having Chris on to talk about what he does.

Chris Summers is Global Director of Food Safety and Compliance for Mission Produce—an avocado company. Every organization needs people like Chris in them to, as we say in the world of safety professionals, make sure shit doesn't get crazy. Some companies use that person better than others. I’ve done some work with Mission and liked what I saw, so today we’re having Chris on to talk about what he does.

Saadia Muzaffar is a tech person based in Toronto. This podcast, we talk about what we can learn about “software eating the world” from that one time colonial agriculture ate North America. People, books, & orgs mentioned in this podcast: TechGirls Canada https://www.techgirls.ca/ Tech Reset Canada https://www.techresetcanada.org/ Melissa & John Nightingale at Raw Signal Group https://www.rawsignal.ca/

Saadia Muzaffar is a tech person based in Toronto. This podcast, we talk about what we can learn about “software eating the world” from that one time colonial agriculture ate North America. People, books, & orgs mentioned in this podcast: TechGirls Canada https://www.techgirls.ca/ Tech Reset Canada https://www.techresetcanada.org/ Melissa & John Nightingale at Raw Signal Group https://www.rawsignal.ca/

This segment of the interview was recorded while I was still traveling around for field season & didn’t have access to the usual recording setup. Everything's perfectly audible but the sound quality is a little rustic. iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/farm-to-taber/id1418015843?mt=2 Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/farm-to-taber-podcast RSS subscribe: http://feeds.soundcloud.com/users/soundcloud:users:432549147/sounds.rss Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=5610560 Donate: https://paypal.me/farmtotaber Twitter: https://twitter.com/farmtotaberpod?lang=en Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/FarmToTaber/ •  Books, organizations, websites, etc mentioned during the podcast The Cooking Gene by Michael Twitty: https://thecookinggene.com/ The lettuce harvester tool Sarah was talking about: it’s so well-meant and it's the worst piece of farm equipment I’ve ever seen in my life. Lord help us all. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OPIfw5_WoLU Why Does He Do That? Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men by Lundy Bancroft. A must-read book by a therapist on how abusive men keep people under their thumbs, and why most of them don’t change: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/289845/why-does-he-do-that-by-lundy-bancroft/9780425191651/ Oregon wine grape growers providing funds for farmworker health care: https://www.oregonlive.com/foodday/2011/08/health_care_comes_to_vineyard.html

Keri Leigh Merritt is a historian who studies how white supremacy fucks over everyone including white people. We had a good time. iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/farm-to-taber/id1418015843?mt=2 Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/farm-to-taber-podcast RSS subscribe: http://feeds.soundcloud.com/users/soundcloud:users:432549147/sounds.rss Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=5610560 Donate: https://paypal.me/farmtotaber Twitter: https://twitter.com/farmtotaberpod?lang=en Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/FarmToTaber/ Books, organizations, websites, etc mentioned during the podcast Masterless Men by Dr Keri Leigh Merritt: https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/masterless-men/4DA0CAD8D061BD3681AB01EFF24D6D44 Nobody Should Be Talking About Beto and Gillum in 2020 Until We Understand Stacey Abrams in 2018: from The Root about Stacey Abrams’s boom in support among rural white voters. https://www.theroot.com/nobody-should-be-talking-about-beto-and-gillum-in-2020-1831061434 Case and Deaton paper on shortening life expectancies among white non-Hispanic Americans: https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/casetextsp17bpea.pdf

This episode takes us on a brief global history of biochar and poop. Listen and find out what sewage history has to do with warfare, early globalization, organic certification, and beer. iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/farm-to-taber/id1418015843?mt=2 Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/farm-to-taber-podcast RSS subscribe: http://feeds.soundcloud.com/users/soundcloud:users:432549147/sounds.rss Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=5610560 Donate: https://paypal.me/farmtotaber Twitter: https://twitter.com/farmtotaberpod?lang=en Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/FarmToTaber/ Sources: Alabama Shit Train: “A ‘poop train’ from New York befouled a small Alabama town, until the town fought back.” Erin Shaw Street, Washington Post, 20 April 2018 England and China handled human waste very differently: Dean Ferguson, “Nightsoil and the ‘Great Divergence’: human waste, the urban economy, and economic productivity, 1500-1900” in Journal of Global History, 2014, 9(3):379-402 Justus von Liebig quote about England being a “vampire upon the breast of Europe” Coprolite mining http://www.bedfordshiregeologygroup.org.uk/leaflets/BLGGCoprolites.pdf Terra preta & what it’s made of: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2311424/ Beer history/IPA made possible by coke (basically biochar made from coal): Encyclopedia Britannica: A Dictionary of Arts, Sciences, and General Literature 1893 Guano islands off of Peru: https://www.audubon.org/news/holy-crap-trip-worlds-largest-guano-producing-islands

Michelle Allison is a nutritionist who teaches her clients how to eat to be healthy and feel strong, wherever that takes them—rather than trying to make their body look a certain way. Her website is http://www.fatnutritionist.com/ and she can be found on twitter at @fatnutritionist. iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/farm-to-taber/id1418015843?mt=2 Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/farm-to-taber-podcast RSS subscribe: http://feeds.soundcloud.com/users/soundcloud:users:432549147/sounds.rss Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=5610560 Donate: https://paypal.me/farmtotaber Twitter: https://twitter.com/farmtotaberpod?lang=en Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/FarmToTaber/ Books, people, websites, & more mentioned in this interview Terror management theory: good overview at https://ernestbecker.org/resources/terror-management-theory/. There’s also a decent entry on terror management on Wikipedia. Both of these links have great collections of resources if you’d like to know more. Decolonizing Fitness is a trans-friendly, fitness-at-every-size personal training practice based in Charlotte, North Carolina. You can find them at https://decolonizingfitness.com/. Diversifying Dietetics: This Atlanta-based group supports BIPOC working in nutrition (traditionally a very white field), and pushes the field of nutrition to be more culturally competent—to know how to recommend healthy diets in all kinds of foodways, not just WASP and “fusion” cooking. They can be found at https://www.diversifydietetics.org/. The Cooking Gene: a book on Blackness, farming, and glorious Southern food. Credits Sound design & edits: Nat Weiner Transcript: Tanja Drayton Intro music: Fight ‘Em Down, Flash Fluharty

Michelle Allison is a nutritionist who teaches her clients how to eat to be healthy and feel strong, wherever that takes them—rather than trying to make their body look a certain way. Her website is http://www.fatnutritionist.com/ and she can be found on twitter at @fatnutritionist. iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/farm-to-taber/id1418015843?mt=2 Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/farm-to-taber-podcast RSS subscribe: http://feeds.soundcloud.com/users/soundcloud:users:432549147/sounds.rss Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=5610560 Donate: https://paypal.me/farmtotaber Twitter: https://twitter.com/farmtotaberpod?lang=en Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/FarmToTaber/ Books, people, websites, & more mentioned in this interview Terror management theory: good overview at https://ernestbecker.org/resources/terror-management-theory/. There’s also a decent entry on terror management on Wikipedia. Both of these links have great collections of resources if you’d like to know more. Decolonizing Fitness is a trans-friendly, fitness-at-every-size personal training practice based in Charlotte, North Carolina. You can find them at https://decolonizingfitness.com/. Diversifying Dietetics: This Atlanta-based group supports BIPOC working in nutrition (traditionally a very white field), and pushes the field of nutrition to be more culturally competent—to know how to recommend healthy diets in all kinds of foodways, not just WASP and “fusion” cooking. They can be found at https://www.diversifydietetics.org/. The Cooking Gene: a book on Blackness, farming, and glorious Southern food. Credits Sound design & edits: Nat Weiner Transcript: Tanja Drayton Intro music: Fight ‘Em Down, Flash Fluharty

This episode is a deep dive into the people side of agriculture. Farm to Taber talks with criminologist Alex Tepperman about systematic bad decisions in criminal justice, and how these decisions played out in the past and today. In the second half, we take on the difficulty of making *good* decisions.

Chris Higgins, greenhouse pro, joins the podcast to nerd out about crop breeding, greenhouses, and the next steps forward in indoor farming.

Special guest & rancher Meg Brown (@MegRaeB on Twitter) joins us to talk the real stuff: the real-world consequences of the isolation that comes with farming, and the macho culture that doesn't need to be part of it but often is.

Family farming isn't all rainbows and unicorns. This episode talks about the history of how America's family farms came to be, how that's shaped them to this day, the rise of agribusiness, and what this means for sustainable agriculture moving forward.

This episode talks about the shady side of honeybees- their role in the colonization of the Americas, why they're not actually that great at pollinating, and why we're still obsessed with them anyway.

Join us with Jim Pantaleo to talk the blood & guts of financial sustainability for indoor farming. We're talking crop selection, tools and equipment, marketing, wrangling buildings, and more.

What do donuts, cars, and grassed beef have in common? Careful design- not just for the final product, but careful design of the process used to make them. "How They're Made" Videos Dunkin Donuts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AVDdjrr670o Krispy Kreme: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rn0XsW2l4d4 Duck Donuts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjaCcm9-_EI

Dr Brandon Ross joins us to talk about how farming inside a building works... and sometimes doesn't. This episode features design principles, interdisciplinary culture clashes, cannabis engineering, and more.

As immigration for farm work slows, farms are beginning to turn to convict labor. Host Sarah Taber talks about her experiences with prison labor on farms and what it means for both agriculture and due process.