322 Nettie Wiebe - We have become monocultural in our fields and minds

A conversation with Nettie Wiebe, organic farmer and long-time small farm activist in Canada and globally, one of the founders of La Via Campesina, part of the IPES food panel, and coauthor of the recent Land Squeeze report. We talk about land purchases and prices. In many places, over 70% of the farmland is controlled by 1% of the farms. This is just one of the many challenges the latest Land Squeeze report of the IPES food panel addresses. We talk about the results of the report and what to do about it, how go get speculative money out of farming and why green grabbing needs to stop.

Land squeeze: one of the biggest issues in regenerative farming is access to land. Why is that? Farmers in the global industrialised north are ageing, and many of them don’t have a next generation taking over the farm; many other people would love to farm and are, in many cases, able, but can never finance the land purchase because land prices and value are completely disconnected. They face competition from ever larger industrial extractive, well financed farms.

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Chapters

• 2:59 Why are you doing what you are doing? Why Soil?
• 36:14 What should smart investors, who want to invest in reg ag and food look out for?
• 41:50 What would you do if you were in charge of a 1B investment portfolio tomorrow morning?
• 46:38 If you could wave a magic wand and change one thing in the agriculture industry from a sustainability point of view, what would it be?

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:19

Land squeeze. One of the biggest issues in regenerative farming is access to land. Why is that? Farmers in the global industrialized north are aging and many don't have a next generation taking over the farm because of many of the issues of the current farming system. Many other people would love to farm and in many cases are able, but they can never finance the land purchases because land prices and value are completely disconnected. They face competition from ever larger industrialized, extractive, very well-financed farms. In many places, over 70% of that farming land is controlled by 1% of the farms. This is just one of the many challenges the latest land squeeze report of IPA's food panel addresses. We talk about it and the results and what to do about it with one of the experts on the IPA's food panel panel, a small scale farmer from Canada and a lifelong activist.

Speaker 1: 1:20

This is the Investing in Regenerative food and agriculture space to learn more on how to put our money to work to regenerate soil, people, local communities and ecosystems, while making an appropriate and fair return. Why my focus on soil and regeneration? Because so many of the pressing issues we face today have their roots in how we treat our land and our sea, grow our food, what we eat, wear and consume, and it's time that we as investors big and small and consumers, start paying much more attention to the dirt slash soil underneath our feet. To make it easy for fans to support our work, we launched our membership community and so many of you have joined us as a member. Thank you, if our work created value for you and if you have the means and only if you have the means consider joining us. Find out more on gumroadcom slash investing in regen ag. That is, gumroadcom slash investing in regen ag. Make sure to link below. Welcome, nettie.

Speaker 2: 2:42

Thank you for having me below Welcome.

Speaker 1: 2:44

Nettie, thank you for having me, and you're calling straight from a farm which I will definitely start unpacking where you are, what you see, what you farm, etc. But to give a bit of background, we always like to start with a personal question. How come you spend most of your awake hours thinking about food and agriculture, thinking about soil, working in the soil and also writing about the soil? How did your life path led to what you do today?

Speaker 2: 3:08

I have grown up on a farm. I have missed in my many decades of life, very few harvests. I grew up on a prairie farm here in Saskatchewan, canada, and have always been close to and, I might say, love, the soil I walk on. And when we get further into our conversation, I'm going to try to persuade you and everyone who is listening that all of us should pay attention to where we live and the web of life in which we're embedded and the food we eat in our daily lives. And that's been my location, I guess.

Speaker 1: 3:55

And to give a bit of context where is that? What do you farm? How big or how small? Of course, that depends on the context.

Speaker 2: 4:02

But just for us to visually feel a bit where you're calling in from today, I'm in, as I said, saskatchewan, canada, and it's what was a medium-scale family farm until relatively recently. But because of the huge concentration of land that's going on here and elsewhere, we're now rated as a small scale farm in the prairie context, and that might surprise you and your listeners, because we farm about 2,000 acres 2,500 acres, which means about 1,000 hectares, half of which is farmland. So in many parts of the world that would seem like a big farm, but here in the prairies that's now rated as a small farm. We grow grains and pulse crops.

Speaker 2: 4:58

Let me be a little clearer. There we grow lentils, field peas, wheat some years, barley no barley this year and oats. So those are our field crops and until very recently we had a small organic cow-calf operation so we sold organic beef. So that's the context here. And let me just say about my current context is that we have had for the last seven years extremely dry conditions and thank goodness this spring it's rained on us window now I see not dry grass and suffering trees around the yard, but I actually see flowers, green grass and healthy trees, and that's a huge gift. We live in a part of the world where the winters are long and cold and the summers are short and sometimes, as I noted, way too dry and quite hot. So it's in some ways quite a difficult place to grow food in, but we grow a lot of food in this region of the world.

Speaker 1: 6:19

And what made you decide not to integrate the cattle or not to do the cattle anymore. Was that a time, or was it the context? Or what made you do that recently?

Speaker 2: 6:33

Okay, yeah, no, it's the time. I love cattle and I grew up on a dairy farm and we grew as I said, we raised beef cattle here and I think cattle are an important part in this part of the world, an important part of the ecosystems. But my husband and I are quite senior and our son has come in to farm with us and he wants to do grain cleaning, which he's setting up a plant, and our purpose is to try to get as close to the consumer, to shorten the food chains, if you will, and what he's interested in doing, rather than raising cattle, is cleaning our own wheat to food standard, and he has already marketed quite a bit of wheat directly to flour mills in the prairie region and in BC. That's a way of directly linking our product to consumers, actually knowing whose wheat is in your bread, if you will.

Speaker 1: 7:47

And because until, like what happens currently with your wheat, your farm organically, does it go into the organic commodity system. How does it work in your part of the world? Who are your buyers and where does it go after it leaves your farm?

Speaker 2: 8:05

the world? Who are your buyers and where does it go after it leaves your farm? Well, the organic market is, here in Canada, a small market. Unfortunately, we haven't been as successful as many European countries in growing the organic market, although here also as elsewhere, it is a growing market. So most of our wheat is bought by organic grain brokers who ship it. Then. Some of it goes to the United States, some to Europe and elsewhere in the world. It's, as I said, not nearly as dominant a market as conventional grain markets and it is also an export market for us because our consumer base here in Canada isn't quite big enough, although, as I said, it is growing. We've been certified organic on this farm for more than two decades completely. So we're very committed to changing the way food is grown and trying to make it both healthier for the environment and healthier for people and, as I said, we're pretty committed to trying to shorten the food chain and get people back in touch with their breakfast, if you will.

Speaker 1: 9:58

Which is a good place to start? And would you say, in your area, are you the exception with your certified organic farm? Are there others? Has that changed over the last decades? What would you say the direction is of your neighbors or your neighbor's neighbors?

Speaker 2: 10:15

We are very much the exception still, I'm afraid, but our neighbors are not hostile to it and there's a lot of interest in organics. Part of it is economic interest. The inputs chemical inputs for conventional chemical farming continue to rise in price and the debt loads of farmers are higher and higher. So if you're talking economics, at least on our little firm, when we switch to organics we have done better economically because our costs are much lower. In terms of the bigger picture, though, no Conventional chemical farming and that corporate sector that drives it and the kind of ideology of productivism, as we call it, always trying to get more and more from the land, more bushels per acre, if you will that model continues to be so dominant that it's the overwhelming number of farmers that continue to work within that model of farmers that continue to work within that model.

Speaker 1: 11:32

And what led you because by all means it's not a small farm, I mean, maybe in the current context in Canada it is but what led you to to start working on the smallholder farmer or the small farm and activism war, because it's quite a step from, from where you farm on multiple thousands of acres to smaller farmers. What piqued your interest there? What led you to go deep on that topic?

Speaker 2: 12:00

Well, you know, I've always understood that food is everybody's business and we should all have a say in it. And we should all have a say in it, and particularly the people who grow food should have a very big voice in how the food systems are organized and we should not cede that voice. I've always been when we started farming. We've always been members of the National Farmers Union here in Canada, which is a small-scale family farmer organization very committed to protecting the role of small-scale farmers in food systems, and that's where I'm located. But I don't consider this just to be self-pleading. I think it's actually very important for the health, ecological and economic health and certainly for the viability of small communities, rural communities, to have small-scale farmers, to have a whole range of diverse farmers producing our food. And I think actually, when I look back at what's happened to food systems, I think that remains a core value, not only, as I said, self-pleading, not only to protect small-scale farmers, but also to protect our environments.

Speaker 2: 13:29

And increasingly we're challenged by what I call global warming and storming, climate change and all kinds of pollution and soil degradation, and I think a lot of those problems stem from a framework where we've erased or are continuing to displace and erase indigenous peoples and peasants and small scale farmers, people who have lived on and taken care of this land and these communities, in some cases for thousands of years, in our context, as as colonial settlers here in the West, for some hundreds of years. But people who know this place and this might sound romantic but who love these places, must take care of them. And so it isn't just that it's my place, that I'm a small-scale farmer and that's why I advocate them. I advocate for small-scale agriculture, peasant agriculture, indigenous food systems, because I think the future of the world depends on protecting those places and giving those people the primary voice in our food systems.

Speaker 1: 14:55

And we're going to get back to that. I'm just wondering how important or unusual is it that your son came back to the farm in your context of neighbors and neighbors of neighbors, et cetera? Because I've seen that a few times at events with a lot of farmers where, let's say, on the organic and the regenerative side, there seems to be an optimism, or maybe the sample size is a bit wrong, but at least when you ask who has a next generation taking over the farm, a lot of hands go up. But if you ask in a conventional industrial extractive farming conference, very few hands go up. How is it in your context? And then we get back to this more, but I just didn't want to lose this thread. How unique is that?

Speaker 2: 15:41

Yeah, no, you've just raised an important point. In our context and I think that's the European context too and maybe much of the world, but certainly in our context the farming population is aging and so you have a lot of farming families, farmers that are nearing retirement or want to be retired or want to be retired, and it is almost impossible for a newcomer, a young farmer, to get access to land. And we'll get back to the land squeeze thing. But that's one of the key problems of the way the land markets are organized and the way the food systems are organized that young farmers actually have a very hard time, given how expensive land has become, gaining entry and older farmers need to retire and that transition to generations is very troubling and very troubled because of the financialization of land.

Speaker 2: 16:43

So in our context we do have some neighbors where the next generation is taking over and, as I said, on our farm we are lucky that that's also happening. But in the majority of cases that's actually not possible and it's almost completely impossible for somebody who isn't inheriting land or inheriting a farm to get into farming. And that's a great pity because a lot of young people understand and I think an increasing number and podcasts like these should actually encourage that, that an increasing number of young people understand that the food system and how we take care of land and rural communities and water systems here out in the country, what we eat and what we grow, is in fact, a key part of the climate and biodiversity problems that we're facing. Crisis, I would say I don't think that's an exaggeration that we're facing in much of the world. So excluding the next generation from doing ecologically good in good food systems and participating in them is actually a very grim thing in our current context.

Speaker 1: 18:06

And how would you now? Fixing is not the right word. How would you? What are opportunities there to turn that around?

Speaker 1: 18:15

I think it's one of the big crises. We have access to land, probably private ownership in land in general. I would know some people that argue that that's one of the main reasons, or the excesses of land speculation and prices is one of the main reasons we're in a lot of these different messes, let's say. But how would we tackle that? How would we look at land ownership and access? Because, interestingly enough, just like you mentioned, there's a whole group and it seems to be growing of people that want to take care of the land and in some cases or many cases maybe are able as well. They just cannot get on because they weren't lucky enough to were born on the farm, and there are, of course, more people that were not born on the farm than born at a farm. So, statistically, that's just a very, very difficult thing to overcome. What are ways that, through the report and other ways you've seen that can tackle this massive underlying issue of land speculation and land ownership?

Speaker 2: 19:17

Yeah, you've just poked your finger into a major wasp nest here.

Speaker 2: 19:24

And let me just say the big picture stuff.

Speaker 2: 19:29

I think you're completely right that the financialization as the land report, land squeeze report points out the financialization of agricultural land globally and the entry of speculative capital into that market and that entry has increased enormously over the last two decades that's actually made it almost impossible for new entrants into farming and it's squeezing out peasant, small-scale agriculture everywhere in the world.

Speaker 2: 20:12

I mean in some places it's more intense than others, but everywhere in the world there's that pressure on who owns the land, who gets to control the land. And in the report we have named this what is an alarming statistic and that is that 1% of the largest farms in the world control 70% of the world's farmland. I mean, get your mind around that 1% controls 70% of the farmland. I mean, get your mind around that 1% controls 70% of the farmland globally and in our context, in North America and in parts of Europe, particularly Eastern Europe, that concentration of land ownership or control over land is increasing and increasing rapidly and that's the underlying problem for young farmers entering or for small-scale farmers remaining is that there's such a tremendous pressure on land and such a lack of access to land for them and such a lack of access to land for them. But can I say something a little sort of bigger context about?

Speaker 1: 21:30

this Absolutely yeah.

Speaker 2: 21:31

It has something to do with how we've allowed capitalist mindsets to dominate the way we think about ourselves, who we are and where we are, and the view that somehow land is mainly or principally meant to be exploited, turned into cash, maximized in terms of profitability and productivity. That mindset, that view of who we are and where we are, of our land, is a very pernicious and destructive view. I mean, land is not just about value per acre or bushels per acre. It's also about where we live, what we walk on, what we eat, our cultural identities. I mean food and the way we grow food and how we prepare food and how we think about food is very key to who we are as people, as civilizations, as communities.

Speaker 2: 22:50

So in the bigger context, this sort of conflation of price with value is a really bad way of looking at ourselves, a really destructive way of looking at ourselves and operating in the world, because it pushes everybody to maximizing production, maximizing profitability and exploiting what's called natural resources. But we should stop talking about them as just resources, as if the land and biodiversity is just something to be used and profited from. We are actually embedded in this web of life, as I say, in this ecological context and we're part of it. And if we don't understand who we are there, then we will, and that's what we're doing. We will misuse and abuse the places where we live and where we grow food and diminish ourselves and destroy the world around us, and that's what you're seeing. So it's also, if I could just say I've been a little long-winded here, but if I could just say it's a moral and a philosophical problem, an ideology problem, if you will, as well as just a financial and ecological problem. The latter two are embedded in how we see ourselves and who we are in this place.

Speaker 1: 24:27

Thank you for that and no need to apologize for answering in a slightly longer way. We have space and time to do that. The reason why we do the podcast is because we're going to give space and time and we've actually recorded a whole series on the regenerative mindset needed, or regenerative mind. What does it mean? How do we square that with the financial sector? That absolutely isn't in many cases, but has resources that could be put to use and are not at the moment in most cases? How do we square the interest and the excitement there is around organic in many places, but also regenerative, and the excitement there is around organic many places, but also regenerative, and and the excitement of young people? But how do we get land out of the, the, the red race, let's say, and not fall into the trap, and at the same time, deal with the urgency that that we need to move pretty fast as we're destroying the soil literally under our feet. So how would you specifically?

Speaker 1: 25:24

There's some great examples in the report as well, and actually one of the other statistics, just to mention it, I think 1% of like 80% of the farmland in Colombia, just to name another example, is controlled by 1%, just out of sheer shock. There are some great examples of land reform in the report as well. So there are some great examples of land reform in the report as well. Is this mostly going to be? I keep going back to the word fix, but I'm not sure if this specifically on this land squeeze, specifically access to land for young people. What do you see as ways out of these challenges?

Speaker 2: 26:47

Well, as we say in the report, one of the big problems is the speculative capital in land markets. I mean, those are investors with deep pockets that have no direct relationship to the land but are lined up to make money from it, and that excludes young people and small scale farmers, who don't have those deep pockets, from access to that land, and that's what you're seeing. So getting speculative capital out of land markets is key, but there's also the governance issue. I mean we're not going to solve this problem one by one. It's a question of governance and there used to be on the agenda land reform, land distribution in progressive regimes, the view that land should be redistributed and those who are growing food should actually have control over and decision-making over the food they grow and the way they treat the land, etc. But as you move towards more distant investors whose main objective is to make money from the investment, then you get this huge gap between the value of the land and the price of the land, and the value, I would say, is not captured by the price.

Speaker 2: 28:27

And government systems have to be organized so that you deliberately ensure that the people who are the small scale farmers, the indigenous peoples in their territories, are allowed and encouraged to continue to live and take care of that land cases for thousands of years have looked after forests and waterways and land are somehow now in the way, and that's part of what we do in the report. We critique the sort of green grabbing that these people are somehow in the way of. Taking care of land is surely a preposterous proposal. So we really have to change the governance systems, re-evaluate what land is actually about and who we are here, change the governance systems, get speculative capital out of the markets and come to a place where we understand just who and what should be taking care of land.

Speaker 1: 29:44

And do you see a role for money for investments in a different way obviously than the speculation in this transition, also in the retirement transition and giving access to land, maybe new ownership structures? Somehow we still probably have to buy the land, maybe new ownership structures. Somehow we still probably have to buy the land, maybe in different forms or different valuations, not the speculative side. But how do we free the land from, let's say, this financial system and is there a role for money in that? Or do you see a role for money in there as a productive tool?

Speaker 2: 30:15

obviously, for money in there as a as a productive tool, obviously, well we're. We're not gonna unload capitalism in one fell swoop here that's uh, that's not.

Speaker 1: 30:24

I have a magic wand question later. If you give it magic power, what to change?

Speaker 2: 30:27

but we'll get to that later, but let's say that doesn't happen, yeah yeah, no, no, we're so, so, uh, so at this moment, I I think the limitations, the regulations and the limitations. I mean there are instruments, there are ways of financing land. There should be ways of doing corporate and community-based land financing. That would give you a different result If you had, as part of the investment strategy, those other values incorporated that environmental, ecological care, community vibrancy, protection of waterways all of those were part of how land could be bought and what it could be used for. Those are governance issues. Then, as I said, there would be a way of financing innovative financing for farmers to access land. That's another possibility.

Speaker 2: 31:31

Cooperative land ownership there used to be, of course, and still is in some countries. A lot of that could be, and should be, kept in the public domain and organized and used in such a way that it serves the public interest. I mean, this is the thing that we need to talk about when we're talking about financial instruments. We have, of course, governments that use a lot of money for public purposes to ensure equality. Here in Canada, we have a publicly funded healthcare system, for example equal access to good healthcare. Those are public funds for public purposes. Why can't we think about land in such a way, too, that public funds are garnered and used for public purposes. I mean this intensification of privatization. I mean this intensification of privatization. Private profitability as being the only real use for land is a real misdirection, and we're seeing how destructive that is.

Speaker 2: 33:11

And you talked about, and we talked earlier about, young farmers, and I noted that a lot of farmers, myself included, are seniors. A lot of farmers or self-included are seniors. So one of the ways in which we need to change systems is to ensure that retiring farmers don't have to sell the land in order to secure their own retirement, that the land isn't, that the social contract includes, that a new generation of people can take over the land without impoverishing or disadvantaging those who have worked on the land all their lives. So there's you see, see, it's quite a complex nest of problems, but all of it hinges on us understanding that we're in this together and that those individual solutions aren't actually adequate to the crisis we face.

Speaker 2: 34:12

And you're talking here to a lifelong activist. So, of course, I believe that when we organize ourselves into social movements, that's our strength and we can demand those changes and implement those kinds of changes great deal of organization and energy and political insight to be able to do that kind of work, and that's, I think, one of our missions here. We really need to get on with it rather than standing along the sidelines wondering why our world is careening into it all the crisis that we're constantly facing now. That's my little pitch as an activist.

Speaker 1: 35:05

No, no, I think we as society don't take this seriously at all. How many times do you hear somebody talk outside our circles about retiring age of farmers and there's no real path of transferring ownership or somehow liberating the land from the huge depth and huge, um like speculative side, which is an immense issue? We never talk about it and and we, I think, by going to cities and by distancing ourselves from the land, um, and our food system, we, we lost connection with it and we basically don't really take it seriously. And that's coming back to haunt us now quite badly with the heat waves, the drought, the fire, the floods and, of course, an incredibly poor quality food in many places. And we, yeah, it's about time we take it seriously. So what would be your message If you, let's say, we do an evening in the financial heart of Canada, in a theater with a lot of people that are interested in this transition but are also managing money or in the financial system, and of course, we inspire, we're on stage, we share a lot of examples, things like that.

Speaker 1: 36:15

But if we had one thing that you would like to one seed, you would like to blend in their mind that they remember the next day when they get to work and they actually have to do something different. And what would that one seed be if you had to pick one?

Speaker 2: 36:27

Oh my, you're asking me a very difficult question because it's as you see from my discourse. It's, in my mind, never one single thing. It's a framework of things. But I would say that if you're just being sort of pragmatic and you're trying to engage people, my first line is always, when I get up to speak to non-farmers and that's most of the time when we're in conversation, because the majority of people are no longer farmers my first piece is always to say look, what you're eating is in fact a function of how farming is going. So anybody who eats should be interested, must be interested, in the question of what's happening in the countryside. So that's a way of engaging people. If you're eating, if you're not intending to eat, this is of no interest to you, but if you're ever intending to eat again, then this question is a question on your plate also. And then I would say to investors I would say um, you know, let's be even in your own framework, let's be pragmatic here.

Speaker 2: 37:43

The destruction of ecosystems around you is not only morally and socially pernicious, it's also, in the long term, financially unsustainable.

Speaker 2: 37:56

And a few are making a lot of money, but seeing the world flooding and burning around us and the loss, the absolutely huge loss of biodiversity at the moment might not be threatening your bank account, may in fact be enhancing your bank account, but it does threaten not only you but future generations.

Speaker 2: 38:25

And let's take the big perspective here and put money back in that smaller, much smaller place where it should be in our thinking and our planning, and start to put all of those other things that are actually life-giving and that are actually key to us being real human beings in human societies. Let's put those back at the center and see if we can't recenter public investment and public interest over and take that over and give that priority over private profit and speculative capital. I mean I can't imagine that I would be welcome in the circle of investors, but I just think we have to be more just, morally conscious and socially conscious when we're talking about money and how money is used and what money is doing in the world. It's, of course, part of how we exchange things and I mean nobody is trying to destroy monetary systems, but what we're trying to do.

Speaker 1: 39:41

Some people are, but yeah.

Speaker 2: 39:44

Well, but they need to be cornered and put. They're wild, they're rampaging through the world in a way that is hugely destructive and is causing enormous suffering for so many people, particularly rural people, peasants, indigenous peoples. So that beast has to be cornered and corralled and put in its place. And does that make sense to you?

Speaker 1: 40:14

Absolutely no. No, I think we have unleashed a beast that we can barely or if not control at all and it's eating eating the planet alive, let's say. But I do see more and more, I think, the underlying I heard somebody say the other week like the only risk um, wealthy, let's say, institutions or families cannot hedge against is societal risk. Like if we collapse, everything goes down, like you can have the biggest I think Charles Eisenstein says this as well like the protection against societal breakdown is not a bigger wall and more bodyguards, it's more community. And I think slowly, but very slowly, more people start to realize that yeah, you cannot eat money literally, and we're starting to get in a position where food security and sovereignty is actually under threat and even the most cynical, smart investor starts to see the value and really the monetary values of functioning ecosystems functioning ecosystems. We're not there yet at all, but I'm seeing people starting to not freak out but see if the food system fails, everything else fails.

Speaker 1: 41:26

Regardless of your interest in small farmers or not, this is of everybody's concern very urgently, not in 10 years or 15 years. How we put that into action is a whole different topic. That's where we've been busy with in this podcast and many people we interview. So what would you do if, magically, you're in charge of a large investment portfolio, let's say a billion Canadian dollars? I'm not asking for exact amounts, I'm asking what would you focus on? It had to be put to work, but could be extremely long-term, so there's no pressure of early financial returns et cetera. At some point it would be nice if it comes back, but it can be extremely long for long-term investments. What would you focus on? What would be the big buckets of your attention if you had pretty much unlimited resources?

Speaker 2: 42:15

Oh my, you're asking a big question On purpose and not a very big answer. But let me just start by saying that no one fund billions of dollars or thousands, whatever denomination you want to take no one strategy is going to solve a problem, and I would put a lot of energy into and money into supporting Indigenous women's, small-scale farmer, peasant social organizations which have at the core their own sustainability and their own taking care of the places and the social context in which they live. There's this tremendous tendency for academics and intellectuals and government people to try and impose solutions on people and often and that's, I think, part of our problem too with how we treat the natural ecosystems around us we're very prone as human beings to try and protect ourselves by controlling everything else. Try and protect ourselves by controlling everything else, and our tremendous success in doing that in biosystems has meant to a complete undermining and a destruction of biodiversity, because control always wants to simplify and have power over and in the world we live in, both the social and the ecological world, interrelationships and complexity and diversity are actually the key to resilience, and if we don't understand that, then we try to take billions of dollars and make something happen in some place where we probably don't understand the complexities, the interrelationship, the injustices, the yen for access, all of those, you know, inclusion, all of those very complex interrelated things.

Speaker 2: 45:03

So if I had resources, I would put them into supporting and funding diversity and sovereignty on every scale, particularly in rural areas, with Indigenous women, small-scale farmers, the people who have lived and understood those environments and have grown food there for, as I said, in some places, thousands of years. So it wouldn't be. Oh, now we've got a technology here and a billion dollars will spread that around the world. That's the kind of solutions we've had a lot of. That's the whole industrial agriculture, modernization of agriculture that we from Western Europe and North America have tried to peddle into other places of the world, mostly for our profitability and their destruction. So let's not continue to do that. Let's not continue to think about money in that way and investment in that way. Let's start to think about all of this and money as only one component of trying to aid and abet and ensure that public interest and equality and justice is fermenting in all of these places, rather than trying to kill it off.

Speaker 1: 46:38

And as a final question, which usually leads to other final questions. But if you had so, we were taking away your investment fund. But you do have a magic wand and again, I absolutely realize the complexity of the issue and the one solution is never. One single thing is never gonna be a solution. But if you had to choose and you could change one thing, which could be anything We've had answers of global consciousness, better flavor, stop private land ownership in one full swoop, like if you had the real magic power of the movies and the books and the stories and the fairy tales you could change one thing, so not three like in Aladdin, but only one. What would that be? One?

Speaker 2: 47:19

thing. So not three like in Aladdin, but only one. What would that be? I would try to change the way people think about themselves in their environment. I would try to reframe the thinking I think we're and global communication systems and global capital and so on encourages this.

Speaker 2: 47:45

We've become sort of monocultural, not only in our fields but also in our minds, and I would try to reinsert a whole range of diverse ways of seeing ourselves and valuing ourselves and living in the world.

Speaker 2: 48:06

I mean, the interesting thing about social context is how complex it is, but we're constantly trying to simplify and control it in ways that, as you and I both know, have been extremely destructive and aren't that interesting or more frightening than interesting. Let's go for interesting rather than frightening. Let's go for diversity rather than monothinking and see what flourishes. I mean, I'm a gardener and also a farmer, as I said, and when you are gentle and tender and loving in your own context, it is always astonishing, always astonishing. In fact, I'm awestruck by how diverse and interesting and wonderful our surroundings actually are, not only the people, but the plants and the environment, and I think if we value and treasure that if I had a wand, that's what I would say I would say let's come to the place where we are awestruck again by the ecological context we live in, rather than the place where we try to control, diminish and simplify the world in which we live.

Speaker 1: 49:45

It's such a perfect end to this conversation.

Speaker 1: 49:48

It's such a big mindset shift as well, going from a farming, food and actually living system of mostly trying to control and kill and keep something alive barely, to where we realize we're part of nature, obviously, but still realizing.

Speaker 1: 50:04

That is a big step and we're farming with nature, which sounds always weird, but I have spoken to so many farmers that discovered this all and discovered this, this letting go of control, which extremely difficult and but extremely Having fun in farming and land management again, and not easy.

Speaker 1: 50:23

None of this is easy but having children come back to the farm, taking over and all of that Basically facilitating life on land and very different than getting out on your tractor and whatever tool you use to try to kill and control, which we might've done for quite a long time in history. If you think that the transition to an agricultural society and it might need quite a bit of undoing, so we might need need a few magic ones to to to get not rid, but to to go through the next transition, let's say as as society. So I want to thank you so much for coming on here in a very busy season part of the season um and to share your work, your wisdom and, of course, what keeps you busy, what keeps you interested and what makes you in awe of your surroundings.

Speaker 2: 51:11

Thank you for having me.

Speaker 1: 51:20

Thank you so much for listening all the way to the end. For the show notes and links we discussed in this episode, check out our website investinginregenerativeagriculturecom. Forward slash posts. If you liked this episode, why not share it with a friend or give us a rating on Apple Podcasts? That really helps. Thanks again and see you next time.