Enhancing Food Systems: Biodiversity, Grazing Practices, and Community Resilience with Dr. Dan Rubenstein

The following interview was recorded for the Poor Proles Almanac podcast with guest, Dr Dan Rubenstein. He's an ecology professor at Princeton University and manages the Rubenstein Lab. We spent the episode chatting with him about looking at the science backing some of the principles of regenerative agriculture and some of the projects he's been involved with regarding creating cooperative farm systems to create more resilient food systems.

Andy: Dr. Rubenstein, thanks so much for coming on to chat with us about this difficult topic. Tell me a little bit about your background and your work with local food systems.

Dr. Dan Rubenstein:

Well, I'm a behavioral ecologist. I study animals. In fact, I study many animals throughout my career, but I focus mainly on the equids, the wild horses, zebras and asses that roam on grassland and savanna landscapes, and my work has brought me into contact with livestock herders, both commercial ranchers and pastoral people that herd livestock for their families and for their well-being, and the animals that I study are routinely considered vermin. Their wellbeing and the animals that I study are routinely considered vermin.

Every grass blade that a horse or a zebra or a wild ass eats commercial rancher or a pastor's believes belong in the belly of their animal for increasing their livelihoods. So that brought me into farming from a different perspective than most people. I'm trying to maintain biodiversity on a landscape that is often shared with domesticated stock that consume the same resources that the wild animals I study consume. Getting to know them, what mattered to them, and why they perceive the animals I study as difficult, onerous vermin brought me to understand that I needed to make my work more available. So we started doing some experiments to examine the relationship between livestock and wildlife.

So in Africa, there's a thing called the grazing succession, which happens among natural wild species, that the zebras are big-bodied and have a hindgut fermentation system. Because most animals don't have cellulase, so they can't get the energy from the carbon bonds in the plant structural material. They can only get the nutrients and the energy in the cells protected by the cell walls. They have chambers where microbes live, and those microbes have cellulase, so those microbes can break down that structural carbon into energy, and bigger animals can subsist on lower quality food, which is full of structural materials. And so what happens on a natural landscape is that the hindgut fermenting big-bodied species like zebras eat the stems, straw, and good stuff, but they can live on the bad stuff.

That opens up and changes the structure of the vegetation so that the other big species, ruminants, that have a different chamber for their microbes, and that need higher-quality food for the same weight, now experience a landscape that has been improved, if you will, by the removal of the tough fibrous material. They then eat that vegetation down and really let the new growth form, which feeds the smaller species like the gazelles. We call that a grazing succession.

It's a form of mutualism, not a competition, and we said maybe that's also happening on a landscape with cattle. So we did experiments where we put cattle and zebras together and we did them at stocking rates the low stocking rate that commercial ranchers use and the high stocking rates that the pastoralists use and we were able to demonstrate very nicely that in fact the zebras eat the stems and the straw, change the structure of the landscape, allow the cattle to get into the forbs that they really like, which are highly nutritious.

The cattle grow better when sharing the landscape with zebras, and the zebras do better, partly because the cattle reinforce the cropping that allows the vegetation to green up after rain. But they also, by the way, they feed with their tongues, grab the vegetation and strip it of the parasites that infect the guts of the zebras and, as a consequence, the zebra's health improves just in general. So the competition that's perceived as long as grass is growing is actually a mutualism where each species improves the ability of the other to survive.

So we work with the ranchers and bring this evidence to them and they go aha, maybe I have to rethink my relationship between my animals and the landscape and the wildlife that they share the landscape with, and so that got me thinking that, in general, people's misunderstanding of the relationships between wildlife and the monitoring and modifying of a landscape needs to be better understood so that people can use it more efficiently, for both sustaining their livelihoods, but also for maintaining biodiversity.

Andy:

So that's how I got into farming relationships, those mutualist relationships with the other species in their community, and to be a part of that intensive grazing pattern that's quickly rotationally grazed. It sounds like you guys did a lot of the legwork that seems to be lacking on that side of the regenerative agriculture scene.

Dr. Dan Rubenstein:

Right. So we've done a series of experiments to really look at the intensified cattle grazing. So, the first experiment that we did, we just let the cattle graze and business as usual, which means they walk around, they choose to eat what they want to eat, and they ignore the stuff that's lower quality, that they don't want to eat. Of course, with zebras, the zebras eat all of it, so the bad stuff vanishes and the good stuff is disproportionately there.

But if a rancher is not going to tolerate much wildlife, how can he make his cattle be like a zebra? How can his farming of pure stock of cattle do to the landscape what the mixture does to the landscape? And that's where intensified rotational grazing, bunch grazing, fits in. We call it holistic grazing because different farmers do different things.

But we've done some experiments on that and found which parts of the Savory story are true and which are more mythical. And the issue of chipping the soil that doesn't apply, because if you chip the soil at the surface, it just washes away, you lose your topsoil, and the real issue is what are you doing to the vegetation? How are you improving its growth? How are you maintaining the diversity, much like a diverse portfolio that you would have for Wall Street?

And again, bunch grazing can do that because you're preventing the animals from choosing what to eat. So they eat the good stuff and the bad stuff. And we've been able to demonstrate in very controlled experiments that when you put a certain number of cattle at the same density and let them do what they want as opposed to putting cattle in tight bunches and letting them intensively use a particular area, then moving the next day to another area and the next day to another area that over a period of time, if they use the same amount of area intensively in sequence as opposed to repeatedly using the same area to do what they want as they nibble around the edges and do their choosiness.

We can show two things: one, that both systems lower the available grass. So cows do what they do; they eat the vegetation and significantly impact that. But, most importantly, those that were in bunched rotational systems denuded the really poor, tough, wiry, fibrous grass at a much higher rate than if the cows are free to move as they want. So bunching and rotation leads to intensive use, lack of choice, and leads to elimination of the bad grass. So the next rain, give the preferred grasses that have been out-competed a chance to regenerate and start to take hold and replenish themselves disproportionately.

And this is the really interesting question when you sit down with a pastoralist and say here's my data and you show them that the bunching and the rotation does have this long-term effect of improving the rangeland, their first question to you is, professor, why should I force my animals to do something they don't voluntarily want to do and I put them at risk making them eat the bad vegetation. Why should I do that for a long-term good? Now remember, they see the world as highly unpredictable. They see the world as not being in equilibrium, and it's got droughts and booms. And so they say, why should I take on that extra risk? That's a really tough question to answer, but we found the answer is that when you bunch your animals and you force them to stay in a particular area, they don't walk very much.

And so it's true: the numerator, the gain, the benefit, the cost curve, the benefit goes down in the sense that the ingestion rate is being depleted and lowered, and it also means they are eating disproportionately the vegetation.

That's going to take the microbes longer to process. So the ingestion rate and the assimilation rate of energy and nutrients are going to go down, but the denominator has been decreased. The energy expended traveling also goes down, and so there really is no net loss immediately. Now, when you share that result with them, they go aha. But again, do they believe you? And this is where working with people matters, in the sense that we hire their children to be herders in our experiments.

So the kids are seeing firsthand the results emerging that the cows that are being bunched and rotated are gaining weight, despite what their fears were that they wouldn't be getting enough good food, and they're seeing that they don't have to work as hard, in the sense that they don't have to push them on the landscape to get them enough food, and so they see the denominator shrinking as well. And that's how knowledge spreads and that's how we change behavior.

Andy:

I have to ask because now you've been talking about multi-species grazing. I do a lot of intensive multi-species grazing with sheep, turkeys, ducks, and chickens. One of the things that I have a big challenge with, and something that I've been personally trying to find an answer to, really is figuring out the proper systems of order and things like that. Because if you look at, say, Mark Shepard, which I'm sure you're probably familiar with, he's written a lot on multi-species grazing but a lot of it is very vague and he'll say, like you should do, turkeys after sheep, but and then it's kind of in vague terms as to why that makes sense. So I'm curious, in the research you've done, if you've come to any solutions, if there are better orders of operation other than by like species with ruminants versus chickens and poultry and birds and things like that, or if there is, or if it doesn't really matter.

Dr. Dan Rubenstein:

Well, I think it does matter. We've done experiments, but we haven't published the results yet. So one of my postdoctoral fellows, Kenyon, loves looking at the relationship between livestock and wildlife, Wilfred Odadi at Egerton University in Kenya. We did an experiment with cattle. Donkeys are our surrogate zebras, and then we added sheep to the mix because most pastoralists now are substituting sheep for cows.

And we did two experiments, and this will get at exactly the point you're raising. We did one experiment where we set aside blocks and we put sheep in and cattle in and donkeys in, and we did them in various mixtures and orders to see how they changed the landscape. And then we looked at the growth rate of the sheep on the different plots that were 100% just sheep used, 100% just cattle used, before sheep were added, 100% donkeys and then cattle and donkey mixtures, and the sheep grew best on the plots that had the cattle and donkey mixtures first.

So that would be, we're using donkeys as surrogate zebras because they have the same body plan, the same gut system, but we can watch them, they don't run away. And then we did a second experiment where we did these experiments in separate bins, and then we took down the walls and fencing between them and let the sheep choose where they preferred to go. So we already knew they grew best on the plots that had been simultaneously being fed with cattle and donkeys. They chose that plot over all the other plots.

So the answer to your question is that the order does matter and that the order fits with the natural processes of the grazing succession I was talking about because the sheep is the smallest-bodied animal—that's the equivalent of Thompson's gazelle. The cow is sort of the wildebeest, and the donkey is the zebra.

And we've already seen that cattle and donkeys facilitate each other, and the two can facilitate the small-bodied species that needs the highest quality food. And so between the two of them, architecturally manipulating the vegetation, they open it up just exactly the way that will foster the small mouth, picky, nibbly sheep to gain their advantage on the landscape. That's had very much of the vegetation cropped down to, where only the sheep with their small mouths can get right down to the nub. So there is a logic to the order.

Now, I can't comment on adding poultry to the mix, but I would think that poultry would be at the ere going to provide manure, insects for the birds, and help fertilize’ help fertilize the landscape in a way that will distribute the manure to grow next year's crop of grass even better, which would support all three. So I would probably put them towards the end in the succession.

Andy:

That's pretty much what I've been doing. It's funny I brought you on because I wanted to talk about food systems and instead we're talking about grazing, because whenever somebody knows something about grazing, I just want to pick their brain. So I'm curious, before we get to what we actually were going to talk about, is you had mentioned using donkeys. What would be the food alternative to a donkey in a food system that was trying just to use productive animals that could be harvested?

Dr. Dan Rubenstein:

Horses. If you had horses or donkeys on your farm, you might use those as beasts of burden, or you might have horses on your farm for leisure pursuits, for riding, for you could even make income off of that by letting people pay you to ride the horses and things like that. So you're putting in a wide mouth clipper, because horses and equids generally have upper and lower incisors and bobbits don't. They've got the bony plate so they feed differently.

So you've got the clippers and they will come in and be able to survive on the low quality food and improve your rangeland first, so that I would know if you have, if you have donkeys, if you have horses, I put them in first and then your cattle will thrive. And then if you've got sheep, I put them in first, and then your cattle will thrive, and then, if you've got sheep, put them in last.

Andy:

Have you ever worked with Pigs?

Dr. Dan Rubenstein:

No, I've never worked with pigs. Pigs are very omnivorous. They can eat almost anything, but they root things up. So if you're trying to turn your soil, then you might want to put pigs in rather than using a rototiller. But this disadvantages the turning your soil because you break up the root system and you take away the hyphae of the fungi, which are your nutrient hunters. They're the ones that go out and bring in the nutrients to the plants.

Andy:

Sure. So all this kind of ties into this idea of food systems and how we think about where our food comes from and how we produce it and deliver it. So I do want to talk quickly about a class that you taught at Princeton called Agriculture, Human Diets, and the Environment.

The concept of this class is kind of similar to the framework of this entire podcast, really bringing in a lot of these complicated questions about how our food gets to us, how resilient those systems are and kind of how climate change is going to play into what that looks like in the future, as well as topsoil depletion and all these other areas that ultimately we have to pay the price for, however that might be. So what inspired that class, and, I guess, what kind of outcomes were you really hoping to get from it?

Dr. Dan Rubenstein:

As I noted, I got into farming through the back door by looking at livestock and wildlife, and once I started to understand how farmers are set in their ways but open to evidence that they see and believe unfolding, before then I started to say before then I started to say I understand natural systems and manipulating natural systems in a shared context can be something that we could do to really improve the efficiency of farming and lower its environmental footprint, and this is going to be critical.

So this is what one of the things that we teach in our environmental studies program, in our core nexus course, is that how are you going to feed nine and a half billion people on this planet in a way that sustains the planet and provides not only food security but nutritional security to every human on the planet? We're doing a good job at getting rid of food insecurity by producing grains and distributing them around the world, but grains are not going to be the answer to nutritional security.

Dense vegetables will be important because they contain elements we need. There are going to be animal products that are needed too. Fish, for example, is strong in the omega fatty acids. Plants are not rich in those, so you do need a balanced diet, and so I start the course by looking at our hominid ancestors. They were hunter-gatherers.

Hunter-gathering is a very efficient lifestyle. In general, it's mediated by sex difference, because humans have a long gestation period and a long toddler period, and so mom is not going to be very efficient at going long distances quickly with a baby on the hip and a baby on the breast and a baby in tow, and so men tend to do the long distance maneuvering to get animal products, and women move long distances, but they can move at a slower pace to go gather tubers, nuts rich in fats and other nutrients, and so sex division, labor is natural in hunter-gathering societies, and between what men and women bring back is a very balanced diet and, as Richard Wrangham noted, once we evolved the use of fire for cooking, that transformed us.

Our jaws changed, our guts changed, and we became very proficient hunter-gatherers. We solved our nutritional problems for very little effort. On average, modern-day hunter-gatherers, the Hadza only take 15,000 steps daily. That's under 10 miles a day. Total effort, pretty easy lifestyle.

Andy:

That's not much less or more than I do, and it definitely comes with a lot of health benefits.

Dr. Dan Rubenstein:

Exactly, and there's time for socialization, right? So they're very healthy societies, the family's very good, but there's not a lot of calories in that food, a lot of protein, and humans generally have a target of 14% protein and we prioritize protein. We focus on never dropping below that. And that's one of the reasons why, if you're trying to lose weight, the South Beach diet works, because it's so protein rich.

You will meet your protein requirement and stop eating long before you get to your 2000 calories per day, so you'll lose weight. Similarly, if you live in areas where you're eating mostly pre-processed food, you're not going to get much protein and you're going to keep eating and eating and eating until you get to your 14% and probably taking in five to 6,000 calories per day. So you put on weight. And so we know humans prioritize protein, and many other animals do not, but most, most do as well. And so the question I pose to the students is, why did hunter-gathering disappear and farming take over?

And it has to do with the fact that farming will generate calories, because where farming took place initially was in special ecotones where you still could hunt and gather, okay, around the estuaries of our big rivers, the Nile, the Yellow River, and the Tigris, Euphrates, so you could still get shellfish. The animals migrated through so you could still get shellfish. The animals migrated through so you could still hunt them. But all of a sudden this water brought nutrients down. The crops on the lowlands were there.

You start harvesting the crops and eating those seeds, and then you start selecting for seeds that are big, and you start selecting for plants that don't shatter, so that they don't spread their seeds until you want them. So Jared Diamond talks about this in his book on Guns, Germs, and Steel, which is what the students read. And farming is pretty easy early on because you're starting to select crops with the traits you want and you get a lot of calories, which means you're going to have a lot of babies.

So the human productivity rate goes up and that starts to displace hunter-gatherers from their landscape and that's why farming spread. But farming at that point now starts to lead into drudgery because the easy pickings on these really rich, fertile estuaries is no longer the case as you move more and more far afield, which means now you have to get into moving night soil and nutrient enriching the soil and having high labor leads to slavery, leads to inventions of animals as beast of burden.

So farming goes through many, many changes and if you're not familiar with Rooster Fries' book on the big ratchet, she talks about how farming is really a response to the ratchet which allows population growth to go up, which causes problems, and just before the hatchet falls we invent something to then have another ratchet. So we keep getting more and more inventive and more and more productive and that's allowed the human population to grow. But as we hit nine and a half billion people, how are we going to farm?

So I give the historical antecedents of why farming won, why it was so effective, and why our inventiveness keeps it going. But now we're on another cusp of having to feed nine and a half billion people, which means we will have to have more intensive farming, more regenerative farming going forward. So we spend a lot of time now talking about how you do farming that's going to be more efficient and maintain biodiversity, so you can get the free ecosystem services and improve livelihoods and lifestyles for everybody.

Elliott:

And that's one thing that we try to touch on a lot with this podcast and we're talking around it a lot. But people's relationship with food and with nature, Andy, I think we talked about in a previous episode. We reference man and nature and not man in nature, and that slight difference in the phrasing kind of points to what you were talking about the hunter-gatherers. Before that was man in nature, and then, after agriculture comes around, it's man trying to conquer nature almost.

Right, they're trying to basically exert their will over nature so that it goes along with-.

Dr. Dan Rubenstein:

That's right, you're right. I mean early on, when we made the transition from hunter-gathering to farming. Farming was a small impact on the landscape because there weren't many of us and we were at the vagaries of nature. Nature caused droughts, caused destitution, and if you look at history, you've got interregna between, like the early kingdom, the middle kingdom, and the empire in Egypt. In between were periods where hunter-gathering, the middle kingdom, and the empire in Egypt, in between were periods where hunter-gathering took over again, when the barbarians won, when there was a collapse, okay. And so there are periods in history when hunter-gathering replaces farming and then farming comes back.

But as time passes, our use of nature increases and we're trying to control nature. I mean, that's what the green revolution is. We grow crops that don't fall over. We grow shorter crops so that more of the grain can be harvested and not lost. We invent ways to become more efficient. We created artificial fertilizer to get around the problem of where all the nitrogen in the soil was that the plants need for growing themselves. We figured out how to do this cheaply and now we have excess.

When people say it's so cheap, if I put a little bit more, I should get more productivity. Well, most of that washes off. It goes into the rivers, you get algae blooms, and you get dead zones in the oceans. Right, that's the excess, but that's largely because people think incorrectly about a little bit. More is going to be better, so they're wasteful, so we try to do efficient farming where you use knowledge, monitor what's going on and add what the plants need at the right time.

Andy:

We saw that was the case with these grazing successional changes, and so we can learn lessons and apply them for judicious interventions, non-wasteful interventions to make the efficiency of farming more, increase the efficiency of farming and the intensification to give us the yields that we need without having to bring more and more pristine land into farming. And I think that, also in these conversations, I don't think it makes sense to ignore the role of wild food in our diets and that we need to start considering that as something that should be a function of how we live, and and that we need to start considering that as something that should be a function of how we live, and I think not only is it something that we need in terms of building those relationships with the environment, but as a supplement and for us to have some management of the systems that we've thrown out of whack.

I know around here, deer overpopulation is a huge issue and if we didn't hunt as much as we do, there'd be a lot of deers starving to death and depleted landscapes, and I think there's probably a need for more of that, and I know we talked, before we started recording, a bit about the role of government and how it's impacted, how our food systems are operated and the challenges of incorporating wild foods into our diet because of the way the requirements are in terms of processing of wild game and things like that that you can't sell it on shelves because it has to be killed in an approved slaughterhouse, and things like that, which further convolutes our relationship with nature and, I think, really understanding our place within it.

Dr. Dan Rubenstein:

You're absolutely right. I mean, we could make venison more available to people, and that would be, you know, a way of solving our problems of over nibbling by the deer, providing protein, and you could subsidize it for poor people that can't afford protein. You know that you have been basically living on processed foods. But again, we need new regulations, new ways to open that up, and that's going just to require educating the public that venison is good, and also to lawmakers to make it easier to get those goods out to the public.

Andy:

Yeah, to go back to kind of what we've been talking about these food systems, I do want to talk about how you've been working to try to solve some of these problems that surround us creatively, especially what we saw coming up with COVID and how we saw very quickly our food systems not be able to deal with the repercussions of a system where people are required to stop working or buy food in advance, and how quickly that falls apart.

Now, I really want to talk about what you've done in terms of the New Jersey Dairy Farmers Project that you were involved with and how you think that's a model of what we could do in the future.

Dr. Dan Rubenstein:

So the pandemic exposed the flaws in our food supply system.

We all take it for granted that when you want food, you go to the supermarket or to the little boutique shop in town and buy what you want, and most people don't give a second thought to where it came from.

If they do, they want it to be local. They prefer it to be organic if they can afford it because of health benefits. But most people will just say there's food, I buy it, I go home. To them, meat is not from a living animal, that's a problem. It's in the styrofoam with the plastic over it, and they take it for granted that it's going to be there. Well, the pandemic exposed how fragile our food supply chain is. All of a sudden, in the dairy farmer case, milk was still being produced, the cows were grazing, they were making milk, and there was no market for the milk.

The supermarkets needed more milk because people weren't getting their milk by buying coffee with milk at Starbucks. Their children weren't getting the milk in school in the small packages that they got. They were now at home and the milk had to be supplied to them, and all of a sudden the shelves were bare. And yet milk was being thrown away because it couldn't be packaged in ways quickly enough to change and meet where people were getting their milk from.

Because individual dairy farmers were making arrangements with purchasers who were providing a supply of a specific sort to a specific specialty, all of a sudden, when those specialties dried up, when we were in lockdown, the only available place to get milk was at the supermarket, and it wasn't geared up for a lot of that milk to go into new packaging to get on the supermarket shelves. So we exposed a system of specializations that was not resilient to a shock.

What happened was a lot of local suppliers started to rejigger what they were selling. So most of your community-sponsored agriculture is about agriculture. You're starting to get crops. You sell them at a food stand. Or people come and they get a box of stuff that's already pre-selected for them, or they get to choose from the shelves at the farm stand, which they put in the box to go home. Well, these local nodes now became the new networks.

The farmers had networks to meat producers, so some of the local farmers started to bring in meat and sausages, others started to bring in alcohol, whiskey from other local areas, and so they started to diversify what they were offering because they could act quickly. They had networks of other local suppliers and so they became nodes, in a way, with a little territorial mosaic, and people that had abandoned the community-sponsored agriculture came back to it because they trusted it. They knew it was there.

Now, why did they abandon it? Maybe price was too high, because Americans only spend about 10% of the income they earn on food and most local markets organic farms are at the upper end in selling produce, and so if your budget's a little bit tight, you're going to try to find ways to cut your investments on things you need, so you have money for the things that are the luxuries that you want to enjoy life. And so you go to the supermarket, and much of the business was weaned away from the local nodes. But during the pandemic they came back.

That then gave money to local nodes to diversify, and we saw a rewiring of the network, which made the system resilient, and each of the little local areas grew. Their profits went up. They had happy customers. The customers had diversified food bags with the local nodes, which are slightly more expensive, or will they gravitate back to the supermarkets to save on the cost of supplying food to their family. The jury is still out on that, but at least we now know how to build networks of food supply that can rewire quickly so it can adapt and therefore not have the hiccups and the collapses and tears that we saw during the pandemic.

Elliott:

I think that was the main failing that really struck me. It wasn't so much that the shelves were bare. I could see runs on a supermarket being a thing at the beginning of a pandemic. That wasn't super surprising, but the part that really did surprise me was the inability to pivot and serve markets that were being underserved.

The inability to pivot and serve underserved markets. With a large superstore or supermarket like that, you would feel that they would be best to make the most money by providing products for underserved markets, and when they don't have the ability to do that, it kind of takes away the awe of the supermarket being a place that you can go to as a one-stop shop.

Andy:

Yeah, or even the awe of market efficiency. You know, scaling, scalability as an ultimate good, because there's that trade off that I think we have been underconsidered in many of these developments, in terms of scalability. You know, you've got these massive farmers who are doing something that they're so specialized and so large and their equipment is designed specifically to produce X amount of whatever it is a day, and they can't change those systems to produce more or less.

They're specifically designed for what they believe their niche in the market is. Right, and that got exposed very quickly, and, like we said, that's a big piece of why they still haven't been able to catch up Right, living with those failures.

I think this points to this idea of cooperative economics, of using these co-ops as a way to provide food in a way that's nimble enough to meet the demands of a community, with the trade-off being a slightly larger price. But at what benefit? And I think that's especially important to consider as we deal with climate change that'll inevitably drive more events. I read something on the internet that had phrased COVID as being like the preamble to what climate change will be, and this is a good wake-up call of what the future will look like.

It might not be a virus, but various incidences like this will break up or disrupt those suppll need to be more resilient to deal with those challenges, and I'm not sure if they can be.

Dr. Dan Rubenstein:

I think they can if they rewire in an interesting way. So you raise an interesting point about the higher price. What if we consider that a higher price like insurance? You buy insurance for your car in order to pay a small deductible to protect you against the whopping cost if someone hits you or you hit someone else, and, in a way, by paying a slightly higher price to keep the local nodes and those networks vibrant, they protect you against recurring shocks.

Now, if the shocks are once every 100 years, you're not going to pay the insurance. But if the shocks start to occur more frequently due to pandemics and or climate change disrupting the supply chain, you might be willing to keep the local networks that get you through these difficult periods going by paying the slightly higher price on a regular basis, which is what insurance is all about against the catastrophe, and the more shocks create more catastrophes, you're more likely to see people patronizing the networks.

Andy:

But it's going to take a change of awareness that it's now, versus the future, the trade-off of what your true costs are going to be yeah, and I think that speaks to having a multiplicity of means of providing things like food, and that we shouldn't rely on specifically a handful of corporations or facilities to provide that, even if they can do it more efficiently. There should always be kind of a backup plan, which, at the very least, these cooperatives can kind of exist as.

Dr. Dan Rubenstein:

Exactly so. We just finished a study on community sponsored fisheries through a node called Fishadelphia. As it implies, it's in downtown Philadelphia and the purveyor that created it did it for food justice. It was to reach inner city people to give them high quality seafood of all races and all economic values. And she has a PhD, she was from Princeton University, her postdoc, and what she did is she created this network of fishers that were local, regional, and more global, which gave her some buffering, these couplings at the supply side.

And then she created distributions with students, using the schools as nodes for people to come and pick up the fish, shellfish, fin fish, whatever, and much like a community sponsored agriculture, much like an organic farm. And what happened during the pandemic was they couldn't come to the schools, they couldn't aggregate. All of a sudden, how do you then feed the public? She diversified and let every student set up on their own porch. So again a distributed network was created and in fact business boomed. They reached more people than having to come to the school.

The first rewiring was to change the outflow, the network of sales. And then the inflows became a problem because the fishers started to sell at the dock. For the same reason, people could flock there sort of haphazardly, and it gave them some ability to sell because the purchases no longer had markets, the big buyers. So they took it on their own to sell locally, which meant Fishadelphia lost locally, which meant Fishadelphia lost.

So she had to rewire and not only just deal with her local fishes, but to go more regionally, and it turned out that the regional ones were harder, so she was stuck with the more local. But then she lost the diversity of input. So finfish dropped, shellfish increased. Well, not everyone eats shellfish, so the consumer had to either change its sort of ability to be wide ranging.

And so she learned that from our analysis, how the network has to have redundancy both within regions and diversity across regions to be able to ensure, when there's a shock, that enough flows come in to meet the needs, which are diversified, of the many publics that were using the fish. So, again, rewiring the ability to anticipate that certain links are going to evaporate and that others are going to have to form quickly, and so some proactive pre-planning and rewarding a diversified group of suppliers and a diversified way of distributing allows the network to become much more efficient and self-sustaining. So we learned that from our analysis. And again, the pandemic revealed the problems with the current supply system.

Andy:

Yeah, and I think a lot of these points to the benefits of erasing a lot of the middlemen in a lot of these food systems. You know that direct sale component seems to be a benefit for almost everybody in terms of getting food more quickly throughout pandemics and it seems like everyone that I know, at least in farming, seems to actually be doing financially better this year than in previous years.

Dr. Dan Rubenstein:

I think that's right. Another trick that some of the farmers are doing is that the network we've been talking about has a lot of horizontal connections. They're also vertically integrating connections. They're also vertically integrating, and so one of the farmers that I work with raises sheep, and to ensure that he has outlets for his sheep, which are very high quality, free range grass fed sheep and lambs, he has his own restaurant, his own market, and his own cafe. So he's vertically integrated. He has three different outlets to sell the meat, and some other farmers have made their farms day outing events.

So you can come and pick apples in the morning, and the kids can have apple pie and play with the animals. It becomes a day out as people spend money, giving the farmer a diversified income to keep them going, but it allows mom and dad to entertain the kids and fill the shopping basket. So again, it's a diversification of outlets I call vertical integration, which is making some of these local nodes stable.

One of the films that I have my students watch is called 100,000 Beating Hearts. I don't know if you've watched it. I haven't. No, it's on YouTube and you should watch it and it's about the collapse of farms in Southwest Georgia, how whole towns go bankrupt, and this one farmer who comes from multi-generation of farming he and his grandfather and his father before him were always profitable but, as the way he puts it, the children didn't want to take over farming, they didn't enjoy it, and he started rethinking about how to farm and he then went into the type of farming we've been talking about, where he moves the chicken coops to move the manure, where he lets the cattle graze the land and then puts the chickens on and he now has the most bald eagles in the state of Georgia on his land.

And, most importantly, he's rebuilt the town because he had markets to sell the food, making jobs for not only the farmers but also sellers. And he bought up a lot of the deteriorating housing stock and has fixed it up and provides it to the workers for rent. So he's making money, but the town is rebuilding to the workers for rent. So he's making money, but the town is rebuilding. So it's a very interesting movie to look at, um, to get an idea of how. And one of the neighboring farmers said; Well, that's great that you're doing this, but you're not going to feed the world. And the quote I like best in the film is said, No one asked me to feed the world. I want to feed my neighborhood right.

Elliott:

I think that's the main thing that's kind of being spotlighted by this conversation is keeping the food local. It's taking away that view of how we see markets as being in competition and it's sort of putting in that mutualistic relationship that we had talked about. I think it might have been before we hit record, but it's bringing in that mutualistic relationship from the farmer and his community so that everybody can benefit from it and thrive in other places and compete in other places and other markets.

Andy:

Yeah, the money isn't just going to some investment club or firm that's bought up all these farms. The money's not being siphoned out of the community, it's staying within the community, like that example you gave. It's helping revitalize those communities in that process.

Dr. Dan Rubenstein:

Two flip sides to this, I mean. So we're talking so far, we're talking from a middle class perspective, Sure. So now let's ask if I live in the barrio and I'm stuck with one shop, a 7-Eleven or something, right, Choices are very limited. You know the meat. I'm stuck with one shop, a 7-Eleven or something, right? Choices are very limited. You know the meat I'm going to get is from you know, beef jerky.

How do we increase the diversity of foods for people on WIC food stamps, essentially, and their markets that are diversified, can be beneficial, and a lot of these communities don't have supermarkets, and so thinking about how to increase the diversity of good foods for people that normally are on the run, doing two jobs coming home to get your kids off to school from being out all night, you stop at McDonald's and bring a fast meal home. It's cheap, it's quick, you want to be with your kids.

Elliott:

High in calories. Low in nutrition, right?

Dr. Dan Rubenstein:

So, let's think about food justice as well. The other side is really important, and it will cut down transportation costs, especially urbanizing. Fewer and fewer people are living outside of cities, so you've got to get the food into cities. You're not going to do it with town gardens in urban centers. They're too densely packed, and the land cost is highly valuable. You're going to have to bring food in.

Local has a smaller footprint in many cases than transported foods. Although, if it comes by rail, the cost of transport is pretty, pretty low. But the flip side of this is what about that farmer in Mexico or that farmer in Kenya? I want some of my income, my expenditure, to go to feed, give those people money for their livelihoods, and let their children have good nutrition, so local should not be the only component that matters. We're in an integrated planet, and we need ways to give other people's opportunities to join the lifestyle that I have.

Andy:

Sure, and you know you can look at someplace like the Zapatistas and their coffee co-ops as a really good model where they grow a majority of their own food and have a very specific product that they can outsource. That doesn't take away from the diversity of the biological community in those regions. That doesn't take away from the diversity of the biological community in those regions. And I think this kind of points to this idea of localizing and owning some of that localization. So we've talked a lot about, you know, raising sheep and cattle and things like that, as well as the local, hunting and those other food systems.

But I think what gets lost in many of these conversations about relocalizing is the utilization of things lost in our food systems. But I think what gets lost in many of these conversations about relocalizing is the utilization of things lost in our food systems. So things like pawpaws, you know, rarer nuts. We forget that there are many edible roots in the northeast of the United States that the indigenous people had utilized as a food source. So there's a lot of things that we can use as those exports that are tied to our local diversity and honor that heritage, and I think, like the Zapatistas, is a really good example of that. But I think that's a key component of globalizing without monotonizing our food system.

Dr. Dan Rubenstein:

Globalizing can diversify our food system and ensure niche products that have high value, Exactly Elsewhere, and the trick is to do it so that it's high quality and that it's desired. You know, when I grew up, food was seasonal. Well, now it doesn't have to be. I can have mandarins, or tangerines, as they used to be called, or satsumas, year long, because I can get them from the season south of the equator versus north of the equator in alternate times of the year, and so I can maintain a very diverse diet, and as long as I do so, cognizant that, I'm delighted to be able to help farmers elsewhere, and if the carbon footprint's a little bit bigger doing that, I'll trade that off. I'll try to then reduce my carbon footprint some other way, by eating meat that is, rebuilding the soils rather than you know, and that'll scrub out the carbon dioxide.

So, there are ways to think globally and act locally, but in your equations, try to balance the costs so that your footprint gets lower and lower over time.

Andy:

That's the name of the game for sure, it reminds me a lot of the concept of donut economics, where you want to be at that level. You don't want to be in the middle of the donut, where you're living a lower quality of life, but you're within that beltway between living either similar to how we are, maybe a little bit less or a little bit more, but within the scope of what the ecology can support. And that's that trade-off of supporting marginalized groups and regions across the globe while also trying to do things that are better for the environment locally. You know, the idea isn't to just ultra-nationalist, ultra-local, like we're closing up all the walls and nothing's coming in or out. That's not how nature works anyway, and that's part of how we have to think about our food systems.

Dr. Dan Rubenstein:

So when we started the conversation, how did I get into teaching this course on agriculture, human diets, and the environment? I asked one question at the start of classes: How are we going to feed nine and a half billion people by 2050?

Elliott:

I'm not going to be around in 2050.

Dr. Dan Rubenstein:

You, the students, will be, and you're not going to be a single student. You're going to have families and children. How will you make decisions personal, from your pocketbook, and at the voting booth in terms of the policies that will shape the food system of tomorrow's world? Because the food system has huge impacts on biodiversity, ecosystem services and climate change because of its impact on greenhouse gases, and the answers are not known.

We're doing experiments, we're getting information. They apply to today, and my goal in the course is to give students a grounding in the multiplicity of conflicts and trade-offs that are going to persist into the future. We have some indication of how to deal with them today, so that'll be their past experiences and then they can use those as benchmarks for bringing in new knowledge based on what they've learned and how to think about parsing a problem into a question that can be answered to make the decisions for tomorrow. Yes, so that's why I teach the course. That's how I teach the course.

The examples we've been talking about are part of the discussion, part of the evidence that uses thinking and data today, and it's why I have them do an analysis of data from farms that use different farming techniques so that they can see how you use evidence to compare farming style A) versus farming style B) in making squash or leafy vegetables Selling strategies. My organic farmers all sell differently. Some use a traditional CSA where you come with a box, you pay for one box or two boxes in your pre-advance.

Others do it with a script. You give $500, they give you $700 a script to go pay to buy foods of your choosing at the farm stand in front of the farm because he's also selling to corporates that are coming by from local industry, but you get a discount because he's inflated your buying power with the script.

Different farmers do things differently. We look at waste, the two systems will have very different waste impacts, and so we can have students ask questions about waste. We can have students ask questions about productivity, drip irrigation, different fumigation methods in organic farming to keep insects down, so they can choose anything they want. But they look at one small slice of the problem, they analyze it, and share it at a symposium, and that gets them thinking. They take ownership of data. It forces them to ask a question and teaches them how to answer a question.

Andy:

So I think all this points to this kind of common thread around that we've lost a relationship with our food in many ways and are trying to find it again. And some of that is part of that scaling component that it's not really possible to know your local cow all the time or where that beef came from, as you gave, for examples, with especially poorer communities that might struggle even to afford the foods that are healthy for us, and that we need to find some ways to make those relationships available again, regardless of class.

Dr. Dan Rubenstein:

Well, one of the things we're trying to do is bring students from urban centers out to the farms to work with suburban kids who live amongst the farms, who are just as disconnected from farming as the urban kids are they just have a different disconnect and let them see what food really is, where it comes from, how hard it is to make it, how ownership matters and how different styles produce food in different ways. Talk to the farmers, talk to the laborers.

The owner of the farm is different from the person who works daily on the farm. Now, most owners work on the New Jersey farms as well as their laborers do, but they've got executive decisions to make. They have to do the bookkeeping. They have to get the food out on the farms in New Jersey as well as their laborers do, but they've got executive decisions to make. They have to do the bookkeeping. They have to get the food out on the stands for marketing. So they do things slightly differently. But seeing internalizing goes back to what we do in Kenya. When we do our new herding style, we hire the children of the herders because that's going to make the information flow back to mom and dad to talk about it.

Ideally, you would then be able to talk about. The kids will go home. I did this. How about this food? Could we try this food? But the trick is to lower the barrier of entry by partnering and sharing information. Make people aware of what options are available. Sharing information, making people aware of the options, and identifying the barriers.

The hurdles are to be able to use that type of food in a productive way to improve health, and then try to reduce those hurdles so that it's easier for people to try something new. And that's where the humanities come in, that's where the social sciences come in, and the natural sciences. That's why, when you deal with undergraduates, courses that are interdisciplinary are critical, because you get people from different walks of life showing the skills that they have to try to identify, by working together, how you can overcome some barriers that a scientist may not see but a humanist does. And that awareness is also part of the solution.

You know the issue is it's from farm to fork, and we often think of agriculture as just the farming side. That's key, but getting from the farm to the plate is a challenge. So, for example, where does waste occur? In the Western world? It occurs in your refrigerator. We're really good at cutting packaging and distributing it to the supermarket, and then you buy too much, and it sits, and you throw it out.

In the developing world, the waste doesn't occur in the refrigerator, it occurs on the farm. The food sits, and the rodents get it, a fungus gets it. Then it falls off the truck, sits at the distributor, and rots. So by the time it gets to the market there's been a lot lost. And then at the market, it could sit and then it gets unappealing. People don't buy it, it gets thrown away and it can't even be reused for compost because it's now waste and it's garbage. And so waste pervades our food system. We don't even pay attention to it and that's about a third of the energy loss. And if you're trying to feed nine and a half billion people.

Fix that. Okay, but you have to identify where the problem is, and dealing with the speed of transport and the safety of transport in the developing world needs to be increased. Governments have to invest in roads. They have to invest in secure markets with refrigeration. They haven't done that. We need to make portion sizes such that when we sell things, the discount is still not to buy more of it, but the unit price goes down, so you buy just what you need.

It's one of the reasons that many millennials like Food Direct, which you think is wasteful, but in fact, they use computerized systems to reduce their tracking, energy use, and the greenhouse gases and the portions. There are no leftovers and everything comes with a recipe. It's easy and it's not wasteful, and so we need to rethink some of the things we ignore in a food supply system. We concentrate mostly on the agricultural land, sparing land, sharing, intensification, so we don't bring land that should stay wild back into farming systems. All true, but there's low-hanging fruit elsewhere that we're not paying as much attention to, and I think if we could do that, that alone will save us probably 20 to 30 percent of our increasing needs, because what we will do is make sure everybody gets something without waste.

Elliott:

And would you think it's fair to say that these systems we are trying to implement? Focusing on longevity and resilience rather than perpetual profitability would be smarter.

Dr. Dan Rubenstein:

Yes, I do, I do, but every farmer wants to make enough money, and so there's going to be pressure on the farmer who lives on very small margins to earn a good living.

So we want to figure out how to ensure the farmer supports his or her family, but we don't have to worry too much about going up the food chain to corporate profits. So everyone deserves some return on their investment, but it doesn't have to be obscene. And the trick is, how do we do that and have a diversified array of foods that are healthy for people to purchase without breaking the bank, so they have money to have fulfilled lives out breaking the bank, so they have money to have fulfilled lives.

I mean, it's very complicated, but an understanding of how many people are involved in a food system, from the farmer to the distributors, to the processors, to the next set of distributors and then the consumer once we understand that they're all connected, then there are ways to work it out I think I'm the optimist so that we can get more efficient and efficiency, not only in terms of profitability but in terms of environmental friendliness.

Andy:

It's funny you said that you're an optimist because I was going to say it sounds like there's a lot of hope in terms of opportunities for us to improve our systems and make them more resilient without having to completely throw away everything that we've invested in in terms of how we grow our food.

Dr. Dan Rubenstein:

I believe in awareness and agency, right? We can increase awareness, and we have to improve agency.

Andy:

Thank you so much.

To listen to this interview, tune into episode #36 of the Poor Proles Almanac.