One Bite is Everything

What happens when someone else decides what goes on your plate every day, for years, and you have almost no power to change it?

Ear Hustle cohosts and cocreators Nigel Poor and Earlonne Woods join Dana DiPrima as guest cohosts for a conversation with Impact Justice’s Aishatu Yusuf and Alex Busansky about food in prison, the messages it sends about human worth, and the consequences that follow people home.

Impact Justice’s James Beard Media Award-winning book, Eating Behind Bars: Ending the Hidden Punishment of Food in Prison, brings a largely hidden food system into view. Together, we explore what their research revealed and how fresh produce, better cooking, and partnerships with farmers can improve life inside.

Nigel also shares her experience following a prison diet for Ear Hustle’s thirty-day challenge, while Earlonne brings his firsthand knowledge of eating and working within the prison food system.

We discuss:

• How food becomes an additional form of punishment.

• What prison meals mean for health, dignity, and life after release.

• What Ear Hustle’s thirty-day challenge revealed about choice and eating.

• How Harvest of the Month, Chefs in Prisons, and growing food inside are creating change.

Explore our guests’ work:

• Ear Hustle: https://www.earhustlesq.com

• Impact Justice and Eating Behind Bars: https://impactjustice.org

Share this episode with someone who hasn’t thought about food in prison. And if you value One Bite is Everything, please leave a five-star rating and a review on Apple Podcasts to help more people find the show.

Hosted by Dana DiPrima. Co-produced by Sonia Dhillon. Sound editing and original music by Russell Chapa.

Eat like it matters. Because it does.

I think this is at the heart of the regenerative movement: a going back. That's what I did to bring you this episode. I went back into some of the conversations I've had here and found three guests who said the same thing in completely different ways.

Rick Clark is a fifth-generation farmer in Indiana. Adam Alexander is a seed collector in Wales, known as the Seed Detective. Chef Sean Sherman is an Oglala Lakota chef in Minneapolis. All three believe that the future of food depends on remembering what we've lost: in the soil, in the seed, and in our culture.

In this episode:

• Rick tells the story of the spring rain that washed his perfectly worked field onto the road, and why the thing his father taught him wasn't how to farm, but how to think.
• Adam explains why seeds have memory, how farmers in Ethiopia have gone 800 years without famine, and why saving a single tomato seed makes it yours.
• Sean describes growing up on Pine Ridge without Lakota food, the beach in Mexico where everything changed, and how Owamni went from buying out of the back of a hatchback to helping build an Indigenous food economy.

Farmer Spotlight: Caleb

This episode launches the For Farmers weekly farmer spotlight, and those stories will be featured here on the podcast too. Our first spotlight is Caleb, a 14-year-old raising heritage Cayuga ducks in West Virginia. He is the youngest person ever to apply for a For Farmers grant. The For Farmers community fully funded his duck run in less than 12 hours. Now you can help with what comes next by shopping his wish list: [LINK]

Find our guests

• Rick Clark: farmgreen.land
• Adam Alexander, the Seed Detective: The Accidental Seed Heroes
• Chef Sean Sherman: Owamni, NATIFS (natifs.org), and the Indigenous Food Lab. His newest cookbook is Turtle Island.

Mentioned in this episode

• Caleb’s wish list
• The Tuesday 5:18 am letter

One Bite Is Everything is part of Heritage Radio Network. Sound editing and original music by Russell Chapa.

What does a farmer mean to a community? Ask the people who nominate them, and you'll hear about far more than food. You'll hear about the neighbor who lends a transplanter, the farmer who rebuilds after losing everything, the one who teaches kids where food comes from, and the one who holds a whole farmers market together.

This episode began with a question. After I spoke at a conference in Massachusetts with Farming Falmouth, someone in the audience asked how more people could hear the stories inside For Farmers Movement nominations. So this week, I'm reading twelve nominations from 2026 out loud, in the words of the people who wrote them: customers, chefs, fellow farmers, friends, and family.

Together, they paint a picture of what farmers mean across the country. Land finally owned after years without it. Sheep herded on ancestral ground in the Navajo Nation. An orchard replanted after a fire. A farm rebuilt after development took the original. A youth program graduate who came back to run the farm. And farmers who, in one nominator's words, "collaborate instead of compete."

I also share why the For Farmers Movement exists. Many of the farmers who apply can't get loans or other grants. They don't have the collateral, they can't front the money for reimbursement-based programs, or they don't meet years-in-business requirements. My grants have none of those hoops. A nomination is often the first step that connects a farmer to funding, resources, and a network of people who want them to succeed. And it tells a farmer something every farmer deserves to hear: you matter to us.

Farms featured in this episode

• Grounded Roots Farms, Rocky Mount, NC
• Hoghan Yahzi Land Restoration Project, Ganado, AZ
• The Blooming Hands Collective, Niwot, CO
• Twin Peaks Orchards, Newcastle, CA
• Mack's Farm, Davie, FL
• Cherry Rock Farm, Brandon, SD
• River View Land & Livestock, Crown City, OH
• Garden-Raised Bounty (GRuB), Olympia, WA
• CremAree Goat Farm and Dairy, Pelham, NC
• Minerva's Meadow, State Center, IA
• Cape Cod Flower Truck, North Falmouth, MA
• Happy Bird Poultry Farm, Isle La Motte, VT

What you can do in the next five minutes

• Tell a farmer what they mean to you. Nominate them
• Shop a farmer wish list
• If you know a nominated farmer, remind them that grant applications are due October 12, National Farmers Day
• Subscribe to my Tuesday letter, in your inbox every Tuesday at 5:18 AM

OBIE Facts

• Top 3% of podcasts globally
• #22 on millionpodcasts.com's top 100 food podcasts
• #87 on their top 100 agriculture podcasts
• More engagement than 88% of podcasts on Spotify
• Five-star rating average
• Proud part of Heritage Radio Network

Connect

Instagram: @xoxofarmgirl

Web: forfarmersmovement.com

Sound design and original music by Russell Chapa.

The Loneliness Between Us

From your plate to the rest of the world, One Bite Is Everything connects the food you eat to the people, policies, and stories behind it.

This episode started with a letter exchange between Maria Rodale and Wendell Berry, and one line stuck out: "I think lonely people join movements."

Through the For Farmers Movement, we have seen and heard about loneliness and isolation. In fact, it's at the heart of why the Movement started. This is an episode about two kinds of loneliness, and about what happens when the people growing our food and the people eating it actually find each other.

Resources

Listen to Maria Rodale on the pod.

Maria Rodale on Substack

Your Support for the Show Matters

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One Bite is Everything

From your plate to the rest of the world, One Bite is Everything explores the connections between food, health, community, the environment, and the economy. Through conversations with farmers, chefs, researchers, advocates, and food system leaders, host Dana DiPrima examines how food touches every aspect of our lives and why understanding our food system has never mattered more.

OBIE Facts

Top 3% of all podcasts globally

Top 100 food podcasts (22)

Top 100 agriculture podcasts (87)

More engagement than more than 88% of all podcasts on Spotify

Five-star rating average

Part of Heritage Radio Network, home of the top voices in food

Connect

Follow Dana at @xoxofarmgirl and learn more about the For Farmers Movement at forfarmersmovement.com.

Co-production for interview episodes by Sonia Dhillon. Sound design and original music always by Russell Chapa.

What happens when a farmer stops doing things the way they've always been done and starts asking whether there's a better way?

Scott Park began farming in California in 1974 with a degree in political theory, almost no agricultural training, and plenty to learn. More than five decades later, he's built a large-scale farming operation by questioning conventional wisdom, experimenting, paying attention, and learning to work with nature rather than against it.

His new book, Growing Rogue: The Adventures of Changing How I Farm, draws on 53 years of meticulous daily records and a lifetime of trial, error, observation, and discovery.

In this conversation, Scott and Dana explore the tension between maximizing yields and maximizing profits, why healthy soil can be a farmer's greatest ally, and what happens when agricultural advice overlooks the value of firsthand experience. They discuss cover crops, water retention, technology, the economics of changing farming practices, and the importance of thinking beyond a single growing season.

Scott also makes a compelling case for why there is no universal recipe for farming well. What works on his California farm may not work somewhere else, but the underlying principles of observation, experimentation, adaptability, and long-term thinking can travel.

This is a conversation about farming, but it's also about questioning assumptions, embracing imperfect progress, and having the courage to try something different.

Scott's book: Growing Rogue: The Adventures of Changing How I Farm, published by Chelsea Green on September 29.

Get involved: For Farmers Movement connects farmers and eaters through stories, grants, wish lists, and simple ways to support the people who grow our food. Visit forfarmersmovement.com .

Subscribe to Bite Sized for Dana's weekly writing about food, farming, and the ways they connect to everything else.

If you enjoyed this episode, give One Bite Is Everything five stars, leave a review, and share it with someone who might appreciate Scott's perspective.

And, as always, eat like it matters. Because it does.

For years, small livestock farmers and ranchers have been saying the same thing: access to processing is one of the biggest obstacles to getting locally raised meat to customers.

In this episode of One Bite is Everything, Dana DiPrima revisits two earlier conversations that show just how long this problem has persisted.

In 2022, Carrie Edsall of Black Willow Pond Farm described what happened when a processing appointment she had booked more than a year in advance disappeared while finished pigs were literally sitting on the trailer. Her story reveals how few alternatives many farmers have, why the right kind of inspection matters, and how quickly extra driving, lost time and unavailable appointments become real costs for a small farm.

In a later conversation, local-food advocate Liz Reitzig explained the regulatory bottleneck behind some of those problems, including the distinction between USDA-inspected and custom-exempt processing and the proposed changes contained in the PRIME Act.

Now, in September 2026, Washington is finally taking up many of the same issues.

A September 4 executive order directs USDA to examine barriers to interstate meat sales, expand support for small and regional processors, increase participation in existing interstate inspection programs, address competition in livestock markets, and identify federal barriers affecting state-inspected and custom-exempt meat.

But the executive order is not a finished solution.

Some changes can be made administratively. Others may require changes to federal law. The PRIME Act remains before Congress. USDA has been given deadlines to study important barriers and make recommendations. And none of it matters ultimately unless policy changes translate into something tangible for farmers: more viable processors, more appropriate processing capacity, workable market access, and appointments when animals are ready.

Farmers and ranchers have spent years pushing this issue into public view. Washington is finally paying attention.

The deal isn’t done yet.

In this episode

Carrie Edsall of Black Willow Pond Farm on what happens when a processing appointment disappears, the hidden costs farmers absorb when processing is hours away, and why access to custom processing doesn’t necessarily allow a farmer to sell meat through the markets their business depends on.

Liz Reitzig explains the processing “choke point,” the difference between USDA-inspected and custom-exempt processing, and what the PRIME Act seeks to change.

Dana brings those earlier conversations into the current beef-processing debate, explains what the September 4 executive order does and does not do, and looks at the decisions still ahead for USDA, Congress, farmers and ranchers.

Resources

September 4, 2026 Executive Order: Promoting Fair Competition in Livestock Markets and Expanding Market Access for American Meat Producers

The PRIME Act, H.R. 4700

USDA Cooperative Interstate Shipment Program

USDA Strengthening Processing for U.S. Ranchers (SPUR) Program

Original One Bite is Everything conversations with Carrie Edsall and Liz Reitzig

One Bite is Everything

From your plate to the rest of the world, One Bite is Everything explores the connections between food, health, community, the environment, and the economy. Through conversations with farmers, chefs, researchers, advocates, and food system leaders, host Dana DiPrima examines how food touches every aspect of our lives and why understanding our food system has never mattered more.

OBIE Facts

Top 3% of all podcasts globally

Top 100 food podcasts (22)

Top 100 agriculture podcasts (87)

More engagement than more than 88% of all podcasts on Spotify

Five-star rating average

Part of Heritage Radio Network, home of the best voices in food

Connect

Get the story behind the story in Dana's Tuesday letter, delivered at 5:18 AM every Tuesday: subscribe here

Know a small farmer doing great work? Nominate them here.

Every episode lives at forfarmersmovement.com/one-bite-is-everything

Follow Dana at @xoxofarmgirl

Co-production by Sonia Dhillon. Sound design and original music by Russell Chapa.

Jack Algiere arrived at Stone Barns Center in 2003 as its very first employee, hired to build a greenhouse on a former Rockefeller cattle operation thirty miles north of Manhattan. More than two decades later, that greenhouse has never seen a chemical, the farm he built with chef Dan Barber and Blue Hill at Stone Barns has become one of the most influential in the country, and Jack has written his first book, Seeding Hope: What Plants Teach Us About Being Human, out now from Chelsea Green.

In this conversation, Jack and I talk about the difference between repairing land and stewarding it, and why he walked onto that property thinking, don't mess this up. He tells the story behind the fence carrot, the tiny Mokum carrot Dan Barber asked him to pick smaller and smaller until it earned a place on the Blue Hill menu that it has held for 23 years. We dig into why flavor is the front door to changing the food system, why training brilliant young farmers isn't enough when there's no runway waiting for them, and why he believes change happens community by community, because local is a metric. And we talk about grounded hope, Jack's term for the understanding that this work is worth fighting for even if you know you won't solve the whole problem.

In this episode

• How a plant scientist from a small farm on the Rhode Island coast ended up stewarding a Rockefeller landscape
• What Stone Barns looks like today: 10 acres of organic vegetables, a half-acre soil greenhouse running year-round since 2003, orchards, grains, and a conservation plan across 1,500 acres of preserve
• The fence carrot story, and what it says about the conversation between field and kitchen
• Why annual production alone isn't sustainable, and how integrated systems with livestock and perennials restore land
• The Leaf program, bringing plants, compost, and vegetable shares to community gardens in the Bronx
• The arc of change: reduce waste, substitute, change systems, build networks, then networks of networks
• Why everyone, from journalists to gardeners to podcast listeners, has a role in fixing the food system

Links from this episode

Get the book: Seeding Hope: What Plants Teach Us About Being Human by Jack Algiere (Chelsea Green)

Learn more about Jack's work: stonebarnscenter.org

One Bite is Everything

From your plate to the rest of the world, One Bite is Everything explores the connections between food, health, community, the environment, and the economy. Through conversations with farmers, chefs, researchers, advocates, and food system leaders, host Dana DiPrima examines how food touches every aspect of our lives and why understanding our food system has never mattered more.

OBIE Facts

Top 3% of all podcasts globally

Top 100 food podcasts (22)

Top 100 agriculture podcasts (87)

More engagement than more than 88% of all podcasts on Spotify

Five-star rating average

Part of Heritage Radio Network, home of the best voices in food

Connect

Get the story behind the story in Dana's Tuesday letter, delivered at 5:18 AM every Tuesday: subscribe here

Know a small farmer doing great work? Nominate them here.

Every episode lives at forfarmersmovement.com/one-bite-is-everything

Follow Dana at @xoxofarmgirl

Co-production by Sonia Dhillon. Sound design and original music by Russell Chapa.

Farmer Meg Despres of Biscuitwood Farm in Esperance, New York had a For Farmers Wish List that nobody had ever shopped. Not one item. So she left a comment on our Instagram asking a simple question: what can I do to make this list work for me?

Here's what happened next. A few DMs, one small fix, a Tuesday morning letter, and a farm transformed almost overnight.

Meg farms 50 acres in Schoharie County with a culinary focus: chef-quality vegetables, pastured eggs, black currant jam, and pierogi made from her own potatoes, a nod to her Polish roots. Her farm stand runs on the honor system with a free food pantry at its heart. She and her husband put everything they had into owning their land, and she tells us what it means to bootstrap a farm debt free, and why small farms can try things big farms never could.

We recorded this conversation during a meeting of our For Farmers interns, so you'll also hear questions from Andrea and Raeesah on how to be a better farmers market customer and how a farm's challenges change over time.

In this episode:

• Why a wish list is a story about a farm and what it needs
• The nomination that made Meg weep (we have more than 1,900 of them)
• Imposter syndrome, 15 years in
• Farming debt free as a deliberate choice
• Small farms as the experimenters of agriculture

Here's Meg's Wish List for Biscuitwood Farm if you'd like to contribute.

From your plate to the rest of the world, One Bite is Everything explores the connections between food, health, community, the environment, and the economy. Through conversations with farmers, chefs, researchers, advocates, and food system leaders, host Dana DiPrima examines how food touches every aspect of our lives and why understanding our food system has never mattered more.

Top 3% of all podcasts globally

Top 100 food podcasts (22)

Top 100 agriculture podcasts (87)

More engagement than more than 88% of all podcasts on Spotify

Five-star rating average

Part of Heritage Radio Network, home of the top voices in food

Follow Dana at @xoxofarmgirl and learn more about the For Farmers Movement at forfarmersmovement.com.

Co-production by Sonia Dhillon. Sound design and original music by Russell Chapa.

Beef is expensive. Cattle prices are at historic highs. Ranchers are finally getting paid more for their animals. So why is the U.S. cattle herd still the smallest it’s been in 75 years? Why are giant meatpackers losing hundreds of millions of dollars and closing plants? And why are smaller ranchers still struggling to find somewhere to process their cattle?

In this solo episode, Dana follows the beef supply chain from pasture to meat counter to understand a moment when almost every part of the system seems to be telling a different story. Years of drought shrank the herd. Rebuilding takes time, land is increasingly expensive, New World screwworm has disrupted cattle movement from Mexico, and enormous processing plants built for volume are suddenly competing for too few animals.

But there’s another beef system operating alongside that one. Small and midsized ranchers can have cattle and customers and still lack access to the regional processing they need. The result is a strange American beef paradox: too much processing capacity in some places, not enough in others, record prices for cattle, record prices for consumers, and plenty of pressure in between.

It’s a story about beef, but it’s also about what happens when efficiency, scale and resilience aren’t the same thing.

Learn more and support farmer grants at For Farmers Movement. Follow along @xoxofarmgirl.

What happens when a farm grows to the point where the farmers can no longer do everything themselves?

Maria Zordan and Max Morningstar own MX Morningstar Farm in Claverack, New York, where they grow about 40 acres of certified organic vegetables and operate a year-round farm store. Their business also reaches far beyond the farm through wholesale accounts, restaurants, distributors, other farms and CSA customers.

In this episode, Maria and Max take us inside the less visible work of building a farm that can last.

We talk about the transition from farmer to business owner and how they knew it was time to step away from some of the day-to-day production. Max explains how he thinks about delegation and why an owner's time should be spent solving the problems that don't have obvious answers. Maria talks about the growing complexity of managing employees, regulations, wholesale accounts and retail while still keeping a hand in production.

We also get into the realities of selling local food. Restaurants may want to buy directly from farms, but consistency, volume and delivery can make those relationships difficult for both sides. Maria and Max explain how distributors, wholesale buyers, other farms and their own farm store help create a system that actually works.

It's a practical conversation about growth, efficiency, hiring, infrastructure and what it takes to turn a farm into a durable business that can employ people, raise wages and keep moving forward.

In this episode:

• How MX Morningstar Farm grew from leased land into a 40-acre vegetable operation
• When farmers need to start thinking like business owners
• How Maria and Max decide what to delegate
• Why efficiency matters as a farm grows
• The complicated reality of selling directly to restaurants
• Where distributors fit into a strong local food system
• How their farm store changed the business
• Growing a farm in a way that creates jobs and supports higher wages
• Why, as Max says, running the business “never ends”

About Maria Zordan & Max Morningstar

Maria Zordan and Max Morningstar are the owners of MX Morningstar Farm, a certified organic vegetable farm in Claverack, New York. The farm grows approximately 40 acres of vegetables and sells through wholesale channels, restaurants, distributors, CSA and its year-round farm store in New York's Hudson Valley.

https://www.mxmorningstarfarm.com

From your plate to the rest of the world, One Bite is Everything explores the connections between food, health, community, the environment, and the economy. Through conversations with farmers, chefs, researchers, advocates, and food system leaders, host Dana DiPrima examines how food touches every aspect of our lives and why understanding our food system has never mattered more.

Top 3% of all podcasts globally

Top 100 food podcasts (22)

Top 100 agriculture podcasts (87)

More engagement than more than 88% of all podcasts on Spotify

Five-star rating average

Part of Heritage Radio Network, home of the top voices in food

Follow Dana at @xoxofarmgirl and learn more about the For Farmers Movement at forfarmersmovement.com.

Co-production by Sonia Dhillon. Sound design and original music by Russell Chapa.