EP4: Fields to Seas: How Chemical Agriculture Fuels Ocean Dead Zones with David Kirchman

The conversation covers the impact of dead zones on aquatic habitats, the causes of dead zones, the role of nutrients in dead zone formation, the historical context of dead zones, the impact of agriculture and biofuels on dead zones, and the trade-offs associated with reducing dead zones

Episode Transcript

(00:02):
Got it.
Okay.
All right.
Well, David, thank you for being on theshow today.
And I've been very excited for this.
I've read I've read most of your book andI've been looking at the different ways in
which I impact some of these things thatyou've been writing about, particularly
the dead zones.

(00:23):
And I actually was walking the other dayand I saw a sign on one of the neighbor's
yards.
It's a little placard that says, you know,
pesticide has been applied, no dogs, nokids, nobody walk on this essentially.
And we're actually currently in aneighborhood where this is all protected
wetlands down below us.

(00:44):
So roughly only 30 yards beyond the wallin this room is wetlands.
And yet we still have these pesticidesbeing applied to a lawn just right down
the way, which inevitably will wash downinto it.
So.
That's right.
If you want to start with just, you know,introduce yourself, tell us, you know,

(01:05):
where are you from originally?
What you know, what your career hasentailed and just start there?
Sure, sure.
Well, I'm just retired as a professor atthe University of Delaware.
People when people ask me, I usually don'tsay marine biologists because I work on
the smallest organisms.
And so that's kind of far from marinebiology.

(01:26):
I do kind of microbial ecology.
microbial oceanography.
I've been around the world on varioustypes of oceanographic ships.
And now I am mainly trying to write upvarious books on topics that I think are
important about their environment,including climate change and the dead

(01:50):
zones was one of those books.
I grew up pretty far from the oceans.
I grew up in Wisconsin, near Green Bay,Wisconsin.
So my ocean was Lake Michigan.
and I found myself to the University ofDelaware because it's a great place, a
great place to work, and where I live isreally nice love.

(02:11):
It's really famous for its beaches andother aspects of the environment.
So that's a little bit of myself.
All right.
And so how long ago was it that you wrotethis book on the dead zones?
I think...
Well, I had the idea maybe as much as 10years ago.

(02:33):
I was involved with doing research.
And doing research doesn't leave a lot oftime in teaching.
It doesn't leave a lot of time to writebooks.
I wrote a textbook about microbial ecologythat took a lot of my time.
But I had this idea and I, of course,realized the importance of dissolved
oxygen and the environmental problem thatwe have of it disappearing.

(02:59):
several years ago.
And when I finally had time to beginwriting, it was probably about two years
ago or three years ago.
So that's roughly when I started the bookin earnest.
All right.
All right.
And so why don't you lead us in and kindof just give us a broad overview of what

(03:19):
is a dead zone?
Right, right.
So a dead zone, the term was coined forthe Gulf of Mexico, northern part of the
Gulf of Mexico.
And it refers to bodies of water, andoften it's the bottom layer of aquatic
habitat that just runs out of oxygen.

(03:39):
Technically, it's anything less than twomilligrams of oxygen per liter, whereas
oxygen normally is roughly at eightmilligrams.
So two is very low.
And now there are some organisms that cansurvive that level of oxygen, at least for
short periods of time.
Many are wiped out, they're killedeventually by that level of oxygen.

(04:04):
And so that's why it earned its name thedead zone because so many origins are
killed.
And we see it, those of us who live on thecoastal regions can see the effect of a
dead zone because we see dead fish washingon our beaches.
But in fact, you don't need to see deadfish to have a dead zone near you if you

(04:27):
live on the coast.
That's one of the problems of makingpeople aware of the problem is that it's
often at the bottom of aquatic habitat andnot visible at surface.
So it started in the northern, it wasfirst coined in the Gulf of Mexico, but in
fact, there are dead zones all over theworld.

(04:48):
Near me, there's the Chesapeake Bay isanother big dead zone.
So they're all over the place.
Right.
You said there's roughly, I think 900today or something like that.
That's right.
It's somewhat hard.
We know the best about those in the USbecause of everyone working on them, in
Europe.
But then you go into Europe and to some ofthe Pacific Islands.

(05:12):
There's some surprising problems nearcoral reefs that are running out of
oxygen.
So that's where it gets a little dicey interms of how you count it.
But yes, the number may be 900, maybe asmuch as 1 ,000.
So we.
There was for a while there an increase intrend, but we've probably have discovered
many of the, certainly the biggest onesand the trend in terms of increasing

(05:36):
number of dead zones is bottom out, Ithink.
And that's only because we found them all.
But what's also a concern is that many ofthese are getting bigger.
They're not going away.
They're getting larger, not smaller.
Right.
And so...
from a scientific point of view, the nextquestion is why?

(05:58):
Why is this happening?
What's the cause?
And that's really a lot of what your bookfocuses on is looking at several different
prominent dead zones and going into, okay,what's the cause?
And so for someone like me who, you know,I don't have a science background, it can
be quite difficult to digest.

(06:18):
So why don't you start us though with thestory?
I love the chapter that was titled, TheGreat Steep.
And tell us about the great stink a littlebit and how that applies to this whole
situation.
Sure.
The great stink was coined for the RiverThames in the mid 19th century for London.

(06:39):
And it referred to the fact that, well,the River Thames stank so badly that
people just couldn't use it anymore.
There's all these horror stories of thenobility and the parliament not being able
to
a whole, they're going to cession becausethe stink was so bad coming from the
river.

(06:59):
And the problem there, it certainly was adead zone.
There was no auction.
You don't get those type of odors whenthere's auction around.
And the problem there was caused by allthe garbage and raw sewage going into the
temps.
And that's what, and the factory used upthat organic material trying to degrade it

(07:22):
and used up the auction.
in the meantime.
So those bacteria are basically doing thesame metabolism that we are doing right
now as we talk.
We take in organic material, we call itfood.
In order to break down that organicmaterial and get energy from it and to
make other compounds and material that weneed to maintain ourselves, we need

(07:45):
oxygen.
And so that's what these bacteria aredoing.
They're breaking down that organicmaterial.
and using oxygen in the meantime.
And what happened in the River Thames, andthen what happened also in many other
rivers where raw sewage was being dumpedinto them, was that there was just not
enough oxygen compared to the amount oforganic material, roughly, really raw

(08:08):
sewage going into these rivers.
And they just stank because all thesechemicals were released that would
normally be degraded with oxygen aspresent.
That's also where the term, right?
I mean, they would call that a cesspool,right?
Each household had a cesspool.

(08:28):
That's right.
Instead of each household having thecesspool, the sewage system basically
transferred the River Thames into onegiant cesspool.
So it just transferred the problem fromsmall -scale individual houses to the
river itself.
And it happened.
I mean, the great state...

(08:49):
refers to the River Thames, but ithappened near where I lived, the Delaware
River, also staying really bad south ofthe Philadelphia metropolitan area.
And it is the same problem because they'rejust dumping raw sewage into the river.
And what was the significance of thatstory?

(09:10):
So, I mean, bad smells are not good.
No one likes them.
No one likes to live on a river.
that stinks so badly, but the real problemin the River Thames and then also in the
Delaware River early 20th century were thediseases that came with that sewage.
So back in the 19th century, there wasthis thought that disease were actually

(09:34):
caused by the bad odors.
But later we soon realized is of coursethat the bacteria and the viruses that
were causing these diseases.
So the raw sewage,
The real problem there going into therivers was that those rivers were being
used as drinking water and people weregetting sick and dying, especially of

(09:56):
cholera and other diseases in the RiverThames and then in the Delaware River in
the US and other rivers around the worldbefore we realized the importance of
adequately treating our sewage.
And this kind of leads to some of thefirst
big pushes for wastewater treatment,right?

(10:18):
Is that correct?
That's right.
I mean, back, I mean, there were attemptsto clean up the sewage because there's
many reasons to do so.
Before the Clean Water Act, I think whatyou're referring to is the Clean Water Act
of 1972, one of the most important acts ofCongress to force cities to clean up their

(10:42):
act.
But there were attempts before that toinstall sewage treatment plants and to
sterilize water before people drank it.
But it was all those problems associatedwith what we now call dead zones that kind
of forced the Clean Water Act to beenacted.

(11:05):
And that led to tremendous improvement inrivers and
other in lakes in this country.
And there's similar stories in Europe aswell.
Right.
Yeah, it reminds me of when I studied thefirst time I went to India and I studied
there, you know, getting to Varanasi andseeing the Ganga, you know, the Ganges

(11:28):
River, which is just this, you know,sacred of all sacred places.
I mean, the city of Varanasi really justvibrates.
a spiritual energy that is unfelt.
And I mean, it's it's you feel it in yourbones when you're there.
But you also see just you can literallysee the waste coming from the city flowing

(11:48):
down into the river and you see this riverjust massively polluted.
And coming back to the states, you startto see that, OK, wait a second, like we we
do have a lot of.
There's a lot to be said about fundamentalthings such as wastewater treatment and

(12:08):
properly managing these things.
That's right.
I mean, wastewater treatment and generalsanitation has been one of the key
successes of why we live as long as we do.
You can talk about all the advances inmedicine, but it was in antibiotics, of
course, that are really important too.
But just having clean water is just soimportant for people's health.

(12:32):
Right.
Right.
And so now it starts to get a little bitmore complex as the investigation into,
okay, what's driving the Gulf Coast deadzone versus the Baltic Sea dead zones?

(12:53):
And so tell us a little bit about it.
Tell us a little bit about what are someof the initial assumptions and how is that
investigation?
developing and evolving over time.
Right.
So, so the, I mean, I should say that westill have some problems with rivers.
I don't think we're, you know, like wecould do be even a better job and cleaning

(13:16):
up what goes into rivers.
But you're right.
The, the story, when we get to the Gulf ofMexico and Europe, the Baltic sea and
other places around the world, it's notthe raw sewage.
I mean, yes, again, there are places whereyou have that problem.
But sewage treatment plants have stoppedthose.
Now the problem there is the nutrientsthat are going into these waters.

(13:40):
And the nutrients, what they're doing isthat they're stimulating algae to grow
much more so than they should be grown.
We're having these algal blooms in thesewaters.
And then the story becomes just like whathappened to River Thames in the 19th
century.
The organic material made by the algae

(14:00):
in this case sinks to the bottom whereit's used up by the bacteria.
And in the process, they use up all theoxygen and the place gets turned into a
dead zone.
So at the end of the whole story, it'sagain, the bacteria for the most part
using up all the oxygen while trying todegrade all this organic material.

(14:23):
And now the organic material comes fromalgae instead of the sewage treatment
plant.
the algae are being pumped up too much bythe nutrients flowing into say the Gulf of
Mexico.
So you have just this, you just had thismassive blooming of all this different
algae and then that algae, you're sayingthat algae itself is using the oxygen or

(14:46):
that algae sinks and then the bacteriathat are trying to dissolve the algae?
Right, you can have the algae will use theaction but they're all in the surface
water and the problem
is not in the surface.
And that's again, getting back to why it'sso hard to appreciate the problems caused
by dead zone.
The surface waters may be just loomingwith life.

(15:10):
And there may be lots of fish.
The Gulf of Mexico is known for its richfisheries.
But then those algae sink.
And when they sink, now they're out of thesurface layer.
They're out of contact with theatmosphere.
They can't photosensitize and make oxygen.

(15:30):
And so those algae now become food for thebacteria.
And the bacteria go to town and use up theoxygen at the bottom of the Gulf of
Mexico.
Right.
Okay.
Understood.
And so, rewinding a little bit, I'm veryinterested in the term nutrients.

(15:52):
And so tell us, what does that mean?
What does nutrients mean in this context?
Yeah, so nutrients is a, you know, youcould think about it as food, plant, in
this case, plant food.
And usually when we talk about algae,we're talking about phosphorus and
nitrogen.

(16:12):
I talk about in a book about how my wifesometimes will be forced to use chemical
fertilizer because she's run out ofcompost.
And I talk about the main nutrients that
And now when you fertilize your garden,you use several of those fertilizers that

(16:34):
have several different components to them.
But the main ones that oceanographers andaquatic ecologists are interested in are
those of nitrogen and phosphorus.
And those are two nutrients that aremainly driving the growth of these algae.
And these are, would you classify them astheir synthetic nutrients?

(16:56):
Are they organic nutrients?
Are they both?
So they're inorganic or not?
They're not organic.
Compost, I would call it organic nutrient,but it's actually turned into these
inorganic chemicals.
More specifically, ammonium and nitrate,when we talk about nitrogen and phosphate,

(17:18):
when we talk about phosphorus.
So these are inorganic, they're notorganic.
And they're natural, I mean, this is avery natural process that normally would
drive these algae to grow and bloom andsupport the food webs that are present in
say the northern Gulf of Mexico.

(17:39):
The Gulf of Mexico was very busy, veryrich in life normally without any help
from us.
The problem is that we're causing thisincrease in nutrients going into the state
of Mexico.
Right.
And you just use an interesting word,which is you said food web.

(18:01):
When I remember growing up as a kid and wewere still being taught in textbooks of a
food chain, are these different ideas nowand how they would be perceived?
I think a food chain is just a verysimple...
You know, grass being eaten by a cow and acow being eaten by a wolf for us.

(18:27):
So there's only these linear steps in thetransfer of material from an energy from
one trophic level to another.
The basis of the food chain are plants,grass and trees and so on, land, and then
the ocean and lakes, it's the algae.
And those in turn are eaten by herbivoresand those in turn are eaten by the...

(18:50):
carnivores.
So that's a food chain.
A food web gets at the idea is thatthere's many of these food chains that are
kind of interlinked and there's not asimple linear, I mean, you could follow
one path going from the lowest part of thefood web, the plants and our algae in the

(19:10):
case of the phonic habitats to the top,but there's more different branches in
that transfer.
energy and material from bottom to thetop.
And it feels more circular as well, right?
The food web feels more circular andinterconnected versus a linear, you know,

(19:31):
the shark eats this fish and then thisdoes that type of thing.
It's much more circular in that way.
Yeah.
Well, circular implies it goes back.
I suppose in a sense it does go backbecause the carnivore excretes the
nutrients that go back to feed eventuallythe plant.
But it's not as if somehow the carnivoreis feeding the plant, but only through the

(19:55):
nutrients, not directly.
So, yeah, it's more intertwined, I thinkis the way to think about it.
One, it's many, food web is many foodchains is one way to think about it.
Okay, I got it.
So,
We're talking about nitrogen andphosphorus.

(20:15):
And for the average person out there, theymay not know that much about these two
nutrients.
But these are probably the two mostapplied nutrients in modern agriculture,
which I don't even like to necessarilycall it modern agriculture.
I typically call it petrochemicalagriculture.

(20:36):
Industrial agriculture, exactly.
So.
Tell us a little bit about, well, one, Imean, actually, I think the origin story
of nitrogen is quite fascinating.
And you go over a little bit of that inyour book.
Why don't you tell us about the originstory of nitrogen in terms of the form in
which we use it now in industrialagriculture?

(20:59):
Yeah, so see, back in the 19th century, wehad to fertilize our field the way my wife
would prefer.
That is,
by compost that's basically returningmanure back onto the fields.
But that became quickly not very, asagriculture grew, there just wasn't enough

(21:26):
manure around to make that efficient.
And so there had to be other sources ofthese fertilizers.
So I'm using fertilizers in the broadestsense of anything that would help plants
grow.
So there are other sources of, ofespecially matching that were looked at.
Guano is one of them.
There's big effort in the late 19thcentury to basically mine the guano that

(21:51):
was off of South America.
Which is bat poop, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
it's, it's bird poop, to be more specificand why South America is because, of the
upwelling there.
And it's, it's basically all these birdswere eating all the
protein rich fish and dumping their wastematerial onto land.

(22:14):
They were horrendous places to work and toexcavate the squano, but that was for a
short period of time, a main source ofnitrogen for farmers and agriculture and
mainly in Europe at that point.
But that was very limited.
And it was realized that, you know, backin the 1890s,

(22:38):
It was realized that that was going to runout soon.
And so there was this mad dash to figureout, especially for nitrogen.
Phosphorus or other sources of phosphorusthat the chemical industry could extract
and to supply for agriculture.
But nitrogen was the real problem.
And the problem there is that there's lotsof nitrogen.

(23:01):
There's lots of nitrogen in theatmosphere, but it's present as nitrogen
gas.
And there's only a few organisms,bacteria, that are able to transform that
nitrogen gas into a chemical form thatplants can use.
And that doesn't happen fast enough tohelp out agriculture.

(23:25):
So there is a mad rush and competition tofigure out how to make nitrogen fertilizer
from basically nitrogen gas.
And the guy who basically figured that wasFritz Haber, who was a German back in the
early 20th century, who figured out thechemistry of being able to do that.

(23:51):
And originally that he did that, one ofthe reasons why he did that was because
nitrogen is also important, sodiumnitrate, for gunpowder.
I remember as a kid, I'm surprised Ididn't blow myself up making gunpowder out
of sodium nitrate, sulfur, and charcoalwas the third ingredient.

(24:12):
Fortunately, I wasn't that good at it as achemist, and so I didn't blow myself up or
lose any fingers.
But sodium nitrate is an important part ofwhat goes into making explosives.
So there was back at the...
during World War I, where Fritz Haber wasa, despite it being Jewish, was very much

(24:38):
a nationalist and supported the Germanstate and wanted to help out the war
effort.
And he invented this method for making afixed, what we call fixed form of Nutsche,
as opposed to Nutsche gas, which is gasthat grows anywhere in the Abster.
A fixed form means it stays, you know,where you put it.

(24:59):
in this case, in water or in soil.
So that started, was invented about 1917,15 or so.
And we've been surviving ever since.
I mean, if we did not have that, I mean,it's caused many problems, but it's been
estimated roughly half of the people onthis planet could not exist if we didn't

(25:24):
have the Fritz Hager.
This is an amazing...
This is an amazing moment in history thatprobably doesn't get talked about enough,
really, because it's the secondary effectsand the main one being a population
explosion through the ability to producemuch more food and have yields much higher

(25:49):
than they ever would have been withoutthis.
And just to cap that story off, you saidthat so interestingly that
He was actually Jewish, but he was astaunch nationalist.
But actually when the Nazis came to power,he was the head of a major organization,
right?
That's right.

(26:09):
That's right.
He was really worked hard between WorldWar I and World War II in trying to help
Germany recover from the devastation ofWorld War I and was, as you pointed out,
head of a very important...
Institute in Germany.

(26:30):
And of course, that story has beenrepeated many times that other very
prominent German scientists were forcedout of their positions because they're
Jewish.
In his case, he basically died a brokenman because he had been converted to being
a Lutheran and done everything he could tosupport Germany and yet was thrown out by

(26:55):
the Nazis.
Wow.
Wow.
But left the world with nitrogen in afixed form is very fascinating because I
think about, you know, you also mentionedearlier, you know, something like
antibiotics.
And this is one of these these reallycomplex and tricky subjects now where
we're, you know, we're seeing thesesecondary effects over, you know, 100

(27:18):
years or 50 years of in the moment.
It's like, my gosh, this is a majorbreakthrough.
This is going to change the way.
you know, of humanity.
And then 50 years later, we're going,there's superbugs that are being created.
You know, we have to stop the world fromusing antibiotics as much as possible.
You know, I've met with an anthropologistin Thailand who enter, you know,

(27:42):
antibiotics are a huge issue in some ofthe Southeast Asian countries, which is
where actually, I believe, I saw astatistic recently that actually,
Like the majority of deaths now inSoutheast Asia are coming from superbugs
or something like that.
It was very interesting.
I don't remember exactly what it was, butthere's something along those lines.

(28:03):
And they were this anthropologist in agroup had been hired by the Thai
government to try and figure out how toget people to take less antibiotics
because everything that people aregetting, and we've done the same thing in
the States for a long time.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's, you know, as you know, antibioticshave been...
really overuse.

(28:23):
I mean, people get a cold, which is causedby a virus.
Antibiotics don't work against viruses.
But I think, you know, the other thingthat folks may not realize that
antibiotics are used in raising cattle,because a lot of the way we raise
livestock is, you know, very artificial.

(28:44):
We're feeding them things that they're notmeant to eat.
And they need to be fed antibiotics to...
not get sick.
And it was just found also, it's nottotally understood why but antibiotics,
massive amounts of antibiotics are beingused just because they seem the cattle
seem to grow better when they're fed theseantibiotics, or whatever reason.

(29:05):
So in addition to overuse for ourselves,it's being overused in by agriculture.
Right.
And this, this topic, it's a pretty
good segue because so let's kind of whenshifting back to the dead zones, the kind

(29:27):
of number one suspect of well, not thenumber one, but there's multiple, you
know, inquiries as to the causing of this.
And we, you know, okay, there's aconnection with nitrogen and phosphorus,
but tell us a little bit about, okay, now,where is this nitrogen coming from?
And let's we can go into like, let's saythe Gulf Coast and

(29:48):
Just what's the whole landscape of theindustries and the things that are going
on?
And let's talk even about the watershedand stuff like that.
Yeah.
So, so they, it's got the Mexico.
It's it's it would be helpful to be ableto picture, the, a map of the Gulf coast

(30:08):
with Louisiana and moving up north.
And of course the main feature there andthe reason why, again, actually speaking,
there are rich.
marine life in the Gulf is because of theMississippi River.
The Mississippi River, of course, drainsthrough Louisiana, but also major parts of

(30:33):
the US, something like 38 states.
I can't remember the number exactly now,and parts of even of Canada.
And so if you look at a map of thewatershed of the Mississippi River, it's
just this great funnel that leads down toLouisiana.
And that's starting in roughly, is itMinnesota or Canada?
That's right.
That's right.

(30:53):
The main branch of the Mississippi is inMinnesota.
So for people for people to visualize.
So imagining from Minnesota kind ofsnaking down through parts of the Midwest
and then through the south, but not onlythe river, but all of the watershed that
is coming from, you know.

(31:15):
other sources that all come into theMississippi and then drain through the
Mississippi down into the Gulf Coast.
That's right.
I mean, at the end, it's the Mississippi,but there's the Missouri and all these
other rivers that feed into theMississippi.
And so that's why I was trying to getfolks to picture a big funnel that covers

(31:37):
the mouth of the funnel, covers much ofthe continental US.
And it's all draining down, funneling downto one point through Louisiana and
emptying into the Gulf of Mexico.
So it's covering a large part of thecontinental US, something like 38 states

(32:00):
are touched one way or the other, or apart of this watershed.
So it's a huge, huge area.
Right.
And so what's happening in that area?
What's going on in that area?
So it's happening in that area.
is Iowa.
To pick on one state, I mean, it's notfair to pick on one state because there
are several other ones contributing.

(32:21):
But Iowa is a good one because it's reallyfamous, of course, for corn.
It grows a lot, a lot of corn.
And because it grows corn, and why does itgrow corn?
I mean, it has rich soils, but in order tokeep on growing corn and have yields of

(32:42):
corn,
keep on increasing, the farmers there havehad to apply more and more fertilizer.
And so that's the basic problem.
Because of the corn, they also have a lotof other livestock that they grow because
corn feeds other of these animals.

(33:02):
So Iowa and all the other states in theMidwest there have, of course, are famous
for their agriculture.
and that agriculture is run byfertilizers.
Okay, and so, yeah, so you're saying thatbecause the corn is also growing there,

(33:22):
you're also seeing a lot of animalindustry focused there, so that way
they're not having to transport the grainand stuff in a big distance.
But now we start to get into differentcomplexities of, okay, we have the corn
farmer who is
applying nitrogen.

(33:43):
But then we also have the animal industrythat is taking the corn, but then that
animal is obviously creating a wasteproduct and pooping and peeing.
And so that is now also creating quotefertilizer, but well, I guess nutrients,
right, we can call them.
And so where where are

(34:05):
where are we with understanding, okay,what is really some of the main drivers of
these things?
And we'll go from there, I guess.
Yeah.
So the main problem is thought to be thatfarmers are using too much for a lot of
products.
So if you think of from the viewpoint of afarmer, they want to maximize their yield,

(34:29):
they want to make the most money that theycan from that acre of crop land that they
have.
And so they, they, there's not muchincentive to not add more fertilizer, but
they add a little more fertilizer.
Then they, if the weather is right, theycan maximize their yield.

(34:50):
So they're always going to add morefertilizer than what the plant really
needs.
And so roughly half or less of thatapplied fertilizer actually goes into the
corn.
Where does the rest go?
Well, eventually goes into rivers.
eventually feed into the MississippiRiver.
This is ironic because we now have, I'mpretty sure there's solid research showing

(35:16):
that roughly 50 % or more of appliednitrogen is wasted, that it flows off.
I was talking to someone from the almondindustry the other day and we were just
talking about the narrative of we have tofeed the world.
This narrative,
We don't know where it comes from, butit's most likely that it's come from

(35:37):
several large companies.
And it's that mindset of yield, yield,yield, yield.
It's all about yield.
And it's not even about profitability.
There's this thought that yield is goingto be the same thing as profitability, but
actually, in fact, it has turned out tonot be the case because if your fertilizer
prices are consistently raising over time,which they have been, or if you're using a

(36:03):
GMO crop,
that you were told, you know, you're goingto have less weeds next year because
you're going to spray this pesticide.
But then actually the weeds come backtwice fold and now you need more of the
pesticide.
Yeah.
So it really hasn't ended up that way.
And I think this is the one hope of theregenerative agricultural movement is
that, Hey, wait a second, just right offthe bat, we can apply less nitrogen

(36:26):
because we know it's running off now.
We know it's actually not even taking, butlike you said, it's kind of like a, it's
almost,
It's not a gambler's mentality, but it'slike, well, depending on the weather, I'll
roll the dice.
I'm going to add 30 pounds more nitrogenper acre just in case I get a good rain

(36:47):
tomorrow or I get good weather or whateverto boost my crop.
Yeah, it'll be interesting with a bigspike in fuel costs.
You mentioned about fertilizer costs goingup and I'm sure they will go up even more.
because making these fertilizers is veryenergy intensive.

(37:09):
And it's because we, in some ways, I justknow from another topic, but I think we
kept our gas and oil prices artificiallylow for various reasons.
But now they're increasing, whether thatwill translate, they will translate into
higher fertilizer costs.
And we'll see whether that translates intothe farmer making that economic decision.

(37:33):
Nevermind talking about the environmentand making the economic decision that's
going to be in the end, better for his ownfinances to use less furloughs.
I think that's the way to argue.
This is something I'm very interested tosee this year.
so you're right.
The, fertilizer costs are alreadydefinitely up.

(37:55):
I think five to 10 X in the past likeyear.
I just saw a CEO of one of the companiestalking on CNBC the other day because.
this is really what's predicting thecoming food shortage.
And that food shortage, they're saying,will be driven by the fact that lots of
farmers are going to be making a decisionas well of, OK, am I going to be able to

(38:16):
put this nitrogen on this year?
The, I guess,
The less positive part of that, becausesome of us could see that as a positive,
is that in a regenerative system, itdoesn't happen in one year.
In order to restart the biologicalprocesses of a good, natural, healthy

(38:40):
soil, you need roughly three to five yearswith doing the right things in that
methodology.
So it's not as simple as, okay, well, wehad this year where we had a lot less
fertilizer because of the prices.
But now we're going to reap the rewards ofthese, all these farmers will be
converted.
But I am hoping that, that, you know, asthe regenerative movement pushes forward,

(39:04):
that this type of moment could lead tosome more farmers saying, Hey, you know
what, I'm just going to move.
You know, I'm going to, I'm going to domore cover cropping.
I'm going to add more legumes.
I'm going to fix nitrogen during thewinter and other months when I can.
And I think that this is a reallyimportant.
part of the possibility is having higherfertilizer prices, but it will mean in the

(39:29):
short term higher food prices for the restof us and for some people food shortages.
Yeah, that's a problem that we are facingis that of course we want to reduce
fertilizer use and reduce dead zones.
On the other hand, people have to eat andthere are too many people that have food

(39:50):
insecurity.
And so that's a huge problem.
But one thing we should touch on anddiscuss a little bit is the fact that
something like 40 % of the corn harvestgoes to making ethanol that we put into
our gas tanks.
And I think President Biden just allowedthat percentage to go higher.

(40:15):
Now I think it's capped at 10 % andthere's talk about it increasing.
And I wonder how you think, well, biofuelthat's renewable, less use of fossil fuel
that's not renewable, that's all good.
But in fact, the environmental cost ofthat ethanol is really, really high.
And one of them is the excessive use offertilizers that went to bake that corn

(40:38):
that went into making that ethanol.
So in some ways, we could perhaps solvepart of the problem with the food
shortages or limitations and prices if wejust got to
rid of biofuels, at least the stuff likethe fuels that come from corn.
This is a really, I like this part of thisconversation, because this is really one

(41:02):
of those first catch 22s, where youmentioned that there's, there's been a
lack of regulations that have led to thecontinual use of things that we are
generally knowing that are that are not.
very good for the environment and theoverall grand ecosystem and ourselves.

(41:23):
But there's some legislation that has ledactually to further degradation.
And so that was the, what was it called?
Something the transport act or?
Yeah, I don't remember the name of it.
right.
They required the 10 % in biofuels in ourgasoline.
Yeah, right.
It was it was essentially the the act thatinitiated the use of biofuels.

(41:47):
And that actually led to like a hugeincrease in the corn crop, especially in
these states that we're talking about,which then means more fertilizer being
used, which then means more fertilizerdraining into the into the Gulf Coast.
Right.
And so, you know, this is something thatthat I am finding as I go through.

(42:09):
the process of doing different researchand for not only having people on the
show, but just for myself is that thisseems to be one of the ways in which the
reductionist model doesn't seem to workvery well at all because now we're looking
at this thing that we're saying, okay,well, we're trying to reduce this carbon

(42:32):
footprint, but the carbon footprintdoesn't account for all these
ecological...
disasters that are happen need to.
It's not dynamic on paper you could say, ouse of biofuels means, reduction in fossil

(42:52):
fuel wow, this is great progress thatwe're continuing to do have no idea what I
mean ramifications of what we 'r
know, millions of pounds of fish and foodin the Gulf Coast could be disappearing in

(43:13):
a matter of 50 years.
So it's just such a nuanced thing.
And that's actually a lot of the reasonfor this show is to understand that, hey,
there's a lot of trade -offs as well asthere's a lot of methodologies that seem
to not enable us to view the problem asholistically as we need to.

(43:34):
That's right.
I
Again, biofuels, it sounds wonderful, butI think folks didn't really think through
what was going to happen.
Now, in defense of biofuels, there areother crops that could be used to make
ethanol and make biofuels.
Switchgrass is one of them.
It's a perennial.

(43:55):
People don't eat it, so you don't havethat competition.
We could be using more sugarcane, althoughthat would come from Brazil, and perhaps
it would cut down more forests.
make room for that sugar cane.
So the concept itself is maybe not so bad.
It's just when you start using a crop thatwe also use for our food, I think that's

(44:16):
where it starts getting problematic.
And so 40 % roughly is the biofuels.
And then where's the rest of that corn andsoybean or just let's, I guess we could
pick on corn, but where's the rest of thatstuff going?
Well, I guess it goes into our food.
some of it goes into high fructose drinks,although that's not really a problem.

(44:40):
I mean, high fructose sugary drinks arenot good for our health.
So there's no reason not to drink those.
But in terms of use of the corn and itsramifications of fertilizer use, that's
not a big problem.
But it's just general food that we'reeating.
Right, and a lot of that going to animalproduct.

(45:01):
A lot of that going to animal.
That's right.
And another defense of the 40 % that goesto the biofuels, a lot of the waste that's
leftover byproduct of that manufacturing,making the ethanol does go to feeding
animals, but it's still very highpercentage.
I was just shocked when I saw that.
And so part of the debate because...

(45:28):
It's not right now.
I mean, is any of this research conclusivethat, hey, it's phosphorus, hey, it's
nitrogen?
Or how do you view that scenario?
Well, I mean, the backup, it's silly.
Ecologists have argued quite a bit aboutwhich is more important.

(45:49):
And we know that is a general rule infresh waters like lakes and good examples
like Erie, which has its own dead zone.
problem.
It seems to be phosphorus that's limitedin the alcohol growth there.
Whereas in the middle of the oceans,biologists generally talk about nitrogen.

(46:12):
plant growth there.
Okay, this is an important clarificationfor me with the reading.
Explain that part of the limiting thegrowth.
What does that mean to limit the growth?
What does that mean?
Yeah, so it basically means if one way todo it is experimentally, what you would do

(46:33):
is you take a bottle of water up onto theship, and you add various nutrients.
You can add
If you're interested in nitrogenlimitation, you'd add ammonium or nitrate,
phosphorus, phosphate.
And also in some waters, it turns out tobe iron that's limited, not the waters

(46:54):
that we're concerned about here.
And so then you add those nutrientsseparately to different bottles of water,
and you just see which one promotes thegrowth of the algae.
And so the one that promotes it the most,we would call it...
the limiting nutrients.
So that is a nutrient that's low supply.
It is the reason why the algae are notgrowing even more than they are.

(47:18):
Okay.
Okay.
So because that's the missing componentthat it wants to grow, that's why it's
called limiting, even though it's reallypromoting the overall growth.
That's right.
It's the limiting factor with thenutrient.
And that's based on the nutrient model.
That's right.
That's right.
Okay.
So it's getting enough of everything else.
It's limited.

(47:38):
terms of that particular nutrient.
Right.
And then if you give it that nutrient,then it explodes.
It explodes.
And that's what happens in, like you weresaying, when you give it enough
phosphorus, you get these big alkyl loopsthere.
Okay.
It deploys like Gulf of Mexico and theBaltic, then it becomes a little bit

(48:00):
dicier in terms of which one is.
And in the end, I think it's not thatimportant.
to know which one is which, although thereare ramifications in how you treat the
water, especially if you're a treatmentplant.
It varies, whether it's nitrogen orphosphorus.
But on the end, it's fertilizer.

(48:23):
And how we understand it definitelydepends on whether nitrogen or phosphorus
is number two.
So I think that's really what Iunderstood.
There's, again, some...
losses in the story for carbon dioxide onthe Baltic Sea.
Right.
And so part of it was differentresearchers looking at these different

(48:45):
dead zones.
And I guess then would you say that partof the...
Part of the challenge then is that thisinformation that's in progress is also
then politically charged, right?
It's never just like there's pure sciencebeing done.

(49:07):
It doesn't exist, right?
The idea of just science and it'sisolated, owned by itself, it actually
doesn't exist, right?
There's always external forces of fundingand of the individual scientists and the
overarching government and country.
And then, of course, the unique ecospherethat they're operating in, right?

(49:29):
The Gulf Coast being dramaticallydifferent than the Baltic Sea in just its
fundamental nature.
Right.
So I think there's two levels of ways toanswer that question.
One is, you know, scientists are humans.
Sometimes they may not seem to be that,but they are.
And so you have two people working on thesame topic.

(49:50):
They sometimes disagree.
Sometimes they disagree.
to the outsider for reasons that don'tmake any sense at all, for not science
reasons, because they're more personal.
So there's that aspect and that's alwaysgoing on in science.
But I think the other thing that you'realluded to is the fact that much of this
work does have implications for whathappens on land.

(50:13):
And the case of the dead zones in the Gulfof Mexico is Nancy Rabelais, who really
publicized
fact that there's a real problem going onin the Gulf of Mexico.
And that led to all sorts of legislationto study the problem and also fight back

(50:36):
and arguments from the chemical companiesand agribusinesses against the whole idea
that they were responsible for the lowoxygen problem in the Gulf of Mexico.
So there's those both aspects of
Right.
And.
So this encounter with the industrialcomplex is quite a common theme with

(51:10):
different scientists approaching it andsome of them were going from like studying
the Gulf Coast and didn't some of them goto the Baltic Sea as well to see if they
could apply some of the lessons or?
Yeah, I think basically we work in ourbackyard.
We have an area that we are comfortablewith that we it's easy just for logistic

(51:34):
reasons.
But then we go to meetings in thesedifferent places and meet up.
with others that are working on, in mycase, I worked on the Delaware River and
Bay, but we'll have meetings in Europe andtalk to folks that have worked on the
Baltic.
So that's generally how the interactionsgo, more so than, though occasionally we

(51:55):
go on a cruise or when I say a cruise,it's a research expedition, it's not a
lump of type of cruise.
We'll go on their ship and go into theBaltic, but for most part,
Nancy Rablice has done all the work in theGulf of Mexico.
Conley has done all his work in theBaltic.
Okay, right.

(52:16):
Those were the two prominent researchersthat you were referencing.
And so...
With the, there's just so many directionsto go.
It's curious that, tell us a little bitabout the, the regulation that often leads

(52:38):
to it's a lot of times it's, well, here'ssome legislation, but, or here's some
funding, but it's to study it more.
Let's study more.
Let's study more.
Yeah, I guess scientists are alwaysaccused of that, that we always have
something more that we want to know abouta problem.

(53:01):
And I have to say that's good, I think,that we want to gain a deeper
understanding of a problem of say whetherit's nitrate or phosphorus limitation,
because that does have implications forhow you treat the water going into that
aquatic habitat.

(53:21):
So I generally do our work without muchawareness of what the political
applications are, the policies are.
Right.
And so, but it's interesting because italmost seems like that's also one of the
main things that's exploited by thepolitical groups as well is that.

(53:46):
is that it's used in that way of, well, wedon't know enough.
We need to study more.
We can't say it's nitrogen or phosphorustoday.
We need another 10 years of studying this.
How do we know?
Right.
That's right.
That's the unfortunate thing is that whenpoliticians seize on this, what they see
as being big uncertainties.
But to the scientists, nitrogen andphosphorus, it's a fertilizer, man.

(54:10):
I mean, geez, we can understand that.
It's more of a detail.
what nutrient is most limited.
You know, even a better example is climatechange back in the 1980s, early 1990s.
I think Bush, George Bush, the first wasrecognized that there's a problem, but he

(54:32):
just basically said, well, we don'tunderstand it well enough.
This is just wait before we have to doanything.
And you can see where he got us.
So even back in the 1980s or even earlier,it was quite clear that
CO2 was causing a big problem with ouratmosphere.
And all the trends were showing that theproblem was going to get worse.

(54:53):
Now there was scientific debate about theextent of the problem and other aspects of
it.
Sure.
Are there still debates about aspects ofthe problem, both with climate change and
with dead zones?
Sure.
There always will be.
We get scientists involved.
But to use that uncertainty to argue thatwe shouldn't do anything, it's just not

(55:14):
right.
Right.
It's kind of it's interesting because Imean, I'm I'm a former free market
capitalist entrepreneur who was, you know,I was trained in in what's called lean
methodology, which is an iteration processwhere you work as fast as possible to see
if you have market fit with whateverproduct or service you're trying to do

(55:36):
instead of a lot of times people will say,I have this great idea.
And then they go and spend two years.
building something and then they bring itto the market and people go, I don't want
that.
I'm not, I'm not, I have no use for that.
And you go, but it was such a great idea.
Whereas in this process, you're trying tobuild a prototype or what's called a

(55:56):
minimum viable product as quickly aspossible to then show people to see, Hey,
would you be interested in purchasing thisor even pre -ordering it?
That way you reduce a lot of the risk.
And I think this is one of the challengesfor with
systems of government that move so slowand the entanglement of that and science

(56:19):
in that it can be a costly endeavorbecause there are lots of times when the
science can be wrong and we could go andspend half a billion dollars on something
and turn around and go, that wasn't reallythe issue.
But it seems that the balance is out ofwhack sometimes.

(56:39):
This is really
I now come from a space where, you know,I'm, I'm, I just spent the past year as a,
apprentice at a medicinal herb farm and,you know, spending our time with all these
medicinal herbs and, you know, studyingnative traditions and first people's

(57:00):
traditions of, you know, here in America,as well as across the world.
And it's just fascinating to me how theydon't even need.
science.
They never needed it.
There's stories of indigenous Japanese inthe 1700s or 1800s saying, hey, our

(57:22):
climate is changing based on some reasonsor just the relationship that peoples have
always had with their relationship or withthe land and the animals that they didn't
need to know that like, hey, you don'tcrap where you eat type of mentality,
which is
which is for us, it's like we've movedbeyond that, but now we're in this spot

(57:46):
where because our mode of being is nolonger connected with nature in a way,
we're trying to force other templates.
And I think from my perspective, I seescience now becoming very religious.
I see lots of people using science in avery religious way, whereas to me, it

(58:09):
should not be a way of
being science is not a way of beingreductionism is not a way of being.
It's a great tool.
It's a great tool to observe ourenvironment, which we've been doing for
thousands of years.
But it's not.
But a lot of times we're, it's, it's areactionary thing to organized religion.
And then it's polarized immediatelybecause of that, versus if we were still

(58:33):
connected with nature in a way that weknow that, Hey, this is,
this tree is very important to myexistence and I view it as a relative
rather than something that should produceme something because I told it to.
Yeah, I think you hit it right there isthat too many people are disconnected to
nature and they think it is a luxury that,you know, it's really nice if we had lots

(58:59):
of forest land or clean waters.
But first thing is people have to have ajob and they have to eat.
Well, I think.
we're starting to realize that we cannothave that disconnect and still be a
healthy society.
Yes, yes, for sure.
And yeah, there's so many ways where thisdisconnect and now I feel like science is

(59:24):
really trying to fill this gap, but itcan't necessarily do that, right?
Science doesn't necessarily have theability to teach us to love nature, to
love all beings.
it has the methodology to observe them andto learn about them, but it doesn't have
that love component.
And I feel like I keep hearing people talkabout, well, people just need to see data.

(59:47):
Well, that's not working.
And it hasn't worked.
And it's never worked, actually.
You know, there's all the data is therefor for any, you know, of these things we
could be looking at.
But it's really.
Yeah.
I was going to say, you know, climatechange, again, is a great example.
And you're right.
scientists used to believe that.
I think we're increasingly realizing thatthat's not the case.

(01:00:09):
You know, we think if only people wouldknow, if only we show them the data and
show them what's going on, then they'llcome around to the right view on solving
the problem.
And as you said, that's just not working.
It's just, and climate change is a greatexample.
The reaction against COVID and the anti-vaxxers is another example.
You can show them all the data you want,but it's almost a religion that these

(01:00:33):
folks are.
getting vaccinated, it's almost a religionthat they react against the idea that
humans are causing our climate to change.
So, yeah, yeah.
And it's and it's interesting, right?
Because, and I think there's there's alsothe there's I think there's good reason
sometime for people to be hesitant ofthis, right?

(01:00:53):
I view a lot of people, I know a lot ofvery educated people who are hesitant,
even with a vaccine because.
They know that a lot of times this data isbeing manipulated, it's being forced upon
them.
And so this is something where I'm lookingto, I'm actually looking to take up some
more Bible study recently, because I thinkactually the main question to ask these

(01:01:18):
farmers, if they are in fact conservativeand if they are in fact Christian a lot of
times, what is their view on the idea ofstewardship?
What does stewardship mean to you?
I think that is way more powerful than,hey, let me show you this data.
Right.
And show you what's happening in Gulf ofMexico 500 miles down.

(01:01:39):
Right, right.
They're going to go, I don't care.
It's, you know, what about the economy?
What about what about what about people'sjobs?
What about my business?
But I want to know, what do you thinkabout being a steward?
What does that mean?
Does that mean that you dominateeverything?
Does that mean that we kill whatever wewant?
Does that mean, you know, what was Christreally who was a martyr?

(01:02:00):
Right.
You know, what would his thoughts be onthis?
Let's be real about this.
Let's sit with this for some time.
And I think that that's actually to relatepeople to that is is probably a you know,
it could be it could be a way to drive alot more positive conversation and
sometimes because if not, I feel like weare in this kind of battle with with

(01:02:24):
certain things.
And I'm interested as well in just, youknow,
the, you know, whether liberal orconservative, all of us here are, you
know, non native now.
Yeah, right.
And so really, it's about, okay, wait asecond.
Well, when did we get disconnected fromour nativeness, right?

(01:02:48):
All at the end of the day, all people areindigenous.
But we've just been disconnected for sometime.
So when did the Celtic tribes, which werehundreds of tribes, thousands of tribes
spread across Europe,
When what happened to them, right?
Caesar slaughtered them.
Caesar came through and slaughtered them.
And that was part of the roots of, hey,wait a second.

(01:03:10):
Now you don't have a relationship with theoak tree, right?
You're no longer holding your ceremoniesamong the oak trees in the oak forest.
And you're no longer using the oak as yourmedicine in your community, which is the
same thing that a lot of native peoplesin.
in America would have done.

(01:03:30):
And there's that connection there.
But I think if we try and approach it onlyfrom a science perspective, sometimes it
can be quite limiting in the conversation.
And not only the conversation, but in theway of being.
But to get back to some of the science,because it is important, the

(01:03:54):
The study of this, I mean, would you saythat, I mean, maybe a little bit more into
the details, because I'm trying tounderstand this as an average person, but
from my understanding, like to have causalevidence is like very rare in science.
Like there's very few things where we havelike strict causal research that's like,

(01:04:18):
this is a definitive quote fact, whereasmost research is,
correlative right
Yeah, well, I guess most scientists wouldkind of disagree that it's more than just
correlations.
And I think perhaps maybe the point ofdiscussion is what you would call a fact.

(01:04:42):
Now, so let's say take a statement,nectrine causes algal blooms.
It's an unlimited nutrient.
I think most aquatic ecologists would saythat's a fact.
But are they?
not studying anymore?
No, they are very much because they'revery much interested in levels of the
form.

(01:05:03):
How does it get there?
Who's it naturally speaking besides ournitrogen pollution problem?
Who's producing that nitrogen?
So there's still a lot of things about itthat mean there's uncertainty about it.
So I think that's where again, we'regetting back to this question about people

(01:05:24):
seeing the uncertainty.
the fact that scientists still argue aboutthat chain causes algal blooms means we
don't have to do anything about it.
Well, that's at some level they do agreethat there's a fact called Nutschin causes
algal blooms.
They may disagree, scientists may disagreeabout aspects of that problem.

(01:05:45):
Okay.
And so, but the nitrogen causing the algalblooms, like that is...
Is that just like something that is shownas a very high correlation or is it like
causal?
Well, you could you can do experimentslike I described.
I mean, one one piece of evidence iscausal.
You can see the increase in action and yousee all the blooms.

(01:06:08):
We know that other blooms occur whennitrogen concentrations are high, but you
can do experiments.
You can take that bottle of water onto.
deck of the ship and add nitrogen and seethat it causes a bloom.
And then I described in the book about areally big experiment where I can't

(01:06:29):
believe the scientists were able toconvince a treatment plant to turn off
their nitrogen control mechanism and seewhat was going to happen to this area of
the Baltic Sea.
And they did the experiment and saw whathappened in terms of the bloom of this
cyanobacteria.
So they're...
And did that lead to kind of a definitive,a more definitive approach by the

(01:06:53):
government there?
That's right, because there was thisargument that in fact, if they limited the
nitrogen going in, if they treated thewater for nitrogen, you would get these
toxic cyanobacteria blooms.
And they were actually more concernedabout these toxic blooms than about other

(01:07:14):
types of algal blooms that would lead todead zones, but maybe not necessarily
toxic.
cells.
So there was that idea.
In fact, there are some very extremestatements that we should actually add
nitrogen to discourage or stop the growthof these toxic algae.

(01:07:34):
So again, the scientists convinced thetreatment plant to do this experiment and
show that, yes, you do get morecyanobacterium as a type of algae.
that grows if you limit the nitrogen, butit's not the toxic ones.
So it very definitely led to a change inwhat the government was doing.

(01:07:59):
Okay.
Yeah.
And that was interesting because you said,you mentioned that one of the most forward
governments on this is Denmark, I believeyou mentioned.
Yeah.
Now my scientist friends in Denmark say,well, it looks great, but maybe...
there's all these loopholes that thefarmers are able to get out of.

(01:08:21):
But yes, they're supposed to justify thefertilizer that they add and do other
measures to limit the amount of fertilizerthat they use on their farms.
We have a big problem with manure also inDenmark, from a very intensive hog

(01:08:41):
production.
But they've been trying their best tolimit the amount of nutrients they go
into.
surrounding waters.
Okay.
Yeah, it's interesting.
Have you ever heard of Korean naturalfarming?
No, no.
I think I'm gonna have to I'm gonna haveto send you a bunch of resources, but I

(01:09:02):
think it's gonna blow your mind.
So essentially, there is you know, there'salways been natural farming techniques and
indigenous ways of helping a crop growthat really we haven't.
looked at for the past 150 years or so.
Actually, I just I'm reading a book rightnow on the Iroquois from kind of like, I

(01:09:25):
think it's Quebec and Northern UnitedStates where they were and they would make
medicine of the corn plant or they wouldmake medicine of other ones and then they
would soak the seeds that they weregetting ready to plant into those.
which is now a very prominent regenerativeidea of soaking seeds in biological

(01:09:46):
solutions in order to help stem theability of the seed and the plant to call
forth different biology in order to callforth all the nutrients that they want.
But this guy named Master Cho, he was abrilliant chemist and

(01:10:06):
But he's kind of an anarchist, right?
He was kind of this guy who said, youknow, the farmer should not be buying any
inputs from either a synthetic supplier oran organic supplier.
And you should be able to farm organicallyat scale for a hundred dollars an acre,
which is now like $6 ,000 an acre onaverage in the U .S.

(01:10:28):
And he essentially collected up all thenatural farming techniques that were
happening in Asia.
before he was noticing the syntheticthings creeping over and how they were
starting to lose lots of different thingsin their ecosystems and that the farmer
was becoming more and more dependent.
So he collected all these things, but thenhe wanted to improve them.

(01:10:52):
And so you make all these fascinatingthings, right?
So one of them is fermented plant juice.
So you might collect a bunch ofdandelions.
and then ferment them.
And that juice that's left over is a broadspectrum juice that has all sorts of plant
soluble ready for the plant to uptake of,you know, manganese, magnesium, copper, I

(01:11:16):
mean, all the different things that thisplant has.
And so I just came from meeting with avery prominent natural farming expert last
weekend and you know, he loves, you know,stinging nettle, stinging nettle, he calls
it the multivitamin of nature, which is inherbalism.
Nettle is used for lots of differentthings, but it also produces a very broad
spectrum of nutrients.

(01:11:38):
But one of the things that Master Cho ismost known for was originally was pigs and
building these what's called a livingfloor for the pigs.
And it's about a couple foot deep, andit's a living floor.
And you can walk up to anyone who's usingthis these days right now, and you will

(01:12:00):
not smell.
a single thing.
Wow.
You don't smell a single thing because oneof the main things they use with this is
lactobacillus.
And you make your own lactobacillus at thefarm, you can make lactobacillus organisms
with just rice water, essentially, and youcan grow those organisms and then you

(01:12:22):
spray that onto the bedding or onto thepoop, and it degrades it much faster.
And I'm really curious.
to see, because this movement is reallyjust starting.
It started to take hold in Hawaii, and nowit's moving more and more to the mainland
US, where more and more people arestarting to use this methodology.
But I would be very interested to see somescientists do research on what the living

(01:12:48):
bed system, what happens to the nutrientsand what gets converted at the site versus
flushing away.
Right, right, right.
With what's happening because there's allsorts of transformations happening at a
biochemical level with these things.
And so it's really fascinating.
Not a lot of people know about it.
It's absolutely the future because again,you can use these broad spectrum, all

(01:13:14):
these different inputs.
And so one of them is like a fermented youget leftover fish heads from your local
restaurant, your seafood place.
And then you ferment those in like, Ithink they use brown sugar.
And then at the end, you get this justthis leftover liquid.
And that liquid is packed with nutrientsthat the plant wants to uptake.

(01:13:36):
And you can spray it as a foliar sprayonto the plant, or you can put it in as a
drench into the soil.
I wonder if it's acting also as an antifungi, anti pathogen defense by the plant.
Well, it's a mix, right?
So we actually also one of the mainamendments is we make what's called
indigenous microorganism.

(01:13:57):
And so we actually go and collect a fungalcollection from you want to go to the area
that has the most old growth forest aspossible in your region and just pull some
leaves away and look if you can see thestrands of mycelium, right?
In general, what we've been told is, isthat if you can see the mycelium with your

(01:14:18):
naked eye,
it's generally a beneficial mycelium.
It's not a pathogenic one.
Right.
Right.
And you said, yeah, you set this box of,of cooked rice on top of that area and you
come back about five days later and it'sbeen populated with all those fungi and
bacteria.
And then we then take that, we make itshelf stable with, brown sugar.

(01:14:42):
And then you, it put the brown sugar putsthe organisms to sleep, right?
They go to sleep.
And then when you scoop some out and putit into your water mix, they come back to
life and you can spray them.
And so we're actually inoculating the soilback with the ratios of fungi and bacteria

(01:15:05):
that would have been there if this wereallowed to naturally success through the
stages of time.
But we're doing it in a way to where ifyou have land that's been degraded,
by fertilizer and pesticides year afteryear, you can quickly inject biology back
into it.
Yeah.
Well, improved soil quality basically muchfaster than if you had to rely on nature.

(01:15:30):
Much faster.
Exactly.
And this is one thing people are having alittle bit of a hard time understanding
is, is that if you have a piece of landthat has been degraded by industrial
agriculture, the last thing you should do,
is just let that land sit there now unusedbecause nothing will happen to it.

(01:15:51):
It'll collect some weeds for the next 100years probably before it even really
starts to transform.
But if you come in and just start puttingbiology back into it and giving it these
minerals, then you'll start to get thetype of population of things that are much
more beneficial.
But I would love to see some science doneon this part.

(01:16:14):
But again,
who wants to do that because there's nomoney to be made, we can all make these
things at home.
Well, I, as a scientist, I hope that if weknew more about the actual mechanisms,
what's going on, why these things work, wemay be able to prove them and maybe make
them and, you know, they'll make it sothat other people can use them more

(01:16:37):
easily.
So I think science would help do this evenbetter.
Definitely, definitely.
And I think that that's,
know, a lot of us are holding to theregenerative agriculture movement as being
one of the only saving possibilities inthis.

(01:16:58):
I tried to look for some rebuttals online.
As I read your book, I wanted to see,okay, what would the Farm Bureau in Iowa
say or what would the chemical companiessay to this?
And most of them were quite poorarguments.

(01:17:19):
I think I sent you one of them that we hadseen.
But there was one that I find quiteinteresting, which was that a large part
of the problem could actually just simplybe that there's no cover crop or there's
no crop in the ground a large part of theyear.

(01:17:43):
where nutrients are purely just runningoff and that would never be the case in
nature, right?
Where you would have uncovered ground.
What do you think about that?
Well, yeah, I think it's, there are somefairly straightforward solutions.
I won't say solutions, maybe a bit extremeword, but certainly help the problem and

(01:18:05):
lessen the runoff of fertilizer.
And you mentioned one of them is covercrop, just planting something in the
winter.
that would, you know, those plants wouldtake up those nutrients that otherwise
would run off into a stream like, andeventually the Mississippi River and the

(01:18:25):
Gulf of Mexico.
So cover crop is one of them.
And it's also a benefit to the farmer.
I think that should be also emphasizeditself and called the green fertilizer in
the sense that if you plant the right typeof cover crop, you're gonna be able to
plow that in and help the soil.
and helping the soil helps your yield andprofitability.

(01:18:47):
Another one is buffer zones.
Just having a zone 30 feet, I mean, thewidth is debatable, but something between
the river creek and where the corn isplanted.
That also helps soak up the nutrientsbefore they get to be a problem.
Right.
And, you know, it's really interesting howyou mentioned that because,

(01:19:11):
one of the articles that I was reading, ithas cover crops as a quote, conservation
practice, which is actually not the waythat I think of it at all.
At all.
I think of a cover crop practice as a wayto increase your profitability actually as
a farmer.
And the end by virtue of that as well asyour will by virtue of increasing

(01:19:35):
biodiversity and
the biology in the soil that are coming upto get specific nutrients from certain
plants, that you're then increasing yournutrient availability and your nutrient
cycling, which all leads to profitabilityfor the farmer.
And so it's just interesting that in thisarticle toward the farmer, it's framed as

(01:19:57):
a conservation practice where from most ofwhat I've been exposed to is it's more
based on just.
increasing resilience and profitabilityover time for the farmer, but it's
fascinating.
Right.
I mean, the farmer could gain some helpfrom the government if he calls it a
conservation practice, but I think you'reright.

(01:20:19):
In the end, it's going to help him on hisbottom line, not just some wishy washy
type of environmental effect.
Right.
And you, so you mentioned this though.
This is kind of an interesting thing.
And especially I've been so I've been deepin the world of carbon credits for the
past couple of weeks and understanding of,okay, is this a good idea?

(01:20:43):
Does it have the potential to be a goodidea?
Or is it kind of a sham where thesecompanies are just offsetting?
They're not really innovating or they'renot adopting innovative technology or
they're not, you know, reducing theiremissions.
They're just using a carbon offset tocover up whatever they're doing.
But you mentioned that one of the mainpositions that we've done in the States is

(01:21:08):
a quote, pay the polluter.
What does that mean?
Tell us a little bit about that.
So the phrase came from an article writtenby Don Bosch who's been doing a lot of
work in this area.
He's now retired.
He got it started down in Lumcon,Louisiana University Marine Consortium.

(01:21:31):
of the Bunk Columnist, and then eventuallybecame president of the University of
Maryland Center for Environmental Studies.
And he wrote an article, he said,basically we have to stop paying the
polluter.
That is, we pay the farmer to plant acover crop.
The farmer gets help from doing that.

(01:21:51):
And so that farmer, maybe a bit extreme tocall him a polluter, him or her a
polluter, certainly,
the type of pollution that a farm puts outis different from say an oil company, but
in the end, it's, it's pollution, it'snutrient pollution.
And the idea is that we should do what wedo with other polluters.

(01:22:13):
That is we find that we should make thempay.
Yeah, this is, yeah, it's interesting.
So I've been, cause I've been looking at,you know, what can qualify for a carbon,
even for carbon farming and.
what can you do?
And it's essentially is that you have tobe able to show this idea of

(01:22:34):
additionality.
So based on your, you know, however muchcarbon your soil has today, you have to
show that you're going to be increasingthat.
But for example, let's say that you're afarmer who has been taking care of your
soil for a very long time and you're doingall sorts of different beneficial
practices, you've reduced your nitrogen,you've reduced your phosphorus.

(01:22:58):
you would not be able to qualify forcarbon farming.
So it's essentially, it's onlyincentivizing people who have chosen to
not do better things over time, or evennow just coming to it.
Because a lot of them, I don't think it'sa choice, right?
I don't think the average farmer has likethis malice within them.

(01:23:19):
I just think that they're within anindustrial complex that has told them for
all of time,
this is your worldview.
This is how you should view nature andyour crop and your farming system.
And they're just starting to get exposureto a new way, but that's scary.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

(01:23:40):
I mean, yeah, I sympathize with them.
I'm sure it's a tough life.
They feel that they have to apply all thisfertilizer to make sure they maximize
their yields.
But as we talked about before,
It may maximize their yield, but it maynot maximize the profit capacity and goal.
Yeah, for sure.

(01:24:02):
Did you choose to not call them syntheticnutrients in the book for a reason?
That's an interesting question.
I guess I thought it may confuse issuesbecause phosphate and fertilizer is the
same as phosphate in the environment.

(01:24:22):
It becomes synthetic when we apply it, Ithink, as way that most people would use
that term.
So I think I didn't find it really useful.
I think people kind of have this feelingthat all inorganic fertilizer is bad.
All inorganic nutrients are bad.
But in fact, that's what the plant isreally taking up.
They're taking up nitrate, ammonium, andphosphate.

(01:24:43):
Most simple inorganic versions of nitrogenand phosphorus.
Now organic farming, or...
applying organic fertilizers great becauseit's helping the health of the soil.
But then eventually what's going to happenis the microbes break down that organic
material to ammonium and nitrate andphosphate that's used by the plant.

(01:25:07):
So that's why I guess I shied away fromthat term.
Right.
You're not thinking like an advertiser.
You guys got to start thinking likeadvertisers now.
You got to advertise your ideas and get itout there.
I mean, whoever...
The person who came up with the dead zone,they had more advertising within them.
It was a journalist who came up with it.
Right.
Exactly.

(01:25:27):
And you know, scientists kind of hate tokind of cringe because, you know, a dead
zone, there's lots of life in the deadzone.
It's just microbial and things that we wedon't really appreciate.
It's not the fish there and so on that wewould like to see.
So let's let's talk about that.
And because we were orbiting the dead zonehere.

(01:25:48):
So.
This is an important point is that what'shappening in terms of the life down there.
So you have species that would normally beflourishing or just are not even
flourishing, but just normal populationsand they're being reduced.
And then the ramifications that has withsecond order effects with other organisms

(01:26:12):
that would eat those.
And then as well as.
I think some more kind of pathogenic typeof advantageous things probably happen as
well.
At least that's what happens in soil.
But tell us about that.
What's happening?
Yeah, so the the sessile organisms, thesessile invertebrates have no choice,

(01:26:33):
right?
They're stuck there at the bottom.
And so now if they if this is a new thingfor them, they're they're toast, they're
dead, right?
So that's going to depopulate thatsediment, that bottom.
like benthos.
And the replication of it is that eventhose mobile organisms no longer can feed

(01:26:54):
on them.
So you're cutting out a food source forthose organisms that were able to swim
away.
Now the other thing that happens is thatthe fish that can't swim away are going to
be forced into a smaller habitat.
Their habitat is being reduced by theformation of this dead zone because they
can't swim or survive for long.

(01:27:16):
in this little oxygen waters.
So even though they can swim away, theirhabitat is reduced.
We get to fish kills when they can't swimaway, when they're confined to a narrow
bay.
Around here we have these human -madecanals that basically become end zones

(01:27:43):
that...
are completed in the summer of oxygen.
You see all these fish flowing into thesurface because they can't swim away.
But even if they can swim away, theirhabitat has been severely reduced in size.
And so this is an interesting part of theconversation because this also has

(01:28:07):
ramifications beyond just, okay, thenatural ecosystem is changing.
but also the way in which humans are thentaking possible sometimes taking advantage
of this in terms of fishing practices.
Tell us about what's happening with that.
Yeah.
So the thing to keep in mind about thedead zone is that it's it's right around

(01:28:29):
that there may be just abundance of life.
And again, the dead zone was created inthe case of the Gulf of Mexico and the
Baltic Sea because of excessive algalblooms, which when they're
of normal levels is great for the rest ofthe food web in those waters.
So there actually can be a concentrationof organisms right at the edge of a dead

(01:28:52):
zone because that's where the algae in thefood is highest.
And the fishermen are not dummies.
They can recognize this and that's wherethey go to harvest their fish.
And so that's why the...
relationship between dead zones andfisheries is really, really complex.

(01:29:13):
You'd think it'd be, well, less oxygen,fewer fish, less fish to be caught.
But in fact, it's not that simple becausethese fish can move.
And in fact, it may have the perverseeffect of actually concentrating them
where they can be caught more easily bythe fishermen.
Right.
So that, and that's like, as the habitatgets smaller, that means that

(01:29:36):
You know, the boats are coming to asmaller, more concentrated area.
Right.
Or there's the fish or shrimp are going tothe edge of the dead zone because that's
where they're kind of playing with fire.
They want to have food that's there.
But of course they need to have the optiontoo.
So they're going right to the edge, thebounds.
And that's where you see the fishermen.
And do you see, I mean, is there storiesof companies using this as a strategy as

(01:30:01):
from the boats using that?
I haven't heard about that because youcan't see this from space.
For example, there are huge fishingcompanies that use satellite information
to look for chlorophyll pigment and algaeand then look for fish.
But the dead zone, low oxygen waters arebelow the surface, so you can't see them

(01:30:24):
from space.
But the I believe the fishermen can lookat temperature and other aspects of the
water.
they can get a sense of where the the lawplaces are.
Okay, yeah, that would that would makesense that there would be some methodology
where they could figure that out.
And what's going on?

(01:30:45):
Yeah.
Yeah.
So how?
What led you to study such smallorganisms?
Yeah, that's a good question.
I, I remember taking a microbiology coursein
college and it didn't really do much forme because it was more of a traditional

(01:31:06):
one focused on I think all the studentsthat were pre -med students.
So I kind of, not for me, but I spent alot of time at Woods Fold and got exposed
to folks that were doing what I nowrecognize as the microbial ecology.
And I could see that these really smallorganisms had these big, big consequences

(01:31:29):
for the environment.
they were doing all these fascinatingthings in the world around us.
And I was just intrigued by that, I guesscontrasting scales.
Right.
And they're also just there, I mean, as ayoung person, right, there would always be
more opportunity as well to study thesmaller things than the bigger things that

(01:31:50):
everyone else has already studied.
Well, some of the organs, E.
coli, for example, has been studied todeath.
Some of the organs have been studiedincredible.
detail.
So there are some aspects of microbiologythat are really, really, really well
known.
But then there are other aspects, andespecially related to the environment that

(01:32:10):
are new, still new.
The field, I mean, you could say itstarted back in the late 19th century,
perhaps even earlier, but really came intoits own last couple of decades.
So there's still so much to be done.
And we're still recognize the relationshipbetween
or since microorganisms and then thebigger world around us.

(01:32:34):
And it's really amazing because, you know,we've all, I mean, we kind of, I think in
general society, you know, we're alwaystold, you know, but we, you know, we,
there's just still so much we don't knowabout the ocean.
And it's so true at the same time, whatwe're seeing now as well.
And in it on the, even on the land is wedon't really know anything about all these

(01:32:57):
different microorganisms.
We really know so little about all thefungi and their processes and how they're
going for thousands of miles, essentially,that we could never imagine.
And they're communicating and it's aliving network.

(01:33:18):
But it's even harder task, I imagine, tothen get down to the depths of the ocean
and figure out and moving water and
It's all sorts of stuff.
It's quite a challenge.
Yeah, I think that's one of the things Ilike about, of course, is the challenges,
but you have to know a little bit ofchemistry, you have to know a little bit
about physics, and of course biology,understand what these organisms are doing

(01:33:42):
in the oceans.
So you mentioned physics.
One of the other main arguments againstthe nutrient, I don't want to call it
theory, the nutrient
understanding of pollution is that theywould say it's weather patterns.

(01:34:04):
It's the weather is changing.
And you tell you mentioned, you mentionedweather, you mentioned wind, and you
mentioned stratification.
I don't know if those are all threeconnected.
But let me let me just table though, letme put those up there on the table.
And just you can kind of run us through,you know, what, what is the impact of
weather?

(01:34:24):
Is that something that
scientists feel is a driving force of thedead zone or why it's not.
And then tell us a little bit about thestratification in the average Joe and Jane
sense.
Okay, sure.
So I mentioned several times that theselow -oxygen waters are at the bottom.

(01:34:48):
And that can be only the case if there'sstratification.
So stratification means that there's lessdense
water on top of the water column at thesurface and more dense water at the
bottom.
And you get that difference in densityfrom two factors.
One is the temperature.

(01:35:08):
Warmer water is lighter than cold water.
So you see warmer water at the surface,cold water at the bottom.
I mean, if you go swimming, I remember asa kid going swimming, sometimes these
lengths and your chest or head would bereally nice and warm, but your feet could
be cold because
you know, what we call a thermocline is soclose to the surface that you can actually

(01:35:31):
feel that over five feet, six feet of aperson.
So temperature is a big impact onstratification.
The other one is salt, salt content.
And that becomes a factor when you see theMississippi River, which of course is
freshwater flowing into the Gulf ofMexico, which is salt water.

(01:35:54):
So now you have this river,
nutrient laden river going onto saltywater and the over the top of salty water.
So you have stratification and that makespossible for the bacteria to bring the
algae down there not to come in contactwith oxygen which waters have to service.

(01:36:15):
So that's the basic, that's also reallyimportant ingredient in setting up a dense
test stratification.
So now weather comes into the fact that isif you have winds,
that are strong enough, you couldpotentially mix up some of that and break
down that stratification.
And that's one of the challenges goingforward with dead zone work is how much

(01:36:39):
weather will be changing, that is, climatewill be changing and how that will impact
stratification and the completion ofoptions.
Okay.
And go ahead.
Go ahead.
Yeah, I was gonna say that
The general feeling is that while theplants can get warmer, we're going to have

(01:36:59):
more stratification.
Surface waters will warm up faster thandeep waters.
And so there'll be more stratificationthat will have more of a problem with the
oxygen disappearing from the bottom of thewater.
Right.
And so what would be the short form ofwhat you would rebuttal to someone who
says, it's not the nutrients, it's theweather?

(01:37:24):
Well, the short form is, is, yeah, youneed stratification, but without that
algal growth, you don't have a problem.
So I think it's pretty, I mean, you can'targue that you need to have the
stratification.
Although the River Thames is an example,and there was quite well mixed, but
there's so much sewage going in thatoxygen is stripped out regardless of, of

(01:37:49):
stratification.
But in Gulf of Mexico, you need it.
But without the algae growing, like aimbusters, because of all those nutrients
flowing in, you don't have a problem.
Right.
Okay.
And again, just to kind of reiterate thatpoint is that we're dealing with mostly
invisible forces, which is the bigchallenge here, that it's hard for even

(01:38:14):
like I was talking about earlier, likeit's hard to physically show.
the neighbor over here that, hey, thepesticide that you just put on that grass
and literally it rained like the next day,you know, and it's all a downhill movement
right into this preserve area.
And so it's hard.

(01:38:36):
I mean, and this is something that as a,as an ex, you know, what I would call, you
know, branding and marketing person, whichis essentially in my expertise is in.
perception, human perception and workingwith that.
And one of the key things in behavioraleconomics is, is how do you make something

(01:38:59):
that's invisible, visible, right?
So for example, you know, it's, it's knownthat some people would call the carbon
footprint a sham because BP hired Ogilvyand Mather, which is one of the most
famous advertising organizations evercreated.
to create the idea of the carbonfootprint, to give this invisible thing

(01:39:24):
something visible, something tangible towhere you'll be able to track yours.
Now, it's probably a good idea, but theone key part, I think people worry about
it to sham is because the main messagingis it's you, Mr.
And Mrs.
Consumer, it's your responsibility.
Meanwhile, over 71 % of all the emissionsare from large corporations.

(01:39:48):
And so in that way, it does feel a littlebit sketchy.
Yeah.
But overall, but but imagine though, theprinciple of that of wait a second before
I'm eating apples, I'm eating oranges.
This orange comes from California or thisorange comes from, you know, South
America.
What's the difference in terms ofemissions as well as ecological things?

(01:40:10):
What's happening there?
And so bringing that visible aspect to aninvisible.
challenge is, is such a key component thatI really hope science and scientists start
to like, naturally come forward.
I see this kind of movement growing,right?
There's a growing movement of, I think,scientists who are understanding that,

(01:40:35):
Hey, wait a second, I can't just be agreat scientist, I also have to be a great
communicator of what I'm studying, which Ithink is, is really, really important
moving forward.
But that brings me to, I don't know if youtalked in your book about it, but what was

(01:40:55):
the book with the DDT when DDT, was itSpring Hill?
No, Silent Spring.
Silent Spring.
Silent Spring.
But you know, it's interesting, she wastrained as a biologist.
I mean, she also wrote a book called TheSea Around Us that was not as well known
as, by far.

(01:41:15):
are inside of spring.
But anyway, she had a master's degree inbiology.
Fascinating story there.
Anyway, go ahead.
I'm sorry.
No, no, tell us a little bit about thatstory.
I don't know much about it.
She, I mean, I was just thinking aboutsome of her work.
Again, she was trained as actually as amarine biologist.
And as I mentioned, more did some of theseother books about about the ocean.

(01:41:40):
And she was writing for the New Yorker and
these series of articles about theproblems caused by DBT and it resulted in
Silent Spring.
Really, as you may guess, heavilycriticized by the chemical industry
because she didn't, I think the mainproblem was she was a woman and she didn't

(01:42:03):
have the status of someone who is workingin the field.
Probably it was the birth ofenvironmentalism and
Certainly in this country back in theearly sixties, it led to some big things
from my understanding.
Like I was doing some research recentlybecause we're in, we're in Greenwich,
right?
We're only, we're here for six weeks.

(01:42:24):
And I mean, I think I did some research.
There's like, I think there's like 20billionaires within like 15 miles of where
I'm at.
Yeah.
I mean, like Ray Dalio is, his office is13 minutes away from where we're at.
but one of the other guys, I can'tremember his name.

(01:42:45):
yeah, I mean, he's like, you know, worthlike 78 billion, but him and his wife were
two of the biggest proponents of theenvironmental defense fund, I believe.
And that seemed to have originated at thetime of Silent Spring.
And the reason that I, that I kind ofbrought this up is because.

(01:43:08):
That was a very visible thing, right?
Where all these falcons and birds werejust dropping dead out of nowhere.
And that's something I feel like you cankind of rally people to more, right?
Of like, hey, have you seen that?
Have you seen a bird just dead in thestreet all of a sudden?
Or there's lots of them dying.

(01:43:29):
And it seems like you can gather momentumpolitically much faster.
Did that lead to...
I mean, so the environmental defense,what, what, yeah, fun, but what happened
after that?
I mean, how did DT, so did DDT gets bannedafter that?
Yeah, it was soon after that, but it musthave been at least 10 years.

(01:43:52):
I don't know the history well enough tosay how long it took for it to be banned.
So that's a good question.
How long after that?
But it certainly was the, you know, startof it or the most important component of
it.
Right.
And it seems like now we're dealing withchallenges that are more invisible.

(01:44:13):
They're more micro as well as industriesare also even more powerful than they were
in the seventies.
You point out BP with a carbon footprint.
I heard that same story about, and onehand we are all responsible.
We're putting gas into our gas guzzlingSUVs and so on.
But on the other hand, it takes away.

(01:44:36):
responsibility that those industries haveincluding.
Right.
And it's the majority of there.
But I, I don't know, it's fascinatingbecause the
It seems like we're wanting to just doband -aid solutions and everything is in
order to protect the free marketessentially, well, the free market.

(01:45:03):
Well, the other argument is that, well,people need their jobs.
We need to be able to have a good life.
It's often argued as being put against
having less CO2 than the atmosphere.
So there's an environment or free jobs orgood jobs.

(01:45:26):
And I think that's a false dichotomythere.
It's not really the case.
I think you can have a better life byappreciating the environment than what
we're doing now.
Yeah.
And it's tricky.
As someone who also lived, I lived inChina for two years and there,

(01:45:48):
It's a really fascinating phenomenonthat's happening there.
There was a whole movement this last yearand it happened from one guy who wrote
this blog that went viral on, I thinkWeibo or Baidu, which is the social media
or the Google kind of of China.
And it's essentially, it was a manifestoand it's called the lying flat manifesto.

(01:46:13):
which is just this it's this call toaction to young people and saying, look,
we should not keep up this lifestyle ofthis nonstop working and just this madness
of fast paced culture that we're living.
And it's fascinating because that's onlybeen happening for them for really the

(01:46:35):
past like.
Max like 30 to 40 years, really only thepast 20 years in China, especially for the
younger generation, for the millennialgeneration and the Gen Xers.
It's really only 20 years, but the UnitedStates has been going through it for a
much longer time with industrializationhappening earlier.
But it's fascinating because.

(01:46:59):
It seems like this could be one of the fewindicators of a way to reach this idea of
living a slower life.
Not, you know, it doesn't we don't have tobe constantly innovating to this no end
where, you know, we were supposed to haveless work with computers.
That didn't happen.

(01:47:19):
That didn't happen.
You know, they followed us home and andthen we were told to answer emails at all
times of the day based on culture, noteven.
I don't know many bosses who would say,hey, you should answer an email, but I
know lots of bosses who would give apromotion to the person who does answer
their email, you know, at 10 o 'clock atnight versus the person who says, hey,

(01:47:41):
when I'm home, I'm with my family and myfriends and I do my life.
You know, those people don't tend to getpromoted in the culture we have.
And it seems like we're reaching apinnacle of, okay, wait a second.
It's...
not only about technological innovation ofgreen industries, but it's also about

(01:48:04):
slowing down and consuming less and doingless of some things, right?
For all of time, one of the main thingsthat we would do is cook food.
Search for it and cook it.
Search for it and cook it was one of themain activities.
And we probably enjoyed ourselves quite abit actually during that time.

(01:48:24):
Whereas now it's like,
Is there a prepped meal plan that I canget?
Because eating is, if you can give it tome in a pill, I'll take it in a pill.
You know what I mean?
There's no joy.
There's no joy of it.
And I've been one of those people when Iwas an entrepreneur working seven days a
week, protein bars, protein shakes, youknow, all these things that are not real

(01:48:46):
food.
Right.
And we do that.
But I'm really hoping that we come into aplace where we can where we can slow down.
And I think nature teaches us that.
that part of, hey, actually taking a walkin the forest is actually way more
enjoyable than watching a movie.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I think one of the, the good thing aboutthe pandemic, I mean, of course it's been

(01:49:08):
horrible for many people is that it hasforced folks to kind of reassess their
relationship to work.
This whole idea about community, forexample, that you can do this in your, at
your home and people can work at home anddon't have to get into a gas guzzling car.
drive two hours to their job.
That alone, I think, may have manypositive impacts on our society.

(01:49:33):
Right.
And I was reading, though, the other daythat there really, though, wasn't that
much reduction in CO2 emissions duringthat time.
No, no.
Which was one of the disheartening things.
Yeah, it was.
I've seen the same studies in data thatdoesn't.
But another aspect of our life, I hope ithas some positive.

(01:49:55):
Definitely.
I agree.
Did you do a lot of writing during thepandemic?
Yeah, I retired basically as the pandemicwas developing.
In some ways, it was bad timing because Ihad all these plans of trying to start

(01:50:15):
another phase of my career that has beenput on hold.
Plus side is, I mean, I was doing a lot of
We have to, because we're a split campus,I was doing a lot of remote teaching.
We always were doing that.
We had students in front of us andstudents at the other end.
So we had to do this type of technology toreach those other students at the other

(01:50:36):
end.
So I'm not, I wasn't totally unaware ofthat technology and how to do that, but to
totally go that way and do it totally byZoom say, would have been a lot of work.
So I'm glad I missed that.
Yeah.
So yeah, because of the...
on the pandemic, I've been able toconcentrate more on the writing.

(01:50:59):
Wow.
And you said that you wanted to, you'replanning on having kind of a second career
after this.
What do you want to do?
I wanted to, I'd like to do some morevolunteer work with some environmental
groups around in this area, more on asmaller scale.
And then I'd like to continue on to do,I'm working on another book now.

(01:51:22):
climate change and microbes, they're allmicrobes and climate change.
So, clean those too, it'll keep you busy.
What's a little bit of a teaser on that?
What is kind of one of the main componentsof that?
Well, basically, microbes are everywhere.
And certainly in the ocean, they're thereason why the oceans are big reason why

(01:51:44):
the oceans take up a lot of CO2.
So to back up, roughly a third...
quarter of the CO2 that we are emittingnow goes into the ocean.
Another quarter or so goes into soils andthen only a half of what we emit stays in

(01:52:05):
the atmosphere.
So it could be even worse if we did nothave these ocean and terrestrial sinks.
So microbes are very much involved in whythe oceans and the atmosphere are taking
up so much CO2.
Right.
That's the...
main thing.
But they're also involved in other gases,methane.

(01:52:27):
Only micros consume methane and producenaturally produced methane.
So they're very much involved in methane,another important greenhouse gas.
I was researching recently with all thecarbon credit stuff.
So the mangrove forests actually are thelargest carbon sink and they're called
blue credits.
And people believe that those will have apremium in the market.

(01:52:52):
because they have the amount of carbonthey sequester is like 10x what a regular
forest would do, something like that.
Yeah.
So what's your thoughts about the carbontax?
Have you looked into that much?
Carbon tax, I haven't looked into toomuch, but I would say from what I can see,
it looks like that's really what needs tohappen.

(01:53:15):
Yeah.
It seems like the market is not going tobe able to solve this on its own.
So there needs to be, you know, there hasto be a more governmental approach into
it.
I liken it to, you know, one of the otherindustry that I liken it to that I have

(01:53:36):
experience in would be the Californiaalmond industry, which is notorious for
pumping, using a lot of water, but it'sactually interesting.
And I just filmed a podcast episode withthe vice president and one of the largest
companies.
But he's also one of the most liberal guysin the entire industry.
And we talked about all these things.

(01:53:57):
But what's interesting is that almonds areactually have the lowest carbon footprint
of all foods, a tree like that.
And my argument would be is that they havethe potential to become one of the best
crops.

(01:54:17):
if we start to farm them in a better way.
If every almond farm had a 25 speciescover crop on it instead of bare ground
and we started rebuilding the soil becausemost of that soil has been degraded and
it's all just dirt.
There's no water infiltration.
So when you do get rain, you're notinfiltrating it, which the rebuilding all

(01:54:42):
of the biology and the soil structurewould lead to more water infiltration.
But this would not have happened withoutor the big thing that's coming into that
industry is that you have what's calledSigma, which is the legislation that
Governor Jerry Brown put into play in thedrought about maybe five or 10 years ago,

(01:55:05):
essentially, maybe 10 years ago, I'm notsure.
But that is now where they're starting.
You have to have a plan for your basin ofthe water basin that you're in.
There has to be a plan.
for how is this basin gonna be bettermanaged and how are we gonna make this
basin sustainable with water?
And that's gonna mean reductions inpumping limitations for farmers as well as

(01:55:31):
industrial uses and all these things.
And the reality is that the market wouldhave just never come to that.
The market before that was is if I'm afarmer and this is my property and I'm
gonna stick my straw into the earth andI'm gonna suck as hard and as fast as I
can,
And that's where we really get into this.
Well, is this a commons resource?

(01:55:52):
Right?
Is this a commons resource or is this aprivate property?
And then we can get into a whole host ofissues of what the problems are with, you
know, the idea, you know, of privateproperty, which the native peoples, I'm
sure could tell us all about, but youknow, it's, it seems like a carbon tax is
necessary, but I'm also, and I'm reallyinterested in.

(01:56:13):
what I call like the duct tape solutionsthat I see.
So like one of them is, is for like thecattle industry is, is that, Hey, well, if
we feed them seaweed, they will belch 30 %less.
Yeah.
Less methane.
Yeah.
I saw that too.
That's right.
Which is incredible.
Even less, even more than that.

(01:56:34):
I think they will.
Yeah.
I think it is.
I think it, I think I'm short selling it,which is the preferred methane on the
podcast.
Yeah, yeah.
But another thing that's happening,there's a there's a company in Texas, a
bio company that's trying to createdifferent microorganisms to populate the

(01:56:56):
gut of the cow that would reduce it evenmore than that.
This these to me are actually mostprobably bad ideas.
These are not good ideas, because theseare those those classic ideas.
where we think it's going to be driven bysome really great science, but the second
order effects are going to be way worse.

(01:57:17):
And to me, that says, okay, wait a second,I'm already seeing in the health and
nutrition space, a rapid increase indemand for seaweed products, right?
I mean, Costco now sells organic seaweedsnacks.
You know what I mean?
That's completely new in the past coupleof years that they would carry a product

(01:57:38):
like that.
And then all of a sudden, if we have thecattle industry wanting all of this
seaweed from the ocean as well, and thatleads to, okay, well now there's going to
be this new seaweed industry, but we stillhaven't perfected growing things in the
oceans and bays and things without doingdamage.

(01:57:59):
So I'm worried about creating a tremendousamount of demand for some idea to then
mitigate.
this other thing that maybe that's notreally the source problem.
The source problem is that we probably allneed to eat less meat.
I was gonna say it's a easy technologicalfix for a problem that the fix probably is

(01:58:21):
not very good at all.
I mean, the number I saw is 90%, which isprobably way, way too high, but it's
probably not even 30 % in reality.
And it kind of takes us off the hook.
Most people off the hook of just eatingless bread.
Right.
Right.
And again, and I eat red meat today.

(01:58:41):
I'm not pure vegetarian, you know, and andand I'm, I'm through the, you know, going
through the process of, all right, how dowe, you know, what, what is it that we
need?
Because there are things like iron andthings that you don't get in the same way
in a plant.
I mean, you would have to eat or at leastit'd be harder.
You'd have to work at it more.
You, you have to work.
I mean, you have to be, you know,essentially you become like the

(01:59:03):
bodybuilder type who's, you know,spooning.
as much kale as you can every severalhours to get the iron and stuff like that.
But it's not impossible.
But I mean, think about the ramificationsof putting in a bunch of microbes that
have been created in a lab into thisanimal now.

(01:59:24):
I mean, it's just it's too far for me.
You know what I mean?
I'm from the perspective of actually let'sgo back to the the farthest we can go back
in the cow genetics.
of natural as possible where it's beenless and less hybridized.
And let's just graze that as properly aswe can, if even that's a good idea.
You know, instead of instead of okay, hangon, how do we manipulate this cow using

(01:59:49):
all of our techniques in order to do this?
Right, right.
You know, so it's the the carbon, thecarbon component is very new for me in
terms of my research.
And it's fascinating.
One thing I'm thinking of creating is adifferent model and a website because

(02:00:09):
going back to the California almonds, theCalifornia almond takes an extraordinary,
it's 460 something gallons to make fourounces of almonds.
But, but, and this is a huge but.
I ask people all the time, when's the lasttime you threw away some lettuce?

(02:00:33):
When's the last time you threw awaytomato?
When's the last time you threw away anavocado?
When's the last time you threw away anykind of citrus fruit or other vegetable
that went bad?
I don't know anyone who can't say I threwaway something in the last week.
Now let's assume that that lettuce tookonly 40 gallons of water.

(02:00:53):
or the orange took 50 gallons of watercompared to that 460 that the almond took.
But guess what?
When's the last time you threw almondsaway?
Right, right.
You probably haven't because they haveroughly a two year shelf life.
So on a net net basis, tremendous amountsmore of water are being wasted with other

(02:01:18):
crops that go bad in our refrigeratorsthan almonds at the end of the day.
Right, right.
And this part's fascinating to me becauseit doesn't negate the water issues in
California.
It doesn't negate the need for betterpractices, but it does bring light to a
nuanced scenario and question, right,which is what we're dealing with here.

(02:01:43):
And I mean, that I mean, it blows my mindwhen I think about that.
You know, I've never I don't think I'veever thrown almonds away.
You know, and almonds are actually evenbetter than, you know, a walnut will go
rancid much faster than a walnut.
That's your refrigerator because of that.
Exactly.
Room temperature and if you kept them in afreezer, it probably even longer than two

(02:02:08):
years, right?
You could go for a very long time, butthat's interesting to me in that way.
But then you have the issue of, okay,well, from the last thing that I read
that, you know, almonds use more glyph.
glyphosate is applied to almonds and anyother crop.
That's a problem.
That's a problem.

(02:02:28):
So how can we work on that?
How can we bring that pesticide use downin that way?
But these are all just fascinating.
This is part of the reason of having thispodcast is because I've seen the almond
industry literally from the bare ground inCalifornia all the way to

(02:02:50):
the end consumer in India and in China.
And I used to sit in the markets in thesecrazy Asian markets where people walk
through with the market in Delhi.
In India is called Karibali and theyliterally a billion dollars in cash walks
through that place every day.

(02:03:13):
It's the largest commodities market inAsia.
And I used to go sit there with the almondbuyers and these little tiny
I mean, a quarter of the room that I'm inright now, these little tiny squares and
like this like underground dungeon thingand people are walking by with spices on
their head and huge sacks.
And you walk by different areas andoverhears the dry fruits and nuts and

(02:03:36):
overhears all the different spices and allthese different commodities.
And it was just fascinating to see theentire supply chain all the way through.
And I would go and visit the.
the factories of our buyers from theCalifornia side.
And then eventually I ended up building afactory there with my business partner.
And so I've seen this industry and I'veseen some other agricultural industries in

(02:04:02):
this light.
And that's very unique.
Most people will never get thatopportunity to see something like that.
And what it did was it exposed me to both.
the good, the bad and the myths, right?
I'm interested in the myths of theindustry of, okay, you know, we have to

(02:04:22):
feed the world.
Where did that come from?
Yeah, yeah.
I don't know.
You know, it's an interesting idea.
Do we really are is our is the averagefarmer's intention really to feed the
world or is it to get the best price fortheir product?
Yeah.
You know, so there's all sorts ofquestions like that.
But the the idea with the website that I'mthinking about,

(02:04:44):
long story long, is there's nowhere youcan go and see, okay, hang on, here's the
carbon footprint of this product.
Here's the water footprint of thisproduct.
Here's the, maybe we create a fertilizerfootprint of this product.

(02:05:05):
And here's a social political footprint ofthis product.
right?
Because I have a book that's called HowBad as a Banana.
And this guy essentially, he does a carbonfootprint for roughly 500 different
products.
And he claims the banana is actually agreat product because of the nutrients

(02:05:31):
that it has for such a low carbonfootprint that it has.
Because interestingly, most transportationdoesn't factor into a large carbon
footprint unless it gets on to
Like a ship versus a truck is verydifferent.
But the first woman that I interviewed forthe podcast also wrote a book on just

(02:05:54):
bananas culturally and all the things thathave happened there, right?
Where there's lots of colonial things andlots of exploitation, the Banana Republic
and all those ideas.
So it's never that simple as one metric.
Right, right, right, right.
Right.
Yeah.
I think that's, that's getting back to thealmond.

(02:06:16):
I think that's one place where sciencecomes in is you look at not just the one
figure that you cited, how much water ituses, but was last time throughout the
water, throughout the almond.
I was thinking back to the biofuel exampleand one fantasy, wow, what a great idea to
replace a fossil fuel was renewable energysource, but they had to realize the cost

(02:06:42):
of
making that also fuel.
So I think that's where a bit moreinformation would help people understand
it.
If they don't do anything differently, atleast they would be more knowledgeable
about a particular topic.
Yeah.
But it's difficult.
I think that we're also approaching thistime where for the average person, it's

(02:07:03):
kind of maddening.
I mean, it's a lot of work to try andunderstand.
And then we're told and everyone's socriticizing now and it's like,
I eat bananas, then someone goes, you're afool for eating bananas, you know what I
mean?
And then you're like, well, okay, I eatalmonds.
You're like, you shouldn't eat almondseither.
And well, you know, okay, you know, who,who can you know, what can you eat?

(02:07:28):
And what do you do?
And, and just all these differentquestions.
And that's also a part of the goal is tois to just bring some, some easier ways to
listen to someone like you to explain, youknow,
your work and the importance of it and tobe able to understand that, okay, wait a
second, what is my role on this?

(02:07:49):
What can I do?
Maybe let's start to close with that iswhat do you think is something that the
average person can do to help thisparticular situation of dead zones?
Well, we've touched on some of the thingsalready.
Food waste is one right there.
A tremendous amount of food is wasted.

(02:08:12):
We talked already about how much food wethrow away after it gets to our house, but
even before it gets to our house, a lot ofit's thrown away.
If we could somehow reduce that waste,that would be great.
And if you think about it, when we go to agrocery store, we're picking out the best
looking fruit, vegetables, and so on.

(02:08:33):
And all the ugly ones are probably goingto be tossed.
If we had a bit more...
liberal attitude about those nuts openlooking piece of fruit that would help
with the waste problem.
The other one is, so the general messagehere is food production.

(02:08:53):
If we somehow reduce that, for mostAmericans don't face the problem of food
insecurity, it is a problem for someAmericans, but not for most.
Most Americans have the opposite problem,they eat too much, right?
Obesity is a big problem in this country.
So if they could reduce their food intake,that would help.

(02:09:17):
You'd need less corn that is grown andless fertilizer that's applied.
And if I were to talk about one food thatpeople should eat less of is red meat.
Red meat is really harmful to theenvironment for many reasons.
And before we get to the environment, ofcourse, red meat has eaten too much of it.

(02:09:38):
is bad for our health.
I still eat red meat.
I'm still a carnivore.
I don't eat a lot of red meat.
That's more because of the taste more thananything.
So I don't think it means going to atotally vegetarian diet, but certainly too
many people eat too much red meat.
And red meat just basically, you know, youhave to feed those cattle so much more

(02:10:02):
corn, antibiotics.
I've talked about that already.
They are fed some, a lot of antibiotics.
And they emit a lot of other greenhousegases, not just CO2, but we talked already
about methane.
They're a big emitter of methane.
Overall, agriculture is roughly about athird of the greenhouse gas emissions are

(02:10:22):
somehow connected with agriculture.
So I would think just thinking a bit moreabout the food that you eat would want way
to solve the problem.
Right.
And what do you mean?
Do you think that the that the
even having a lawn and fertilizing thatlawn and stuff like that is something that

(02:10:44):
they could look into?
I think there are a lot of reasons.
I never understood the big lawn andspending hours and hours on a CO2 belching
lawnmower.
The fertilizer that they're adding to thelawn is probably not a huge problem.
I mean, it certainly doesn't help.

(02:11:04):
Some of that fertilizer is going to end upin the nearby stream.
but grass is fairly good.
At least the studies that have been doneon golf courses show that golf courses are
really a lot of fertilizer applied to golfcourses.
A lot of that just stays right there,fortunately.
So that's not probably the thing I wouldharp on the most.
I look more what's happening inside thehouse or at the barbecue.

(02:11:28):
Yeah, I would say from a little bit thatI've seen though that there are lots of
golf courses that are in very...
particular areas that are critical areas.
And there's some, you know, in the like inSan Francisco, that will be close to the
estuaries and things where we where wewouldn't want to necessarily be doing

(02:11:50):
that.
But yeah, the law and idea is funny,right?
Because it's really where we should begrowing a little bit of our own food.
You know, not not all of it.
We don't have to grow all of our own food.
I don't think I'm not I'm not a proponentof that.
But if you could grow 20 percent of yourown food,
If you have a lawn and you know exactlywhat you put into it, you also develop

(02:12:12):
your relationship with nature at a deeperlevel.
It's one of the healthiest things we cando on a lot of different, you know, on a
lot of different fronts, not only fromwhat we intake on a nutrient basis.
It seems like that to me is a, I'm, I'malways curious in looking for what is
something that I, as an average personreally have some control over, you know,

(02:12:36):
Yeah, getting back to what we eat, we havelots of control over that.
Advertisers certainly sway that quite abit.
Right.
If you don't grow your own food, ifthere's something else you do with your
lawns, you're not spending all your timeon a riding lawn mower every day or every
weekend.

(02:12:58):
So those type of things, I think, have, asyou kind of alluded to, so many other
benefits.
That's what I kind of look forward to alsois.
you do something that has just notreducing nutrients, but it helps with
greenhouse gases and it helps with yourown health.
It has these multiple benefits to you andthose around you.

(02:13:20):
Definitely.
Yeah.
Looking for the co -benefits is a reallybig thing.
And I think looking for...
I also just said for one final closingpoint is I just want to bring up the topic
of just...
moving away from the anthropocentric viewof the world.
You know, we have this just chronic viewthat we are the center of the universe and

(02:13:43):
that it's all about the human species.
And that's what's leading us to not beable to empathize and have a relationship
with all of the other organisms that areactually supporting us and all of this
life.
And until we start to be more inclusivewith all beings, human and non -human,

(02:14:03):
I feel like we're going to continue tohave a lot of these challenges.
Yeah, I think, I mean, it's not just thewell -being of these other organisms.
It's our own well -being.
Now that going back to a human centeredview, that's one argument to put forward
is that our own well -being depends onthese other organisms life around us.

(02:14:24):
So in that quality of our life depends onthem.
Right.
The quality is very much is the quality aswell as.
what seems to be coming as the possibilityof our life.
Yeah, yeah, I'm not an extremist that way.
I think people are amazingly resilient.
And we would probably survive anything.
I mean, if the worst comes to pass withclimate change, but who wants to live in

(02:14:49):
that world?
Yeah, I don't think I don't think we do.
And I think we do want to live in a worldwhere we are enjoying ourselves more with
with that connection to nature.
with the connection to our food and allthese different things.
And so, well, David, thank you very muchfor your time.
This was fantastic.
I have to say I was a little bit moreworried about this podcast because there's

(02:15:12):
a lot of science there, but you did afantastic job of guiding me through it.
And I really appreciate your time.
And we wish you the best of luck on yourupcoming book.
And hopefully we'll have you back on afterthat comes out.
I love that.
This has been really rewarding andenjoyable.
Thanks a lot, Justin.

(02:15:32):
Awesome.
Take care.
I'll send you an email on some naturalfarming stuff for your wife.
Okay.
Great.
Yeah.
Thank you.
All right.
Take care.
Bye -bye.
Bye.