In this podcast episode, EWG President and co-Founder Ken Cook talks with Mike Grunwald, one of the nation’s most prominent investigative reporters and a modern agriculture expert. Grunwald is a New York Times bestseller and has written for publications including the Boston Globe, the Washington Post, Time and Politico.
Cook and Grunwald discuss Grunwald’s newest book, "We Are Eating the Earth, the Race to Fix Our Food System and Save Our Climate." They tackle how food fits into the climate debate and attempt to answer a seemingly contradictory question: How to feed more people with less land?
Ken: Hey, it's Ken Cook and I'm having another episode. I'm gonna start this episode off with a story. It's 25 years ago. I'm fresh out of high school and I'm standing in the middle of a field in Aniston, Alabama with a friend who later became a board member of EWG David Baker, an amazing environmental community advocate, champion who was taking on Monsanto because Monsanto had caused the field, the two of us were standing in to be raised to the ground. It was formerly a neighborhood. There were homes, but when we were standing there, there were only empty streets with weeds growing up through the cracked cement. A few street signs, but no homes left because Monsanto had dumped huge amounts of PCBs for decades on this town.
And instead of owning up to it and being held accountable and doing the right thing. They simply bought the property, the value of which was depressed by the Monsanto pollution, and then raised all of the homes to the ground. It was not even a ghost town. While I'm standing in that field, I call back to my colleague Mike Casey, tell him what I'm seeing.
I had just come from a courtroom where Monsanto was being sued. So it was all coming together. But here I was, I called him and he said, “You know, you need to call Mike Grunwald at the Washington Post and tell him the story.”
So while I'm standing there with my cell phone, I called Grunwald and I told him what I was seeing.
I told him about the court case. We had some internal documents that we had gotten hold of, and I told them that they spelled out even more of the story that Monsanto knew for decades that they were poisoning this little community. They knew fish were dying. They knew that the levels of PCBs in the soil and in the water and in the air were way above limits that were deemed safe by any scientists and authoritative bodies. And they didn't do anything about it. So they had to be sued.
And ultimately the litigation turned out to bring about one of the biggest civil rights settlements in history for the people of Aniston. Mike went down to Aniston, he dug into those documents. He did incredible investigative work. And the next thing we know, there's a front page story in the Washington Post that says, Monsanto hid pollution for decades.
That led to other journalists picking up People Magazine picked up, did a six page spread on Aniston, Alabama. 60 Minutes did a story focused on my colleague, friend, and inspiration, David Baker, who took on Monsanto and won.
So I'm thrilled today to have Mike Grunwald on the show. He's one of the really great investigative reporters of our time, certainly one of the greats that I've ever come across.
You can find his work now at Canary Media, at the Breakthrough Institute and on the Climate Wars Podcast. He's a New York Times bestselling author, and his new book is called We Are Eating the Earth, the Race to Fix Our Food System and Save Our Climate. It's about uncovering uncomfortable truths about our food system, including uncomfortable truths for critics and defenders of modern agriculture.
So I'm especially excited about it because it's built a lot around a friend and colleague, and another inspiration of mine, Tim Searchinger and his amazing journey uncovering these uncomfortable truths.
Mike, welcome to the show. It's great to see you again, my friend, and I'm tickled that you're here to talk about your great new book.
Mike: It's awesome. It's been a long time since Aniston man.
Ken: Yeah. Yeah. And Monsanto hasn't done any better since, but that's another story, right?
Mike: Yeah. I remember looking at those documents and being like, wow, they put it all in writing. They wrote it.
Ken: Yeah. We had one of them in our [office] hallway. I don't know if you remember one of the documents we blew up to about eight feet high. It was Monsanto telling the state authorities in Alabama that they hoped they would not disclose what Monsanto knew to be the case with this PCB pollution. The state regulators were reported in the same memo as saying, “Yes, that's not a problem. We won't say a word about how you're poisoning our people.”
And on top of it all it was, I think, “confidential, read and destroy.”
Mike: Exactly. That's what I remember. That's the thing I remember most about that story. It was like the first few documents, it was like “confidential, confidential.” And Purdue was like, “Super super duper confidential.” And then “confidential, read and destroy.”
That's when I'm like, huh, I think this is a story.
Ken: Well, it was a story in your hands and it was a great win and it really had a huge impact. On the proceedings in Anniston, the litigation, the uproar around it, the bipartisan support to help the folks down there with the problems they were having, getting a response from the EPA… All that. The best that you [could] expect from investigative journalism, and that is that it opens up issues in ways that ordinary people would never have had the opportunity to open up. And does it in a way that has a lasting impact.
So that's how I, when I think of your career, I think of that. And I think this book is very much in line with that. So I love the eating part and I love how you first decided you were gonna write this book.
Mike: You kind of gave away a little bit of the punchline, which is that really agriculture is eating the earth.
Right now, two of every five acres on this planet are cropped or grazed. And, you know, a lot of us, spent a lot of time writing about urban sprawl, about how it's kind of going into forests and wetlands. And it is, it's a real problem.
But I always point out that sort of cities and suburbs and highways and driveways, the developed part of our planet, that's 1% of our land. Agriculture is 40%.
And so the book is really about how this natural planet of ours is becoming an agricultural planet, which has incredible all kinds of environmental consequences, including climate consequences. Because as our agricultural footprint expands, our natural footprint shrinks. That's, you know, forests and wetlands that store a lot of carbon and that also absorb a lot of carbon from the atmosphere.
You know, what we're doing, it's like we're trying to clean our house when we try to decarbonize the planet, but it's like we're smashing the vacuum cleaner to bits in the living room. That's what we're doing with deforestation and we're continuing to lose a soccer field worth of tropical forest every six seconds.
And that's because of agriculture.
Ken: Yeah. And as someone who's been to Brazil myself, that part of your book is really, really compelling and, and really concerning. But we're, you know, we're more than happy to plow up land here for no real good reason unless you count subsidies and the need to do something with that land that earns greater return.
Mike: Well, I do try to bang my spoon on my highchair a little bit about this notion that, you know, we look at the United States where there is some, still some wetlands, drainage, and there is still some deforestation, but essentially like we tore down our ‘Amazon’ in the 19th century, right?
Ken: Absolutely.
Mike: Indiana was 85% forest and now it's all corn and soybeans. And we wag our fingers at Brazil when we see deforestation there for corn and soybeans, mostly for cattle. The fact is, you know, what we are doing is not all that different from what they're doing. They're just doing it a little bit later.
My sort of larger point of this book is really about recognizing that essentially we have a land problem. That we need to make more food with less land and fewer emissions.
It's not like we are the good guys because we got rid of our nature so long ago while Brazil and Indonesia are, you know, dealing with those issues now. It's all the same issues. And if we'd had bulldozers, we would've done it faster
Ken: Back in the day, but—
Mike: Exactly. Exactly. I mean, 12,000 years ago, early agriculturalists got rid of a South America worth of nature. They transformed that into farmland before the industrial revolution. Before the tractors. [Instead of] the nasty chemicals, you know, they just use fire and the ax.
So agriculture really does make a mess. And my kind of message is that we first of all have to acknowledge this mess. It's something that a lot of us don't think about every day. I certainly didn't until I started working on this.
And then we gotta do something about that mess. Because we gotta eat.
Ken: Yeah. No question about that. And there are more and more of us who have to eat, people need food and they want more protein. That comes at a huge price. So Tim Searchinger, who's the protagonist in the book, [who] I think of as a friend of many years of mine and colleagues here at the Environmental Working Group.
We've worked together on any number of issues. Farm [subsidies] in particular, but also the ethanol fight in the early 2000s, and up through about 2014-2015. And so I don't know who latched onto who. My experience has been [that] Tim latches onto something and doesn't let go, but in this case, he didn't come to you and say, write a book about me.
But it was very compelling the way you tell his story of a critical thinker who's willing to take on, I mean literally, any intellectual challenge if he's convinced that he's right. Most of what he has built his life around is protecting the planet and human health. How did you meet Searcher? How did you decide that you're gonna, you know, follow his story and tell this broader story that you tell so well?
Mike: So I've known Tim for 25 years. I actually tell the story in the book of the first time I met him, which was in Union Station. I had just started doing some investigative stuff at the Washington Post, and he had some ideas for me, and I talked to him like at the time he was, you know, we were both very young.
He was wearing this—he kind of looked like it was like a college kid wearing his first suit. And what I remember is even [in] that first meeting, first of all this like just blizzard of verbiage which is what you get with Tim Searchinger. He is obviously brilliant. But one thing that really stuck with me is that here's this guy who's, at the time we were talking a lot about the Army Corps of Engineers, and how they were just building these wasteful and destructive boondoggles all over the country that were destroying rivers. And really for no apparent reason.
First of all, he had all the documentation, because he would say these things that sounded kind of crazy. And he showed me he had done all the work—and here's the documentation. What I also remember is that he would give me all the opposing arguments, you know, he's a lawyer. He was a wetlands lawyer, but he would kind of go through the six best arguments for the other side and he would explain why four of them were bogus. And then this one was only partly bogus and this is actually a pretty good argument here. So I was like, my God, this guy is like, he's just sort of incredibly, [he’s] honest but also incredibly smart and ridiculously driven.
You know, I ended up doing a whole thing. I spent a year kicking around the Army Corps on the front page of the Washington Post. He gave me the first tip about the Florida Everglades that led me to write my first book and move to Florida and meet my wife and have a family. So, Tim's been a kind of influential person in my life.
But we had sort of, uh, we had… I guess we drifted a little apart. I'd been doing all kinds of different sorts of reporting, including a lot of climate reporting and I was mostly energy reporting, like most of us who think a lot about climate. And I had written this piece about my own life in the green economy. I'd gotten solar panels and an electric car.
My point was not that, ‘I'm an awesome eco saint and you should be like me.’ My point was more like, “Hey, I'm saving a lot of money. If I've figured this out, this stuff is gonna go mainstream.”
I actually had this kind of throwaway line about how I don't line dry my laundry, I don't unplug my computer at night, [and] I still eat meat. And then when I was fact checking it, I was like, huh, I still eat meat. Is meat even bad for the climate?
I genuinely didn't know and I'd been writing about climate stuff for 15 years and I knew, like people talked about the cow farts. Yeah. And I knew that like, ‘Meatless Mondays’ was supposed to be good. But I [thought] like, “Is this just something that vegans say because we want to be nice to animals, or is this actually bad for the climate?”
Ken: Vegans with solar panels and electric cars?
Mike: Yeah. I knew Tim was sort of doing some agricultural stuff with climate. I called him and I said, “Hey Tim, is meat really that bad for the climate?” And he said, “Yes.” And then he said, because that's sort of how Tim is, “Just a little bit.” We ended up having this conversation and so one of the things he explained basically is that food is about a third of our climate problem, and of course it's like 3% of climate finance and like 0% of climate conversation.
So that was really striking to me. And we had done a story together about biofuels and he said basically the problem with meat is [that it’s] like biofuels. It uses too much land.
Biofuels use about a Texas worth of the earth, and that's crazy. But livestock use like 50 Texas' worth of the earth. You know when you eat a burger, you're eating a cow, but really you're eating the Amazon, you're eating the Macaw and the Jaguars and the rest of the cast of Rio.
And it was just, that first conversation really made me think, ‘I don't know anything about this stuff, that it's a third of the climate problem and I write about the climate. [If I don’t know] then probably most people don't.” Obviously there are like a million books about energy and climate and a lot of them are really good books and this, it's really important. But we kind of know what to do about energy now. I mean, we're even starting to do it just not fast enough.
Food, I realized, was just this incredible white space where we don't know what to do. The problem's getting worse and we haven't even really grappled with it. And so my book is really, I hope it grapples with it.
Ken: Yeah. So what do you think some of the big misconceptions are about how agriculture's affecting the climate and just the environment generally? The critters go first and the climate goes right after? Why hasn't more attention been paid to it? Is it just too naughty, too complex?
Mike: Sure. Well, I mean, I think there are a whole bunch of misconceptions, because I think the first thing is that people don't really know much about food and climate. But then it's also a lot of what they think they know just isn't so. The first big issue, and obviously this is kind of the title of the book, is that land use, that's the giant elephant in the room, and that's what's been ignored, that the climate analysis of food, of agriculture, of biofuels has consciously ignored land use. That's where all the marbles are. That's been the big problem.
And so Tim's big insight essentially is that land is not free.
He first discovered this by looking at biofuels, where essentially there had been a lot of criticism of biofuels, particularly corn ethanol, because the idea was we're using almost as much fossil fuel to create ethanol as we are replacing fossil fuels. I mean, it's just incredibly inefficient.
But the idea was always, yeah, you do emit a lot in making ethanol, but then when you grow corn, that kind of sucks the carbon out of the air. That you're burning in the engine. When you burn the corn and it goes out the tailpipe, those negative emissions in the field kind of offset it.
At the time, it was basically the, the prevailing science was, ethanol was like 20% better because of that. And Tim just looked at this and was like, well, that's weird because that cornfield was sucking up carbon when it was growing food, like even before it was growing fuel. If you're gonna grow fuel, then somewhere else you're gonna have to grow more food and it's probably not gonna be in a parking lot. It's gonna be in a forest or a wetland or a prairie or someplace that had a lot of carbon and there's gonna be a real cost. You're going to use more land and that has just been completely ignored by all of the science. And so when Tim ended up doing the math and the modeling, ethanol was not 20% better than gasoline, it was twice as bad, and soy biodiesel was even worse because you needed more land to make the same amount of diesel.
So that was really the initial insight, and that really is the idea that's behind a lot of this book. You know, when you think about agriculture, there's this kind of notion that a lot of people have of, there's kind of good agriculture, Michael Pollen, agriculture. Less chemicals, which is nice, but also small scale, diverse, old school more natural. And then there's kind of big evil industrial agriculture, which is like large. And yes, it has a lot of chemicals, mono cropping, but also it's often called production agriculture or efficient agriculture. Like efficiency is this kind of evil word that rapacious corporations kind of dredge dollars out of the dirt.
But when you realize, when you start thinking about land, it’s that making more food per acre is really important because then you need fewer acres to make food and that there really is this trade off.
When you reduce yields, there's a lot of nice things about regenerative agriculture that takes care of the soil or organic agriculture where you're using fewer chemicals. But to the extent there's a yield drag, then there's increased pressure on the Amazon, on the Congo Rainforest, on this Saranetti, you name it.
Ken: Or even on The Great Plains. What's left of the grasslands there.
Mike: Yeah, exactly. And of course, it also creates pressure on hunger because the world population is growing and we are gonna need 50% more calories by 2050. Right now we're on track to need 70% more meat. And if we keep doing things the way we're doing them now we're gonna have to deforest another dozen Californians worth of land and we don't really have that.
So that's really the kind of issues that I think have been misunderstood. There's this idea that kind of like sustainable agriculture means like not being too mean to the soil or not being too intensive. But you know, the phrase is sustainable intensification. You know, if you can make more food per acre, that is a really good thing.
Ken: Yeah. The one thing that I, I kept thinking about when I was reading your book, is that there are ways in which you could intensify production and get more yield, even in an organic system or agroforestry systems. But the amount of labor it takes to do that, the return to the land, the ability to earn a living from doing it, that's not just subsistence, that's the dilemma that I think, you know, we also don't confront.
Even if you could show, yeah, I'm growing instead of growing corn, I'm growing fruits and vegetables. I'm getting more value per acre, more calories per acre, more nutrients per acre. And I'm doing it organically. That's fine. But you can't, but it doesn't scale.
Mike: That's exactly right, that's the word I was going to use. It's very difficult to scale because really my book is about how do we feed the world without frying the world? And I do think people want to look at their own little acre. Right? And say, “Look at my microbiome. You know, look at these diverse crops.” But is that really gonna scale on the kind of like millions and billions of acres? We're going to need to actually feed 8 to 10 billion people. It's hard.
Now, I wanna say, sometimes I come off, when I talk about this, I end up sounding like this kind of apologist for industrial agriculture.
And when, first of all, I wanna say like, I acknowledge all the things that people hate about him and I usually hate it too. Right. You know, the way that they treat animals badly, they treat people badly, they create a lot of toxic pollution. They dump too much crap in rivers. They use too much antibiotics, which creates a public health menace. Their politics suck. I'm aware of all that and I don't wanna justify that.
I'm more of the, how can we reform them so that they can make even more food with less of a mess. At the same time, I also don't want to just blow off this idea that there can be better ways of farming.
I went to a ranch in Brazil where they have a feedlot, they fertilize their pastures, stuff that Michael Pollen wouldn't like at all, but they also do a lot of Michael Pollan stuff. They have cover crops, they have no-till. They integrate their cattle and let them graze the cover crops. They rotational graze their cattle, so you know, the kind of regenerative mob grazing? And they get unbelievable yields. So my real focus is like yield production. That is really important because we really do need to create a lot of affordable, sustainable food.
But I don't wanna be the guy who's saying things like, “You have to do it this way, or you have to do it that way.” Like right now organic generally has like 20 to 40% yield drag in the United States and other parts of the world even more. But if you can figure out a way to do super high yield organic, good for you. That's awesome.
Ken: You know, legislation that was passed had us on the path of really dramatically expanding ethanol, and I think Tim's argument, and there weren't many of us making the argument. It was a landslide, including a lot of people in the environmental community, which you write about, who were in favor of, let's go for ethanol. Some, partly because they bought into the technical scientific reasons that the problems with it weren't as apparent until Tim's insights became more commonplace. And secondly, some of them just wanted to curry favor with farm state legislators to get energy bills passed. That was, that's true. The ugliest part of it.
Mike: I tell that story, but it was also the politics of ethanol sucked. I tell that funny story about when Tim was trying to convince one democratic senator who had no corn in his state, you know, he was talking to an aide and was like, “Hey, this is just gonna tax your people and it's just going to reward agribusinesses in the Midwest.”
And this was John Corzine's and he said to Tim, “Look, I'm sorry, the boss can't afford to piss off the farmers in Iowa.” And Tim was like, “Wait a minute! I mean, your boss used to be the head of Goldman Sachs. He thinks he's gonna be president someday?” And the aide said, “Tim, they all think they're gonna be president someday.”
Ken: That's right. That's right. Especially when they look at who's already running.
Mike: Oh, exactly. Exactly! And so I do think, you know, the Ag-lobby is really extraordinary. Tim thought once he kind of figured this stuff out about ethanol, he realized he had this great idea where he was going to basically try to create some dissension in the ag ranks. And he went to the, he secretly met with the pork lobby because he figured, “Hey, they feed corn to their yeah pigs and ethanol's gonna increase the price of corn.” But of course the pork guys, whatever their difference about ethanol, they all stick together.
And they dimed Tim out and Tim ended up having to leave his environmental group because they dimed him out to his bosses that he was trying to cause problems with ethanol. People forget that this was around 2007. There was no solar [energy]. There was no wind [energy]. There were no electric cars.
Biofuels were the only alternative to fossil fuels we had .And at the time Tim comes along and is sort of like, “They're actually worse than fossil fuels.” That was not what people wanted to hear. And in a way, I was kind of shocked by how many environmentalists were actually willing, and scientists were willing, to look at what Tim came up with, even though he wasn't a scientist at the time, and sort of say like, “Hey, you know what? You're right. We were wrong.” Which is a hard thing for us humans to say.
That said, I do think there are still some environmentalists who are trying to make fetch happen when it comes to biofuels. Even now with everything we know about, about the land use problems, you know, and a lot of Democrats, Midwestern Democrats in this, in the Big Beautiful Republican Bill, there's language that makes it work that basically says, “Well you can't look at the [biofuels]. When you look at biofuels, you can't look at the land use change, because of course that's what makes it not pencil out.”
Ken: That's the Achilles heel. A hundred percent. So essentially the—
Mike: The government is saying, okay, well you have to put down your pencils.
Ken: Yeah. And we were pretty actively involved on Tim's side and most of the environmental community was on the other side. Friends of the Earth did some good work. They were on our side. You know, some folks in the wildlife community 'cause they saw that what was left of wildlife habitat was being turned into corn ground at the loss of grasslands in the prairie, parts of the heartland.. It just got completely out of control.
I was invited to speak at an ethanol conference because we were critics and they, to their credit, wanted to go back and forth with us. And I'll never forget, somebody came up at the reception. He said, “So Ken, you made some good points, but lemme ask you this. If we paired back on ethanol, what are we gonna do with all that corn?” Right?
Because that was what was really driving it. Too much fucking corn.
They couldn't subsidize exports anymore because of the WTO. You can only do so much with corn here in the U.S. The domestic demand has been reasonably flat. So what do we do? Well, we put it in our SUVs. Next they wanna put it in the plains.
Mike: Which is even crazier! And sort of back of the envelope, to provide about a quarter of the world's jet fuel, with crops would take about 40% of the world's crops.
Ken: Yeah. So talk a little bit about that because you know, one thing that people could accuse you of, I happen to know it's not the case, is that individual action is futile—It's all about big numbers, big acreages and so and so forth, making changes at the policy level. But talk a little bit about everyday people, how they should think about where they fit into this.
Mike: That’s a great question. I think it was about like five years ago, there was just this vision, it kind of farang through the environmental community, this notion that we've gotta stop scolding people. You know, we don't want to be that guy anymore. I think it was like one of the big oil companies actually came up with the first carbon footprint calculator. And so it became, the kind of cool thing to say was like, if worried about your carbon footprint, you're just doing big oil’s bidding.
And I get it and look, they're bad. We can stipulate that. We can also stipulate that policy is really important. And look, corporations need to do their part. But you know, like Donald Trump isn't, and, and McDonald's and JBS are not shoving all these burgers, you know, they're not forcing us to eat three burgers a week.
And the fact is, if we only ate two burgers a week, we would save like a Massachusetts worth of land every year. And even beyond that, I think there's something kind of uncool about the environmental community. On the one hand, sort of saying like, you know, we're in a crisis. This is horrible. Like we have this deadline, we need [to be under] 2 degrees Celsius by X date, all hands on deck.
And then at the same time being like, “Oh, but your emissions don't matter. Don't worry about that.” So I just think that's crazy. Yeah. You know, I don't want to be judgy and I'd certainly, I don't think perfect's on the menu and you're a vegan. That's the best thing you can do for your diet, for the climate, and that's awesome. I am weak. I am a hypocrite. I think some of this is a little bit like organized religion. You find the level of hypocrisy you're comfortable with. Right. I have cut out beef; like I said, vegan is the best and being a vegetarian is also great. But cutting out beef is about, generally about as good as being a vegetarian for the planet and the climate, because beef is so bad and vegetarians end up eating more dairy to replace their protein. And I do tell the story in the book of how I went to Brazil and spent a couple weeks on cattle ranches and fell off the wagon and ate a lot of delicious steak.
Ken: Hard not to in Brazil,
Mike: People told me like, “Oh, after a month you won't even miss it.” And that was bullshit. I really miss it. [Beef] is delicious. And our ancestors started eating this stuff 2 million years ago. We like it. That said, I do think the best thing you can do in your individual diet is eat less beef and waste less food because when we waste food, we waste the farmland and the water and the chemicals and fertilizers that are used to grow that food.
It's dumb that we, the world, use about a China worth of land to grow garbage. That seems suboptimal.
I try not to get up on my high horse, just [say] like, “I have an electric vehicle and solar panels and stuff.” But I fly too much. We all have an impact.
All agriculture has an impact.
This is my third book and, and all three books, one of the big themes has been that better is better than worse. And I think that's a good goal. I think we should try to do better rather than worse.
Ken: Yeah. I do think an individual commitment like that or an understanding like that can often nourish an interest, and looking and participating in efforts to change policy. It gives you a degree of authenticity, a grounding, and so forth.
Mike: We vote three times a day, right? So it really is a matter of consciousness.
The one thing I will say is, you know, I often hear. And usually it's to excuse something else. It's sort of like, we don't need to do X, we just all need to go vegan or we just need to stop wasting food or stop using biofuels. And one thing I do point out is that, and this is a real theme in the book as well, is that math is the math.
And the math really sucks.
So that even in the rich world [if] we cut our beef consumption in half. Which I think is gonna be really hard, but that I think should be the goal. Because in the poor world, we actually want people to eat more meat. I mean it's outrageous that there are 6 billion people on earth that basically eat none. So just for equity and you know, we want people to be healthy and have affordable meat.
Imagine we cut our beef consumption in half and imagine the entire world cutting food waste in half. And just imagine we got rid of all biofuels. We're still gonna need to make a lot more food with a lot less land to basically feed the world without frying it by 2050.
We really need to do all the things, or at least, you know, if not all of the above, most of the above. And that includes, on the dietary side, whether it's, you know, eating less beef or replacing it with alternative proteins, whether it's, the fake meat or maybe someday the cultivated meat grown from cells.
But also on the agricultural side, we need to again, whether it's higher yield crops, drought tolerant crops, alternative fertilizers, alternative pesticides, better grazing that puts more cows on the same amount of land. We're gonna need to investigate all that stuff. We need to throw money into research.
We need to deploy the stuff that works and then it's still gonna be hard.
Ken: Yeah, no question. I think the next logical thing is, okay, well, so if I'm thinking big about policy and I'm trying to balance this out, what's the combination that results in progress, not perfection, but it's meaningful progress?
Taking on the climate challenge and the challenge of feeding people at the same time. If you invest in technology that boosts yields, how do you avoid the pressure to take that technology and clear more land because it grows so much more food? What's the policy frame there?
Mike: That's a great question because right there is this kind of rebound effect where globally, if we increase yields, that should decrease demand for land. But locally, you give a farmer in Brazil, you know, or a farmer in Africa, access to fertilizer, he's gonna grow more food and the first thing he is gonna do is like, this is awesome. And he's gonna go and cut down more trees; farm another sector [because it] would be good. Expand the farm.
So I would say from a global policy perspective, we really do need this notion of ‘produce and protect’ where it's linked, where we're gonna help farmers and we're gonna help particularly developing nations, we're gonna help them increase their yields. And also we're going to help them with the kind of climate friendly technologies that we discussed. Biological fertilizers or biological nitrification inhibition or, you know… I'm really fun at parties.
Ken: People are usually worried I'm gonna take a blood sample or something. So I think, I think exactly.
Mike: I might even be lower on the invite list.
Look, I mean, there are all kinds of very exciting technological and agronomic solutions that I think should be invested in and that can really help. But at the same time, that has to be linked with—like there has to be strings attached to the money. Hey, if not all of Brazil, at least the Brazilian province, we will give you all this money to help you make even more food, but you cannot cut down your forest. And if you do, the money gets cut off.
I should point out that like about 10 years ago that was supposed to be the deal where. Brazil was supposed to do its part, and if they did its part, they were supposed to get lots of money and the international community did not come up with the money, which broke our promises. And that led to a lot of political unrest and all kinds of disaster.
So again, this is all very hard. I want to acknowledge that this is not something you can just snap your fingers and be like, “produce and protect, easy.” But I think that it is the model where we should be looking at and unfortunately the energy at the institutions like the UN foundations like Rockefeller and Walmart, and you name it. And even these agribusinesses like PepsiCo and General Mills, the big food, big Ag guys as well as in the United States, you see Bobby Kennedy and Joe Rogan on the right, as well as Michael Pollan and Al Gore on the left.
Everybody has this vision where we're gonna spend billions, maybe trillions of dollars essentially transitioning to this agroecological paradise where we're just gonna be nicer to the soil and somehow the carbon from the sky is gonna come down and just be repatriated to the soil. And that is very dangerous because the carbon farming aspect of it is mostly bullshit. It doesn't pencil out. It just doesn't work.
And the regenerative agriculture part of it, which does do some very nice things for the soil, but again, if you're reducing your yields, you're creating a real deforestation problem. So I just think this is stuff that needs to be thought through. We can't have this kind of faith-based transformation of global agriculture.
Ken: Yeah, I think that's right. I see a lot of benefits to regenerative agriculture, which, so capacious in its definition, it could mean everything. It's no surprise that we have some really devout, smart, advanced agro ecologists thinking about it.
And we have fair thinking about it, right? They both used the term. No surprise that we need a little definitional rigor here. The notion that we're going to farm in such a way that it's going to be the solution to climate change, storing carbon in the soil. And, you know, my background long ago was soil science.
And all the soil scientists I've gotten to know over the years have basically said when you start clearing land, you never have a very good chance of going back to that carbon storage capability that you had in a forest, say, or even tallgrass prairie.
Mike: You're absolutely right, and this is an area where, again, scary Michael Pollen is a beautiful writer, and I wish I wrote as well as he does. He's done a little bit of a disservice by creating this kind of nostalgia and romance around this idea that there's this kind of good, sustainable old style farming with lovely diverse crops and the red barn and the rustic pastoral setting and the farmer and his wife with the pitchfork.
It's true that when those kinds of pastoral bucolic farms got transformed into bigger industrial farms, there was some environmental cost to that. And you at the Environmental Working Group have done a fantastic job of really focusing particularly on the pesticide side of it, that there really are trade-offs there that are, that are absolutely real.
But that said, the real environmental catastrophe was the transformation of the prairie or the forest into those bucolic Michael Pollen, beloved farms in the first place. That's where we lost biodiversity. That's where we lost the carbon. That's like a different way of thinking about agriculture.
When you're taking your cross-country flight and looking at all those squares and circles, you know, a way that actually treasures the land, not just for that individual piece of land, but being able to think of it as part of a food system where we are going to need to feed. A shit ton of people and they're gonna need a shit ton of food. And that agricultural sprawl, like I said, it's 40 times as big as urban sprawl and it's getting bigger and that just can't continue indefinitely.
Mark Twain said they ain't making any more of it. And right now there's about as much nature as there is farms.
But the farm part is getting bigger every day and the nature part is getting smaller.
Ken: So your book is coming out and the name of the book is, We Are Eating the Earth: The Race to Fix Our Food System and Save Our Climate. And I would recommend anyone with an interest in climate, energy, agriculture, our food system, to pick up Mike's book.
I think it'll challenge the way you think about some things. I think it will maybe open some creative new ways to characterize the problems as maybe some of us have conceptualized them in the past and come back. I think everyone will come back to the importance of the land. I think everyone agrees it's important, but I think it's important in your book in a different way because if we continue to lose the capability to preserve nature, because we chew it all up and eat it all, we're in big trouble as we have MAHA (Make America Healthy Again). We had Kennedy on the campaign trail saying he was gonna be in charge of all the health agencies and USDA. It didn't exactly work out that way, among other promises that didn't work out. So how do you see this debate unfolding over the next few years?
You have a republican control of Congress. It looks very much like Mr. Trump's Secretary of Agriculture is very conventional in the way she approaches politics and policy. You have. Kennedy, unable to really do much that affects agriculture from his perch at HHS. He can do a lot of other things like cut Medicaid, but he can't really do much about agriculture.
So how do you see these arguments unfolding, Mike, over the next few years?
Mike: We talked a little bit in the beginning about how uh, there's sort of this energy and climate world and the food and climate part of it is sort of new. Right. And I like to say it's probably 20, 25 years behind energy and climate.
Right now for people who are energy and climate people, which I was one of them, I guess I still am, even though I've taken this six year detour. Obviously these next four years are gonna suck. We know where Trump is. He doesn't give a shit about the climate and he's actually. A fan of fossil fuels. He is going to do everything he can to advance fossil fuels at the expense of clean energy.
Ken: To his great credit, he has figured out that there's a problem with solar energy, which is called sunset.
Mike: Did you know that the wind doesn't always blow, Ken? Have you, Have you heard that?
Ken: I know, I wrote it down. The first time I heard him say it.
Mike: So he's going to be rolling back. A lot of good stuff happened. The good news is that wind and solar and batteries and electric vehicles have gotten so cheap and good that I don't think he can just completely end the revolution. But that's gonna be, you know, it's gonna be a political fight and he is gonna roll some stuff back.
So the sort of good news for my world from food and climate is that it’s so new that there's nothing to roll back. Or at least not very much. Right. But I do think that this is a time where we need to figure shit out.
In a way it's, I mean—opportunities not really the right word at least—so that when there is globally and in the United States when at least the kind of political stars are aligned to actually do something about this stuff we'll be ready to do the right thing. And that's where I do have to at least give a shout out to Denmark.
You know, when I talk about this stuff, people are, you know, there's a lot of like, oh yeah, right? “Yeah, we're just gonna snap our fingers and take on the ag industry and do this and do that.”
Well, Denmark, it turns out, is doing all the things I went there with, searching for her who had been hired along with the World Resources Institute, by the Danish agricultural lobby, essentially to help them decarbonize their industry. Denmark had done so much work on climate stuff, basically on the energy side that suddenly agriculture was looking like a massive part of the problem.
So they were kind of like, even though they were very powerful and they were like, “Oh my God, I mean the energy guys did their part. We're gonna have to do ours. What can we do?” And of course at the time the environs were like,”Well, you need to shut down your pig farms and shut down your dairy farms.” And Tim came and said, “No, you have incredibly efficient pig and dairy farms. It would be dumb to shut it down and outsource all that deforestation and pollution to the developing world. Instead, we should make it even more productive, but less of a mess. Test all of the technologies, you know, the drought tolerant crops and the greener fertilizers and… you name it, the feed additives so that the cows burp less methane. We're gonna test all that. We're gonna deploy the stuff that works. You'll make even more food, but you're also going to have to use less land. And we're gonna rewild a million acres of farmland at the same time. We're gonna tax agricultural emissions. We're going to have a nationwide effort to promote plant forward eating.”
So basically we're gonna do everything. And I think that's the model.
Now, I don't expect that to happen very soon in the United States. I talked to one pollster who told me that actually taxing or any kind of restrictions on meat was the least popular policy he had ever surveyed, he said, “It pulled like veterans benefits for ISIS.”
So again, it's hard. But I think that should be the goal, it’s to try to let a thousand flowers bloom, let the technologies improve, get better policy and try to have individuals try to do their part. Even if we're not perfect—we're all flawed—but we could try to do a little better.
Ken: Well, Mike, I'm so grateful to spend this time with you. I'm so proud of all the books you've written but especially this one. I'm really excited to have it hit the streets and the debate it's gonna stir up, I think is long overdue. We've been, in some ways, resting on some comfortable delusions for maybe too long about how big this problem is and how to take it on as an organization that's been in the teeth of big Ag for a long time. We know how hard they fight. But I do think you're pointing the way here to some ideas that we really knew do need to at least give a good sounding to and who knows.
The pendulum swings and there may be an embrace of some of these ideas. We look at the ideas that are popular now that we didn't think were thinkable just a few years ago. So times do change and politics change and I think, in the agriculture space, this is gonna really help shape the conversation about that.
So, Mike I'm thrilled for you and grateful to you and can't wait to see what you do next.
Mike: Well, it's been awesome talking to you, and I really appreciate all your kind words and of course, all your great work.
Ken: Mike Grunwald, thank you so much for joining us today. I also want to thank all of you out there for listening.
Be sure to check out Mike's latest book. We are Eating the Earth, the Race to Fix Our Food System and Save Our Climate. And if you'd like to learn more. Be sure to check out our show notes for additional links. To take a deeper dive into today's discussion, make sure to follow us on Instagram at Ken Cooks podcast, and if you're interested in learning more about EWG.
Head on over to ewg.org or check out the EWG Instagram account at Environmental Working Group. If this episode resonated with you or you think someone you know would benefit from it, send it along. The best way to make positive change is to start as a community with your community. Today's episode was produced by the extraordinary Beth Row and Mary Kelly.
Our show's theme music is Courtesy of Moby. Thank you Moby, and thanks again to all of you for listening.
