We walk into our local grocery store and most likely barely consider what’s on display in front of us. Forty thousand items. Stacked, uniform, produce. Cuisine from around the globe. Open often 24 hours.

As author Benjamin Lorr points out, that can be considered a miracle.

In The Secret Life of Groceries, Ben dives deep into the hidden machinery behind that miracle. He spent years inside the system, working behind a Whole Foods fish counter, riding cross-country with long-haul truckers, and tracing supply chains all the way to shrimp boats in Thailand. What he found is a system that delivers abundance, convenience, and quality at historically unprecedented levels. But it does so by squeezing every inefficiency out of the chain, and often squeezing workers and ecosystems along with it.

In this episode, we dive into:
• Why the modern supermarket truly is miraculous
• How deregulation reshaped trucking and the invisible logistics backbone of food
• What “just-in-time” efficiency means for grocery workers
• The hidden labor dynamics behind ultra-cheap shrimp and other commodities
• Why certifications and labels often can’t fix systemic incentives
• The tension between convenience, price, and ethics
• Whether we actually have the food system we’ve chosen

More about Benjamin:

Benjamin Lorr is the author of Hell-Bent, a critically acclaimed exploration of the Bikram Yoga community that first detailed patterns of abuse and sexual misconduct by guru Bikram Choudhury, and The Secret Life of Groceries, called “a titanic achievement of reportage, insight, humor, and humanity” examining the American supermarket from all angles. Lorr is a graduate of Montgomery County, Maryland public schools and Columbia University. He lives in New York City.

You can buy Benjamin’s books online here or for audiobooks, here.

Follow him on Instagram.

Agrarian Futures is produced by Alexandre Miller, who also wrote our theme song. This episode was edited by Drew O’Doherty.

I’m willing to bet that most of our listeners - like us - have traditionally seen acorns as food for squirrels, not people. But as Elspeth Hay points out in this conversation, that assumption says more about our food system than it does about the acorn.

For much of human history, acorns were a staple. They fed communities across North America, Europe, North Africa, and Asia - and in some cases - still do. They were managed, processed, stored, and celebrated. So how did we go from acorns as everyday food to acorns as woodland debris? In her fantastic book Feed Us with Trees, Elspeth traces how enclosure, industrial agriculture, and a narrow definition of “real farming” pushed perennial forest foods to the margins of our imagination.

In this episode, we dive into:
• Why acorns were once reliable staple crops, not novelty ingredients
• The myth that we can only feed ourselves with annual row crops
• How the loss of commons reshaped our relationship to forests and food
• What Indigenous land management, including fire, meant for food abundance
• The false divide between farming and foraging
• How pigs, oaks, and people once formed integrated food systems
• What it would take to bring acorns and other perennial tree foods back into our diets

More about Elspeth:

Elspeth Hay is the creator and host of the Local Food Report, a weekly feature that has aired on the Cape and Islands NPR station since 2008, and the author of Feed Us with Trees: Nuts and the Future of Food.

Deeply immersed in her own local-food system, she writes and reports for print, radio, and online media with a focus on food and the environment. You can learn more about her work at elspethhay.com.

Agrarian Futures is produced by Alexandre Miller, who also wrote our theme song. This episode was edited by Drew O’Doherty.

We’ve spent a lot of time on this show digging into the dire state of modern farming and ranching, and the challenging economics for those trying to build a regenerative future. Our guest today, Cate Havstad, is no stranger to these challenges as a first-generation farmer and rancher. That experience led directly to an innovative solution that could be an important missing piece in this economic puzzle.

As she explains, only about 65 percent of the cattle she sent out to slaughter was actually used, leaving hides and other materials treated as low-value byproducts rather than essential parts of a living system. That waste isn’t just ecological. It’s economic, and it puts real pressure on ranchers trying to do things the right way.

Cate is changing that. As the founder of Range Revolution, she’s building a new market for regenerative hides, turning them into high-quality leather goods while creating an additional revenue stream for ranchers committed to land stewardship. Her work challenges the idea that sustainability and luxury are incompatible, and shows how value-added products can help make regenerative ranching financially viable.

In this episode, we dive into:
• Why hides have been devalued in the modern meat system
• How waste in the supply chain undermines regenerative ranchers
• What it takes to build a leather supply chain aligned with land health
• Why luxury markets can play a role in regenerative economics
• The hidden costs of conventional leather production
• How whole-animal utilization strengthens rural livelihoods
• What a more honest pricing of materials could unlock for agriculture

More about Cate and Range Revolution:

Cate Havstad-Casad is a first-generation farmer/rancher, designer, systems-thinker and agricultural advocate.

At the age of 23 Cate founded Havstad Hat Company and began her career as a designer and maker. She has crafted hats for Post Malone, Shania Twain, Kacey Musgraves among other notable pop-culture icons.

Cate began farming with her husband in 2014, both first generation farmers. Starting on 5 acres of leased land, Cate and her husband now manage 1400 acres of farmland & rangeland at Casad Family Farms in Madras, Oregon. This work on the ranch and in building markets for regenerative meats informed the launch of Range Revolution in 2021; a category-defining regenerative leather goods company which is building 100% of its products out of traceable American cattle hides coming from verifiably regenerative ranches. Range Revolution addresses the 5 million cattle hides that are thrown into the trash each year, rebuilding systems for whole-carcass utilization, increasing margins for processors and producers, and harnessing brand building to tell stories that reconnect citizens to natural fibers and regional supply chains. Range Revolution offers both a collection of finished goods as well as B2B material development.

Cate believes deeply in building businesses that support regional, decentralized systems for agriculture of the middle to thrive, and that human health and ecosystem health are one in the same.

Agrarian Futures is produced by Alexandre Miller, who also wrote our theme song. This episode was edited by Drew O’Doherty.

Joel Salatin is one of the most influential voices in the modern regenerative farming movement. As the founder of Polyface Farm in Virginia, he’s become known for building a radically different model of agriculture, one rooted in ecological systems, local markets, and a refusal to accept industrial “efficiency” as the end goal.

In this episode, Joel shares what he’s learned from decades of farming and advocacy, why the middle of the food system is where so many good farms get stuck, and what it will take to move regenerative agriculture to the center of our food system.

In this episode, we dive into:
• Why the industrial food system prioritizes scale and uniformity over real stewardship
• What we lose when farming becomes a commodity business instead of a community livelihood
• The biggest barriers that keep good farms from reaching more people
• Why local processing and local markets matter more than most people realize
• How Polyface built an alternative model that actually works economically
• What it would take for regenerative agriculture to become “normal” again
• Why Joel thinks the story we tell about food is just as important as the practices
• Where he sees real hope, and what he thinks we need to stop pretending will fix things

More about Joel:

Joel Salatin co-owns, with his family, Polyface Farm in Swoope, Virginia. Featured in the New York Times bestseller Omnivore’s Dilemma and award-winning documentary Food Inc., the farm services more than 5,000 families, 10 restaurants, and 5 retail outlets with salad bar beef, pigaerator pork, pastured poultry, and forestry products. The farm ships nationwide to your doorstep.

Salatin is the editor of The Stockman Grass Farmer, granddaddy catalyst for the grass farming movement. He writes the “Confessions of a Steward” column for Plain Values magazine, the “Homestead Abundance” column for Homestead Living magazine, columns for Homesteaders of America, and a column a month for the e-magazine Manward. His blog is Musings from the Lunatic Farmer and he co-hosts a podcast titled BEYOND LABELS with co-author Dr. Sina McCullough.

Agrarian Futures is produced by Alexandre Miller, who also wrote our theme song. This episode was edited by Drew O’Doherty.

Fish have long been one of the last wild foods, a source of nourishment that connects us to the powerful ecology of the planet’s waters. But as journalist and author Paul Greenberg chronicles in his award-winning book Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food, our relationship with the sea has dramatically changed over the past century. Once nearly all of the seafood we ate was wild; today, nearly half is farmed and the pressures on both wild and farmed systems are intensifying.

In this conversation, Paul doesn’t simply lament loss nor offer blind optimism. Instead, he helps us see where wild fisheries and aquaculture have faltered, where they remain strong, and how our choices today will shape the future of seafood and the oceans that feed us. Viewed through the lens of regenerative agriculture, his insights show that healthy waters and healthy land are part of the same story, and that ecological regeneration on farms must be paired with thoughtful stewardship of our rivers, estuaries, and oceans.

In this episode, we get into:

• What history teaches us about the human-ocean relationship and how it changed as we tamed the sea
• How modern fishing and seafood production mirror some of the same challenges in industrial agriculture
• Why some wild fisheries can still be models of careful management
• Where aquaculture offers real promise and where it deepens existing problems
• How ecological health, species diversity, and regional systems are essential for both land and sea
• What eating fish in ways that support long-term abundance actually looks like
• Why regenerative principles belong in discussions about oceans as much as soil

More about Paul:

Paul writes at the intersection of the environment and technology, seeking to help his readers find emotional and ecological balance with their planet. He is the author of seven books including the New York Times bestseller Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food. His other books are The Climate Diet, Goodbye Phone, Hello World, The Omega Principle, American Catch, A Third Term and the novel, Leaving Katya.

Paul’s writing on oceans, climate change, health, technology, and the environment appears regularly in The New York Times and many other publications. He’s the recipient of a James Beard Award for Writing and Literature, a Pew Fellowship in Marine Conservation, a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship and many other grants and awards.

A frequent guest on national television and radio including Fresh Air with Terry Gross and the co-creator of the podcast Fish Talk, Paul also works in film, television and documentary. His PBS Frontline documentary The Fish on My Plate was among the most viewed Frontline films of the 2017 season and his TED Talk has reached over 1.5 million viewers to date. He has lectured widely at institutions around the world ranging from Harvard to Google to the United States Senate. A graduate in Russian Studies from Brown University, Paul speaks Russian and French. He currently teaches within New York University’s Animals Studies program and lives at Ground Zero in Manhattan where he maintains a family and a terrace garden and produces, to his knowledge, the only wine grown south of 14th Street.

Agrarian Futures is produced by Alexandre Miller, who also wrote our theme song. This episode was edited by Drew O’Doherty.

If you want to understand what it takes to build a healthier local food system and bring rural communities back to life, you talk to someone who’s actually done it. Bob Quinn has spent decades farming in Montana, rebuilding soil, creating local markets, and pushing back against the idea that small towns and small farms are destined to disappear.

Through his farm and the Quinn Institute, Bob is exploring what a healthier rural economy - and a healthier food system - could look like. That includes everything from improving soil health and growing better food to rethinking how we organize our communities, our businesses, and even our underlying values.

In this episode, we get into:
• Why rebuilding rural America starts with rebuilding soil
• How regenerative practices can revive both land and local economies
• What we’ve lost as rural communities hollow out
• The mission behind the Quinn Institute and why Bob created it
• Why scale isn’t the only measure of agricultural success
• How local markets, local relationships, and local identity shape rural futures
• The deeper cultural values we need to restore if regeneration is going to last

More about Bob and the Quinn Institute:

Bob Quinn's roots run deep into the rich soil of Big Sandy, Montana, where he returned after earning a PhD in plant biochemistry from UC Davis to apply his scientific knowledge to the family farm. From his return in 1978, Bob embarked on a transformative journey that led him to convert his entire farm of over 3000 acres to a regenerative organic system in just three years, from 1986 to 1988. At the same time he pioneered Kamut International, a thriving business that turned an ancient grain into a global superfood synonymous with health and community.

Agrarian Futures is produced by Alexandre Miller, who also wrote our theme song. This episode was edited by Drew O’Doherty.

If regenerative agriculture is about rebuilding the foundations of our food system, then soil is where that story starts.

Geologist and author David Montgomery has spent decades tracing how the health of our soil shapes everything else: the nutrition in our food, the resilience of our farms, and the long-term fate of entire civilizations. What he shows is both sobering and energizing. We have degraded our soils at an astonishing pace, yet we now understand enough about how they actually work to turn the tide.

In this conversation, David helps us zoom out. He connects the collapse of ancient societies to the vulnerabilities we see in modern industrial agriculture, and he lays out what farmers around the world are doing to rebuild soil faster than it erodes. If regeneration is the goal, soil biology is the map.

In this episode, we get into:
• How soil degradation has shaped the rise and fall of societies
• The real consequences of erosion, tillage, and synthetic nitrogen
• Why soil microbes are central to nutrient density and farm resilience
• What regenerative farmers are proving about soil recovery timelines
• Three core principles that can rebuild fertility at scale
• Why technology must complement, not replace, ecological understanding
• The policies and incentives needed to make soil health the baseline, not the exception

More about David:

David R. Montgomery is a MacArthur Fellow and professor of geomorphology at the University of Washington. He studies landscape evolution and the effects of geological processes on ecological systems and human societies. An author of award-winning popular-science books, he has been featured in documentary films, network and cable news, and on a wide variety of TV and radio programs. His books have been translated into ten languages.  He lives in Seattle with his wife, and co-author, Anne Biklé.  Their latest book What Your Food Ate: How to Heal Our Land and Reclaim Our Health was published summer 2022.  Connect with them at www.dig2grow.com.

Agrarian Futures is produced by Alexandre Miller, who also wrote our theme song. This episode was edited by Drew O’Doherty.

Across the south, generations of Black farmers and business owners have faced losing not just their land, but their livelihoods - pushed out by discriminatory lending, land theft, and the consolidation of power. Yet from that struggle has grown something powerful: a movement rooted in cooperation, where farmers pool their resources, share their knowledge, and build wealth together instead of competing for survival.

That spirit of collective power is what drives the Federation of Southern Cooperatives, where Terence Courtney works to support Black-owned farms and rural businesses through education, advocacy, and cooperative enterprise. The Federation’s model flips the extractive script of traditional capitalism, proving that shared ownership and community investment are sound economic strategies.

In this episode, we dive into:

• The long history of Black cooperative movements in the South.
• How cooperative models help farmers build wealth and autonomy in the face of systemic discrimination.
• Why collective economics is key to sustaining rural communities.
• The Federation’s approach to balancing profitability with community values.
• How policy and history continue to shape access to land and opportunity.
• What true self-determination looks like in agriculture.

More about Terence and the Federation of Southern Cooperatives:

Terence Courtney began organizing with the Service Employees International Union to improve economic conditions for working people. He led union campaigns and later became the union’s statewide representative in Georgia. He’s co-founded and led coalitions such as Atlanta Jobs with Justice and a community group focused on the public sector called the Atlanta Public Sector Alliance.

Expanding from a city to a regional focus, Terence organized US born and foreign born (immigrants) of African descent to educate and raise consciousness about immigrant rights and mass incarceration from a Black Diasporic perspective for the Black Alliance for Just Immigration. He co-developed the Organization for Human Rights and Democracy and served as the Director of Organizing overseeing campaigns against school privatization, as well as its spin off project: Cooperative Atlanta. Currently Terence serves as the Director of Cooperative Development & Strategic Initiatives for theFFederation of Southern Cooperatives

Agrarian Futures is produced by Alexandre Miller, who also wrote our theme song. This episode was edited by Drew O’Doherty.

What happens when you leave behind a career in food journalism to take over a family farm in Iowa? For Beth Hoffman, it meant putting theory into practice - and learning firsthand just how difficult it is to make small and mid-sized farming work in today’s economy.

In her book Bet the Farm and in her daily life raising grass-finished cattle and organic crops, Beth confronts the financial and cultural realities most farmers face: land that’s too expensive for beginners, markets that reward consolidation over stewardship, and infrastructure built for scale instead of community. Yet her story is also one of possibility -o f finding ways to align values with viability and imagining what a more just and sustainable food system could look like.

In this episode, we dive into:

• Beth’s journey from food journalist to first-generation farmer in Iowa
• The hidden costs of farming and why most operations run on razor-thin margins
• The double bind of land access, generational transfer, and skyrocketing prices
• Why infrastructure like slaughterhouses and markets is as important as the land itself
• The trade-offs between environmental ideals and financial realities on the ground
• How gender and cultural narratives shape who is seen as a “real farmer”
• What a truly sustainable and just farming system would require

More about Beth:

Beth Hoffman began her food writing career focused on culture, producing a food series on KUER in Salt Lake City and receiving a grant to document the stories of immigrant women as they cooked in their homes (which became a radio series that aired on Weekend America). Now, twenty-five years into writing and producing work on food and agriculture, Beth has freelanced for radio and print publications (NPR, The World, The Guardian, Forbes and many more) and was an Associate Professor at the University of San Francisco in Media Studies. But perhaps most importantly, she and her husband John moved from the big city to rural Iowa to take over his family's 530-acre farm. She wrote a book called Bet the Farm: The Dollars and Sense of Growing Food in America, using their experiences to illustrate how the American food system works. The couple raises grass-fed and finished beef, pastured goats and some vegetables and offer cooking and writing classes on the farm.

Agrarian Futures is produced by Alexandre Miller, who also wrote our theme song. This episode was edited by Drew O’Doherty.

Before industrial dredging, clear-cutting, and destructive fishing practices, our rivers and oceans were full of wood. Fallen trees, driftwood, and branches created underwater forests where fish and countless other creatures could thrive. That wood provided shelter, food, and the foundation for entire aquatic ecosystems. Today, much of it is gone, and so are the fish.

Marine restoration expert Jon Dickson noticed this loss while working along Europe’s coasts and asked a deceptively simple question: if we remove the wood, do we also remove the fish? His answer is the “tree reef,” an artificial reef made from pear trees and other natural materials that replaces destroyed habitat. It is a low-tech, high-impact idea with the potential to revive aquatic life far beyond local waters, and it is deeply connected to the broader regenerative agriculture movement on land and at sea.

In this episode, we dive into:

• The forgotten role of wood in rivers, estuaries, and oceans and why it matters for fish
• How dredging and “cleaning” waterways destroyed essential aquatic habitats
• Why restoring fish populations is critical for global ecological balance, including land-based food systems
• The limitations of many well-meaning marine restoration efforts and how tree reefs succeed where others fail
• The design, construction, and surprising results of tree reefs
• How low-cost, replicable solutions could transform restoration at scale
• Why thinking like an ecosystem is the key to regeneration everywhere

If you have ever wondered how oceans and rivers fit into the future of regenerative food systems, Jon’s work might change the way you see both land and sea.

More about Jon and Marine Trees:

Jon grew up in British Columbia, Canada, where after university, he worked as a forest fire fighter. In the off season, he worked as a polar guide and boat driver in Antarctica, Greenland, and Northern Canada. These seasonal jobs and education were interspersed by backpacking trips; his favourite countries (so far) are Iceland, Mongolia, Uganda, Slovenia, and with a vote for the home team, Canada. Since moving to the Netherlands to work on a PhD, he noticed a distinct lack of driftwood in Europe and decided to see if fish were missing habitat due to lack of wood - and so invented tree-reefs, an artificial reef made of trees to replace destroyed habitat.

Agrarian Futures is produced by Alexandre Miller, who also wrote our theme song. This episode was edited by Drew O’Doherty.