Beth Hoffman is an author, journalist, and farmer. She spent much of her adult life in the San Francisco area as a journalist focused on writing about food and agriculture and a professor at the University of San Francisco.

In her late 40s, Beth and her husband John decided to return to his family farm in Iowa to work as full time farmers. From that experience was born Beth’s book Bet the Farm: The Dollars and Sense of Growing Food in America.

The book is part memoir, looking at her and John’s struggles to convert a conventional Iowa farm raising commodity crops like corn and soy beans into Whippoorwill Creek Farm, a grass finished cattle operation that also uses organic practices for raising vegetables. But the book is also a look at the economic challenges that face farmers in this country today.

Beth joins Heath to discuss not only the difficult physical tasks that come with growing food and raising meat, but also the larger systemic issues in farming including racial discrimination, influence from large agribusiness companies, and the threats posed by climate change.

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