Animals—and people—have instincts that will guide them to eat a very healthy diet if given half a chance. But we also have cultural practices, marketing, dubious government guidelines, degradation of food supplies, and many other impediments to healthy eating. Fred Provenza explores all this and more in his book Nourishment: What Animals Can Te ...…

The science of farm and rangeland is often incomprehensible to the people on the land. We talk to On Pasture magazine founder Kathy Voth, whose mission is to make science accessible to people who need it--and to help keep them from being bamboozled by the latest agriculture fads.

Today's program is from the Radio Cafe archives. David Johnson is a senior research scientist and molecular biologist at the Institute for Energy and the Environment at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces. We talk about the process of restoring soil, and how farmers, ranchers, and land managers can be incentivized to engage in healthy soi ...…

Gavin Van Horn is author of the new book, The Way of Coyote: Shared Journeys of the Urban Wild. As we read the book we walk with him along streets, rivers, and lakes, and learn a slower and softer way of seeing – even in the bustling city – that includes the wildlife with which we share our world.

Reginaldo Haslett Marroquín of the Main Street Project in Northfield, Minnesota, talks about a new model for a healthy and regenerative poultry industry -- and how it can be accomplished with modest investments of land and capital. One of the main challenges of envisioning a healthy food system is how it can work at a large scale, and not just ...…

This is the second in our series of interviews from the Regenerate 2018 conference in Albuquerque. We talk Jonathan and Kaylyn Cobb, co-owners Green Fields Farm in Rogers, Texas, who tell us the story of almost selling the farm but then coming in contact with regenerative principles and changing not only their way of working the land but of und ...…

What does it take for a retail brand to make a commitment to sourcing meat from ranchers who are regenerating the land? We talk to Gina Asoudegan, vice president of mission and innovation at Applegate Natural and Organic Meats, and Katie Forrest, cofounder of EPIC Provisions about how they work with producers, and how the mission of a small foo ...…

Sallie Calhoun is president of the Globetrotter Foundation, owner of the Paicines Ranch, and founder of the #NoRegrets Initiative. She came to ranching from electrical engineering and high-tech entrepreneurship, and has devoted her life to sustainable agriculture–and both investing and teaching others about investing in a healthy food system. S ...…

Since the end of the civil war, White Oak Pastures has been in the Harris family, but their farming practices have ranged from 19th century subsistence farming to post-war industrial agriculture — and now larger scale regenerative farming. Will Harris has created a closed-loop, no-waste farm, whose goals include providing healthy food raised in ...…

How do adversaries find common ground? How do they work together to find common goals an interests? Food from the Radical Center: Healing our Land and Communities by Gary Paul Nabhan is about food and land conservation, but its lessons have the potential to bring together many people in our polarized nation. Nabhan is a writer, seed conservatio ...…

Dr. Hisham Moharram founded The Good Tree Farm and Good Tree Farm, Inc. as an expression of his Muslim faith. He explains how to keep a farm profitable, regenerate the land, feed communities that don’t have good access to healthy food, and provide entrepreneurship opportunities for young people.

Christine Su is CEO and co-founder of Pasturemap, a tool that helps ranchers increase productivity on their rangelands. We talk about the synergies among soil health, grass abundance, profitability, carbon sequestration, and intergenerational--and inter-regional--information sharing.

Nicole Masters is an agroecologist who teaches, writes about, and consults on regenerative agriculture and soil regeneration. With projects in both the US and her home, New Zealand, she has worked on nearly a million acres of crop lands and range lands to improve soil and help producers reap the many benefits of doing so -- healthier food, heal ...…

Bill McDorman, executive director of the Rocky Mountain Seed Alliance in Ketchum, Idaho, and co-founder of the Seed School, has been saving seeds for over three decades. He explains the dangers of the massive biodiversity loss that's happened in the last fifty years, and how seed saving can move us toward a well-adapted local agriculture.…

Jo Robinson is an investigative journalist whose book Eating on the Wild Side is all about the deep history of the human diet -- and how we can find nutritious food even in the plastic jungle of industrial agriculture and retail. She spoke at a Quivira Coalition conference several years ago.

In Gunnison, Colorado, there is an innovative collaboration to conserve the Gunnison Sage Grouse, a threatened--but not endangered--species native to this part of the Southwest. By building simple rock structures, using the techniques of land restoration pioneer Bill Zeedyk, they have been able to build up habitat for the sage grouse, and at th ...…

Andrew deCoriolis is with Farm Forward, an organization dedicated to animal welfare for farm animals. We discuss the poultry industry, and the near-disappearance of the many healthy breeds of chickens and turkeys that once populated all farms in the US. Now virtually all poultry are unhealthy, grotesque animals that live miserable lives and pro ...…

Faithlands is an initiative of the Agrarian Trust that brings together religious traditions and regenerative agriculture. Today we talk to Severine von Tscharner Fleming, organizer in the young farmers movement, and Sam Chamelin, founding pastor of the Keep and Till and the St. Mark's United Church of Christ in Hempstead Maryland.…

Caroline Fraser just won the Pulitzer Prize for biography for her new book, Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder. For those who read the Little House books, you’ll remember the tales of a loving family on the American frontier. What’s behind the scenes is the extraordinary destruction wrought by settlers—both to the native ...…

Author and sustainability ecologist Tony Juniper talks about his book, What Has Nature Ever Done for Us? How Money Really Does Grow on Trees. He explains the value of natural ecosystems in a variety of economic contexts, from food systems to oceans.

Doug Crabtree and Anna Jones Crabtree are the owners of Vilicus Farms in Havre, Montana. The 6800-acre organic farm is as far from industrial agriculture as you can get -- they grow as many as 20 different crops every year, without any farm chemicals, and with a focus on building soil, stewarding the land stewardship, and co-existing with wildl ...…

Professor of geography at the University of California, Berkeley, Nathan Sayre is author of the book, The Politics of Scale: A History of Rangeland Science.

Judith Schwartz is author of the book Cows Save the Planet: And Other Improbable Ways of Restoring Soil to Heal the Earth. We talk about ecosystems, and biodiversity, and soil, and climate change mitigation, and alternatives to the current industrial food model.

Chris Jagger is a vegetable farmer in Oregon, and he's founder of the Living Soils Symposium, an annual gathering of farmers and people interested in regenerative agriculture. He talks about the many challenges of farming, including the economic pressure on small and medium-sized growers, and the rewards of growing healthy food and living in a ...…

Lesli Allison, executive director of the Western Landowners Alliance, talks about the complex relationships among conservationists, ranchers, farmers, land managers--and wildlife, water, and earth. Challenges that have previously seemed insurmountable are now being met, as environmental crises escalate and people on all sides build relationship ...…

Brad Lancaster is co-founder of Desert Harvesters, in Tucson, Arizona. He's author of Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands and Beyond. His new book, produced with Desert Harvesters, is Eat Mesquite and More: A Cookbook for Sonoran Desert Foods and Living.

Gabe Brown and his family endured hail, drought, and near ruin before they changed their way of farming and ranching. Theirs is a story of creative response to adversity that led to a much healthier and more successful landscape and business than the previous model. Brown's Ranch has inspired people from all over the world; Gabe Brown has been ...…

Pioneering plant geneticist Wes Jackson on a truly sustainable agriculture using perennial grains and resilient ecosystems.

Sandra Postel‘s new book is Replenish: The Virtuous Cycle of Water and Prosperity. It’s about the world water cycle, and about real solutions to the problem of providing water for people and food, and at the same time for nature and wildlife. And it’s also about building coalitions, relationships, and partnerships among many different water use ...…

Mike Callicrate left industrial feedlot agriculture to raise meat animals in a way that is healthier for everyone, including the animals and the people who eat them. http://radiocafe.media/downtoearth/ https://quiviracoalition.org/

Adam Danforth left behind a career in advertising and marketing in order to do something more grounded and meaningful with his life. He became a butcher, one of a new breed of artisanal butchers who are challenging the toxic and environmentally destructive world if industrial meat production. They’re practicing new ways (grounded in old ways) o ...…

Calla Rose Ostrander is an expert on climate change policy and regenerative agriculture — and the place where those worlds meet. She offers a hopeful vision of how agriculture could transform from climate problem to solution. And it’s not only a vision. It’s actually happening, thanks to innovators like the Marin Carbon Project, Fibershed, the ...…

Allen Williams speaks of his travels across multiple continents practicing and teaching ecosystem-based ranching, and shares his vision of a world with healthy food, wildlife, and rural communities. http://radiocafe.media/downtoearth/ www.quiviracoalition.org

Paul and Elizabeth Kaiser went into farming because it seemed like an earth-friendly way to make a living–and they brought a lot of knowledge and innovation to the process. The result: Singing Frogs Farm is a thriving, productive place that has a new harvest every few months, pays good wages, and makes an order of magnitude more money per acre ...…