Down to Earth: The Planet to Plate Podcast

By Quivira Coalition and Radio Cafe

Natural Sciences Education

What's Down to Earth: The Planet to Plate Podcast about?

Down to Earth is a podcast about regenerative agriculture, and it’s for everyone who eats. We invite you to meet the people shaping a healthier food system—farmers, ranchers, scientists, land managers, writers, and many others. Designing a future that draws on both tradition and innovation, they’re on a mission to change the paradigm so that the food we eat is healthy and long-term sustainable—for families and growers, for wildlife and water, for climate and planet. downtoearthradio.com

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Technology-assisted regener...

03.14.2023

Industrial agriculture imposes a simplified production model onto complex ecosystems––with dire consequences. In the new book, The Great Regeneration: Ecological Agriculture, Open-Source Technology, and a Radical Vision of Hope, co-authors Dorn Cox and Courtney White explore the place where complex ...

Down to Earth: The Planet to Plate Podcast episodes:

03.14.2023 Technology-assisted regeneration Industrial agriculture imposes a simplified production model onto complex ecosystems––with dire consequences. In the new book, The Great Regeneration: Ecological Agriculture, Open-Source Technology, and a Radical Vision of Hope, co-authors Dorn Cox and Courtney White explore the place where complex ...
02.28.2023 Wolves in the West: Finding common ground After being driven almost to extinction, wolves are back in some of their natural habitat. A new podcast, Working Wild University, explores how ranchers, conservationists, and others are coming together to find paths toward peaceful co-habitation. We talk to podcast ...
02.13.2023 De-commodifying land: Challenging your inner capitalist The price of land keeps going up across the country as wealthy investors buy farmland and people move out of cities. This puts untenable pressure on farmers and land stewards who are producing healthy food and maintaining biodiversity, land health, ...
01.30.2023 Healing Grounds: The enduring cultures of regenerative agriculture Liz Carlisle's new book, Healing Grounds: Climate, Justice, and the Deep Roots of Regenerative Farming, is a fascinating exploration of food, agriculture, and cultural traditions of the North American, Mesoamerican, African, and Asian diasporas that have survived against all odds ...
01.17.2023 Innovative approaches to regeneration on a California ranch TomKat Ranch manager Mark Biaggi talks about dealing with winter floods, summer droughts, and degraded landscapes––and the process of continual experimentation that leads to dramatic regeneration of damaged land.
12.15.2022 Giant bison, mammoths, and eagles 66 million years ago an asteroid struck earth, causing the fifth mass extinction of species on earth. With the dinosaurs gone, new species proliferated all over the planet. Now we're in the sixth extinction––this time caused by people. But when ...
11.30.2022 Sustainable development, climate mitigation, and biochar Brando Crespi has devoted decades to sustainable development as co-founder and Executive Chair at Pro Natura International and Global Biochar. His holistic approach to sustainable development could be called regenerative––instead of telling poor and exploited people what they should do, ...
11.15.2022 Bringing dead land back to life John D. Liu started his career as a journalist and cameraman, covering politics, economics, and culture. In 1995, he began documenting the Loess Plateau in China, a massive landscape that had been destroyed by poor agriculture practices over the course ...
11.01.2022 Desert wisdom: sustaining Southwest agriculture using old ways––and new Gary Paul Nabhan, known by many as the "father of the local food movement," is a prolific author, scientist, and activist for a healthy and truly regenerative food system that respects the land and its plants and animals; the people ...
10.18.2022 A vibrant pecan oasis in the desert Coley Burgess grew up on a conventional farm, then studied mathematics and electrical engineering...and he brought his scientific rigor and curiosity to a 20-acre pecan farm that he and his family bought in southern New Mexico. The ground was bare ...
10.01.2022 The food-housing nexus Professor Phillip Warsaw's work is all about the interconnectedness of the systems that keep our lives going––food, housing, transportation, health care. In his research in Milwaukee he discovered that in Black and Latino neighborhoods housing was significantly more expensive if ...
09.20.2022 Leveling the growing field If you're a small or mid-size farmer, it's nearly impossible to compete against giant food conglomerates. But fairer policy could help smaller farms to prosper, provide healthy food and thriving communities, and keep more profits for food producers––rather than executives ...
09.06.2022 Big Team Farms––a new economic model? Both big ag and small family farms have their problems...but what's the alternative? We talk with agricultural journalist Sarah Mock about the some possible models.
08.23.2022 The USDA goes after a small sheep farm Linda and Larry Faillace spent years at the University of Nottingham in England, where Linda became an expert in Mad Cow Disease (BSE). Upon return to the U.S., they imported sheep from Europe, with USDA approval, and began a cheese ...
08.07.2022 Making your tax dollars work after fires and floods Congresswoman Teresa Leger Fernandez (D-NM-3), a native of Las Vegas, NM, deeply understands the challenges and strengths of rural people in northern New Mexico. She's been working to bring money to those whose property and livelihoods have been damaged by ...
07.26.2022 Place, Power, And Purpose Bees date back over 10,000 years on the American continent and are vital to the health of almost every bite of food we eat, but today they face threats from industrialization and habitat fragmentation. Melanie Kirby is a decades-long beekeeper, ...
07.12.2022 What's good for the farm is good for the planet During Carol Ekarius's early years in Colorado, the Buffalo Creek Fire burned just under 12,000 acres — and at the time was considered a huge, catastrophic fire. Now fires in the west are consuming hundreds of thousands of acres, and ...
06.28.2022 What is Your Foodprint? We all know the term carbon "footprint." Well, Foodprint takes this idea and broadens it to apply to our food system; they explore how the foods we eat affect not only carbon emissions, but a whole range of things, like ...
06.07.2022 Kiss the Ground: A project born of devotion to the earth Ryland Engelhart came from a family of vegans and vegetarians and knew early on that he wanted to devote his life to the health of the planet. Once he began to see that there is no food –– no life ...
05.24.2022 Food, forests, and farms Most of the American Midwest was once a vast savanna, an open grassland with abundant trees and wildlife. As the land was converted to agriculture many of the trees were lost, and with them went countless benefits to the landscape, ...
05.10.2022 Western Wildfires In New Mexico and across the West wildfires are burning through wildlands, farms, ranches, and communities. Lesli Allison, executive director of the Western Landowners Alliance, has many years of experience in prescribed burn management—and like many New Mexcians she's directly ...
04.25.2022 The path to positive food policy Aria McLauchlan and Harley Cross, co-founders of Land Core, have been working for years on food and farming policy that promotes regenerative practices. In this podcast we talk about the Farm Bill––a trillion dollar piece of legislation which most people ...
04.12.2022 Making the regenerative transition Jessica Chiartas is a PhD soil bio-geochemist who's working to catalyze the transition from "conventional" to regenerative agriculture. She’s a postdoctoral researcher at the Innovation Institute for Food and Health at UC Davis and fellow with Food Shot Global, and ...
03.29.2022 Restoring landscapes...with goats Amanita Thorp Berto is owner of Horned Locust Remediation, and she uses a flock of goats and sheep to do landscaping projects. In gardens, parks, photovoltaic installations, and many other places, goats take the place of toxic herbicides and pesticides ...
03.15.2022 Rebuilding resilience on native land In the late 1990s, members of Santa Ana Pueblo embarked on a long-term project to restore their land, which had been damaged over the last century by multiple forces, including overgrazing, hunting, logging, and habitat fragmentation. Glenn Tenorio is former ...
02.22.2022 The Sequestration Solution: Soil Karl Thidemann is co-founder of Soil4Climate, a non-profit that advocates for regenerative agriculture, with a focus on grazing and the restoration of grasslands. In this podcast he makes the case, supported by extensive scientific research, that the restoration of grasslands ...
02.08.2022 Restore the water cycle, revive the planet Zach Weiss has seen land so degraded that even weeds couldn't grow...and helped transform it into healthy, living landscapes by changing the flow of water and letting nature do most of the work. Protégé of Austrian farmer Sepp Holzer, he ...
01.25.2022 This earth to which we belong The title of Pamela Tanner Boll's new film, To Which We Belong, comes from a quotation by the author Aldo Leopold, early 20th conservationist and environmentalist whose work has inspired generations of ecologists, agrarians, and nature lovers. Leopold wrote, "We ...
01.11.2022 Science meets compost Eva Stricker is director of the Carbon Ranch Initiative for the Quivira coalition and a Research Assistant Professor at the University of New Mexico Department of Biology. One of her projects is the scientific study of compost––with the goals of ...
12.15.2021 Cultivating the People-Planet-Profit model on an urban farm Matt Draper and Minor Morgan started North Valley Organics on two plots of land in Albuquerque, and have made a commitment to the People-Planet-Profit model for their business. Working with diversity and resilience as core principles, they want farm work ...
11.30.2021 Planetary regeneration on a community scale About a decade ago Tijinder and Juliana Ciano took over Reunity Resources' land from a centenarian veteran, and they've continued to honor his mission of feeding the community. Their work includes vegetable farming and a farm stand and food truck, ...
11.16.2021 Growing pecans in the desert? In today's podcast we look at the synergistic collaboration between a soil scientist and a pecan farmer. Southern New Mexico is not an ideal landscape for pecans, which grow best in warm, wet climates. But the industry is here, and ...
11.02.2021 Got goat? Renard Turner and his wife Chinette founded the Vanguard Ranch Natural Gourmet in Gordonsville, Virginia, 25 years ago, and through creative entrepreneurship and wise land management and animal husbandry practices have built a value-added business model that works on a ...
10.19.2021 Tribal food renaissance Latashia Redhouse is director of the American Indian Foods program at the Intertribal Agriculture Council, where she supports food producers across the country to get their food to consumers in the US and beyond—while encouraging traditional and regenerative agriculture practices.
10.04.2021 From despair to care William deBuys is a prolific author of books documenting people's relationship to the earth—which is too often destructive. In his new book, The Trail to Kanjiroba: Rediscovering Earth in an Age of Loss, he writes of an expedition to Nepal ...
09.21.2021 Stepping back from the abyss James Rebanks is the author of the newly-released book Pastoral Song: A Farmer’s Journey, which recently won the 2021 Wainwright prize for UK Nature writing, and best-seller The Shepherd's Life: Modern Dispatches from an Ancient Landscape. His books explore the ...
09.07.2021 Restoring the global water cycle Sandra Postel has devoted her life to studying the world's freshwater systems, and they're not looking so great right now. Through a combination of over-allocation, over-engineering, over-use, and climate change, we'll be in trouble if we don't address the problem ...
08.24.2021 How—and why—to be good to your microbes Many of us were taught that microbes—and bacteria in particular—were dangerous pathogens, and the safest thing human beings could do was create a sterile, bacteria-free environment. But in fact microbes are absolutely essential to human health, the health of the ...
08.10.2021 Lush and abundant biodiversity—in a desert city Reese Baker has been designing permaculture landscapes for many years, and with his family has turned his home on a quarter-acre lot in Santa Fe, NM into a teeming oasis of life, complete with wetlands, a pond, trees, and food ...
07.28.2021 The deep history of apples Gordon Tooley and his wife Margaret Yancey started Tooley's Trees in Truchas, New Mexico, in the early 1990s. They grow and sell rare and heirloom trees that are well adapted to the semi-arid climate of the region. But just as ...
07.13.2021 Pests, pathogens, and porcupines Steve Wood is an apple grower and cider maker in Lebanon, New Hampshire, and he's been working on the family orchard since he was a child. Dubbed the Godfather of the hard cider industry in the US, he's one of ...
06.30.2021 Rockweed: underwater forest or industrial commodity? Dr. Robin Hadlock Seeley grew up in Maine and has dedicated her life as a scientist to the preservation of coastal ecosystems—in particular a form of seaweed called rockweed. Severine von Tscharner Fleming is a farmer and activist whose farm ...
06.16.2021 Designing systems that improve as they age Jesse Smith was studying design when he was asked, how can you make something that gets better than age? Intrigued by the question of how to design stuff that won't end up being thrown in the trash, he found his ...
06.01.2021 Into the Pasture: Grassfed Goes Mainstream Carrie Balkcom grew up on a cattle ranch in Florida. In 2003 she returned to her roots when she became the executive director of the American Grassfed Association at its founding--and she's been there ever since. AGA certifies pasture-raised livestock--and ...
05.18.2021 Busting myths about beef Nicolette Hahn Niman never thought that she would have anything positive to say about animal agriculture. An environmental lawyer and a committed vegetarian who had seen the horrors of industrial livestock production up close, her life changed when she married ...
05.05.2021 Transforming the American Prairie, one strip at a time Omar de Kok-Mercado Scientist with background in Agro-ecology, Soil Microbiology and Biochemistry, and he’s at Iowa State University working on a project that integrates prairie strips into row-crop agriculture. By working with farmers to plant strips of land—"prairie strips—with native ...
04.20.2021 Welcome to Cowgirl Camp! Beth Robinette is a fourth generation rancher in Eastern Washington State, where she and her family run a grassfed beef operation, the Lazy R Ranch, based on holistic management principles. She’s co-founder of LINC Foods (Local Inland Northwest Cooperative), a ...
04.06.2021 Lipan Apache: Bringing back the buffalo in Texas Lucille Contreras discovered her Lipan Apache roots as a young adult. After working in IT for many years, she founded the Texas Tribal Buffalo Project as a way of bringing together the Lipan diaspora, cultivating healthy land and food, rescuing ...
03.16.2021 Regenerative production of...seaweed Kristina Long is founder and CEO of Sea Forest, a kelp farming company in British Columbia, Canada. We talk about everything kelp--sustainable farming and harvesting, uses of kelp, the business model, and the community.
03.02.2021 Biosphere 2: farming while sealed off from the world Mark Nelson is an environmental engineer, author, and farmer at Synergia Ranch, in Santa Fe, NM. He's co-author of the book, Life Under Glass : Crucial lessons in planetary stewardship from Biosphere 2, and he's in a new documentary about ...

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