Latashia Redhouse is director of the American Indian Foods program at the Intertribal Agriculture Council, where she supports food producers across the country to get their food to consumers in the US and beyond—while encouraging traditional and regenerative agriculture practices.

Down to Earth: The Planet to Plate Podcast

Tribal food renaissance

William deBuys is a prolific author of books documenting people's relationship to the earth—which is too often destructive. In his new book, The Trail to Kanjiroba: Rediscovering Earth in an Age of Loss, he writes of an expedition to Nepal that he made with a group of doctors and other medical professionals, led by American Zen Buddhist Roshi Joan Halifax, and reflects on what it means to care for an ailing earth as doctors care for patients. 

From despair to care

James Rebanks is the author of the newly-released book Pastoral Song: A Farmer’s Journey, which recently won the 2021 Wainwright prize for UK Nature writing, and best-seller The Shepherd's Life: Modern Dispatches from an Ancient Landscape. His books explore the experience of being a farmer from a millennia-old farming tradition that was almost lost to "improvement." Wonderfully written and highly readable, these accounts of his life in the Lake District of Cumbria, England, give us a lived sense of the promise of industrialism, the genuine short-term gains, the nuances of what went wrong and why...and the reality that there are no clear heroes and villains, but rather it's a truly complex system that has to be managed for land and human health if we want to survive.

Stepping back from the abyss

Sandra Postel has devoted her life to studying the world's freshwater systems, and they're not looking so great right now. Through a combination of over-allocation, over-engineering, over-use, and climate change, we'll be in trouble if we don't address the problem soon—in fact, we're in trouble now. But the solutions are there, and already in place on a small scale, and they involve working with nature rather than against it to restore the natural flows and stay in balance.  

Restoring the global water cycle

Many of us were taught that microbes—and bacteria in particular—were dangerous pathogens, and the safest thing human beings could do was create a sterile, bacteria-free environment. But in fact microbes are absolutely essential to human health, the health of the soil, and to pretty much all life on earth. Dr. Emeran Mayer is a gastroenterologist, executive director of the G. Oppenheimer Center for Neurobiology of Stress and Resilience, and the director of the UCLA Microbiome Center. And he’s author of the new book, The Gut-Immune Connection. We talk about how the human microbiome functions, how it's stressed by the standard American diet (SAD) and lifestyle—and the deep interconnections between the human gut and the destruction of the soil microbiome by intensive chemical agriculture. And yes, there are good solutions—if we have the knowledge and will to make them happen.

How—and why—to be good to your microbes

Reese Baker has been designing permaculture landscapes for many years, and with his family has turned his home on a quarter-acre lot in Santa Fe, NM into a teeming oasis of life, complete with wetlands, a pond, trees, and food and flower gardens—not to mention bats, pollinators, fungi, soil life, and other friendly creatures. His vision for Santa Fe is to make it a pilot city for large scale water conservation, capturing each drop of rain to grow gardens and trees, and lessening the pressure on municipal water systems while increasing local food production. 

Lush and abundant biodiversity—in a desert city

Gordon Tooley and his wife Margaret Yancey started Tooley's Trees in Truchas, New Mexico, in the early 1990s. They grow and sell rare and heirloom trees that are well adapted to the semi-arid climate of the region. But just as important as the business is the history of these fruit trees and the genetic preservation of varieties that have very specific characteristics and uses--and the way of life that cultivates a deep relationship with the wildlife, soil, water, and even air in their particular place. We talk about what it means to choose a slower pace of life that favors close observation and low-tech tools over instant gratification. This interview is part the Good Earth series, a project supported by the New Mexico Department of Agriculture Healthy Soils Initiative and led by photographer Esha Chiocchio. It features a set of eight videos on soil stewards in New Mexico. Please check out the short videos here.

The deep history of apples

Steve Wood is an apple grower and cider maker in Lebanon, New Hampshire, and he's been working on the family orchard since he was a child. Dubbed the Godfather of the hard cider industry in the US, he's one of the New England's leading voices on Integrated Pest Management—a way of keeping creatures of all kinds from destroying the trees and their fruit while minimizing harm to the ecosystem.

Pests, pathogens, and porcupines

Dr. Robin Hadlock Seeley grew up in Maine and has dedicated her life as a scientist to the preservation of coastal ecosystems—in particular a form of seaweed called rockweed. Severine von Tscharner Fleming is a farmer and activist whose farm is on the Maine coast where rockweed is being harvested by the ton and shipped all over the world. What is the function of rockweed in ecosystems, and what would sustainable harvesting—as opposed to extractive mining—of rockweed look like?

Rockweed: underwater forest or industrial commodity?

Jesse Smith was studying design when he was asked, how can you make something that gets better than age? Intrigued by the question of how to design stuff that won't end up being thrown in the trash, he found his way to agricultural systems, cultured foods, and a community-based way of life. As director of stewardship at the White Buffalo Land Trust, which recently bought the Jalama Canyon Ranch near Santa Barbara, California, he is working with a team to bring back a degraded landscape using grazing animals, agroforestry, and healthy soil practices, and creating an agricultural, educational, and economic model for regenerative local food systems.

Designing systems that improve as they age

Carrie Balkcom grew up on a cattle ranch in Florida. In 2003 she returned to her roots when she became the executive director of the American Grassfed Association at its founding--and she's been there ever since. AGA certifies pasture-raised livestock--and not just beef--and they help producers develop and sustain regenerative practices for the sake of the animals, the land, and the consumer.

Into the Pasture: Grassfed Goes Mainstream

Nicolette Hahn Niman never thought that she would have anything positive to say about animal agriculture. An environmental lawyer and a committed vegetarian who had seen the horrors of industrial livestock production up close, her life changed when she married a rancher and began to perceive the complexities of both animal and crop production. She's author of the book, Defending Beef: The Ecological and Nutritional Case for Meat, and we talk about the new and updated edition of the book, in which she makes the case that well-raised livestock can be part of the climate solution--and that good meat can improve human health. 

Busting myths about beef

Omar de Kok-Mercado Scientist with background in Agro-ecology, Soil Microbiology and Biochemistry, and he’s at Iowa State University working on a project that integrates prairie strips into row-crop agriculture. By working with farmers to plant strips of land—"prairie strips—with native prairie vegetation, he and his team are working to bring back healthy soil, wildlife, corridors, a healthy water cycle, and innumerable potential benefits to land that is currently being cultivated in ways that are not sustainable in the long run.

Transforming the American Prairie, one strip at a time

Beth Robinette is a fourth generation rancher in Eastern Washington State, where she and her family run a grassfed beef operation, the Lazy R Ranch, based on holistic management principles. She’s co-founder of LINC Foods (Local Inland Northwest Cooperative), a local food hub based in Spokane Washington; and she runs the New Cowgirl Camp, an intensive ranching retreat for women, and New Rancher Camp, which is for both men and women.

Welcome to Cowgirl Camp!

Lucille Contreras discovered her Lipan Apache roots as a young adult. After working in IT for many years, she founded the Texas Tribal Buffalo Project as a way of bringing together the Lipan diaspora, cultivating healthy land and food, rescuing the language, and honoring the co-existence of people and buffalo on their native lands.

Lipan Apache: Bringing back the buffalo in Texas

Down to Earth is a podcast about hope. As climate change collides with our industrial food system, we focus not on doom but instead on people who are developing practical, innovative solutions. We invite you to meet farmers, ranchers, scientists, land managers, writers, and many others on a mission to create a world in which the food we eat is healthy—for us, for the land and water from which it springs, for the lives and livelihoods of the producers, and for the planet.

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Down to Earth: The Planet to Plate Podcast

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