Something to Chew On

We welcome special guest, Futurity CEO Jack Bobo. Jack finds himself at the intersection of food, technology and design harnessing science, policy, values and communication. Bobo supports businesses that are enhancing the healthfulness and sustainability of the global food system. His study of food technology and consumer attitudes and trends helps to create a better understanding of the future of food.

Transcript:

A Futurists Thoughts on Food with Jack Bobo, CEO of Futurity

But, you know, you need a diversity of players to be able to do those kinds of analyses to because of all the trade offs, you know, again, that's what it comes back to, is that on a single dimension, organic might look good on multiple dimensions, then it's going to be more complicated, doesn't mean it looks bad, but it's certainly more complicated conversation.

Something to chew on is a podcast devoted to the exploration and discussion of Global Food Systems produced by the Office of Research Development at Kansas State University. I'm Maureen Olewnik, coordinator of Global Food Systems. I would like to welcome today a guest host, Dr. Jim Stack, Professor of Plant Pathology, and Director of the Great Plains Diagnostic Network.

I'm Scott Tanona. I'm a philosopher of science.

Today's guest is Jack Bobo. Jack is the CEO of futurity, a food foresight company that works with food and agriculture organizations to better understand emerging food trends and consumer attitudes and behaviors so they can position themselves to thrive in an ever more complex world. Jack previously served as the chief communications officer and Senior Vice President for Global Policy and Government Affairs at Intrexon Corporation. He is a globally recognized thought leader having delivered more than 300 speeches in 50 countries on the future of food, the role of science and technology and sustainably and nutritiously feeding the world and how to build consumer trust. In 2015, he was named by Scientific American, one of the 100 most influential people in biotechnology. Prior to joining Intrexon Jack worked at the US Department of State for 13 years as a Senior Advisor for global food policy, food security, climate change, biotechnology and agricultural trade. Prior to his career at the State Department, he was an attorney at Cromwell and moring LLP, he received a JD, a Master of Science and Environmental Science, a Bachelors of Arts in Psychology and chemistry, and a Bachelor of Science in Biology from Indiana University. Again, I want to thank you so much for joining us. This is a real treat for us and I think is going to be a real treat for the listeners that we've got on our podcast series. I'd like to welcome you duck Bobo to the something to chew on podcasts here at Kansas State University. And we'd like to start by asking you to give us a little background on yourself and what brought you to the high level of interest in the food system.

Well, thank you, thank you for allowing me to be on this podcast. I'm really excited to be here. So like some of your previous guests, I'm going to go way back. I'm going to go back to when I was growing up in southern Indiana. And I didn't grow up on a farm but I did have a cornfield that it came all the way up to my backyard. And my family we had a family garden at my grandmother's house. And unlike many of the gardens today we grew corn, peppers, green beans, cantaloupe, strawberries, watermelons and pretty much everything you can name and my mother canned everything. And I like to tell people that we were all organic, because we had child labor, which was me and my brothers. And so I didn't grow up with a bit of an understanding of what it meant to produce the food you eat. But I certainly never thought that I'd be working in food and agriculture. When I grew up. I went to Indiana University and as an undergrad I ended up with degrees in psychology, chemistry and biology. I was as indecisive then as I am now was a Peace Corps volunteer in Central Africa, came back and got a master's degree in environmental science and a degree in law. Well, that led me to the US Department of State where I worked for 13 years on global food policy. And I always Thought I'd work on environmental policy. But once I got into the food world, I realized that really, there's nothing more important than agriculture in terms of the impact on the environment. So if I really wanted to try to have a positive impact on the environment, food and agriculture was the place to be. Well, after that, I spent a few years working for a biotechnology company that was working in food and agriculture as well. And for the last year and a half, I started my own consulting firm, where I work on the future of food. I work with food tech startups and big food brands, helping them understand what is the future of food look like? Where a consumer trends and attitudes going? And how does one get ahead of the trends so they don't get run over by them?

Great. Well, thank you for that. Thank you for that overview. That's quite a background. And it's interesting to hear that you that you kind of started your professionalism, professional focus on things, internationally, looking at things that were going on in, in various parts of the world, and probably in very poor parts of the world, where, where food and food availability was more of a challenge than it is here.

Yeah, absolutely. I was a volunteer and gap on in Central Africa. And I was a science teacher, but I was in perhaps the most isolated corner of the country. And certainly, food insecurity was a everyday reality for the people and the students around me.

And I think the natural first question is, so what is the future of food?

Well, well, that's a good question. And I've got a futurist answer, which is futurist don't predict the future. What we do is we try to help organizations understand what does what are the possible futures that are out there, and work with organizations to try to figure out what's your preferred future, and then develop a path to get there. So it's less about predicting, and it's more about understanding what's possible, and try figuring out what's the best possible outcome we can have. And that might be by working with dairy and livestock, but also with the newer plant based and alternative protein companies.

Also, so then it's gonna be hard for me to wrangle some more answers out of you, if you don't want to predict things which everybody wants. Right. But so yeah, plant proteins are obviously, you know, old trend. What are the other kind of new-ish things coming up that are maybe maybe instead of predicting what the future is? What kinds of possibilities do you see opening up that, like the average consumer may not be aware of?

Yeah, well, so, what I worry about more is less the opportunity, I see that there's tremendous opportunity with alternative proteins, but also just improving the livestock sectors that we have today. I mean, now you have facial recognition for cows that are making our productivity, you know, better and improving the health and welfare of the animals, you've got robots out in the fields that are, you know, waiting for companies, you have, you know, these alternative proteins, where you can produce eggs, proteins through fermentation. So there are a lot of exciting things happening just across the food chain. But what I worry a little bit about is how the food industry in some ways is going after each other. The alternative protein companies plant based company, as you're talking about how 10 years from now, we're gonna see the end of the livestock industry. And then the livestock industry responds by talking about how Ultra processed these other foods are. And what I worry about is that what these companies are doing is they're really undermining consumer confidence in our food system. And I think that's important because people are really worried about really small risks are food has never been safer in the history of the planet, and people have never been more scared. And I think that undermines the confidence and people just don't enjoy food as much as they once did.

And what else plays into the role of the that lack of confidence? Is this Are you concerned about concerns about like pesticides and GMOs and things like that as well?

Well, I'm not worried about them, but certainly concerned about people's worries.

Yeah. Yeah, well, because, you know, if we're looking at places like the United States and Europe, in many parts of the world, those technologies are beneficial farmers that are using some of those technologies really like them, but the biggest benefits are often in other places. So if you're a farmer and you start using a herbicide tolerant crop or a BT crop that's insecticide resistant, you know, you probably save a little bit of money or you save a little bit of time. But if you say take that same technology to South Africa, or China or India, all of a sudden you end up with 70% yield increases and dramatic reductions in pesticide poisonings. And so the real benefits are in other parts of the world. And we often don't see that. And so I worry about the lack of innovation being available to people in other places. Recently, within the last year, Europe has developed its Farm to Fork strategy. And it really builds on these kinds of concerns, because they're hoping to go to 25%. Organic for all of the agricultural land in Europe by 2030. And this sounds like a good thing. And you will end consumers think about it, I'm sure that they're pretty excited about it. But under the Well, based on the research from the European Commission, organic production in Europe is about 36%, less productive than conventional agriculture under real world conditions. So if they move to 25%, organic, that's going to cause an 8% reduction in production in Europe. And the country that sends the most food to Europe is Brazil. So Europe is planning on exporting its environmental footprint to the most biodiverse country on the planet. And so that's where it's not really about right or wrong, or good or bad, but there are real choices and consequences at play.

So you work with a lot of different country companies. And as you mentioned, in your TED talk, the world's gonna add quite a few more people to the planet, this entry. And I'm wondering as you work with those companies, are they just tracking markets and market development? Or do they have a vision for what the food systems should look like, say 3040 50 years down the road?

Well, that's a good question. And many of the alternative protein companies, they do have a vision. And unfortunately, often that vision doesn't include much of a role for the livestock industry. And I think that's part of what's creating this tension is this expectation that they're going to usurp the role, or they're going to replace animal agriculture. And I think they're, they're mistaken in that because, as you said, we're going to add another two to 3 billion people to the planet in the next 3040 years. And that means that we're going to need to increase production of food by at least 50, or 60%, if not 100%, in areas of like protein. And so there's this huge market opportunity for everybody. The alternative protein industry can grow to be a trillion dollar industry in the next 30 or 40 years. And that wouldn't require the elimination of any animal industry at all. And so instead of talking about how they're going to replace what's there, they should talk about meeting this future need, because that's big enough. And, you know, it's an opportunity, and it's not the sort of problem that's going to create the pushback that can slow down new innovations.

So does their vision, focus on markets? Or food security outcomes or health or life outcomes? I mean, and I don't mean that in a data set, and just what are the drier, they're developing their strategic plans?

Yeah. So if you look at a lot of these, it's really focused on the environmental benefits. So let's just use plant based proteins as an example. So you have Impossible Foods You have beyond meat. And those products are, by and large, intended to reduce the impact of agriculture on the planet. But what's interesting is if you look at why people are buying those products, 95% of purchasers are doing it for health reasons. And I think that there's an interesting disconnect there if the reason you're producing a product is because of its environmental benefits, and the reason people are buying it are because of what they have a perceived health benefit. And then when you go and do the nutritional comparison, you find out that it's not actually nutritionally better at all. I think there's a risk of consumers being turned off about, you know, whether or not those products are delivering on what they want.

How do you approach industry with this type of a dilemma? How, what is the discussion with companies that are kind of working against one another, and trying to put things out in such a way that it's going to be benefiting all?

Well, so part of what I do is I always tell people my personal mission is to de escalate the tension in our food system, so that we can all get about our business of saving the planet. our own way. And so give you a concrete example of putting that into practice. Back in 2017, there was a lot of conversation around clean meat, which is the lab grown or cell based meat. And I gave a talk at the new harvest Conference, which is sort of the research arm of the cell based lab meat industry. And I encourage them to kill the term clean meat. Now, after my talk, there was a lot of pushback the people at the conference, were not terribly happy that I had told them that they were calling their product, the wrong thing. But I worked with the companies in that space over the next nine months, and help them to understand that the use of the term clean meat was implying that the other meat was dirty or unethical. And that that might not be a particularly good way of marketing your product. If you're trying to tell people you're evil, stop being evil and consume my product. But that might not be a good message for the consumer. And over the course of that nine months, I was able to convince all of the companies in the sector that they would drop the term clean meat and took about a year and a half. But pretty much all of the organizations that are working in the space and you know, moved away. And that's why you hear more about cell based meat or cellular agriculture today.

The challenges that are around the world, from a food perspective are incredibly varied. You know, what you were facing what you were discussing was going on in Europe, as opposed to some of the activities happening here, as opposed to what was going on in Gabon when you were there, and is probably still some of the situation there? How do you? How do you get your hands around messaging, some of the futuristic ideas or thoughts that you have, when you've got such variability worldwide, in different areas around the world?

Will, I think it's, it's not as hard to come up with good messaging, the trouble I have is convincing people to stop using the bad message. You may have run across the Eat Lancet report that came out a couple of years ago. And it's an example of a report that, you know, had a lot of positive aspects to it, it was talking about how people need to shift some of their diet so that we're eating a more balanced and nutritious meal. And many of us are eating too many calories. But there was the language they used was frankly, you know, somewhat off putting or offensive to a lot of livestock producers. And the message never really got put forward. So we never ended up having an important conversation about, you know, what our global food system should look a lot like, because it sort of quickly degenerated into, you know, two different sides. Now, as an example, I was working on the Rockefeller Foundation's food vision prize, I was a judge, and then later a mentor for two of the 10 finalists. And each of the finalists. In their proposal, were pushing for reduction of animal agriculture and moving to these alternative proteins in their food vision for the future. And what I told them was, if their goal was to improve the planet, and to improve health, and they were saying we want to reduce animal protein by 30%. I said, Well, why don't you just say that your goal is to reduce the impact of protein production by 30%? Well, maybe that's going to happen because of plant based proteins and cell based meat. But if the livestock industry can deliver the environmental benefits that you're asking for, why not let them have a seat at the table. And so instead of saying a reduction of 30%, in animal products, saying the reduction of 30% of you know, the impact completely changed the dynamic of that conversation, and they at least were able to realize that, you know, they had these biases in their mind that, you know, they were looking for a particular future, and that the language they were using wasn't going to help them to get there.

So that's, that's really interesting. I was going to ask, because you've been talking a lot about language and the importance of language for consumers and for producers as well. Right. And in some cases, some of what you're recommending is just a shift from one kind of language to another that might make it more palatable or, or better convey what's actually happening, right sort of with. So but but in some cases, like this is a case of not just a change in language, but it's a it's a shift, maybe a subtle shift, but a shift in goals, right, sort of an I wonder, right, sort of to, to instead of reducing, right, the impact of certain animal production, to just reduce the impact sort of overall right of you know, whatever, it's a shift, right. So I'm wondering, like, how much of the tasks for getting the different actors in the food production system? and the consumers right to together, like on the same page and something that works well for all of us and is sustainable. You know, how much of it is like, look, we actually have the same goals in mind, we just have to be talking about it in the right way. And how much of it requires some shifting, you know, and what we're trying to accomplish?

Yes. So I think this is actually one of the areas where futurism has a role to play. Because often, when people are looking at the future, they're sort of saying, Well, what do I need to do today, what needs to happen tomorrow in order to get to a very specific future that they've already imagined. Whereas, you know, there are actually lots of possible futures that could be sustainable, that we could achieve in different ways. And that it's actually really helpful to start with a vision for the future, you know. So, for me, I have a vision for the future that is both sustainable and nutritious, so that people are nutritiously fed and that food is sustainably produced. So I have a very clear vision of what I want that future to look like. But I actually am very flexible about how we get there. And so one of the fathers of Futurism, Bob Johansen, he always says that the future rewards clarity, and punishes certainty. And what he means by that is, it's really important to know where you're going, but you'd never, you shouldn't be so fixed on how you're going to get there, because reality is going to intervene. And so it's a little bit like, you know, somebody is traveling down the highway, and they know where they're trying to get. And all of a sudden, there's a detour. And they just stopped because they don't know how to get there. Well, people who are flexible are gonna say, Well, you know, let's just go off on this, let's get out Google Maps, and we'll find another way of getting to our goal. And so having that flexibility about how you get there is really helpful to organizations, it's helpful to companies, and not being so fixed on what it's going to require.

So, so that's good. I wonder. And I'm sure there's, there's lots of ways in which we kind of have a similar vision, and maybe if we just shift and act towards it in a different way, we can sort of get on the same page. But I wonder, sort of maybe to kind of a question that Jim was asking earlier, if, if the, if the visions are enough aligned to get us there, or do we does the futurist require also work? You know, in helping us with that vision, right? Not just Yes, yeah. We're all working to write but sort of, have you considered this goal even right, nevermind, you tour the power the path, right, but sort of even where we're aiming for.

Yeah, and that's why, you know, in the visioning exercise, you know, one builds different scenarios to try to understand, you know, the range of possible futures. Because if you just start out and sort of write down what that future is, then, you know, you're really limiting yourself. Because there, there are all sorts of, you know, ideas that could be brought to the table. And so really, you know, it should be the result of a process. And part of that is going out and looking at sort of the signals of the future, you know, what, what's happening around the world today that, you know, could suggest new opportunities in the future. And that's, that's going to be important, because, again, you know, we don't quite know, what the world's gonna look like, you know, even 10 years from now, let alone 20 or 30. I think it would, you know, if you look back at 10 years ago, well, what companies, you know, exist today that you couldn't live without, that didn't exist at all, you know, just 10 or 15 years ago. And, you know, it's really pretty shocking, you know, that, you know, companies like Google and Facebook and Instagram and all these things that people spend all their time on, you know, didn't exist, you know, not too long ago.

If I could follow up on Scott's thinking there. industry, government, academia, all these sectors are contributing to the research and technology development that drives progress. But on the government and academic side, a lot of that is influenced by policy. The policy determines what the priority priorities are going to be, what initiatives we're going to pursue. And I'm wondering, you know, maybe somewhat based on your experience at state, but now that, you know, you've had time to reflect on that and interact with the industries that are driving progress. Do you think we have the policy right, or should be policies, right, to realize some of these goals or are there specific policy challenges we need to address.

Yeah, well, I always tell people, I'm a science optimist, I'm convinced that science and technology consume can address many of the problems we have. But I'm a regulatory pessimist. I'm not at all convinced that the scientist will be allowed to go there. And so, I think that goes to your point that, you know, I think that there is a real risk that we don't achieve our goals, because the policies, you know, don't allow us to go there. I mean, I think that's pretty clear. If you look at what's happened in Europe, over the last 20 years, you've had an exodus of science scientists working in biotechnology in many fields, because you know, if you can't, doesn't help if you can do research in a lab, if you can never bring a product to market. And it's very hard to understand, you know, what opportunities never came to be, you know, because you can't quantify, you know, the discoveries that weren't made or the products that weren't commercialized. But there's certainly a cost to it. And I think that, you know, we need to try to find a way of figuring, including that more in these conversations, that goes to what I was talking about earlier, in terms of local sustainability. And you see that in the UN Food System Summit, that's going to happen next year, as well. There's this emphasis on local sustainability, regenerative agriculture and other things. And I think we forget that, you know, it's a continuum, local sustainability is about using less water, fertilizer, insecticides and other things. But global sustainability is about being more intensively preparing producing products, so that you have less of an impact in some distant place. And because consumers think about sustainability, in terms of local, and companies and organizations, often things in terms of global, there is that disconnect in terms of how they're, they're envisioning, you know, how we get to a sustainable future. And right now, you know, in many places, there is a very strong push for policies that will prioritize local sustainability. And they're really just going to be exporting their environmental problems to other parts of the world, that are even less capable of, you know, absorbing those impacts. And I think, you know, that's, that's why it's important that, you know, we have close conversations about these issues, so that we, you know, keep a proper balance, you know, it's about trade offs. It's not about, you know, one being right, and the other being wrong. But, you know, we need a balance of both.

Any wisdom on how to influence policy development?

Well, you know, I think that, you know, researchers at universities, and the work that you do, certainly has an impact on what people are thinking about in Washington, DC. But in my experience, many universities don't take advantage of the power they have, you know, we seldom see researchers, you know, coming and knocking on the door, saying, you know, the fact that you're opposing these technologies, or it'd be the fact that we don't have a regulatory path for Gene edited animals are, whatever it might be, means that we're just not going to do any work in that field, you know, that instead, the research, just go do something else. And so again, nobody ever hears about the problem that, you know, they just ignore it, or they walked away from. So I think the research community needs to be far more engaged in these conversations than they have been historically. Otherwise, it's going to be consumers that are driving the policy. And, you know, frankly, you know, consumers have never cared more nor known less how their food is produced. And because they care, they're asking for policy changes, but because they don't understand it, those policy changes may not result in the kind of change they actually want. And so I think we need a broader spectrum of voices in the conversation. So I absolutely think there's, you know, there's a role for industry, the private sector, university researchers really need to, you know, spend a little bit of time looking at how they can influence these policy conversations.

Yeah, thank you for that. I agree with that assessment. I think we're a bit challenged right now, in deriving a set of policies that unleash the capabilities that are clearly there, but in a manner that doesn't create more problems than it solves.

Well, one area where I think universities could use of health as in science communication, which of course is what this podcast is all about. But by and large, I don't think there's enough of an emphasis on the role of science communicator. At most, you know, big research universities, people aren't necessarily rewarded for it. I know they are more now than they were in the past. But we need, you know, a lot more science communication than we've had.

So I, yeah, I agree, we need more and better science communication. And this is across the board, not just in areas of food. But I wonder how much I mean, I hear this a lot. And I worry sometimes not that we're doing this. But I worry sometimes that we sort of then put the onus on the scientist, and I'm wondering, to communicate more to communicate better. I'm wondering, sort of, if you could say something about some of the other factors, you said that consumers never cared more, but knowing less about their food, where, where it comes from maybe how its produced, I forget what you said. But there's a lot of factors here, some of it is sort of the media at large, some of it's sort of the way our food is advertised. Right. And that is not on the scientists, you know, that's on people, maybe we're doing the advertising, right. And there's, just so many factors here. I wonder if you could sort of talk a little bit about what you think, that interplay there is and what other what other ways there are of getting consumers to better understand and not just the local impact, but the but the, you know, the science behind the behind food production and, and the global issues and global impact of different production.

Yes, so I'm, I'm just finishing up a book now, why smart people make bad food choices. And it certainly doesn't put the blame on, you know, the universities or others. A lot of it has to do with psychology. And, you know, a lot of the problems we have today weren't necessarily sort of intentionally brought about. But, you know, back in the 80s, there was this move towards, you know, looking at nutrients in foods, were we breaking down our foods really better understand, you know, its components and what its components do in terms of health. But once we started doing that, then it led to companies saying, oh, you know, fat is bad. So I'm going to give you low, low fat cookies, well, those low fat cookies still had a lot of sugar. But you know, health halos, our mind immediately jumped to the positive aspect of it ignored all the negatives. And so, you know, we have a lot of things that are happening all at the same time. And so when I'm talking to scientists, I'm encouraging them to, you know, communicate more when I'm talking to companies, I'm talking about the importance of trust, you know, that we need to, to build trust, because consumers aren't going to allow you to deploy new technologies if they don't trust you. You know, science tells us what we can do. But it's the public that tells us what we should do. And so we really have to be working at each of these levels. And, you know, it's not enough to try to communicate on a controversial issue. I think we all know that when it comes to things like GMOs, it's not an information deficit model problem. More information is not going to convince people that these technologies are safe and effective. What's going to change is whether or not people trust you. And I'll give you a concrete example. In, you know, the Impossible Foods, their product is a GMO hamburger, but obviously, it has not received a lot of pushback from the public. But imagine for a moment if Monsanto had created the Impossible Burger. Well, I think we all know that it would not have been a hit. But all of the journalists would have said it failed, because nobody wants a GMO burger. Well, that obviously isn't true. So why people think it failed, and why it actually failed are often different. The reason it would have failed is that nobody wanted a GMO burger from a large multinational company. And because they misunderstand what's going on in situations like that, they also companies like Impossible Foods misunderstand it as well. They think that consumers trust us because you know, we share their ethical values. And that's partially true, but it's only true as long as they're small. The moment Impossible Foods went into 18,000 Burger Kings was the moment that people push back on the fact that it was Ultra processed. No rich people cared that it was Ultra processed, but it was $20, a burger and high end restaurants. They only cared when poor people could afford it. And so you know, the relationship of companies to the consumer changes as they scale. So I just mentioned that, there are a lot of different things going on. It's not just our relationship to industry, it's relationship to the kind of industry the point that they are and their development. And so that's why I spend so much of my time trying to de-escalate that tension. Because it's not making people happier. You know, people are less happy, you know, then than they have been in a long time. People in the United States tend to be less happy than people in many developing countries that obviously have much More difficult circumstances. And that's because so much of the messaging that's going on is convincing people to worry about smaller and smaller risks. Because that's what we do as human beings, you know, we, we focus on hazards, we don't focus on risk.

And we're very bad judges of risk. I totally agree with that. And something else you said, is really interesting to me, too. And I think the way he was talking about how policy drives so much of what research gets done, and but you just talked several times about the ways in which at least certain groups of consumers drive, drive the future of food drive some of the innovations in food, right. So could you say something about what you think that interplay is between the well off people interested in sort of certain kinds of food products and the impact that has on our system overall?

Sure. Well, you know, it's interesting that if you look at 2019, the biggest diet trend of 2019 was clean eating, but the biggest IPO of 2019 was beyond meat. And so on one hand, you know, consumers believe that the most important way to a healthier life is to eat whole foods and simple ingredients. And yet, they're investing in companies that are fundamentally producing an ultra processed product. And so there is this disconnect that's happening. And the consumers that are pushing some of these trends, you know, they are focused more on health and wellness. And yet 85% of consumers are more value shoppers. And so trends often get pushed in a direction that doesn't necessarily reflect the needs of the vast majority. And I'll return to the Eat Lancet report, as an example, you know, they the report kind of demonized animal products, and that, you know, we're eating too much meat. And yet, if you went in analysis was done, the cost of consuming the diet that they were proposing, it was clearly more expensive than the diet, people were eating. And so, if money is not an issue, then you can eat healthy any way you want. But if money is an issue, then you need to take that into account. And too often when you have people from a certain socioeconomic status where money is not as much of an issue, they're balancing their environmental desires versus taste and quality and other things. But for many people, you know, they don't have the luxury of balancing those. And just to give one concrete example, there, there's a report that looked at, you know, do consumer, what do consumers worry about in their food? And how important are environmental issues? And the report said, like 65% of consumers said that, you know, environmental issues were very important in their purchases. But then when they broke that down as to well, what does that mean for you? Well, for most people, that meant that you were reducing pesticides, or you were making food more affordable? Well, my guess is that was not the same consumer saying those two things, you know, for some reducing pesticides equated to environmentally sustainable. On the other hand, some people thought making food more affordable, made it more environmentally sustainable. And obviously, those two things are actually, you know, in conflict, if you reduce pesticide, you increase cost, and, you know, so, you know, we have different parts of the community that are at odds. And, you know, only one of those is really at the table most of the time.

So, like, we've spent quite a bit of time talking about the foods that we eat, and you know, what's in people's diets. Another very important component of food security, or the future food is how food gets to the table. So the distribution technologies and systems. And I'm wondering if you've given as much thought to that, as you have to the rest of it, I'd just be curious what you think about the role of distribution in realizing this vision for safe, nutritious food in the future?

Yeah, well, certainly, you know, in the age of COVID, there's been a lot of interest in food supply chains. And I think there's a lot of concern about long food supply chains. I'm a bit of a contrarian here on that topic. You know, I understand why when we look at the bottleneck that was caused by meat processing, that people would be concerned about the consolidation of that industry, but it's, it's worth looking at, you know, what the alternative is, and if we go back, just two years, there was a swine fever outbreak in China. And as a result of that, you know, they had to slaughter half, you know, 500 billion pigs or something like that. And the reason the problem was so bad is because they had such a highly distributed processing, you know, backyard processing and other things that exacerbated the, last pandemic. And of course, in response to that China has gone massively in the direction of the more consolidated processing that we have here in the United States. And so, you know, there are always going to be those kinds of trade offs when we think about our supply system. But, you know, my view is that the, the global trade and the diversity of our supply system, you know, really strengthens it. And it's, it's fine to buy local, you know, it's good to buy local support your community, but it's probably unrealistic to think that that can solve all of our problems. You know, if you were to look at the environmental footprint of local production, you know, for many products, it's going to be greater than something produced far away. And the reality is, you're going to end up with a much less diverse, much less nutritious food palette, you know, if you do reduce, you know, the, the reliance on these global supply chains. So I think they're to our credit, and we need to improve them, we need to reduce the some of those risks. But you know, calls for, you know, increasing inventory so that we don't have the disruptions we had in the past, I think it's short sighted. The reason we have if you increase a inventory, what you're really doing is increasing slack in the food system. And slack is a lack of productivity and efficiency, and it means higher cost. And again, I'm personally more concerned about people on the lower end assist socio economic scale, and they're the ones who are going to pay for, you know, having the luxury of inventory that's going to be there when somebody wants toilet paper, you know, in the next pandemic, 50 years from now.

What about the energy aspect? That wasn't too provocative?

No, quite interesting. What about the energy aspects of that, you know, the, right now agriculture is being looked at as one of the primary drivers of climate change, and land use change. And if we're going to move more food over greater distances, in shorter periods of time, it's gonna take a lot more energy to do that. And if energy is one of the important contributors to climate change, how do we reconcile that, you know, we're going to move more food at the same time we want a better environment?

Well, you know, one there, it's always worth doing a lifecycle analysis to see whether or not something produced in New Zealand really has a, you know, a bigger carbon footprint, because the transportation, most of the time, that's actually not true. But I also think that, you know, when somebody talks about the carbon footprint of transportation, often the conversation then turns around, says, well, we should be doing producing food, you know, organically and regeneratively and other things like well, either we're going to look at the carbon footprint or we're not, you know, if the carbon footprint matters, then organic production loses every single time, regenerative agriculture is probably not going to win, you know, any of these conversations. My personal perspective is that, you know, we need a balance of both, that our food system is stronger because of the diversity, but that one solution is not going to solve the problem. So producing food in Brazil might reduce the global environmental footprint, unless you're deforesting land to expand that. And so you know, right now, you know, as I mentioned earlier, Europe, Europe is the number one export market for Brazil, Brazil's top export destination is Europe or sometimes China. And so, you know, it's not just, you know, the distance traveled, but it's, you know, where it came from, as well.

So some of comments that you've made over the last, you know, several minutes, really deal with one of the things I've focused on most heavily since I've been at K State, which is trying to get a good interdisciplinary activity going between different players. This is probably more of a comment than I'd like you to just speak to that it is really a question, but it's clear that interdisciplinary and bringing in many different facets of study, then looking at these questions is going to be critical in coming up with any kind of a solution. Could you speak to that?

Yeah, well, I think you're absolutely right. I mean, too often, we have You know, an analysis by, you know, one group that's, you know, has a vested interest in the outcome. And I think we need to have more of that multidisciplinary approach. I think organizations like the World Resources Institute, tend to do a pretty good job of balancing those. You know, but you know, other organizations have been a little bit disappointed, and, you know, their lack of concern about, you know, productivity as being an important factor. I've had conversations with the World Wildlife Fund and others, and they're not really convinced that productivity is that important. And, you know, frankly, I don't understand how they can view that because, you know, if we double productivity by 2050, and we need twice as much food, then that's great. But if we double productivity, and it turns out, we don't need any food, then we've just cut in half our environmental impact. And so there's a benefit. But, you know, you need a diversity of players to be able to do those kinds of analyses to because of all the trade offs, you know, again, that's what it comes back to, is that on a single dimension, organic might look good on multiple dimensions, then it's going to be more complicated, doesn't mean it looks bad, but it's certainly more complicated conversation.

Yeah, and in that discussion, even thinking outside of the use, the term that I should not use ever is the hard sciences, but looking at the the need for the social impacts, and understanding where those fit in, in dealing with some of this, the situations that you've discussed, I think, is is of critical importance as well.

Yeah, I think, you know, many Americans forget that, you know, before COVID Hit 40% of Americans at some time in the previous year, didn't have enough money to buy the food they wanted. So, you know, these are not, you know, problems for, you know, foreign countries, developing countries, whatever. I mean, these are, you know, realities for many people today, and it's obviously, you know, significantly worse today.

Right, and I think it's, it's not just a problem outside of the United States, I think there have been studies done certainly within our university campus and within our town and surrounding regions that show a fairly high level of people before, even before COVID that weren't, weren't able to purchase the quantities of food needed.

Yeah, I mean, I spend a lot of my time these days, you know, talking about, you know, behavioral sciences, cognitive psychology, behavioral economics, and I think, you know, the, those areas are going to have a big impact on our ability to, one figure out how to communicate these issues, but also how to reshape our food environment to begin delivering some better outcomes.

You think we're missing anything in the academic environment in terms of training those next generations of students that are going out?

I think that they're, you know, students are quite capable. And I think the challenge is just understanding, you know, what are the problems that are going to be and that's hard to anticipate. And so they're often I think universities are being squeezed in order to train people more like, you know, a technical school as opposed to train people how to think. And I think that the direction that we're going, you know, we need people that are have a good foundation and systems thinking, in addition to whatever, you know, specialization they might have.

I completely agree with that. We just published a paper on that idea.

You'll have to send it to me.

We'll do. I will just say, thank you so much, Jack, and very much enjoyed the conversation. And I did want to comment on your TED talk. What you did at the end, was very creative. enjoyed that very much.

Well, thank you. I wasn't at all sure that it was going to, to work. So it was actually louder in person. I wish they had sort of up to a little bit of volume on the video. But my fingers were crossed. They said, well, we'll just cut it out. If it doesn't work.

It was great. Thanks for joining us.

And hopefully everybody listening here now goes and watches that TED Talk and sees what's gonna happen at the end. Yes, this has been great. Thanks. I was wondering if there's sort of any one thing that sums up what you think either gay anybody worried about food systems from production to the consumer and should be should it be doing to to address all all the range of things that you've been saying?

Well, the one thing I think is important is that I am I often hear a lot that, you know, consumers are anti science or different groups are anti science. And I think it's worth remembering that, you know, I have never met anybody who's anti-science. I've met a lot of people who didn't trust the government and didn't trust industry. But they all love science. I think we sometimes, you know, confused that lack of trust with a lack of, you know, belief in science. And so we need to be aware that when somebody says they don't trust the science, you know, even if you know that that's not correct, it's probably we're trying to understand why they don't trust the person saying it, you know, instead of the thing that they're saying. But the last thing I'd like to say is just, you know, I would encourage, you know, students, scientists and others, to expand their networks, one of the things that, you know, I worry about is that people have not built a big professional network that's going to be there. And I personally don't look at networking as a job skill. I look at it as a life skill. And it's how you build relationships with people. And it's how you help people before you need their help. And if you're out there helping people every day, you can be confident that the day when the day comes that you do need somebody else's support, they'll be there. And it's never been more important because unfortunately, like my daughter, the kids today are going to be graduating into the worst economic climate since the Great Depression. And so, you know, there's never been a better time to reach out and you know, ask questions and you know, get to know other people.

A message. Thanks so much.

That is a great message. Yeah. Thank you so much. And with that, I think we will sign off and I and again, I so appreciate your coming on with us Jack and have enjoyed the conversation and look forward to getting this out to share with listeners.

Well, thank you so much for having me on. Really appreciate it. If I can be of any help, let me know. Thanks.

If you have any questions or comments you would like to share check out our website at https://www.k-state.edu/research/global-food/ and drop us an email. Our music was adapted from Dr. Wayne Goins's album Chronicles of Carmela. Special thanks to him for providing that to us. Something to Chew On is produced by the Office of Research Development at Kansas State University.

Yanting Tina Shen is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Grain Science and Industry, Kansas State University. Her research is focused on functional improvement of plant proteins for food uses, as well as bakery chemistry. She currently works in the Cereal Chemistry Lab under supervision of Dr. Yonghui Li

In this episode, we focus on a critical element of any research endeavor — having the correct tools to do the work. The interdisciplinary research of our guest, Dr. Ryan Hansen, assistant professor of chemical engineering at Kansas State University, focuses on food and health related studies. Dr. Hanson uses innovative approaches in microfabrication, polymer science and surface chemistry to design novel synthetic biological interfaces for characterizing microbial populations.

Advancements in Measuring Techniques: our ability to understand microorganism interaction with Dr. Ryan Hansen, assistant professor of chemical engineering

With the microbiome is that it really does require a range of skills. It's not just going to be one person that can do, you know, genetics or, you know, one person that makes these cool devices, right, or one person that specializes in bioinformatics. It's a combination of biologists, computer science, computer scientists, chemists, engineers, right. And so, so it really does require, you know, it takes a village, if you will, right, it's going to be a very big interdisciplinary effort.

Something to chew on is a podcast devoted to the exploration and discussion of Global Food Systems produced by the Office of Research Development at Kansas State University. I'm Maureen Olewnik, coordinator of Global Food Systems.

And I'm Colene Lind, Associate Professor of Communication Studies at Kansas State. I studied the public's role in science and environmental policy.

And I'm Jon Faubion. I'm a food scientist.

A critical element of any research endeavor is having the tools needed to do the work. Today's guest is Dr. Ryan Hansen, Assistant Professor of Chemical Engineering, and the Steve Hsu and Warren and Gisela Kennedy Keystone research scholar when it comes to micro organisms, and the interaction of microbes and complex systems, the tools being developed in Dr. Hanson's group may change or at least have direct impact on the ability, speed and accuracy of these studies. Ryan, welcome to the podcast. I would like to welcome you Ryan, Dr. Ryan Hanson to Something to Chew On. We're really looking forward to hearing a little bit more about your research activities. Before we move into that I would also like to welcome Dr. Colene Lind. Dr. Lind is an associate professor of Communication Studies at Kansas State and will be joining us from on occasion as a host. And so welcome, Colene.

Thank you, Maureen. Great to be here.

And with that, Ryan, could you start out by giving us a little background on who you are? And really what drew you into the area of study that you're into, and then maybe we'll take it from there?

Sure. So I am an Assistant Professor in Chemical Engineering at K State in the Tim Taylor, Department of Chemical Engineering. And I've been here for five years now I'm going this is my sixth year. I started in 2015. I came over from Oak Ridge National Laboratory and I had worked there a couple years. But my background is in chemical engineering. So I graduated with my PhD from the University of Colorado. And they're I studied chemical engineering and I looked at materials polymer science for biomedical applications. And then I hung around in Colorado, it's where I'm from, and I went to the Colorado School of Mines, which is also where I did my undergrad. And I kind of went more than the biomedical route for a while. And I developed blood diagnostics. So tests that could actually diagnose bleeding disorders. And so I did that for a few years. And then my career took a turn to the National Lab scene. As I said, I was at Oak Ridge National Lab before coming to K State and I was there for a little over a little over two years, two and a half years. And there I got to do a lot of things, but it actually got me into some environmental microbiology. And I was also able to use some of the skillset that I had developed in my previous research, which was focused on developing and designing devices for, for measuring and biological systems or characterizing biological systems. So I got to apply that at Oak Ridge and do a lot there. For those of you that don't know about a national laboratory, it's funded by the Department of Energy. I was able to pick up some aspects and microbiology some aspects of design devices, micro nanofabrication. So these are all I would say very different fields, but it was really unique because I got to combine them and really participate in a very new area of research and I really liked that. And while I was there at Oak Ridge I I decided that it was really fun to do my own research. And I really enjoy the the freedom of research that I was able to do at Oak Ridge. But that was certainly a temporary situation. So that got me thinking about faculty positions, and I had been out, I would say, Yo, boy, six, maybe more than six years, from my PhD to that point. So I've been out a long time. But I really thought at that point, boy, it would be fun to be a faculty member. And I, you know, I jumped around, I had quite a few experiences, but I saw K State, and was really interested in case state. And one of the big reasons was, because I could see myself fitting in with their emphasis on food, and their emphasis on biosecurity, and their emphasis on environmental research, as well. And you know, those are some of that was new to me. But I knew that being at Oak Ridge, where we were looking at some environmental microbiology, it would be somewhere where I could expand my research and grow. And so I really liked K State. For that reason, I really liked the Department of Chemical Engineering as well, it was a nice size, there wasn't it wasn't really big, there was enough faculty there that were all really, really good and very welcoming. And I realized that I would fit in just very well with the culture here. So I started in 2015, and have been here since. So that's a little bit about my career progression.

What are your research areas? What are you hoping to end up with, and at the end of the day, all of those.

So my research is really at the intersection of microbiology, and material science. And so we look at interfaces and using interface using materials to characterize microbes to separate microbes. We study how microbes interact with their environment, how they interact with surfaces with membranes and with each other, basically. And what we do is we're developing devices, we're developing materials that really help aid the microbiologist and making new measurements and progressing their research. What I found, when I started was that the tools that the microbiologist actually has are, are fairly limited and have been around for decades. And microbiology is just this field of exploding knowledge. There's, there's all sorts of new organisms that are being discovered all the time. And there's so much more out there. And I saw that and I said, you know, it would be for someone to come and develop new tools that can help a microbiologist, do what they're doing and study these organisms at a higher, a higher level, learn more, that would be great. That would be a lot of opportunity there. And so that's what I've been doing. I've been basically developing new tools, new systems, new materials that are geared towards studying microbes, and how they interact in their environment.

Interesting. So it's, it's not more it's not a quantification it's more of a characterization of behaviors?

Yeah, I mean, currently, you Yeah, well, there's there's quantitative aspects, for sure. And in my research, but it is, it's it's characterizing, characterizing how microbes interact, how they, how they work with each other to survive, how they inhibit each other. And I think we'll get into this, I think when we get into our, you know, some of the global food system work, but it's really trying to characterize, okay, how are these organisms interacting together and natural systems, bacteria, microbes, the, you know, they don't, they don't interact in a vacuum, right? They're there, they interact in these very complex environments. And it's because it's so complex, it's been very difficult for a microbiologist with the standard tools, they have to piece together these, these small pieces of information and get a bigger picture of what's going on. And that's, that's a broad statement. But you see that in any system, any kind of ecological system, whether it's soil or plant or in the ocean, simply there's a lot that's unknown, that needs to be discovered. So yeah, so that's, that's what we're doing. And you know, there's quantitative parts of our work, certainly with that, but yeah, a lot of a lot of instrument development and a lot of engineering actually.

So, I know when I first met you, when I first came on board at K State, what came to my mind my background, pretty heavily focused on the food safety area, and the first thing I thought of when I saw what you were working on is food safety, specifically, and the potential of some of these types of activities being carried out. You were talking about the complexity of microbiology and the systems that they are that they're growing in, and the ability to, to measure and test but food systems, food matrices are incredibly complex. And just thinking of the possibilities of what you're doing, and where that would fit into these complex systems was just, it certainly hit the mark with me. And I understand that, you're probably well, you can speak to this a little more I'm from, from my background, people are looking for something fast and cheap, something that they can take out onto a floor and work on and do the tests. And it's done. I know you're not there yet. But is that something that would be an ultimate focus? Or?

Yeah, so I certainly think that there are some ties in industry to what we have been doing and what we're going to continue to do. And we want rapid detection, for example, or rapid characterization of a sample to save time to save money to prevent, for example, contaminated food from being put into distribution. And these all require better techniques for detection, right, if we're going to go with foodborne pathogens, right? Being able to detect contamination without having to culture is a big deal. Right. And so, yeah, we're working on materials and interfaces that capture pathogens, foodborne pathogens, specifically, and isolate them from their environment so that they can be detected. You know, one, one important step that people often forget is there's a separation component here, where you have to separate out oftentimes a pathogen from everything else in this complex matrix. And to do that, you need materials. And that's actually where the chemical engineer comes, comes in. Because a lot of people are listening to this thinking, Okay, this is a lot of microbiology, but there's the separation aspect, where you're trying to pull out a certain organism, in this case, a pathogen, and you need that to detect it or to characterize it. And so that's really one thing we're doing. And one, one way we're using these materials and these interfaces is to, to pull out pathogens from a sample, it might be water, it might be food, and then characterize it. So yeah, and, you know, certainly I think, from the industry perspective, that's one area where we're, I think we have a lot of ties into what companies need. You know, the other thing that we're doing is also looking at this at a fundamental level. One project that we have starting up, this is an NSF project that I have, and it is focused on isolating foodborne pathogens that have what's called a viable but non culturable phenotype. Basically, these are pathogens that are a small, a small subset of an overall population, but they have a unique phenotype. And what they do is they actually can turn off their metabolism go into this dormant state where they can't be treated with antibiotics, for example, but what happens is that they can resuscitate over time and then come back. And so obviously, that causes a lot of problems. That causes a lot of problems in clinical settings that causes problems also, potentially with foodborne pathogens. And so we're interested in separating out those types of cells so that we can study their, their genetic makeup study their their RNA that they're being expressed, find biomarkers that will allow us to detect that that specific population of cells because right now, that's really hard to do, you're looking for, it's very hard to separate out these cells that are that look very similar, but are behaving differently. And so yeah, so that's one example where that would certainly improve food safety. And it also ties into clinical applications as well.

So it appears, at least in thinking a bit and actually, I'll have to admit to coming from a biology background from a developmental biology background, are you are you focused in on dealing with the cell surface architecture or chemistry as a way to as a way to remove the selectively two from the rest of the from the rest of the matrix?

So in some applications, yes, some applications you can actually go back to this just idea of separating out a pathogen from let's say, a water matrix or a food matrix. There are antibodies that you can use to target individual pathogens. And so what we're doing is we're developing interfaces that allow us to orient those antibodies and not only combine the antibody, but we with a surface but also provide a structure on the surface that allows that cell to interact with the surface in a very high level. Contact lenses so that you actually can improve how efficiently you capture these organisms. Once you get efficient capture, that translates to sensitivity. And so that's, and that's key, because sensitivity is everything right? If it's there, right, and it's, we'll say one cell per milliliter, right? That's a really low concentration. But in some cases, that might be what you need. Well, if you need it, if you have an application like that, you really need an efficient separation process. So yeah, that's certainly one way of doing this is to look at the surface and target the cell surface and make an engineered surface so that that cell is going to stick on that surface. Once it comes in contact with it.

I was just looking at some of the information background on what you've been working on. And you may have just spoken to this, but there's a mention of a photo degradable hydrogel application that you're working on. Can you explain a little bit about what that is?

Yeah, I'm so excited about this. So this actually, the way that came about was actually interesting, because I work on photo degradable hydrogels, or they're more generally photo polymer. So these are polymers that are either formed by light or degraded by light. And that was my background. And I put that on the shelf for, you know, six or seven years. But then when I started working here, I realized that I could use a lot of those materials I worked with in grad school for some of these applications. And so what we have done is we've designed these polymers, we, and they're hydro gels. And so basically, hydro gels are these really water absorbent. polymers, they're these cross linked polymers that absorb water. So just, you know, just like material you would find in a diaper, right, that's super water absorbent. These materials do the same thing as far as being very compatible with an aqueous system. And we decided to try to actually capture cells into these hydro gels. And what that does is basically hold these cells in place, so that you can look at them and look at a lot of them at the same time. And then what we do is we take a pattern light source, and if we see a cell that we want, so let's say that we see a cell and it's behaving oddly, but let's say it has this, this culturable. But non-viable phenotype, right behavior. And when we if we see that, right, that might be a needle in a haystack, we want to get that out and separate it so we can study its genetics. And so what we're doing was we're designing these polymers so that we shine light right over that cell that's trapped in this hydrogel, and it pops out. And we were what we can now do is, we can now just take that out in a little droplet, and isolate it and then study its genetics, at least that's where we're going and what we're doing. So it's a separation technique again, and it's, you know, it's hopefully going to be a very, very practical type of technique that a lot of people can do. And so that's, that's the idea of the materials and the photo degradable hydrogels. You know, the other thing with that, and this gets more into the medical side of things is people are really interested in using bacteria as therapeutics. So there's this initiative from the NIH bugs is drugs, that's basically looking at using bacteria, oftentimes engineered bacteria to deliver therapeutic agents to a tumor site, or simply to colonize in a tumor site and kill that tumor. And so they're seeing that some types of bacteria can do that. Well, the challenge there is that you also have to deliver it into a tissue. And so just like they do this with drug delivery, what they do with drugs is they'll encapsulate them in a protective coating. And then they'll shine light on it, and it releases the drug in that specific site. What we saw that we said, well, we could probably do the same thing with bacteria, because people are really interested now and using bacteria to deliver a drug to a cancer site. So we also are kind of moving that direction where we're saying, Okay, let's, let's encapsulate these potentially therapeutic bacteria into these polymers that fall apart in life. And then if they can fall apart in near IR light, so this is really, really low energy light source, and it penetrates through tissue. So if you can do that, and if you could get the chemistry, right, you could actually have this on demand release of bacteria into a tumor site or into some type of disease site. So it's, again, it's this intersection of microbiology and material science towards a new direction now towards more of the clinical side of things. I know that gets off of the food application. It brings up kind of a new area we're going.

It's fascinating and actually, I may be stretching this just a bit but on the health side of things, I could see probably applications Then in meat animals or in, you know, in the veterinary side of things, so things come full circle, one point or another.

They do I found that to be true in my career as well, because I, I started out in environmental, doing environmental work in industry, and then I went to biomedical and then I circled all the way back around to the environmental side when I got K State. So yeah, things always come back around. It's interesting how that works.

Yeah, absolutely.

Is there an organism that you're using as I don't want to say a test but sort of a model.

Yeah, there's, there's a few organisms that we have experience with. I mean, the one that everybody uses is e coli. Because you can, you can manipulate that very easily on a genetic level. People can do all sorts of things with e coli. So when we're thinking about drug delivery, right, equalize the first thing that they think about. But you know, certainly. And of course, there's a strain of e coli. That's a foodborne pathogen. And so that's an organism that makes sense for not only me, but most people that are developing these materials to start with, standardized as an organism. In the past, I had a student who worked with Campylobacter Did you know, which is a common foodborne pathogen, and that is actually an organism that has this culturable, but non viable phenotype. And it causes problems and infection. And so we're looking at potentially working with that organism, and then certainly, you know, I will probably get into this, but I, you know, I'm not just looking there, I'm also really interested in what's going on underground in the soil. And so there, we're looking at classes of beneficial bacteria. So moving away from the pathogens and looking at beneficial organisms, we're working with axis beryllium, specifically axis beryllium bracante. So this is a bio fertilizer, it's a commercially available bio fertilizer that fixes nitrogen into plants. And so we're studying that organism a lot. And that kind of moves us underground and around the plant and gets us into bio fertilizer. So those are, those are a few organisms that we've recently been working with. And you know, but it's, we're always it's interesting, because, what we're doing when we go back to looking at these environmental systems is that we're uncovering new organisms nor characterizing new organisms. So we're always, you know, we're always out finding new organisms and pairs of organisms that interact in certain ways and that have new applications. Great. Yeah.

Ryan, I find it so interesting, you know, the first when you first started talking about your work, and you made it really clear for you to understand what the the need and the challenges for that you're trying to meet, the way that these microbes are so variable, the complex interactions that change the way that the fact that many of them have been discovered yet really, really fascinating. And now for the last few minutes, talking about how your work takes you to so many different kinds of little miniature ecologies, I realized, wow, you have to go from the soil to an animal gut to all kinds of different plants. I'm just thinking about this from a practical perspective. As you know, running your lab, how do you do that? How do you move from all of these different contexts, and yet be able to do work that is useful in all of these different ecologies? I mean, just does that make sense at all? It seems like it would be a real reality.

Yeah, so that's a good question. I so you know, it's the, the link for me is that all these areas, they really need, they have the same problems. There's so much that's unknown in any system, whether we're looking in the soil, or whether we're looking at plant roots, whether we're looking in our gut, there's many organisms that are unknown, and, and their function is unknown. So we're really developing these generalized tools that hopefully translate from one we call it a microbiome. So this is basically a community of organisms from one microbiome to the next to the next. And hopefully, they translate. So if we develop something that's useful in the soil, maybe that applies to the gut, and maybe, you know, we're looking at studying interactions between beneficial bacteria in the soil. Somebody that has a biomedical background and is into more medical microbiology can pick that up and apply it to the gut. Right. And so I think the uniting theme here is that there's similar needs in all these areas of microbiology, and there's Just so much that's unknown in each area. So let me put that into context. I looked up some numbers before we were talking. So I'll look at the soil. So the soil, if you take one gram of soil, you could ask, what are you going to find in that sample? Well, one gram of soil can harbor up to 10 billion organisms, 10 billion, so I didn't, I didn't misspeak there 10 billion. And with that, there's about 60, anywhere from 60 to 40,000, difference, different types of organisms with different species. So what I do when I present this type of work to my class is all simply way out. eight grams, 10 grams of bacteria. And I'll ask my students, how many organisms do you think are present here, then, and you think there's actually more organisms here than people on Earth? And of course, people don't think that. But in fact, there are, there's 10 billion organisms and about 10 grams of soil. And so I think it's really fascinating, just all the unknown information that's there. It's just very ripe for discovery. So, so anyways, I think, you know, the uniting theme there, though, is that people need new tools everywhere in microbiology. And so for me, that's great, because I can go a lot of different places, especially when I'm looking for funding. And I can say, Okay, this might tie to energy, this might tie to food, this might tie to health. But at the end of the day, microbes shapes so much of our life, energy, food health environment, that, you know, I think the possibilities are endless for, you know, what we what we can do, and and I think there's a need for the engineer in here, as well, it shouldn't just be isolated to the microbiologists.

I attempted to follow up on that idea that there's real value for you. Because you are interdisciplinary and have to be in the kind of work that you're doing. But speaking from my own perspective, I know that comes with its own challenges, too. But let me just go back to a minute for this idea that the 10 billion in one gram of oil, I mean, it reminds me, I have found really inspiring as I've listened to you talk to the last few minutes, I mean, just the idea of discovery of the unknown and pure discovery is just so comfortable in what you're talking about. And then the idea that there could be enough commonalities between these very, very different settings. It's also sort of it gets that it's kind of a really inspirational quality about science in general. I wonder, yeah. Because the work that you're dealing with is on such a tiny, tiny scale that, you know, some like me from outside the science has no idea how to envision it, that you're 1 billion in one gram. That's a great example. Do you have other examples of the ways that you try and help either your students or the general public understand and envision what's going on in this little tiny, tiny scale that you work with?

Yeah, that's a great question. I do. And I do it from a chemical engineering perspective, because those are my students. And so for example, we, in chemical engineering, we talk a lot about reactors and reactor design, right? And so you would look at that, and you'd say, okay, that has nothing to do with what I'm working on, right? Well, that's actually not true. So you think about a big reactor, right, and we design a reactor to, you know, operate at a temperature and pressure and volume to do a reaction? Well, our devices are really scaled down file reactors, what we do is we take we our devices take organisms, and we put them together in little, little reactors, not big ones. And when you do that, you can you can miniaturize the whole process and basically have 10,000 reactors and do that in a single test. And so I think, you know, I think for me, it's, it's, it's kind of finding the commonalities with my traditional discipline and what we're doing, because oftentimes, it can feel a little disconnected, but really the principles of what we teach you can find in the research we do, and so I think it's just especially for engaging undergrads saying, hey, you know, what you're learning. You know, this was done. Some of this was done decades ago, but we're still using these principles, and they translate what we're doing now. The course I teach is called transport phenomena. So it's, fluid mechanics and heat mass transfer, well, mass transfer, which is the study of diffusion of chemicals through time and space. That's how bacteria communicate with each other. They send the soluble chemical signals to one another, so you can apply a lot of what we learned to new systems. And so I think I think just making sure that you have that connection with students and you say, you know, you're learning stuff that we're actually applying, and we're making discovery with, and I've really engages students, students really want to, I think take ownership of material, they want to have an impact, they want to know what they're doing isn't just, you know, what was done in the 50s, or 60s or 70s, or whatever, right. It's having an impact now. So I think always connecting research for me, keeping research and teaching, integrated and, and not separating the two is really important for this type of engagement. And so I think that gets that what you were what you were saying, and so just some examples there

It just seems that this is a sort of a type of science and discovery that it's almost a step change, it's the, it reminds me of the the initial development of radio immuno acids, where all of a sudden people had, you know, magnitudes, greater sensitivity and many magnitudes greater specificity. And after that, the work on that, once that work got out and into the general scientific public, where it ended up being applicable was incredible. In terms of GE, I never thought it, I never thought of using it for, you know, X, Y or Z. And do you think this technique, is that that powerful at this point? Or at least potentially?

Yeah, I really do. I mean, I think that it made certainly, the tools and the methods were developing, they have their challenges, and they're not, we're not there yet. But we've seen some really promising results. I think there are some hurdles that are still there that we have to overcome. But if we can do that, and it's, you know, it's this field of kind of these, these engineers and microbiologist working together, you know, if we can do that, I think that this field is just going to continue to progress in a very rapid manner. So for example, one limitation that's very common is that most microbes in environmental systems don't grow. And so, you know, we talk about, okay, there's, there's 10 billion organisms in the soil. Well, the problem is 99.7% of those organisms don't grow, we're getting wood and to study then you have to grow them in microbiology. So we get that point. 3%. Right, that's a small fraction of what's actually there. And so the rest of it is dark matter. We don't know what it is. And, recently, they're great.

I love that characterization. Dark matter?

Yeah, yeah, that's what they call it, it's biological dark matter. And then recently, there's, there's a field, you know, in the past decade, I would say that's taken off, and it's called meta genomic. And so basically, meta genomic, you're actually able to get an idea of everything that is in a community of organisms without having to grow it. But, you know, from application side of things, you have to be able to grow an organism to use it, right? If I get one or two cells, and I'm, and they're producing an antibiotic, I can't, you know, I have to, I have to amplify that right, I have to grow that dramatically, to actually produce something. So the trick is figuring out how to culture these uncultured uncoachable. And I use that in quotations, uncoachable microbes, or bacteria, in this case, grow in a laboratory setting is a new challenge, right. And so, engineers and microbiologist are addressing this, how do we, what tricks can we do to recover new organisms? There's one group that actually, this is years ago now. But they were actually able to take a device and isolate individual organisms and then put it back in the soil where the soil contain all the metabolites that were needed, and start growing organisms that they could never grow before. And when they did, that, they were able to actually take new organisms that were producing new antibiotics, and isolate those. So that that gets at antibiotic discovery. And obviously, there's a need for new antibiotics. And so, you know, so that's a technical hurdle. But I think that's something that we're making progress on. And we continue to make progress on how do we recover organisms. And it's not just soil, you can look at any ecosystem, whether it's freshwater, you know, whether you're in the ocean, or in the soil, or any environment, most organisms you can't recover right now. So, but to me, that dark matter that's out there, it's just exciting, because, because I think that there's going to be more technological innovation that's going to get us there and get us to recover new organisms that do things that we've never thought of or that are producing new molecules that could be very, very useful.

Sounds fascinating. Really.

We'd have a really exciting pieces that we you had been involved in a, a workshop that we did earlier on on microbiome, and I appreciated the presentation that you did there. But it was it was one where we had speakers from a variety of different areas on campus that are doing research in the microbiome area. And I was, I was so excited to see there were a few people that presented there that I don't think knew what you were doing, understood the kind of work you were doing. And I'm hoping that that interface connected for you on campus, but it's, it just brings out the criticality, the importance of having this interdisciplinary understanding and work going on. You've, you've touched on so many different areas that just reach out into agriculture, that reach out into biology and reach out into so many areas of research on campus, and that that interaction is so critical.

It is it is, you know, and I think K State is a great place for that. I mean, we have an emphasis on food, but we have veterinary medicine, right. We have biosecurity applications all over. You know, and as we said, the microbiome, it touches all of these areas. And so, you know, I think that, you know, that was some of the motivation of having that microbiome research was to get people on the same page in the same venue, and really see how we can work together. You know, the other thing with the microbiome is that it's, it really does require great range of skills, it's not just going to be one person that can do, you know, genetics, or, you know, one person that makes these cool devices, right, or one person that specializes in bioinformatics, it's a combination of biologists, computer science, computer scientists, chemists, engineers, right. And so it really does require, you know, it takes a village, if you will, right, it's going to be a very big interdisciplinary effort. And so really getting, you know, we can do so much more, you know, this, the sun will be so much greater than, than the individual parts, if we can come together and tackle these big problems, because it's very complex. It really is. And I don't think there's one, you know, I've never met one single scientist that can do all of this.

Well, it sounds like a great hunt really does that, that that would be the sort of thing that would get me up and back in the lab, I think,

I do think it's really, we haven't talked too much about my global food project. But you know, there's similar things going on there, where it's understanding the interactions and plant roots. And using that to improve crop growth to improve drought, stress and crops. And that gets towards, you know, agriculture, obviously, and, and making plants resilient in the face of drought in the face of climate change. You know, relying less on chemical fertilizers, more and bio fertilizers. And so you know, there, there's another and I really think that's, you know, one of the, one of the big applications that I that we can do and do well here at K State with our emphasis on food. And so, yeah, I mean, I think I think for me, this is the fun part of research is that you, you don't always know where it's gonna go, but it can, it can, and you can end up in some really exciting and cool places. True.

Ryan, I would love to hear more about that particular work. I mean, when I when I read about the fact that you are interested in interactions and caring in the axis beryllium binome I thought, I wonder roots of what plants I wonder. So yeah, now, I love the idea that you might be able to promote plant growth without synthetic fertilizers. So please tell me more.

Yeah. So this is a global food systems project that kicked off last May. And we the goal of it is to understand important interactions between axis beryllium. And I mentioned that this is a well known bacteria, it's probably one of the most well known class plant growth promoting bacteria. What it does is it fixes nitrogen and provides ammonia to the plant for growth. So that's important, that's important specifically, while it's important for many crops, I'm focusing on corn and you know, corn is obviously a very valued commodity here. And so I think people some people use assel sprung alone for recording growth, but the problem is that these bio fertilizers really aren't very reliable. And and there's sort of this this issue of, well a plant growth promoting bacteria, will it be successful there? Or how reliable will it be when I implement it when I inoculate it into the soil or on a seedling and then there's a lot of risk associated with that from the producer standpoint. It when you know you have chemical for lasers that are going to give you a lot of bang for your buck initially, right? But, but long term are obviously very environmentally bad, you know, can degrade soil quality have a lot of environmental issues, there's really a need for transitioning to bio fertilizers. But there's a perception that bio fertilizers aren't very reliable. And so what we're trying to do is improve that and in the way we can improve that, I think is if you can understand the interactions that are going on between your beneficial bacteria. So in that case, that would be a axis beryllium on and the organisms that are already there, right, so the plant rises here. So this is the area just outside the root, where there's a very rich assortment of bacteria, and all sorts of microbes on that root surface. So that's where these cells interact. And for plant growth, promoting bacteria to interact with a plant, they have to establish themselves into these rhizosphere communities. Well, what interactions are important for that bacteria to survive in the root? We don't know, people don't know those questions. We're out to find those and to uncover important interactions. And if we can, and we've already actually done that, and have some really promising results. Just very recently, last few weeks on this, if we can understand those interactions, we can basically profile plants, we can look at the microbiome of the plant and say, okay, these organisms are present. And we know that this organism does well when those organisms are already there. And so that is kind of this site specific approach to bio fertilizer, where we already have some knowledge, we're not just blindly dumping in bacteria into the soil, we have some knowledge of what's already there. And we can match it to what we're putting in the soil. And that might improve the reliability, and hopefully, the perception of bio fertilizers. And so you know, we're very interested in that idea. We have a tool that we can use that can uncover these interactions very efficiently now. And so certainly, that's where we're going with that. And again, we're looking at corn and axis beryllium, because that's kind of a high impact application. I think. So but it wouldn't stop there. I think we could use it for all sorts of systems. And so that's where we're going on on that one. And then ultimately, what we want to do is if we find these sets of organisms that worked really well together, can we actually start putting these over a seedling and then showing that they're improving plant growth? Because what people are interested in, in this area is not just one organism, it's a consortia. They always say, microbial consortia. So is there a collection of organisms that can do the job better than just one in isolation? And most people will say yes, but we they don't know what that collection is. So we're looking for those networks, those interactions that can improve these bio fertilizers. And again, we think we have a tool that can do a good job at that.

So Ryan, the global food system, seed grant activity is based obviously, on the quality of the research that's put in and that type of thing. But we're also focusing heavily on interdisciplinary. So who are you working with on that particular project?

Yeah, so I have a strong collaboration with Assistant Professor in Department of Biology, I guess, which is Tom Platt, Dr. Tom Platt. So he actually is a microbial ecologist, and he knows a lot of the genetic side of things. And he works. He's traditionally worked with Agrobacterium tumor patients, which is a plant pathogen, but he gives us a skillset that we don't have as far as genetics and sequencing and understanding bacteria on a molecular level. And so you know, certainly for me, I'm an engineer, I'm doing devices, I making materials, I don't have that skill set. So that's one collaboration. And we've been actually working together for four years now. And so we have a, and we develop this device together. So we have that collaboration. And then also, I think important is industry and industry ties. And so we've engaged Bayer crop science. And so they've shown some interest in this work for developing bio fertilizers for improving drought stress in crops, and certainly are working on that in that engagement. And, you know, having them are more more or less an advisory role for us right now. But we hope that it leads to more and we hope that it leads to interest from Bayer. I mean, certainly they have a good relationship with Kstate. And you know, I think beyond that there's a lot of other companies that are smaller startup companies that are interested in that are developing these bio fertilizers, these these consortia of microorganisms that you can add to the soil or that you can amend the soil with So, you know, we're always out for collaboration we work with with KSURF, and they help us find some of these industry contacts. But I think certainly, keeping that strong tie is important. And I think industry sees a lot of potential here, because, you know, we talked about some of these devices, they can, they can screen, they can look at a lot of different interactions. At the same time I had mentioned, we can make 10 to the fifth small reactors on a single chip right on one test, from an industry perspective, you know, you're going to find that that combination rapidly and quickly and cheaply, the alternative to that is you're looking at how organisms interact by traditionally spotting them together, maybe looking at 10s of interactions at a time, whereas we're looking at 10,000 interactions at a time. And so just the time and the money that you can save from doing that rapidly from an industry perspective, I think is very valuable. And is you know, something that for a company that invests in this type of technology, which would really offer a lot

Plus, and give you much more powerful data when you go to analyze. You can have 10 to the fifth on the thing.

Yeah. So yeah, so we can look at that, you know, you're thinking about these different combinations of organisms trying to find the right combination, we can assemble 10, to about 10,000, I believe, right now, it's the number of 10,000 different different combinations of organisms and find that right combination, I say this, this shows the most promise, I almost, I almost liken it to an interview process. Let's say that you have, you know, you have 10,000 candidates, right, and you have to figure you got to get the candidate that fits in the most and does the job that best right? Well, I want to do that really rapidly, I don't want to go one by one, right and do that I want to do that at one at a one one shot, right. And so our devices designed to do that to where you can, you can consider 1000s of different organisms, you take the top one, and you are the top combination of organisms and you combine it with the bacteria that you already know, is beneficial. And you have your consortium, you have your mixture that you can then add to your crop. So that's the idea. Again, there's not many technologies out there that can do that. And that's certainly something we think we have we have an advantage with.

This is absolutely fascinating.

I have many more questions, but we've got not long right. Yeah, maybe you can help me in a relatively short amount of time understand this. I think that you've gotten this last little bit, it's really helped me understand the sort of the leak that you're making with your tests of being able to take a number of. Is it something about the tests that you're doing themselves? Or there's something about the computing of the actual looking at all the different combinations? What allows you to make that jump, Ryan?

That's a great question. So what allows us to make that jump is basically miniaturizing everything. So what we do is, if we, you know, cells are about one micron, so your hair is about 10 microns, 100 microns in diameter cells, one might affect common bacteria. So this variation here, we'll just say it's one micron in length, well, that basically means we can scale down all these reactors into these little small reactors, and put 10,000 on a ship that's, that I can hold in my hand. And when I do that, I can look it with a microscope, we have a force of microscope, and I can look at everything at the same time. So this is called high throughput, high throughput study. So we can basically, when you miniaturize everything into these small devices, observation of all these different reactions, if you will, again, going to chemical engineering language here, all these different reactions are reactors going on at the same time. So it's making things small. And when you make things small, you increase the throughput. So that's, that's probably the answer, I would say to your question.

Thanks. That really helps me pull it back to you know, the nanotechnology.

Yeah, that's the connection.

It might feel testing messages is so much easier because of computing power. But there's also a little bit of analogy here. And that when you've got little tiny political messages on Facebook, for example, as opposed to a 30 second commercial, there are much greater combinations to be tested at once out there. So it's not exactly the same, but I get it.

Yeah, right. These ideas, you know, they can translate to different different fields. I will just say it's, it's been, it's really defining, you know, for professors to talk about their research. It's, I'm sure you, you get this with everybody. It's always really fun. And you can go on a long time, but I do want to thank you guys for the opportunity. I think that's, it's great to get the word out there as far as what we're doing, not only in my lab, but in K state as a whole. I think we're just, we're doing a lot of great things here. And so You know, thanks to the Global Food Systems for, you know, not only the opportunity that you guys give us, but also the messaging and the communication that we can do through that program. So, thank you guys very much.

I will continue to follow you Ryan. I just I'm your work just fascinates me to know and so great. Great, so exciting. I really appreciate the time from all of you. And again, welcome Colene. This was a lot of fun. Thanks a lot.

All right. Thank you, everybody. Thanks, everybody.

If you have any questions or comments you would like to share check out our website at https://www.k-state.edu/research/global-food/ and drop us an email.

Our music was adapted from Dr. Wayne Goins's album Chronicles of Carmela. Special thanks to him for providing that to us. Something to Chew On is produced by the Office of Research Development at Kansas State University.

In this episode, we discuss the importance of what is in our soil and how its nutrients or contaminants affect plant growth and the food we eat. Dr. Ganga Hettiarachchi, is one of the world's leading scientists in the fields of trace metal and nutrient chemistry in soils. Hettiarachchi's research at K-State focuses on understanding the chemistry of both nutrient and contaminant elements in soils, with the goal of developing solutions to agricultural or environmental problems.

Soil Chemistry: What's In It For Us? – food science from the ground up, with Dr. Ganga Hettiarachchi, professor in the Department of Agronomy at Kansas State University

I think current practices. Most of the time if you think about farmers, they try to do the best they can do to protect their soil. I mean, that doesn't really, they do not want to do things to harm their soil.

Something to chew on is a podcast devoted to the exploration and discussion of Global Food Systems produced by the Office of Research Development at Kansas State University. I'm Maureen Olewnik, coordinator of Global Food Systems.

I'm Scott Tanona. I'm a Philosopher of Science.

And I'm Jon Faubion. I'm a Food Scientist.

Hello everybody and welcome back. The food we eat is a product of many factors including seed quality and variety, weather conditions during the growing season, and processing and storage. But one of the most critical aspects of growing food is what it is grown in the soil. Soil provides nutrients to the growing plants through its components, which include minerals, water, organic matter and microorganisms. Additionally, soil provides a critical avenue for carbon dioxide sequestration, a major factor in reducing greenhouse gas. In this podcast, we will be talking with Dr. Ganga Hettiarachchi, Professor in the Department of Agronomy in Kansas State University's College of Agriculture. Ganga is one of the world's leading scientists in the fields of trace metal and nutrient chemistry and soils. Her research at K State focuses on understanding the chemistry of both nutrient and contaminant elements in soils with the goal of developing solutions to agricultural or environmental problems. I'd like to welcome Ganga to Something to Chew On and look forward to hearing more about you personally and about your profession.

Thank you for inviting me. So I was born and raised in a suburb of Colombo, Sri Lanka. And then when I was about to go to university, I had opportunity either to go into Agriculture Science to go into geo sciences. And my mom was leaning towards geosciences, because that means that I could go to university from home, because it was a university, the base we noted before that was in Colombo, and then the Agricultural Sciences, it was in a different city, my dad thought that doing Agricultural Sciences, more like applied sciences would be beneficial. So he encouraged me to actually take opportunity, although it was in a different city and go and do that. And then while I was doing my Bachelor's, third year, we get an opportunity to so we do sort of agriculture courses, starting from Agricultural Engineering, Agricultural Economics, to Soil Science, Food Science, Animal Science, everything pretty much. And then third year, we get a chance to select what area we want to specialize in. And then finally a fourth year we do only that and then we have six months research projects as a bachelor student during doing like 100 on a degree BSC honors degree. So I chose Soil Science, I could have gone and do some other things. Because the prospects job prospects for Soil Science wasn't that great at that time in Sri Lanka, but because my desire for Soil Science, I stick with that and I did my specialization in soil science, and I did a project related to phosphorus chemistry to my final year. And then I got a opportunity to come to US on a Fulbright scholarship to do my Masters. And I came to Kansas State University and did my Masters and stayed at Kansas State University. Same progresses. Dr. Gary Pierzynski and did my PhD in soil chemistry as well. Only difference was when I was doing my master's I did again Phosphorus Chemistry, but I changed my focus and did more like Environmental Chemistry focusing on contaminants and how to handle soil contamination, remediation focus, more specifically, incident stabilization of soil lead, cadmium and zinc. And then I took a I did a postdoctoral fellowship at USBC National Risk Management laboratory at Cincinnati, Ohio. And I went back to my university because I was actually when I was doing my Masters and PhD, I was on study leave as an assistant lecturer at the same university. I did my bachelor's, so I went back and work as a Senior Lecturer over there for two years, and took a position as a research scientist and Adelaide, Australia. So I was at the University of Adelaide and the CSIRO, Commonwealth Science and Industrial Research Organization for three years before came on to this position. So I actually replaced since Dr. Pierzynski, decided to go to Administration, I was the replacement for his position.

So you shifted when you started your masters, it was you shifted into more of the environmental side and looking at the chemistry of environmental contaminants what led to that shift?

How is it actually it's the same principle a lot of people ask me that, because I focus on soil contamination remediation, that came for my PhD and then when I was in Australia, I was again working on nutrient chemistry, phosphorus and micronutrients. It same principles only saying is, when it comes to nutrient as a soil chemist, I tried to find ways I can maximize nutrient availability to plant and synchronize nutrient availability to replant update, who couldn't have enough is again understanding chemistry of that, and then trying to minimize the bioavailability of it. For example, when I was doing my PhD, I was looking at things in Southeast Kansas and the tri-state mining area, we are seeing wholesale issue concentration was too high. So that seemed was causing phytotoxicity. We cannot get any plants to grow in those mining materials. So I was trying to see how we can minimize zinc bioavailability so that we can get grass growing and the with growing grass minimize contaminated material moving from by being by water. And then when I was in South Australia, I was looking at zinc as a nutrient, because in most of the strain in South Australia has lot of high pH, high Calcareous area soils, so zinc is not available for plan to take up. Most crops are suffering from zinc deficiency. So I was looking at things over there are two ways to maximize things bioavailability so I think it's the same principle, same understanding, just looking at depending on situation, looking at either to increase bioavailability you decrease bioavailability.

And the results of your research get promulgated out through by what way how do they actually reach the people that might benefit by it?

Yeah, so in various ways. So the when we were dealing with so the first project after I moved to K State as a faculty member, it was funded by US EPA, and that's to looking at Urban gardening, sustainable gardening at brownfield sites. So brownfields are actually sometimes not necessarily contaminated, maybe mildly contaminated, but because of perceived contamination is abandoned or underutilized. So looking at those kind of soils, and then how to get those to put into urban gardening or some other use. So in that project, we actually directly dealt with communities. We chose the Brownfield sites to establish our test plots, working with communities, so we had that direct community involvement, as well as other part of it for research, research, technical assistance, kind of programs to we needed to work with communities, we made a lot of the factsheet for people to use, as well as we did lots of workshops, different places. So through workshops and things like that when I was in Australia working on micronutrient and ways to enhance micronutrient availability. We use again, journals that, oh, the magazines actually goes to farmers. So I remember when I receiving sometimes directly phone calls from farmers, actually, just before they are deciding to apply fertilizer, asking me why I think that liquid would work better for their soils compared to granules. And I had that similar experience over here. After one of my PhD students, like most recent papers, Jay Weeks will know Him. And then I got an email from a farmer named Brisca. Asking about, again, the same type of questions. So I think sometimes it's great again, that that person like that was published in the recent paper was published in Science Society of America journal, that's not what actually reads the farmer, based on that case are the key sorry, the the kind of intervene, I think that was what elegent farmers so I think they we do need to be do we should not think that publishing in, although that is our goal, progressional goal to publish in peer reviewed journals. But at the same time, we do need to do those kinds of interviews, those kinds of workshops and things like that, so that information will get to farmers, gardeners, who in uses.

I was just going to ask you were talking about the Brownfields and identifying contaminants in inner cities and those types of things. Did you get to the point to where you were working with actually cleaning those up? How does that happen? How do you clean up an area once it's contaminated that way?

So the then doing brownfields work, we were supposed to actually not just go to any brownfields. The EPA grant required us to actually go to brownfields where communities intend to have decided you can convert that to transform that into an urban garden or a community garden. So we work with those communities to assess thing when we were doing that process, since we cannot actually test everything under the sun to we do some kind of history information, trying to gather industry information, using Sanborn map, talking to neighbors talking to community and then then trying to kind of narrow down what things need to be tested. And we had seven sites within that project. And first site was in Kansas City, Missouri and then the second site was Tacoma, Washington, Seattle, Washington, and then site was Indianapolis, Indiana, one was Pomona, California, and then we had a sighting feeling as well to all those places after talking to them we sometimes we only tested for inorganic contaminants, because we found that the most common contaminants most common contaminant been those brownfields thats lead. Sometimes it was lead and arsenic sometimes it was we thought that cadmium is also another common contaminant, but we did did not find it by contaminated with all three and Indian qualified we found in addition to lead arsenic, we found polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon concentration to be elevated as well. So, depending on site see what we found were different. And then if it is organic contaminant more and then we try to see what other ways to degrade that enhance degradation of that, but with inorganic contaminants, we were not trying to remove thee they are not degrading they are they are most of these inorganic contaminants are persistent. Only thing we can do is we can look at ways to transform the those into less mobile for more or less bioavailable form. So useful amendments and use other understanding about that particular chemical and that particular soil and treat are try best way to keep it in place. So that it will not move from soil to plant. And in any way. The something like lead is not something easily moving from soil to plant. Even if it's more it actually stays in growth rather than moving from room to shoot. So the understanding how they behave in soil and how they behave in plan, like the uptake and all that we can decide what's the best approach?

And do you set when you go into a site? Do you set specific thresholds that you would consider these sites that ought to be remediated? Or how are those…

So how that works. So we do know that when soil lead concentration, so if you look at EPA, the residential swill lead limit is 400 milligrams per kilogram. But that was determined, we decided, based on 10 micrograms per deciliter of children's blood lead concentration. In 2012, the CDC had a group of scientists looking at all the health sciences looking at all the effects of a bad lead on children health. And the recommendation was that no blood level is safe for children. CDC cannot go, I mean, going forward two micrograms per deciliter is not practical. So they went with this 95th percentile, which was five micrograms per deciliter limit. And currently CDC is in considering to actually bring it down further to three micrograms per deciliter. So, after CDC is the change from 10 to five, actually, EPA did not do any kind of change to the residential soil lead limit. But we all know that based on to whom we talk to me know that this this concentration of soil lead could be 150 200. But again, as a soil scientist, I know that the what really matters is not the total concentration, you could have even 400 to 400 or higher, so lead by the city is not bioavailable, then it might be safer than a soil with 159 milligrams per kilogram of lead. But but but the lead is bioavailable. So I know, I think that what we use is not the total concentration, we look at total concentration because that's what mostly people want to know. But at the same time we make decisions based on bio accessibility. Because bio accessibility is we do have tests, proven tests with animal to animal feeding studies, that we can mimic gastro intestinal dissolution of soil lead, and then determine what's the the amount of lead that can be bio the maximum amount of lead that can be bio accessible to human child or the adult human if they accidentally ingest that soil to other decisions we made based on both?

And are these treatments, radiation treatments that you would apply to the soil? Are they if this were to roll down to the level of the producer? Would it be the gardener or the farmer or the land owner or teller would they be the ones that would be having the responsibility of doing these treatments?

Yeah, so yeah. And then most of the time these soil amendments as is towns are things that province will gardeners use. For example, when it comes to that it's it is phosphorus to all of us use phosphorus as fertilizer and fertilize other garden I mean loans and everything with phosphorus. So, the reason phosphorus is the most effective treatment for to reduce lead bioaccessibility phosphorus can induce formation of lead phosphate and specific group of lead phosphate known as Title Five and that has very little solubility even if it is subject to very acidic summer conditions. So So phosphorus or either depending on soil properties, we may not be directly recommending to use straight fertilizer. It may be that the organic source of phosphorus, organic source of phosphorus that slowly releasing phosphorus and maintaining phosphorus in a high enough level to promote these kinds of transformation and reduced bioaccessibility of lead, because you know that phosphorus has two sides. So these kinds of benefits are they are it's a fertilizer plant with two compete their lifecycle to we need to maintain good, good phosphorus levels. But at the same time, the phosphorus nitrogen ending up in surface water can cause eutrophication. Considering all that some of those sides, if we find that the extractable levels of phosphorus is already high than what we recommended could be slow releasing fertilizers mostly like organic, like, like compost. Did I answer your question?

Yes, you did. Thank you very completely.

I know that you had mentioned the Dr. Jay Weeks a little bit earlier. And I've visited with him in the past, actually, he was one of our hosts for a period of time. And we talked a lot about sequestration of co2 and with global warming and everything we know about co2 in the atmosphere. Can you tell us a bit about how that system works? And is that something that you're working on as well?

Yeah, I work on it. And before I had a PhD student and actually working on entirely that over PhD, and then if we look at why we are interested in a carbon soil carbon sequestration and so it depends on the AVI looked at what the carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere and what's the carbon dioxide concentration and a carbon concentration in the an organic carbon specifically in the top one meter of soil. And then you see that the top one to one meter of soil contains organic carbon two to three times higher than what we have in the atmosphere. And then simply will do we know that the geologic carbon tools can be much high and then the other marine and environment carbon and can be high, but if you consider why we consider as soil carbon sequestration as a mitigation efforts, the soil is in direct contact with the atmosphere. So soil can be a simple source for carbon. So I do know that the soil can be your thing to the photosynthesis and photosynthesis processes using carbon dioxide and water, when sunlight is there to convert inorganic carbon to organic carbon, and then this organic carbon gets into soil. And then the part of it can be composed and release carbon dioxide back. And at the same time, there can be waste with this carbon this because the organic carbon actually going to be part of what we consider as soil organic carbon or the humors. And then finding ways to keep this carbon in soil longer, longer. We consider the call as carbon sequestration. So the I was interested in like, I'm always interested in understanding basic, like mechanisms. My whole research interest is understanding mechanisms of any processes that I'm interested in. So, we were interested in looking at the temperate soils like Mali soils from that was Dr. Chuck Rice's Long Term field study is actually close to 30 years now. And at the time we sample it, it was over 23 years, and I post on the continuous court. And they had these treatments, different levels of nitrogen fertilizer, and also to two different sources of nitrogen fertilizers. And then looking at the carbon sequestration mechanisms, like how carbon getting sequences, how soil mineralogy can impact that sequestration. And then also we compare that system with a long term field studies about that long, more than 22 years long study from Brazil as well, because soil types are different. So no farm soil that was a Mali soil. And then we consider those soils that are relatively younger. And then when we consider the Brazil that soil goes and oxic souls and that was highly weather and high in iron, aluminum and manganese, oxy hydroxide. So there are mechanisms. When we look at carbon sequestration mechanisms, you could see that more influence from a mineralogy and it doesn't mean that when you go to moleculer levels and looking at that level, even in Mali soil they're both in their contribution from mineralogy. So initial contribution from mineralogical evidence And in both systems, again, you know that the all of us as researchers, we have interest. And then sometimes depending on funding, we move from one to another to at the moment I do not have active projects that looking at carbon sequestration. But I am always interested in that aspect of the potential of soil to the carbon soil carbon sequestration to be mitigation efforts for climate change.

Is this something that takes a little bit of doing to get farmers to buy into the idea of changing their methods to to help enhance co2 sequestration? Is it something where they're going to have to change what they're doing? Or are there current practices that will work well into that?

I think current practices, most of the time. If you think about farmers, they try to do the best they can do to protect their soils. I mean, that doesn't really they, they do not want to do things to harm their soils. So the those both those studies, I mentioned, one in North farm and the one in Brazil, actually both had killed and Northfield system that we compare. So you know that no note here low reduce tail is something that farmers moving towards most farmers, it's hard for us to find feel sometimes that continuously. So the no till practices, adding the residue back into soil, use cover crops, and all sorts of those things that you mean opportunities for farmers to increase, soil carbon levels increase, as well as not just increase temporary but but maintaining good soil carbon levels. That's something farmers actually willing to do, I think, not just you know, having incentives by having an incentive, definitely will help. But you can see the incentive, I actually read recent articles related to getting prairies to enhance carbon sequestration, and Texas and they were talking about how that can work, how the farmers to keep those things or how people to maintain those kind of natural areas, as is goodwill college, because the public company is they are looking for ways to get carbon clean. So maybe they can work with people who are maintaining prairies and contribute into this carbon sequestration, reclaiming carbon so they can work together. So there can be not not just government incentives, there can be like private entities that are willing to work with and do this kind of creating carbon trading. So those kinds of things could work, I think farmers why they would consider doing this because they know that if they can maintain good organic carbon concentration in soil that would enhance microbial activity. So that is promoting nuclear cycling, and then promoting nuclear cycling, meaning that the amount of fertilizer inputs are going to be reduced over time. So there are a lot of positive things that farmers going to gain by doing it. And then this carbon sequestration is actually part of soil aggregation as well, too. If you improve soil aggregation to the then that will improve a lot of other physical properties as well. So the the AI and water movement in soil so I think it's a win situation for farmers. It's something that's going to improve their soils and into their soil productivity in the long run.

Are there parts of the world that have a greater need for this kind of approach than others if we you know, we talk about the Southeast important part of Kansas, but if we look globally, are there areas?

Yeah, I think if we look at like Africa and the other soils like, very deficient in carbon, the end then they may not have that many sources, but they could consider the conservation type of agriculture management practices to preserve carbon in soil and enhance carbon in soils. So yes, the highly weathered soils and then the drier areas, the arid and semi arid climates. If you find less carbon in soil to that will be more beneficial, even more beneficial for those farmers to do those kinds of practices.

So I was wondering back to thinking about contaminants, I was wondering if you're talking about processes to do to make inorganics less bioavailable, I was wondering if there are things that people do to their soil that actually do the reverse that make things worse. You know, that set up the mechanisms set up mechanisms that actually make those inorganics uptake into uptake into the crops more than they would have otherwise.

Yeah, so the we sometimes do it intentionally. So we call it pride extraction. That's a method of phyto remediation. phyto remediation is in general, meaning like using plants to remediate soils, sediments or water, sometimes we intentionally try to remove use plants to remove contaminants from soil, it does work for some contaminants, but not folk, highly mobile contaminants like lead. So for something like lead, it's more effective to try to introduce stabilize it, for them trying to extract it. So the attempt to enhance lead uptake by adding EDT, to the key leading the enhanced lead solubility by acylation and getting plants a carb, but no matter what, since plants are not taking lead, that much what happens when you add something like that to enhance the photo extraction, you would put that I mean, that lead can be subject to maybe moving downward or moving elsewhere to so that could be problematic. So that's why we do need to understand how we can deal with each of these contaminants. And each of those situation like what's the best way to handle it, but the something like arsenic for example, they are raw group of plants, we call that like hyper accumulators, that means they can accumulate these contaminants higher than normal plants would do. And then, so, those kinds of hyper accumulators would allow us to do that clean up, like use plants and grow plants for some time to do the cleanup. But if you do, but unfortunately, that doesn't work that well for most trace elements, contaminants, most trace elements are the zone to soil follow is very strong. So they uptake is very low. And then even if you find a hyper accumulator, you know that the removal is going to be dependent on not only how much they can accumulate in their plant, but also the biomass. So, most hyper accumulators will do their high packing laters meaning that they can have like a high concentration in their tissue, but they are not really a large biomass producers. So, if you do calculations, it can take a long time to do the cleanup, it may take 20-30 or more years to do the cleanup, but still, if you want to do that kind of cleanup, so, that would be the situation where we tried to do enhance availability, so that plants will take up and to your question, if you asked like can we make it more bioavailable, so, it ended up being food crops or something which we do not find? It can happen if we do it without understanding that particular soil. I think it can happen if we try to just do it without understanding the situation of soil. I can give you a example if you look at arsenic, arsenic is something that we are very much concerned about. And you see that people talking about some moss and it came out but Jews or somebody making apples or making rice and things like that. And then one thing I want to tell you that arsenic, lead and all other potentially toxic trace elements, they are naturally present in soil. So there's nothing called like positive lead positive, arsenic positive or negative because it's everywhere in various, you know the concentrations that are not harmful to us in most cases. And then in the air we breathe Again, if what matters is the concentration, is it a ball concentration that's going to harm us. So, if it is not higher than that, then then we are not concerned. So, same thing in waters in water you find these three potentially toxic trace elements in very small quantities. So, consolidation, so, we are concerned if it is a bottom the drinking water who the that motor quality standards. So, if you take arsenic is less bioavailable under oxic conditions. So, that means like the urban gardening Oh, we are the corn no we to any kind of gardening we do the latest soils in the biome because arsenic under that condition arsenic is going to stay as arsenic five and we do know that arsenic five species do chain by soil colloid and then they are by they are not bioavailable, but if you consider rice paddies and that is grown and then soils underwater. So, when soils and the water then the there's less oxygen going in and then the the whatever the oxygen labs can be consumed by microorganisms and then soon after about 10-14 days after the submergence, so it will become in like sub toxic to anoxic, under that as some toxic or non toxic environment those these Robotnik because I am Iron is a good Kevin iron oxide is a good scavenger for arsenic. So, the iron oxides and hydroxides can undergo reductive dissolution, the dissolution actually induced by reduction of irons. So, that these arsenic can really and then actually cool So, this release arsenic in five form can reduce into arsenic three, and then the arsenic retention to soil Polo is less than the arsenic five and even if it's routine, it's not actually retained via stronger the mechanisms. So, they can be they can become easily more bio available and then under under toxic conditions the arsenic availability can be high, but then again soils turning into an anoxic conditions more or less no oxygen under that conditions arsenic can get the sunlight and it can get people to the into sulfides and become a less available. So, so, so, I so, I think we do need to understand what the situations we are dealing with, and then understand the chemistry of soil understand the behavior of that particular contaminant. So, organic or inorganic contaminants of interest, and then then then think about things through that, how we can better manage it better, better manage it,

When you've got a contaminated soil, and you've talked about a few ways of mitigating some of that contaminants being taken up into the plant. Do you have when the soil is taken care of? And you're, you're mulching it? You're adding composted soil on top of that and working it in? Do you have a dilution effect over time there that will help mitigate just total quantities of material that's in there.

Thank you for bringing that back point. That's one thing I forgot to mention before. So, the things about why we sometimes go with those organic sources other than direct fertilizers, if you think about composed to any other organic source, we add in high quantities. So sometimes like 1/3 or one food by volume to offer 15 centimeter soil so and then mix it well. So, the immediate benefit that farmers get from that kind of application is the dilution effect. Sometimes dilution effect can be very high, and depending on the amount you make, and it can be to the 40% of dilution, then you do it that so and then maintaining that not by adding every year, but adding it every three months in every meal. So farmers can maintain that dilution in two years, the adding high quantities of organic matter will that would be the immediate benefit that farmers going to get and then the transforming into less bioavailable forms. Sometimes take time. And if it is a soluble P we are adding, we know that it can be quiet. I mean, it's relatively fast, but again, it depends on wheels. Late availability, because a lead is not available for plan to take off, could be the lead is not available for phosphorus react either. So because of that leads and those reaction can take place, take time. But the immediate benefit of adding something like organic matter would be dilution.

Well, as John said, this is a very, very complicated topic, but it's probably as critical to our food supply as any soil, if the soil quality is not there, the crops are not going to grow appropriately. And so that's just a fascinating area.

If you look at, we are looking at so we were originally going with a FAOW2 standard and those cortex limit, who lead concentration in any type of vegetables, but if the started looking at those by themselves, but at the same time, sometimes you see that these initial numbers coming out of scientifically, there's no base. Unfortunately, those could be completely decided by like toxicology tanpoint. And as some of you have food scientists, so you know that everything in food is not bioavailable, so we have to kind of consider that as well, especially when you are developing these types of standards. So that's a complete subject area that we can talk.

That is that is another complete subject area. And yeah, many times regulations are set, not necessarily based on based on the science that that's needed to set them behind it.

Yes, absolutely. Very intense learning situation. For me, certainly, like, I was probably one of those people that thought that soil was just something that held the plants, you know, physically.

I've learned I've learned with soil scientists, you do not call it dirt do not call it. So,

I was going to say that soil is very important for environmental quality. So the one of the causes I am teaching environmental quality, something that I tell my students this school is you can expect to learn about environmental quality, from the perspective of a soil scientist to how soil can how much may rely on soils, you know, not only to like group plans, and you know, provide that way but and then sometimes our objectives could be like holding a building or some something completely different. But at the same time, a lot of if we look at like these recycling, we expect soil to do lot of things, you know, feel the contaminants, degrade contaminants, and protect, cover groundwater, and then protect cover surface waters, and then with carbon mitigation and other efforts, and then help with global climate change. I think I think there's a lot that we can do,

And much more dynamic system that people appreciate.

Yes, speaks nicely to the global food systems approach towards interdisciplinary research. It touches on so many things and there's so many areas that work into it.

If you have any questions or comments you would like to share check out our website at https://www.k-state.edu/research/global-food/ and drop us an email. Our music was adapted from Dr. Wayne Goins's album Chronicles of Carmela. Special thanks to him for providing that to us. Something to Chew On is produced by the Office of Research Development at Kansas State University.

In this episode, we will visit with Dr. Marcellus Caldas, a self-described economic/environmental geographer. Dr. Caldas research focus remains on the analysis of land use and land cover change, environmental processes, spatial patterns, and its effect on policies and governance at different scales. Dr. Marcellus Caldas, is the Assistant Provost, International Collaboration and Educational Programs, Office of International Programs.

Transcript:

Food Production and Environmental Challenges in the Rain Forests of South America - with Dr. Marcellus Caldas, Assistant Provost, International Collaboration and Educational Programs, Office of International Programs

Trying to see their perspective how they feel about that now what's going on with him and try to see know where the problems come from. It try to work with policymakers to show for instance and that also there is that helping is create much more problem for the be part of the population that they didn't consider.

Something to Chew On is a podcast devoted to the exploration and discussion of Global Food Systems produced by the Office of Research Development at Kansas State University. I'm Maureen Olewnik, coordinator of Global Food Systems.

I'm Scott Tanona. I'm a Philosopher of Science.

And I'm Jon Faubion. I'm a Food Scientist.

Hello everyone, and welcome back to the Kansas State University Global Food Systems podcast Something to Chew On. In today's podcast, we will visit with Dr. Marcellus Caldas, a self described economic environmental geographer. Some of Dr. Caldas past research included the study of the cocoa economy, and effects of that economy on the Atlantic Rainforest of Brazil. This work evaluated the attitudes of cocoa farmers and implications on the environment. Dr. Caldas research focus remains on the analysis of land use and land cover change environmental processes, spatial patterns, and its effect on policies and governance at different scales. Dr. Caldas is a Professor of Geography and Geospatial Science. Marcellus carries PhDs in Applied Economics from the College of Agriculture at the University of Sao Paulo, Brazil, and in geography from Michigan State University. Welcome, Marcellus. And thank you so much for joining us today on this podcast. We're looking forward to learning a lot more about your background and about the work that you do in the food related area. But before we get started down that path, could you give us a little background on yourself? And how you got interested in moving into this kind of activity?

Yeah, good morning everyone. I think my story is not so different from many people that work within the environment was a small boy in the Amazon. So I was born in the Amazon, the Brazilian Amazon, and was our boys. It was a boy scout, I had a trip in the summer of 1968, or 69. So the idea of the trip was to go and learn about the trans Amazon highway, the trans Amazon highway was a federal road that the Brazilian government was building, you know, crossing the Amazon from east to west. The idea was to bring people to the land, and connect with land the people. So in that trip, now, I had chance to see no, what was the Amazon going outside the big city, and see the jungle and see the population that live in the end. So. So in that trip, instead of seeing that the development that they go over there was proposing, now, as a young boy, what I saw was a bunch of destruction, you know big trees, erosion, you know Native American pushing out of their lands, and so on. So that was very touching for me, you know, seeing that type of seeing it wasn't what I was expecting to see. No, I was expect to see wildlife. And I saw by doing that. And when I went to college, I decided to become environment values. But not this sense. But in the sense of this study, you know, I'm an economist by background. I have a PhD in applied economics, by the College of Agriculture at the University of San Paolo. And I have a PhD in geography where I work with GIS remote sensing, and my idea was to learn how to preserve forests conservation for us. Now, that's what I do work with Phil in the US political change. I do environmental studies, and trying to implement and change policy. That's basically some of my background.

As I was reading through in your background, you mentioned that working in the Amazon, you had done work on cocoa plantations or cocoa growing activities in that area. Can you expand a little on what that was about?

Yeah, one of the things that we had done, in fact, wasn't Amazon was that the Atlantic forest was when there was a professor in the College of Agriculture. In one of the university in Brazil, we had a grant from Conservation International, to look at the farmland, his decision of the cocoa farmers. Now, the Atlantic forest is one of the most degraded forests in the world, probably Brazil has now just 4% of that forest, the rest was completely logged the Forest, for globalization, in agriculture, and so on. But the cocoa plantation it's very interesting because they have a production system where they use the shades of the big trees, known to protect the trees, the cocoa trees. And what happened is that Brazil was one of the biggest producers will number one, in terms of cocoa. And the state of Bahia the place that I was working, he was the number one for the country. And cocoa is like any other commodities that are boom bust, and we are going through a very good boom. However, in a 1986 and seven, know the cocoa price went down, at the same time that he sees that which boom to seize, will start to appear in the cocoa farms, and in this state of Bahia. So there was a perfect storm for the farmers. Simple reason, cocoa, the disease wasn't damaged from the Amazon. And nobody could understand how that this is appeared in this stage of my year that was more than 3000 miles for that place. So many tourists appears we were interesting to understand now how the farmers were responding to this crisis. So we got this grant phone Conservation International to interview farmers and try to figure out what they were doing. And what we saw was a big change. No, the cocoa was basically a transition in the state of Bahia, especially in the south part of the state and very conservative area in the farmers that completely changed land use. So we start to see farmers selling farms that they had for more than 100 years now selling to pay the debts that the fees and the price would cause them to them. So we start to see the cutting of the whole plantation, the bigger trees into grass land, in some place, we saw coffee in someplace, we saw a coconut. So it was very interesting to see how they change the perception, you know, they said that they couldn't support know what the trees was doing. They have in the area Research Center that diversity specifically for coco but with we saw the economic deprives the sending could do much to help them so now is different. So after 30 years, we start to see that they get injection of money, they develop new wires that are more resistance to disease and you start to see now the cocoa come back. But what was done was done so they lost many areas of forest that will protect very protected by the cocoa farm for the brokers system. That's what they call their one day clean underneath the big trees plant cacao. So that was the study to understand the formula to use disease, how that was changed. Now, the lands changed in the region.

Is there any resistance amongst any people or groups to the approach that you're using as a work that you're doing? Are you, is it pretty well generally seen as a good thing?

Well, no depends where you are in the country. So if you are in the Atlantic Forest, no, we don't have much forest there. So there are a huge interest in protect that there are endemic animals that are they gold monkey on the Beco lounge or the small monkey with His face is completely, no big the bite is almost a gold. That is another one that's the face is gold and the body is black. So designing them for their so people like when you do this type of work, but you cannot say the same when you go to the Amazon. Now, when you go to the Amazon do this type of work? No, it's you got to make sure that you are well connected with people that work there, especially farmers. No, we don't go in just to start to do your work with contact all these. No Association cooperative is make sure that people understand well, your work. If not, you can get in trouble I'm going to give an example was in 97, I think I was with a professor for Michigan State. And we're looking at we'll try to identify lightning areas and Amazon use remote sensing. So the idea was to go to the field, collect some points, some polygons using GIS, and use that to help us to validate the classification of the image. We got lost, you know, in the jungle going around, and we decided to stop and to get some points put in map to see where we are. Well, we saw that two guys came in a horse with rifles, guns and asked us what we are doing there. So we had to explain what we're doing. And the guy Yes, What's this gringo doing here as to what my colleege it was me? And so, we had to explain it. We have to give a name say well, we work with these. And we know this people say yeah, but okay, but next time, don't don't come to this side. Now, and we can understand when we were driving because there are so many logging roads inside the forest, when we had to drive we saw that this group that actually they were doing illegal logging there. So depends where you are, you are going to see no these type of things happening. So, it's interesting work. But it's a little dangerous if you are not prepared to work with disputes. So that's what I tell my clients that never go to this place alone. No, never go without contact people talk to people, let's do the baseboard first before we can go to the field. Now, if people don't have any idea how much danger is stored in some parts of the Amazon, a lot of gold mining, illegal gold mining, you can no work with could be driving around. And suddenly you get in a place that nobody knew. We have these big people, villages or whatever you want to call. Now we could use all kinds of people there working, logging, mining is kind of dangerous. So

It brings to mind what you recently got a seed grant through the global systems here. And part of the topic is assessing rural perception of Land Management, what you just described is kind of scary. I mean, in there, there are a lot of things. What have you learned there that relate to the work that you're doing here? Or are they just totally different landscapes that really don't overlap with one another.

Yeah, they are totally different landscapes for many reasons, one of the things that we see here. We are in an area that is very well developed now, people are very well informed themselves, the management of the landscape. We are looking at fire Conservation Reserve programs now. So people knows how to manage the fire. What happens he that sometimes the fire gets out of control because of the wind, you know, and that's going to affect the perception or some farmers around say, well, these are going to affect me, I'm going to just know, do this type of things to avoid this by coming to my property. Now they're very, very informative. They are the owners of the land, now going to places in Brazil like the Amazon. There are a lot of public land and people are grabbing land. Now, imagine that Oklahoma and Kansas in the beginning where people would come grab land. That's what happened in the Amazon. That's what is happening right now. Now people are there is a law in Brazil that say that you use the land for five, five years in one day. You are the owner of the land. So that's kind of thing that people do in the Amazon. People don't want to use to go around and start asking questions about what we're doing. It's kind of dangerous if we go to the middle of the jungle start. It's kind of compared to what you see here. Now, it's a jungle there. And here it's completely developed. Now, if you go to the savanna there in Brazil, in the middle of the country where the agribusiness in general are working, it's completely different. Now, they're gonna treat you the same way. So enforcing the works. Governance works. Not completely like here but works, they not gonna kill you, like in the Amazon. So that's the big difference that I see. No, people don't like to talk about this. But this is the reality. If you look at indicting aiders, they, we had a bunch of kills that will not say, a word, a highlight in the newspaper or the world environmentalists being killed in the Amazon. So, no, I think that there are some places that we can see that it's similar, but places that are completely closed.

I see part of the activities that you head up at K State includes coordinating and collaborating initiatives to do research internationally. Can you explain a little bit what that brings to the state of Kansas? What is the importance of that kind of international collaboration? And, you know, what's the value to the food system within the United States and certainly within the state of Kansas?

Yeah, that's, I think the one of the things that my position we strive to do is to create more opportunities for faculty to work in problems that don't have boundaries. You know, what, let me give you an example. We produce soybeans in the United States, Brazil lost produce soybeans. Now, which kind of problem both countries are facing that could be solved in benefit both countries. So the idea is to develop collaboration help affects develop preparation is that gonna help both countries, we have a disease in soybeans, and in Brazil, that we don't have any United States, or develop a collaboration for them, can help us to stay one step ahead. Now, look at the problem of the wishbone that happened in the state of Bahia, Brazil, if Brazil had been working with orders, now, maybe they wouldn't be suffering what they know suffered, because of the disease. So the idea of this, which kind of collaboration would benefit us and others, of course, there are people's there are some people with more interest in doing or no local regional state work at the international work. But there are also people that would like to do a little bit more international work, because they can no benefit for injection of funds. In some regions, for instance, now we have a lot of interest in helping African countries. So there are funds available now for people that want to work. But we need to know which countries so it's very important to see what are the problems in my office in helping them to learn about that opportunity to that country and connect people. For from that country with people from here in developing this type of proposal that can benefit both countries. That's the idea of the resource.

Would you say that the problems that you're addressing in well, in all this work, are they you think of them as like people problems? Or do you think of them as you know, economic problems or something else?

I think that both I think for instance global warming. So that's a societal problem that we need to face in there are problems that are problems that we created. Now, for instance, a bad manager of your soil in your farm. Now, if you're not aware, if you don't know how to do it, even to just increase the problem. I think that the thing is that separates these problems, what are the problems that we create? What are the problems that is the government that creates? What's the problem that society in general creates, it's look at the case of Brazil. Now, these were what's known big problem of inequality. There are 1% of the population. Very, very rich, and there is a middle class in the middle That's not to big and the majority population is poor. So no its a problem that society creates. So depends on what you are analyzing. And we can separate these problems.

When you look at, like any of these things that you've described, and going back to the cocoa production in Brazil, and there was a disease was one major factor here. Right? So the price in general is another factor, who, for problem like that, how do you think about like the different stakeholders and the like, how do you go about addressing sort of the challenges that you've got? Right? You know, is this work where you're talking in interviewing lots of different people? Are you looking, you know, more at the system's point of view? Where do you intervene? And, you know, what do you do?

Yeah, yeah, that's a good question, what I tried to do I try to connect the different scales, what try to look at the local scale the Farmer, Know, what are the problems he's facing, and try to connect these to a large scale, like a regional scale, or national scale for global scale. Now meaningful, the problems that you face at a larger scale, were sometimes developed at the module, B, a large scale, and it was a national policy that was created to prevent now, some things to happen. And that's affecting different farmers in different ways. So the idea is to review. Now my working to view this farm and trying to see their perspective, how they feel about that now, what's going on with him, and try to see know where the problems come from. It tried to work with policymakers to show for instance, and that also there is that helping is create much more problem for the be part of the population that they didn't consider now, and how to change that or how to create other policies that can benefit the majority of the population, not just the 60 groups. Now, that would be benefit from their policy, and so on. So it's my work that works at the different scales, now try to understand, I do a lot of work for the field. I do fieldwork, interview farmers, lens less people, policymakers in try to understand how this system works, you know, what can be done now to adjust and create policies to benefit society?

How often is it that there are groups of people that have just been entirely overlooked in the policy decisions that are made? And often are you actually finding? Well, look, we know who the stakeholders are, but we just didn't know what they what they wanted. And when we do this fieldwork, we discover new things about them. Are you also pointing out, you know, new pockets of people and stakeholders? And, that if that should have been included in part of the process and weren't?

Yeah, that's one of the things that's very important doing this type of field work now is to look at groups and think that through and see it? No. I'd like to use some example of Brazil, people can compare now with the United States, and being in the United States now we see now that business the industry, it's very well organized in doing pressure and developing for their own interest. This is a very different thing in South American Latin America in general. Now, some places like Brazil, the agribusiness for instance is very strong business, and they have a very group very well organized compress of the government. But if you look at the other part of the society, like small farmers that they don't have all the support, they leave it for resistance, it just produced to eat now, they don't have this lobby. And many of the policies that are developed now, it's going to focus on one part of the supply chain. Now, general commodities, and forget from the other part, that the people that produce just resistance to survive. Now, and that's one of the things so the idea is to know look at these different agents in the supply chain, and see how these policies are affected by these different agents.

So in many ways the farming system in the US is changed over time, a lot recently, right but but we understand sort of all the parts in some ways and it may be less the case Is that where there's less overall organization? Or like you said the different lobbying partners are not, you know, not as well developed and not as well established? And hasn't everybody? Or they're still missing pieces, though here in the US have voices in the food systems that are just sort of not not being represented? Do you think?

I think they are very well represented. They are not too strong. No, that's the difference for me, they are represented different from Brazil, what they are, some pieces are not represent are not part of the analysis. Here they had part of the nest, although they are not too strong. Now, that's one of the big differences that I see. Now, if you look at, if you ask you, what is the agricultural frontier in the United States? People are gonna tell me, we don't have it. Right. So by saying that we don't have a it we say, Well, we know we are. We are now using everything that we have, we know everything that's going on, and so on. But if you look at countries like Brazil, or countries in Africa, where the agricultural frontier is to moving now, there are a bunch of piece that you are learning when you move to these frontiers. Now, sometimes people know, have made a mistake in my perception say, well, but we don't have any agricultural frontieres anymore. No, we do know there are places in the Amazon known place in Africa that nobody's living there just now in case of Brazil, some indigenous people there. So from Brazil we are still moving. And there are a bunch of things that we we don't understand how that works. Let me give you an example here. Now that I see, for instance, if you look at scientific papers, no research has been done in the last nine years about Linda COVID changed Amazon. The you're going to see that people blame the agribusiness for what's going on in terms of deforestation far so well, but when you look at how they interpret ag business, in fact, they are talking about large farmers. No data classify activities by the type of the crop is the commodity by the size of the farm, by how intense now is the use of inputs that and to facilitate, know the analysis, they call agribusiness. However, know the classical definition of agribusiness, is the whole agents. Reform gate, the production to the tables for there. I like to say from the fuel to the fork, but it's not there to this issue that they apply when they're in why and what's missing there. Now all those so far, they cannot capture these peak definition was the organisms from pre farm gate to post farm gate. And we always consider agribusiness equation variables modeling. So but in fact, it's very endogenous because no in frontier areas, when do I buy a chainsaw? No, when do I buy seeds to put grass, the agribusiness, they're working for you and how can you comment for that in the modeling. So there are a lot of things that we are trying to understand now in this process of development, that here we are marching now informed because these are happening now. 1800 1900s. Now, if this happened and is still happening now.

Can you give us any specific specifics on the impact that you have had directly on policy and governance related to these to these activities? I may have missed something that you said prior to but are there any are there any specific detail or specific activities that you point to that were impacted?

Yeah, I think that as a professor, one of the my main goals was to call attention for problems now helping advance the leader at work in my field that led us when the COVID change or land use science. I think that the leader of land use science talks a lot about drivers of political change. And one of our demands that we had now I don't, it's not just me. But the group that I have been worked with for many years. It was trying to show new drivers offline for a change that people can. We didn't have a leader to. For instance, I have a colleague and co author for him one paper that talks about to contention, let to COVID change. No. And before nobody can understand what what was contention when COVID change and the idea was to show that fight for land No, in the Amazon was leading to deforestation. And one of these The was a consequence of the Brazilian law. No, the Constitution that was not pay attention for this details. Let me give you an example of they're now in the in the presidency of Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, he was a leftist president in Brazil, he was supporting social movements organization for land reforms. And these organizations, they were in occupying large profits. In many parts of the country, especially in the Amazon. The Amazon, we had large farmers, when they say large farmers the big they are 30,000 hectares 60,000 acres. And it's very difficult to monitor them on the field, a large property like there. So search movement organization where we occupy these lands now and try to force the government to appropriate the property and transform the property in small farm for them. So we start to look at satellite image, and we start to see different patterns in the landscape now and we'd like to grant for our National Science Foundation, we get some grants or get together and delete scam. Now, see how those lender forms settlements are affect Linda COVID change. One of the things that we learned with this proposal was that because of this law, that say that if you work in land for five years in a day, now you get the right to the land, and the government has the ability to this is appropriate, your land in give to others, we start to see that these movements they occupy, know this part of the land, these old properties properties, large profit, and they're the own it to protect the land. They will create militias. Now to monitor the land. So we start to see a lot of crime in some locations and the Amazon. At the same time we start to see a lot of deforestation. Well, people ask, How come the deforestation, the land reform and they create a encampments inside the forest to produce foods force of resistance, and the owner of the property, because a lot of the propets now are for land speculation. When they saw that they would lose the land. What they did was to occupy the land, cleaned the land for the grassland and wait for the ground to disappropriate and pay the value of all the infrastructure that he developed on the farms that had developed in the land. So with that, we start to see this contention now be a factor in political change. So that's one of the big advances. You know, I'm showing that the way there is contention can lead to clinical change in the Amazon. Another one and was separate know, this type of movement for spontaneous settlements. Let me give an idea what that means. There are two types of settlements for land reform in the Amazon one that is a consequence of social movement organization, they occupy the land. So Ricky, I'm usually turned off by the land, because that's the perception off of the land, the less people that want the land, they finally, but if you ask the owner of the farm, they say no, they are not occupied. They are invading my property. So it's a very interesting, you know, definitions that you need to work on. Talk to the people. In the case of the Amazon when the Brazilian government was opening the trans Amazon highway, bring people without land, to learn to talk people what they did was to develop settlements. Now in the 1970s. Now for these people they gave, they're gonna gave 100 hectares now, for families 300 hectares to 500, for people that want to create the business in develope it even more, no more advanced agriculture. Well, after four years, the kids of that family that moved to the Amazon, they became adults, they start to look for them, or land to create the farm on the acre bears. Now, this is a small piece of land, to be honest in the Amazon for a family, especially because of the soil that's nice roared and so on. So this perspective moves deeper in the forest to create their own settlements. Now, no social movement organization or behind your just little, what they call the life cycle of the household, they start to open trails and the forest, mark their own land, and use for five years after they have enough people, you know, around them, they decide to go to the ground, say, hey, we have this therapy for living here. We're living here for 10-15 years. So we need this for you need to legalize need to take off the land so we can get credit. You know, and so to improve the farm is completely different. The similarities in terms of the deforestation that they did in the air on the land was the forest like in this social movement organization. So now the governor didn't know that. And we have to show the data, Turing's talk to policymakers to see now how they can help this group for no increase the deforestation. So this is one of the consequences of the work.

What are the different ways that you can make your research and the results aware? I know as a faculty person I, you know, published in scholarly journals, are there additional ways that you need to get that information out to different groups?

Yeah, yeah, I wonder you're working places like that. No real need to make sure that to have a broad impact? No, the idea is to prepare the information, not just the cost for us, but also for the farmers development workshops, develope talks, now where you're going to educate them about the problems that they face policy makers the case of Brazil, no, they are in Brasilia, the capital or in the capital city in the state. Now and we have connections, we need to you need to develop this connection to people so that you can present reports you can present, make your case, to show why these need to change. Sometimes we need to work off nouns for known nongovernmental organization to present report then because they have the larger genes and so on. So let's think there are many different ways to do that depends on what you know, if you want to create too much, no. First, sometimes going to the newspaper is a good one. Just want to call it data flows. Sometimes you just want to work with for the policymakers directly now in this state, and show them the importance of that let them fight for that thing for you. Now, depends on what you are looking for. How important is that thing, no perspective for that side. In particular. I'm what the most important thing is, I promise you, it's not to be afraid to show what you are doing, how important that for society.

Great, thanks.

The work you're doing with Dr. Joslin out of out of geography and Dr. Bergtold out of Ag Econ on the title of this is "Agricultural Food Production and Conservation Reserve Programs in the Context of Wildfire". Can you explain a bit about that particular project? And if there are things that you've just discussed that tie into this or how does this project play out in the overall perception of what you're working on today?

Yeah, that's a good question. You we look at the perceptual of farmers for a while, you know, try to understand how they perceive the danger of fire in their property, how that can affect food system. And values, norms, beliefs are very important ways to look at these now how much I value no conservation my profit. Now these thought to that is very difficult. Because we it's the way health measure is this for a modeler How to measure these things into models. And that's the most important thing that they're trying to figure out how to look at the various how to look at perception. How to look at normals how these is important for a farmer? No, that's producing to make money. No, that's, that's awesome. He in the West, now we start to see people associate in some location, well fires to conservation. Where are these, these, this guy was responsible for this big fire, he doesn't take care of this E CRP. And there why I don't have any here, no, in my profits, because I don't want to take the risk of no fire that come to my property, you know, it this. That's one of the things that I think that my work has do that's components, trying to understand, at the same time, try to develop known ways to create policy, understand how to influential policymakers for, you know, for change in that thing. So it is a work that is still in the beginning, we had the first data collection, but because of the COVID. Now, we couldn't move much, because some students tabulate the data for us. And they had to ask was, when you finished the collection of the data? No, it was in March of this year. And we know it is rolling, going back to that is to is that create modular proposal to submit for some fund agents to try to understand the influence of fire in the perceptions of the farmers and land use of us.

Yes, I recall the I don't know if this is what prompted this particular study. But there was just an absolutely devastating fire wildfire in the southern portion of Kansas.

Yeah, not just in Kansas, we know, after we start to look at these, we start to see no immediate differential location that goes from Nebraska, all the way down to Texas. So wildfires, so fire that became wildfires, and sometime we know no lack of management, no. And all they do is try to figure out the perception of the farms, how this is going to affect for CRPS in the United States, into effects conservation and so on. Yeah, I think that's, it's interesting and would be great maybe in the future to have, instead just one, but another one speaker, with a little more expertise in the West to do a comparison. Like I am not an expert in the United States, my work is in land use land cover change in Latin America, and tropical countries. You know, and it's sometimes difficult to do the comparison with the United States because my field now, but I see that's important is the environment economist, because that's where no changes that are occurring, the hands of no natural resources. So if we look at Brazil 4% of the GDP in Brazil, come for the agriculture sector. Now, the agriculture sector since 2008, now inject $350 billion in the Brazilian economy. So you know, it's 10% of the labor force was on that field. And because I was born there, now, I have interest to understand this process ologies affect the use of resources. Especially, if you look at climate change, how these change can affect society in general. So in maybe another person from the West will have a different perspective. Now I look at a the company compatible. Now inside production, like US are the biggest oil producer. And Brazil is the second one and they compete but there are the other thing is that they complement each other so that we wouldn't be making the maybe it is a little bit more interesting for the larger means.

Yeah, it'd be interesting sometime.

So it was a pleasure to talk to you guys and I hope that I have answered your questions. You have!

My insight, I hope it is interesting for people. Learn a little bit more about what I do and why it is important, my perspective.

If you have any questions or comments you would like to share check out our website at https://www.k-state.edu/research/global-food/ and drop us an email. Our music was adapted from Dr. Wayne Goins's album Chronicles of Carmela. Special thanks to him for providing that to us. Something to Chew On is produced by the Office of Research Development at Kansas State University.

In this episode, we discuss the highly dynamic area of food safety as it pertains to food processors, regulators, and technology providers. Dr. Randall Phebus' area of study focuses on improving food quality and safety through laboratory and processing-based research. He also specializes in food microbiology as it relates to food safety, food biosecurity and defense and public health. Additionally, Dr. Phebus works with undergraduate and graduate students, helping to provide the knowledge needed for the next generation of food-safety experts.

Transcript:

At the Intersection of Industry and Academia – Food safety, interdisciplinary research and technology integration, with Dr. Randall Phebus, professor in animal science and industry at Kansas State University

This is really exciting to me. You know, it's kind of opening up a new era of integrated food safety and a lot of it is based on machine learning and artificial intelligence and food safety culture developments.

Something to Chew On is a podcast devoted to the exploration and discussion of Global Food Systems produced by the Office of Research Development at Kansas State University. I'm Maureen Olewnik, coordinator of Global Food Systems.

And I'm Jon Faubion. I'm a food scientist.

Hello everybody, and welcome back to the K State Global Food Systems podcast something to chew on. The food we eat comes to us from a variety of sources, some through a complex international food chain, and some from our local farmers. Regardless of the source, the safety of that food is paramount in protecting the well being of you, your family, your friends, or your customers. In this podcast, we speak with Dr. Randall Phoebus. Professor in the Department of Animal Science and Industry here at K State. Randy specializes in food safety education research, where his teaching and study spans most food categories. He works closely with food processors, regulators and technology providers across the country focusing on food safety process validation. Randy's research has taken him from the biosecurity Research Institute at K State where to scale food safety studies have been carried out on beef processing, to the study of bakery products in proving that the oven is an effective microbiological kill step. Well, thank you so much for agreeing to do this. I've been wanting to get you on here for a while. And we've finally gotten around to doing it. And looking forward to the discussion. Welcome, Randy.

It's great to be with you guys. Today.

I've had the opportunity of working with Randy for many, many years. Your focus is on food safety, and certainly you're known around the world for a lot of the work that you've done in that area. We'll look forward to learning more about the research and understanding where your focus is and how that information has been used. But I'd like to start out with getting a little bit of background on you, who you are and what got you interested got you started in the area of food safety of microbiology and all of the things that go along with that.

Well, I'll tell you what, that they answer that it goes way back. My family. I'm from a little town in Tennessee called Waverly and my father and mother had been in the grocery business since before I was born, which was before 1968. We'll leave it at that. And so, you know, I grew up in the retail side of the food industry with my parents working at the unknown in the grocery store. And all through school and even college, I worked and supported that family business. But during that time, I also had a very keen interest. I have a lot of young folks pursuing a degree in veterinary medicine. And that's what I went to the University of Tennessee to study. And after I got my undergraduate degree in animal sciences, their University of Tennessee, and with discussion with some of the close friends in the veterinary field that I worked with, I made the decision that really wasn't what I wanted to do and just pure fortune, I was able to connect with a actually a Kansan, Dr. Jim Riemann, who was a meat scientist, specialist, that professor there at the University of Tennessee, and he convinced me in one meeting, basically that food science, and particularly food safety, which is my area would kind of be my calling in. So I was somewhat familiar with it just from my family heritage, but I really got into the food science and got my master's degree there at University of Tennessee and then state owned for PhD in food safety, which I got in December of 1992. And I actually came to K State and began my assistant professor position here and food safety and in the Animal Science and Industry department a month before I got my degree, my PhD degree actually. So I was here in November of 92. And although I've had numerous opportunities to go to industry or even to go back to my home university over the years, I have chosen to stay at K State. And I think pretty much I'm going to complete my long career here at K State. So I'm in my 28th year as being a professor of food safety. And it's been a really dynamic ride, I guess we would say, to participate and watch how food safety has evolved and progressed across the globe, actually, in this last three decades is phenomenal. But then to look at where we are today, and look like we're going to be doing in the future, relative to public health and food safety, I think, I think the next decade is just going to be off the charts and in terms of what we have to do and can do to improve public health and food safety. So here at K State, yes, I'm on a 70% of research appointment. But I also, my 30% teaching appointment is just as exciting to me, where I'm mostly interacting with undergraduates, I teach the Introduction to Food Science course here, with so I'm the person who gets the students coming into the food science program on their very first year. So I try to instill enthusiasm and excitement in those students and really help them get off to a good start in our food science program through that course.

And you do that really well.

Well, thank you, Jon, I appreciate that.

I'll step back and ask kind of a global question on where you are on the work that you're doing these days. But what do you think are some of the most critical food safety issues in the food supply chain today?

Well, you know, we always in food safety, we're always focused on those pathogens that continue over the last several years, could be 100 years, causing us grief, things like salmonella, and E. coli, Listeria, they're not going away, we've got data showing that some in some cases, they're expanding. So that is still the big focus, I guess, just from pure food safety. But as we sit back and watch what's happened, just you know, over the last four months, COVID it's not per se a food safety issue, or we don't think it is at this time. But you never know what's going to come down the pike. I mean, today, you're working with salmonella. Tomorrow, you need to convert and work with a virus, you never know what's going to be on the agenda, you know, even the next day, but particularly in the next couple of years out. And to me, that's an exciting, you have to be adaptable and flexible and nimble to make sure that you can, you know, address what is, you know, the real focus point of any particular time and food safety. But looking ahead, I really think what's going to be exciting going forward and in hopefully we can even talk about that is we are integrating other technologies at a very rapid rate into our food safety, traditional type food safety programs. So here I'm talking about machine learning and blockchain and artificial intelligence and all of these things that us microbiologists really didn't think much about in the past. We are now coming up with great ways, probably just scratching the surface to make very good advancements that probably weren't thought about 10 years ago in terms of public health. So that's kind of what drives me in terms of excitement getting up every day is Yeah, and I know a lot about salmonella. I don't know much about blockchain. But I do know that I'm going to get left in the dust if I don't learn, because it's going to happen. It is happening right now. So hopefully that answers your question. But you know, you never know today, it's the integrated dynamic aspects of things that, you know, we look at things like nanomaterials, and they're using the food system. Well, they have so many implications, whether it's food safety, or nutrition, or personal safety of the people handling them. And so you can't just be any kind of one type of a scientist that anymore, you get to kind of span or cross disciplines, which to me, you know, I'm one of these people who's kind of like a sponge when it comes to wanting to get new knowledge every day. And whether that's in my field or outside of my field. That's what excites me.

Is there an issue a potential problem that you think that academic scientists or industrial food science are missing? That are they're ignoring or they're not wanting to face? I mean, are we kidding ourselves, in some cases, are just ignorant?

Well, you know, that's probably always going to be the case, try to take the optimistic approach to most things. We've got all the hurdles that are always there in terms, particularly in academia, of finding out and learning who's doing what, whether it's on campus or out in the industry or in another country, it doesn't matter, but breaking down those silos and those information barriers. That to me is where we are we continue to have difficulty even as much as we try to go interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary in our approaches to solving problems. I think we're making progress. But we still have a lot to do there. And, you know, that's one of the things that's always even before Maureen came to campus was exciting to me about our Global Food Systems Program is that's the goal, you know, is to get people out of their box and to get them talking across disciplines. So that we can bring new tools or new remedies to the table in an applied way, you know, not just dream up, but actually get them to work.

Do you think the university and this is a loaded question? So are there roadblocks that the university has to that interaction, or particularly to that interaction that might drive grant or contract? Reception to the faculty?

Well, that's kind of a difficult question and ganas guy even thought so much about it as a focused thought process. But you know, just being here so long I, Jon, you're one of the few people been here longer than me, I think. So you kind of pick up on what some of those barriers are to make this happen. And yes, we have differences in ways we approach things or rules and whatnot, across different colleges. Or if we're working at, for instance, the Biosecurity Research Institute, which is where I do a lot of my work. Sometimes I, you know, I value that facility like crazy, because I can do work that nobody else in the world can do at scale and that facility, including things like COVID, but you know, some of the barriers to getting in there and doing work efficiently and making it you know, there's not enough hours in the day to do all the paperwork and the IBC approvals and the IRB approvals in the biosafety training, I just think all of those things are important that we need to find ways to maximize the efficiency and take out some redundancy.

Yeah, and I think intellectual property has become an important factor or in some cases, almost a holy grail. And that certainly slows the process down in getting that resolved, if in fact, we do get it can get resolved between an industry funder and a university, doer or recipient.

All of that intellectual property and everything. And, you know, really, the root of all of that discussion is our budgets, you know, we continue to have budget issues, they are increasing as we were on the phone here. But to me, a lot of what I just went through in that list, for instance, training, I got a big staff, lab staff, and to have them trained and medically cleared through Via Christi here in town. And some trainings, we've probably got 20 modules, we have to go through each person each year. And I have to pay for that. And really, you know, there's not many budgets that you can cover all of that with not, you know, not even to mention the managing of all of that. So, right. I've always been looking, you know, just outside of the scope of science in my research program, but how can I do things more efficiently so that I'm not trying to do the paperwork as much as I am doing the pipetting. And in spreading plates and generating data? That's what my passion is, you know, right.

Randy, you were a recipient of a pretty major grant over the last couple of years. Can you talk a bit about that? You mentioned BRI, and the capabilities that you have there, and I think that grant opportunity took you into the facility. Can you give us a bit of background on what that was? And maybe some of the outcomes?

Absolutely. You know, even in my career that that has been a defining grant, defining program, that we got back in? Well, we submitted it in 2011. And were awarded the grant in 2012, through the US Department of Agriculture's NIFA program, and the National Institute of Food and Agriculture. And we were the recipient of what's called a cap grant, which is Coordinated Agricultural Projects grant. And that grant was $25 million over a five year duration. And it was multi institutional. I think we ended up with 17 Different institutions and two or three different agencies, government agencies working under that grant, there was five of us that managed it on a daily basis. The grant with to no cost extensions turned into a seven year effort. And K State was extraordinarily important in the overall $25 million grant we brought about nine in a little over 9 million to K State directly of the funding, which we were by far the largest recipient, recipient of the subcontract now that grant and it was focused on understanding and controlling ShiGa toxigenic E Coli across the entire beef system. So here we're talking about counting Production, Water and Environmental Management, beef processing, particularly, and then all of the things that happen as far as training the next generation of food safety specialist and doing teacher education in our K through 12. So it spanned everything you can imagine, for I'll tell you what I was tired at the end of it, it just ended in December of this past year. But to see what we accomplished in terms of working with the industry, it wasn't just us academics, even the beef industry was majorly involved letting us work in their facilities, helping us teach serving on advisory boards, and it was just a very big public private partnership effort. And, you know, we gained an understanding through all of this at a level that probably wouldn't have happened with your normal granting process of say, you know, a couple 100,000 to this project, and to that project, to be able to pull all that government funding together, pull the team together and make them work together toward defined goals really was efficient, I don't think you're going to see any more of the cap grants at the level of 25 million per project anymore, they've indicated that's probably not going to happen. But the concept of getting people, you know, interdisciplinary type people working together toward a common set of objectives, really did work. And so right now, you know, we've published manuscript and abandon manuscripts, and probably 100 grad students are out there working in the industry out of the project. So I think, you know, over the years, you're going to see substantial evidence of the importance in the work output that that grant generated for food safety, particularly the safety in this country. That's incredibly incredible.

You know, I think that the everyday listener knows about E coli. But the other half of that name of that bug is probably unfamiliar to you guys. Why is it? Why is that a big deal?

Well, that's a great point. Everybody in school hears about E coli. It's on the news all the time. And it is generally a, you know, very beneficial, required healthy organism for our GI tract. It's the most common organism in our GI tract, but there is a subset of E coli that is what we refer to as Shiga toxigenic e coli. That means they produce a toxin that's similar to the toxin Shigella dysenteriae. A produces that's the organism that causes dysentery all around the world. And it's extremely potent, can be extremely deadly knocks out your kidneys, and particularly in young adolescent type people, causes hemolytic uremic syndrome and bloody diarrhea. We also refer to this group or not getting into much science here, but we call them Entero Hema Rages, which means that they produce bloody diarrhea. So it's a major issue. And it's been particularly related to the beef industry for quite some time now since about 1992. When we had the Jack in the Box outbreak and kind of made its rise to fame during that time. Even during that time K State was very in my group and was extremely focused on controlling chicken toxigenic E Coli worked with Cargill and Freekeh, Skandia. And we developed here at K State, the steam pasteurization process, where a very large percentage of the US beef processors adopted and installed these big steam cabinets for major manufacturing, food safety in the beef industry. I remember that. Yeah, that organism, you know, continues to cause problems. We talked about it in beef, but as far as manure and water runoff from feedlots and dust and things like that, we have problems with fresh produce, whether it's leafy greens or sprouts or whatever it might be that organism, you know, crosses several different food commodities, we've had problems with it in wheat, which is then transferred to raw flour coming out of your, your area, Jon. And that's one area that I'm working on right now is working with the industry to develop interventions to kill or control, she can talk to unique e coli and salmonella in flour in baked goods. So you know, you can't just focus on one commodity these organisms span the gamut basically melons, and peppers and spices and all kinds of things.

Yeah, we've certainly seen recalls and all of those areas over the years based on those organism organisms. Yep.

And I might add that it's not just human food, you know, we're doing The same scientific research validation projects we call them for pet foods. And pet foods now under the Food Safety Modernization Act are basically regulated to the same standards as human foods. And so they'd have to have those validated processes in place, which is kind of my specialty is validating commercial manufacturing processes for their ability to control these organisms. So we've been doing almost as much pet food work as we have been human food work here at K State for the last few years.

It's a huge business that a lot of people don't know anything about.

Well, that's true. And you know, here in Kansas, you know, we have all of the agriculture and the meat processing. So that means we have a lot of byproducts that go into the pet foods. Yeah, so if you look at the pet food industry, here in Kansas, and Missouri, especially, we are probably the biggest in the nation. So it is a huge issue for our state.

Manhattan was chosen several years ago, as the new home for the National bio and agro defense facility with the M bath is what we call it, will there be an intersection with the kinds of work you're doing? And that facility? That's not I know, directly associated with the university, but it certainly physically directly associated with university and very, very close to the other laboratories you've worked in? What kind of communication and overlap Do you see with that facility once it's completed?

Well, I think it's going to be a tremendous positive impact on our community in our region, not just our community, but our region, but especially Kansas State University, because what's really going to happen, I think, is we're going to have a lot of opportunities for scientists, particularly the vet animal, you know, oriented type scientists, to work with the NBAF government scientists. And I really think it will spurn or found a lot of innovation. And, particularly, you know, like, for me, I do a lot of applied research, which means I'm taking technologies, maybe they were already developed by the technology industry, but they need to be either adapted or validated for the food industry. And so I take those, and I'm not necessarily developing the technology, I am proving it, the proving its effectiveness in a lot of times, that's either done here at Call Hall, or over in the BRI. So that's applied research, but I think NBAF will help with a lot of basic research interactions where, you know, we're understanding the molecular side of things or generating physiological responses to vaccines and things like that. And you know, that'll strengthen both the government program and the case they program us working together. In terms of food manufacturing, food processing, I don't think there's a major connection there, per se that you immediately see, I guess, it because it's mostly animal health, and for an animal disease control type focus, if we take COVID as an example, you know, they they invest in DOD and all them understand that that is a threat to our national security. And they are interested in helping in whether that turns whether COVID There turns out to be a food safety risk or impacts the food chain or whatever else, it has something to do with massive security. We do have right now in existence as NBAF is being built. There are some transition funds that the government has provided to kind of foster the work in the interconnection with K State as that building is being built. I see that as being really big because it helps us leverage additional funding. When we go after other you know, government funds. For instance, a group of it's just submitted a USDA NIFA grant, we're waiting to hear back from controlling COVID in meat and poultry processing. Well, you know, the NBAF transition fund was very valuable in saying, you know, we can leverage this amount of money towards your grant, if you get it to improve what you do, you know, to get more out of the government funding. So that's kind of where we, I hate to say play the game, but it's play the process of pulling money together opportunities and resources together from across different groups, so that we can do better, more complex, more integrated projects, and do them quickly and get data out there. Obviously, we need to know how to control COVID and meat and poultry processing where it's such an issue right now.

Let me let me just skip back. You use the term validation or when to validate a process. What does that mean? In the real world?

In the real world? It's actually a process that's mandated it began back in 1994 when HACCP by Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points was mandated for producing or manufacturing a meat and poultry products, which is a science based system where you actually have to understand your process and demonstrate that it is capable of controlling whatever food safety hazard is related to your product. And then there's a kind of a connected term called verification. So you got validation, which is scientifically proving the capability of a process. And then verification means that on an ongoing basis, you are proving that your system is working, the way it was validated, so they go hand in hand, you know, so half up was mostly for seafood and meat and poultry. But now with the Food Safety Modernization Act, it basically brings that same risk based scientifically based mindset to preventive controls. That hasn't been. So now we're basically doing that approach across all of the food categories. And so validation means specifically that I go in, and I will, under our bio containment Facilities and Operations, I will actually inoculate the food product with the organism of interest. And then I will apply whatever technology we're interested in, in quantify the impacts of that in terms of reducing the level of that organism, generally, we try to depending on what part of the process where if it's an animal harvest situation like a carcass wash, we would like to see two to three logs, which would be 99.9% reduction of what we put on there. As far as reducing that particular pathogen. If we're doing maybe sub primals, like loins or roast, which wouldn't have very much own it, by the time it gets to that point, if we can show one log reduction, that's a major advance that would be 90% reduction. So again, that kind of tells you it's not just one point in the process that we try to control this, it's at multiple points and kind of have an additive effect of microbial protection throughout the whole process. And you know, that whole process includes restaurants and consumers, you know, they're just as reported in the food safety chain as, as the manufacturers are. So that's kind of how we operate is looking at the systemic reduction that we can get when we mimic a full production process. And not universities can do that. But with our BRI facility, we can follow all the way from a live animal through harvest, through fabrication through manufacturing of hotdogs, and hook it all together under one roof.

Excellent. If I remember, HACCP, it grew originally out of the US space program, I think,, yeah, that's correct.

That was it was actually invented by the Pillsbury company, back in the early days of NASA to ensure that none of the food that the astronauts would be consuming would make them sick. I teach this in my intro to food science course. And I try to keep people laughing a little bit. But can you imagine being in your spacesuit and having diarrhea or throwing up, you know, that would be kind of a math, it would be deadly? And so perhaps up was, its predictive management, basically, you are anticipating what could happen, and then instituting controls to make sure it doesn't happen?

Significant difference in approach to what a lot of people think, yeah.

You talked about the criticality of interdisciplinary research and, you know, the, need to understand things that are outside of your current area of expertise. And you've also talked about and providing some basic research in some of these areas. We've got several departments on campus that really just focus on basic research, you know, whether it's physics or biology or chemistry or some of these, how do you see these groups? How do you see the intersection between interdisciplinary and the fundamental sciences on campus and the need for that kind of interaction from the basic research perspective?

Well, that is exactly the point I was trying to make. And Maureen is the manager of our Global Food Systems Program, I'm looking for you to make that happen. A lot of the technologies that we are dealing with in food safety today, particularly the what we call intervention technologies, those like carcass washing or cooking or whatever else. The way the industry and consumer preferences are everything's going to minimal processing or clean labels where you don't use preservatives or chemicals, ingredients in the product. And yeah, that may appease people who are looking for all natural and things like that. But, you know, from a scientific standpoint, it can cause challenges in terms of food safety, and shelf life and food quality. And so, as we Look to develop these technologies, for instance, high pressure technology, which just applies, you know, high 80 psi 80,000 Psi to per square centimeter to a product, it kills the organism, you know, I need someone like in our physics department or in our engineering department to figure out how to make that technology work in a high paced food production scenario. So, you know, that's where we team up and I heard some other podcasts that you've done. And just knowing who is on campus, doing what, or even who has an interest in doing something is where our Global Food Systems program can really help. You know, I just found out and we actually was able to get an internal grant recently, um, controlling organisms in wheat. And a part of that grant was rapid detection of the organism based on using these extremely one atom thin layers of graphene. Well, until we had the Global Food Systems program, I really didn't know we had someone on campus, looking at that, you know, and so we were able to hook up and get a seed grant. And as soon as we get our labs open back up this week, we're going to be, you know, addressing that. So to make the answer a little bit shorter is we need the engineering we need the basic sciences mathematicians, the IT people, big data people to partner up with us microbiologist and, you know, predictive models, people and actually pull it together and address the food system, not say the automobile system, you know, that sort of thing. Can I just point one thing out that happened this week that I think it's going to be really important for the future of food safety in the US and probably the world. But starting here in the US, as the Food and Drug Administration just released their what they call blueprint, that the title is the New Era of Smarter Food Safety, it's a blueprint that the FDA is going to follow, that really takes us into the next decade of food safety. In particular, they point out four pillars of things that they're going to address, but it basically comes down to advancing technologies, managing things that we haven't managed before, to any degree, which is the food supply chain, in looking at how we document and digitize the food supply chain, so that instead of doing a trace back because of an illness, that's going to take, you know, three months, we can do it in three minutes, based on big data and blockchain technology. And then, a piece of that is food safety culture, you know, we can have the world's most wonderful technologies in place. But if we have a cook, or a person working on the processing line, that when the supervisor is not looking they don't they cut corners, then we're always going to be at risk. And so developing a culture where that doesn't happen, is part of it. And, you know, this is coming out of the FDA, but one of my very close friends over many years, Mr. Frankie honest, as the deputy director of the Food and Drug Administration, he was formerly at Walmart, and before that, at Walt Disney World, running their food safety programs. And this is really exciting to me, you know, it's kind of opening up a new era of integrated food safety, and a lot of it is based on machine learning and artificial intelligence and food safety, culture development. So, you know, what we're doing here at K State is the reason I get so excited is right in line with what the FDA blueprint is calling for. And as long as we, you know, continue to develop that and formalize it and get more people involved with it, including more students, then we're going to be leading the way I think you're in a state or one of the institutions that leads the way.

I listened to Frank Yiannas's presentation at the virtual IFT meeting. He certainly covered exactly the topics that you've that you that you mentioned. And he's been trying, he's been working on those topics for some years, I think even before he got to FDA. So it's interesting to see how some of that is starting to play in and interestingly enough, the last blockchain series that I attended at K State was in the business department. So again, the interdisciplinary approach to things is critical and connecting, connecting you all and getting those discussions going along is going to be a fun, fun challenge over the next years, but I there's a lot to be done.

I just really appreciate you guys doing these podcasts and getting our messages out and, you know, instilling some interest in the public, whether it's our students or what other people around the country listening to our podcasts, so I encourage you to keep it up.

If you have any questions or comments you would like to share check out our website at https://www.k-state.edu/research/global-food/ and drop us an email.

Our music was adapted from Dr. Wayne Goins's album Chronicles of Carmela. Special thanks to him for providing that to us. Something to Chew On is produced by the Office of Research Development at Kansas State University.

In this episode, hosts talk with Dr. Gordon Smith, professor in the Department of Grain Science and Industry and head of the International Grains Program Institute at Kansas State University. Professor Smith has worked in food processing areas as diverse as hot dogs, breakfast sandwiches and baked goods. Through his passion for understanding the science behind food, supporting research and providing guidance to the next generation of scientists, Smith is focused on helping to solve critical challenges in food production and food safety.

Transcript:

Perspectives On Food Chemistry - the importance of understanding the fundamental and applied science of food, with Dr. Gordon Smith, professor in grain science and industry, head and IGP Institute Director

The results can be much, much less positive and much less impactful to the society that we live in.

Yeah there can be a lot of thought roadblocks there. Yeah. So how often do you think these things work? Quite well, right. So where you've got the right personality. Together, I think most of the people were searching out. And most of the departments who look for these partnerships sort of know what they're getting into and doing it and they're ready?

Something to Chew On is a podcast devoted to the exploration and discussion of Global Food Systems produced by the Office of Research Development at Kansas State University. I'm Maureen Olewnik, coordinator of Global Food Systems.

I'm Scott Tanona. I'm a Philosopher of Science.

And I'm Jon Faubion. I'm a Food Scientist.

Hello everybody, and welcome back to the Global Food Systems podcast Something to Chew On. Food System professionals are trained to study and better understand many aspects of the food we eat. Production, nutrition, logistics, ethics, social implications, and sustainability all play an important part. However, an underlying need in the understanding of a food system begins with fundamental science. It is that research that provides the foundational building blocks for understanding food science. In this podcast, we talk with Dr. Gordon Smith, professor and department head in the Department of Grain Science and Industry, and director of the KSU International Grains Program. Gordon is a Chemist by training, and with a deep understanding of the science and interest in its applications. Those fundamentals led him to work in commercial food safety, large scale production of meats and bakery goods, as well as processing of fruits and vegetables. Prior to coming to K State, Gordon worked at the intersection of industrial and academic research and product development with ConAgra Foods, Sara Lee, and other food industry manufacturers. Gordon, welcome to the podcast. I'm really excited about bringing someone in from my home department at Kansas State University. I spent many, many years working on my Master's and PhD in the Grain Science department. And it's really a special pleasure for me to introduce Dr. Gordon Smith, and share more about him and the programs currently carried out in the Department of Grain Science and Industry. Gordon, can you give us a little background on yourself, how you ended up studying chemistry and how that all led you to the food industry.

Thanks for having me. It's my pleasure. We do have a unique situation here within the department of K State. And I'm looking forward to telling your audience about that. And so for my background, I was raised as the son of a college professor. And what that means, among other things is you're exposed to college professors from a very, very young age, and that you live in college towns. And so I was born in Pullman, Washington, moved to Corvallis, Oregon to Oregon State, and then to the University of Tennessee, where my father retired after 25 or 30 years. And so, you know, I guess I was raised as a purebred academic education was important. Science was important. I was in the laboratories, you know, as young as I can remember five or six with my dad. And that translated kind of in high school over to a love of chemistry, thanks to a just phenomenal high school chemistry teacher. You know, I had a great teacher in high school, I had great teachers in college. And it translated into a love of chemistry that continued on through my master's. And so I have a master's in organic chemistry. Then I moved to the more applied side of things and have a PhD in food chemistry and food science that led me in the beginning to make the choice, the conscious choice not to be an academic because I saw, you know, kind of the life of my dad and I wanted to do something a little bit different, but with a love for academia. And so I spent 25 years in the food industry. And then almost six years ago made the move back to academia and it's been a it's been terrific ride from graduate school or undergraduate to this point forward. And it's just been a terrific adventure and I've really quite tickled that I choose science and did I choose food science in specific.

That's great when I look through and actually I've known this I've known you for many years now and looking back your background is in need science more than in grain science. Can you talk a bit about about that background in that the work that you did over the years in the meat area? And kind of how you transitioned out of that into the grains and milling and baking side of things?

Yeah, funny I would. The way I think about myself is my background is I'm really a chemist, first and foremost. And chemistry is chemistry, regardless of what the substrate is, or the discipline, or the food type. And so I always prided myself in having a very strong fundamental chemistry background. And it just so happened, you know that I went to meat science section within the animal science department at Texas A&M To get my PhD. But my PhD was in food science, even though I was better than a meats group. And the specific area of my study was meat, protein chemistry. And so it's what I've done in chemistry, it just turned applied. But that, you know, adventure into meat proteins led me into an industry job was Sara Lee, which in the beginning was about meats. So I was hired by the meats group at Sara Lee, which was a massive, publicly traded corporation at the time, and half non food and half food. And so you know, again, obviously, most people know the sara lee brand, but also ballpark and Jimmy Dean and Hillshire farms and products like that, and champion, and playTex bras and legs and coach leather, and kiwi shoe polish. And Annika, as you know, hired by Sara Lee did pure meats for about two or three years. And it became obvious again, you know, almost 30 years ago that what consumers wanted was convenience, convenient nutrition, especially for breakfast. And you know, what has become commonplace sense was not commonplace at all at all at the time, which was breakfast sandwiches. And so we started working on breakfast sandwiches for the Jimmy Dean brand. I got the opportunity to work for Jimmy specifically, which is really interesting purebred entrepreneur. But the work on sandwiches put me in a bunch of bakeries, both sara lee bakeries and Kopec bakeries, especially around specialty breads. So bagels and baguette and French toast and pancakes and on agos croissants. And so again, I get a whole lot, especially baking experience by being responsible for the breakfast sandwiches initially for Jimmy Dean, but that obviously spread beyond that brand to other Sara Lee brands. But that's how it started. So introduced to bakery goods through you know, through sandwiches. And then when I made the move from, from Sara Lee to ConAgra, you know, then my, I became truly a food scientist. So I did little meats at ConAgra and did tomatoes and potatoes and popcorn and you know, on it goes so, so not too radical to be here after some of what's happened since my early career days.

So what's it like to be moving from the different food product areas? Alright, so from me to tomatoes and brains. So chemistry is in common between all these but tell us something a little bit about what that's like sort of switching to a different subject area like that.

Yeah, you know, that journey, I think all of us learn at some point, and I certainly learned it younger in life. You know, I like to do challenge sports. I like to mountain climb early on. And you know, and what you kind of discover is, it's about the journey much more than it is about the summit. Staying on top of the mountain is really rewarding and beautiful and all kinds of things. But the trial to get there is much more meaningful in a lot of ways. And I would tell you that my career's been the same way. You know, it's been about the journey. And I, I would I like many academics, I am a lifelong learner, I value education, both formal and informal. And I always found the challenge of taking the biology to chemistry and about chemistry the new and applying it to something new, just terrific, really, really rewarding and meaningful. And so you know, a lot of things you can teach yourself if you have the fundamental, you know, kind of basics and if you have an environment where learning is critical or important to the business as well and I was blessed that places I worked valued, someone who's capable of becoming technically competent about the new subject areas.

Can you give us a little notion of what the industry experience brought to the academic setting? A lot of times those things are, are considered quite different from one another. But obviously, you've been here for a while now. And we're able to bring something to that program that may not have seen in the past. How does that change work?

Yeah, so, you know, I guess the first kind of caveat is I value both experiences really deeply. And so the industry people think that I'm an academic that play the industry guy, and the academics that I'm an industry person who plays my academics, I've been a misfit for the majority of my existence. And the organic chemists that turned out to be the food scientist. And so I'm used to that, of having a news show background. And so I love the fact I've been able to do both. And, you know, both sides believe they understand the other side first. So industry thinks they understand academia, and academics think they understand industry. And the truth is, unless you've lived, truly lived in both places, while you may intellectually kind of understand what's going on, you certainly have no emotional connection, or no, you know, heart connection with what, what really happens in the other world. You know, this, you know, now, after nearly six years in academia, I'm sort of kind of imagining that I know a little bit about what it's like to be a true academic, but I would say it still will take four or five more years. You know, it's, again, another journey that's slow, to truly, you know, embrace what this is all about. But you know, the things that are different between the two, and what a industry person or an academic can bring to the other world is, I had faculty tell me when I first came here, they understood industry, I go, Well, I have a litmus test. So my litmus test is, have you ever had a job and so these are lifetime at academics, they do? Have you ever had a job when someone could walk in today, and fire you on the spot? Go thanks for your service, we just don't need you anymore. We're not going in that direction. We've sold the business, there are 100 different reasons. But you would go home to your family and not have a job. And to most academics, certainly the who have never been an industry at all, they've never been in a position like that. The system just doesn't work like that. There's more worrying to longer term, you know, those abrupt decisions, just not so common, and place. And so it's difficult to understand the industry into you understand how fragile your position or your existence is, regardless of how good you are, you can be the best there is and the best rocket scientist on the planet, right to the point where we decided we're not making rockets anymore. And the minute you do that, the need for rocket scientists has gone to zero. And so I think that's a, you know, this idea of, you know, industry people, or the business is a kind of fragile world. And it can change really, really quickly. And so we deal with industry, people, you're trying to solve industry problems, and you need to keep those realities in mind. You know, that kind of sense of the business, fragile nature of business, and the sense of urgency that business has, if we don't do it, we're losing money. If we don't do we're leaving money on the table. If we don't do it, someone else will do it before us and be the first mover into a new category. And so those are things that, you know, industry person certainly understands that can bring to this environment. Some of the things.

I was just going to ask how much you think that those different kinds of approaches to problems, but shapes the kind of work that's done, like the kinds of problems, the kinds of questions that get asked or the kinds of solutions that the people are looking for. I was wondering if you maybe have an example you can pull out of your hat or just say something a little bit more about, you know, about, yeah, how these different kind of backgrounds and shape? What gets done.

Yeah, it's a really interesting question. And you kind of hear it in some of the pure stereotypes of both groups, like academics like to go deep and it's esoteric, and it has no meaning in the real world. And if you can't do you teach and all those kind of stereotypical comments about academia and the inverse for industry, people, industry people really don't know very much. They're, you know, everything is shallow, everything is fast. They have no interest in the deeper understanding of things. And so of course, Like many things as stereotypes are based somewhat in reality. And to your question, you know, one of the realities is this idea that because speed, as I talked about earlier is so critical to business. And it is. And science, in many cases just isn't fast. You know, no matter how bad you want a cure to the Coronavirus, viral cures just take time, they take time to develop, they take time to prove small scale, they take time to prove on larger scale, they take time to develop and essentially extend out and execute. And so the speed is what drives not necessarily unwillingness for industry people to want to understand things deeper or better, or, you know, more thoroughly, they just simply don't have the time to do it. And funny, what they do have in many cases is the money. So industry scientists have money that academics may never see. And yet they have no time and the academics have the time to understand problems more deeply. But they don't have the funding often to be able to do that. So you're absolutely right, the simple reality is the base constraints of the two environments affect how problems and solutions are developed every day, no doubt about it.

So what happens at the intersection, then, sort of when you've got academics working with industry?

I was talking to a friend of mine a week ago, and there are a number of us who've worked at the intersection most of our lives. So when I worked for Sara Lee, I managed a budget, where we were allowed to work with academic and do research with academia, when I moved to ConAgra, that became a more formalized position with a much larger budget. And when I came here, this department is Maureen well knows is heavily connected to industry. So it had the good fortune to live at the interface. And the answer is the activity at the interface, the productivity, maybe that's even a better word, right? The productivity of the interface depends completely on who the people are, who are interacting there. It's all dependent on the attitude and the personalities and the tolerance for looking at problems differently. And if you put the right people at the interface, the results are just can be spectacular, have a huge heart for public private industry government University consortium, I think they can be very, very effective. But it's completely dependent upon the players that are involved. And without the right people in the right attitude and the right respect for others, the results can be much, much less positive and much less impactful to the society that we live in.

Yeah, there can be a lot of roadblocks there. Yeah. So how often do you think these things work? Quite well. All right. So where you've got the right personality? together? I think most of the people were searching out. And most of the departments who looked for these partnerships sort of know what they're getting into and doing it and they're ready. Are there a lot of challenges there?

Yeah, I think there are challenges. There are certainly professionals on both sides. People in industry, who are very skilled at working with academia and academics who are very skilled with working with industry, and I have some of my favorites, I won't name them. But I mean, there are some people in my mind who are the textbook, you know, academics in my industrial experience, people who provided high value, and timely results and insight into our business that we would not have gotten otherwise. So there's no doubt that those people exist on both sides. And there are people on both sides who want to do what they want to do. And they really don't want to be very connected or very inhibited by the constraints that come with projects. And one of the simplest constraints. Again, we're back to you here. The semblance of theme is time based industry, there's a critical path. There's a development timeline, there are deliverables, you know, certainly, you know, certain times during the month, you know, or monthly deliverables, probably not weekly in many cases, but I mean, their deliverables are things you're expected to accomplish. And again, I didn't say things you were supposed to get done and things you were supposed to accomplish. And so getting to a point and going well, I just didn't have time or my graduate students on vacation or the universities closed is simply and inadequate. To answer for why the timeline didn't get met, and no one in industry has a concept of that, you know, they don't have graduate students have employees and employees are salaried employees, and they're being paid to do a job. And it's as simple as that. And so thinking that in either environment is the same across the aisle, is not just unfortunate, it's counterproductive. And I've had to, you know, shockingly, you know, I've set with the CEO of, you know, gazillions of billions of dollars in earnings company, and had to try to explain why academics were failing to deliver against the time and expectations that were agreed upon at the beginning of projects. And that is a very unpleasant situation to be in if you're an industry scientist.

So Gordon, the Grain Science Department at K State is unique in a lot of ways. Can you give us a bit of background on the department itself, and where you see the unique value and what it offers?

Absolutely. So this is the only department in the country that is kind of comprised, and with a mission and the kind of ecosystem to deliver on that mission. So we're one of a kind in this country, there are some international universities that look similar, sort of most of universities in China that have patterned with a lot of influence from students back and forth against this department. But essentially, you know, this is a grain products based department that specifically is the Department of Grain Science and industry. So it's just not a Grain Science department. And that an industry is a nod to our reliance and our partnership with industry and everything that we do. And so we look to work with industry professionals, as a matter of practice, we try to solve industry problems, we try to be relevant. We try to train students who are prepared for industry jobs, and certainly as undergraduates. And against that we have kind of, we confer three degrees. So we don't, we actually confer four if you count the graduate degree, but we have three undergraduate degrees, a BS and bakery science, a BS in knowing science, and a BS in feed manufacturing science. And the feed science also, in the modern world includes pet food, which is a obviously critical industry in the US and abroad. And so the graduate degrees here are all in Grain Science. And so there's a number of K State individuals who are Grain Scientists, with master's and with PhDs as Maureen's one, and they're all over the world. So not just in this country, but the reach is quite impressive. And so with those degrees, you have a department that is kind of unique, and its approach to things. And you also have a massive diversity of students. So Feed science student doesn't look like a Mill science student, and they don't look like a graduate student from Europe or from China, or from India, working on a Grain Science degree. And so the diversity in this department, not just within students, but within faculty is simply incredible. You know, we have the four major religious groups representative within faculty, we have six different nationalities, again, male and female faculty, these programs, which historically were male dominant, are not male dominant anymore. So the idea that, you know, if you think about flower Miller's being male is simply untrue. And so now it more and more looks 5050. For bakery science students, it's female dominated and has been for a long time. And feed scientists is about half and half. And so again, it's a very diverse, very interesting group. And unlike almost any other unit at K State, we compile the industry experience. So if you look at the 18 or 19 faculty members that we have within grain science, we have about 150 years of industry experience. And so the norm here is for high class, high respect. academics who also have spent time in industry. And so we have some purebred academics, but the majority of our faculty has spent time in industry and I think that really is good for our students.

What I was just going to mention is the recent seed grants, Global Food System seed grant programs, there have been a few of those that have been one are provided. To to some of the folks in in your area. Do you want to talk a bit about some of the research activities that are going on in Grain Science these days? And one of the other questions that I like to throw out there, because I think it's such a critically important piece at this point in time is the importance of interdisciplinary approaches to tackling some of these problems.

Yeah, exactly. So I will start with any summary of research will be a smattering. And it will undoubtedly leave somebody out. I would refer people to the department's website, if they were really interested in a date, comprehensive review of the research that going on because I'll never get all of it. I always get criticized for leaving something out. But but a few of the highlights that kind of demonstrate the diversity, if you will, is we have a number of faculty who are experts in a lot of different areas. And so if you look at connectivity to the industry, Dr. Greg Aldridge has been a consultant for the pet food, he's a pet food nutritionist, and has been connected to the pet food industry. We're working for them. He's an older IMEs scientist for a number of years. And, you know, he has a large research large international research group that essentially is plugged in to industry funded projects, because there's not a lot of competitive funding for, you know, pet food or pet food science. And so, again, we're we've kind of become the go to place for pet food manufacturing and the interface between manufacturing and engineering. I heard and another feed science professor Dr. Chad Pollack had the dissertation defense for his first PhD candidate this morning, and she was working on processing, you know, essentially the impact of processing on enzyme levels and the way that enzymes in feed affect digestibility in poultry feed. And so now, that is a more traditional kind of feed science project that ties processing the chemical, the chemistry or the chemical components of the feed and nutrition to the animals all into one place. And so you can go from there to several of our more chemistry more dear near and dear to my heart, Yong Kim, she and Yonghui Li are both chemists, Dr. Li is a world renowned starts chemist, and one of the best that there is. And he continues to work on modified starch and the impact on product acceptability, quality, nutrition stability, that he is a start to modification expert. And as the world moves to a more full cleaner labels, all natural, then some of the modification technology that has existed in the past becomes less desired by the industry. And all natural, you know, non chemical sounding, non complicated. Starch modification is actually very technically difficult. And then Dr. Li, again, another chemist is more of a protein chemist. And he has benefited from some of the seed money grants, but he is working on how you might extract natural antioxidants from either grains or spent grain material. And so, you know, how do you add value. Antioxidants are extremely expensive, expensive chemicals, historically, they've been both natural and chemically made. And so this idea that we could take extracts from grain products is a very natural sort of way of getting to antioxidants, all natural antioxidants, and cereals. And those are desired greatly by the food industry. And so, you know, again, the kind of basic, you know, basic chemistry, and then we have others working in the interface of flour milling and safety, certainly the e coli and the salmonella concerns and flour, which are, you know, when Maureen and I were in school, there was zero, you know, so I say it facetiously, right, there was zero risk. Microbial contamination.

There was certainly much less focus on it.

Yeah, yeah. And we were taught that I mean, again, the way food micro and we were taught it was it's a low water activity, shelf, stable, dry bake, you know, for finished goods, and they're just not much risk. And what we've seen is the world we live in constantly surprises us, scientists included and microorganisms change and the manufacturing systems change. And so now we have an emerging threat to the industry and our third to consumers. And that's then met, enforced by the industry and by the university complexes. And so we have a number of scientists. Here, Dr. Kelly Silveru, myself, Randy Phoebus, in food science, who have a great interest in microbial safety, flour and baked goods. And so we've gotten some good industry support for those projects. There were some grants out to the federal funding agencies, again, around grain flour, grain safety. So those are some examples, again, not nearly all the research that we're working on, but it does give you kind of a feel for what the department is up to.

As you said, it's a broad, it's a broad based number of categories that you are impacting and touching and some very interesting, interesting work. Dr. Silveru's, his work I found fascinating, because, as you said, is, when you and I were in school, there's a kill step on bread, it's not an issue, don't worry about it. And as we both worked in the area of food safety over the last many years, it has become a big problem and a big issue. And it's been really interesting watching the kinds of activities that are going on on the milling side in approaching this problem.

Yeah, I agree. And it's, it's a world. You know, again, I have a soft spot for food safety, it's critical to consumers and critical to the consuming public. And it's a world where whatever you think you knew, or think, you know, you can be sure that it will change. Yep, those organisms evolved, the world becomes different as I had an old friend that talks all the time that unintended consequences as you try to make the system better, or products better for consumers, you create new challenges. And that is part of what makes food science so exciting, is it's not static at all. It's ever changing. And you and I both could tell story after story after story where some of the stuff that I was taught, you know, in high school and college and even in graduate school simply has been proven to be found not to be true, or to be significantly modified by the scientific process.

Or, by the way things are handled in the world today. It's exactly things morph and change. And as I was, I've been listening the last couple of days to some of the IFT convention presentations and looking and discussing the way the food system is set up today. Is it appropriate? Are there things that we should be going back to but that's a sidebar comment, but it's interesting to watch the way things are changing. And as you said, the some of the things that we were taught back in the day are just either not correct or not relevant to the situation we're in today. Yeah. A question I had to I wanted to probably give you a pat on the back if nothing else, but the milling department at K State and you guys put together a flour giveaway recently. You want to talk a bit about that.

Yeah, we did. So all of us, as human beings had been affected by the COVID crisis. And, you know, again, I went away for a vacation myself at Spring Break, as the students were out and I never came back like everyone else, nobody would have predicted it, again, really kind of uncharted territory. And so as a consumer, much like both of you, I was met by the same things at retail, you know, first not interested really going around a bunch of people. Number one, and number two, once it became apparent that we had to shop for groceries, then the lack of what I could buy was just unprecedented for living in the US. I've traveled all over the world. I've been in markets where, you know, we're good for very limited. So I had seen it before, but I had never in this country walked into a grocery store and not been able to buy flour or toilet paper or hot dogs or it's simply almost unfathomable really interesting philosophic, philosophical kind of conversation where you go just to happen to us, but it did and the kind of impact it made to our faculty was for flour you know, again, I can't imagine in there not being flour on a retail shelf in this country. And yet there was you know, store after store for sure you couldn't buy a flour if you wanted it not five pounds, or 50 pounds. And so that is one of those things that we have the capacity to do something about. So we have a flour mill much like any manufacturing facility, you know, not running for a while is fine not running for a long period of time is actually counterproductive. And so there's a point at which running the mill is good for the mill is good for the faculty. And so this kind of convergence of us getting the mill back operating, and there being a need that we're uniquely suited to kind of address. And with the really gracious kind of support we have from the Kansas wheat commission and others to provide, we then print shop at the university run by one of my one of my buddies, Jason Ellis, and that communications provides the labels. And so there are other people who are interested in participating allowed, essentially four of us to run the mill to produce product. So as you might suspect, the mill is not set up to produce 10 bag, 10 pound bags of flour. So those are very small, that becomes a very hand done process. physically challenging, but nonetheless, you know, we manufactured about 15,000 pounds of flour, and we distributed to the local community, with no expectation of how much we might give away, it could be five pounds, or it could be all of it. And, you know, in the end, we gave away every pound that we manufactured, we in fact, almost we had agreed that we're going to pass flour out from three to seven at about 645. We ran out of product, it really worked out very well, I think people were people, we're pleased to help them understand once again, kind of what the department can do. And we do value our place in the community. But it was something that we could do. We're also extremely well supported by the Dean, the Provost and the President. And so the President came out and pack some flour himself. And then he drove by on his way out of town to see how things were going when we passed the flour out. So again, I am thankful to work at a place where, you know, these kinds of faculty administration initiatives are so well appreciated and supported by the senior administration of the University.

It was such a nice outreach to the community at a really tough time.

We appreciate it. It's, you know, we've heard nothing but positive feedback. And so, you know, it's one of those things where you take a chance, and you hope it works out, proceed in the spirit of wish it was given? And in this case, I think it was so.

Do you have a specific area of research that you're involved in at this point in time?

Yeah, so my my interest has for a long time, and then really in, you know, a couple of areas. So years ago, when I was at Sara Lee by force of situation, I was turned into a food safety professional. So we had a major outbreak, one of the first Ecoli outbreak, Listeria outbreaks, and then meat processing facilities, and that forced kind of all hands on deck and changed me from being a product developer to being a listeria E Coli salmonella expert for a number of years for about three years. And so it put me at the interface between the science and technology, the regulators, and the operations of large scale meat processing plants. And so I think it's funny people think about hot dogs, and you go, how hard can it be make to make hot dogs need to go it's really not that hard. All of us could do it in our kitchen. Sara Lee wasn't making a hot dog or to Sara Lee was making a million pounds of hotdogs a day out of one facility and we had five or six. And so, the sheer number of volume gets to be kind of impressive. So, I got to work at the interface. I got good at it, I got where I knew the community and understood the science and that carried over to my responsibilities at ConAgra and it also carried over to my interest when I came here. And so not just microbial safety, but also chemical safety. And so, krill amide is a process induced toxic and I worked on it extensively at ConAgra it has a place in and baked product safety, cereal safety. And so I remain interested you know kind of microbial contaminants and process induced process induced chemistry as it relates to baking grain products. And I continue to be interested in ingredient in chemistry, especially protein chemistry. And so you know, my as both of you might have spec you know, my day job keeps me plenty busy, especially during these times. And so I, you know, I have co advised students I haven't had, I haven't tried to carry a research program that was standalone, I haven't tried to carry my own students, because I found the demands of being a good department head just don't allow the time that would be necessary to have the kind of quality of research program I would expect of myself. But I do have collaborators both within this department and beyond, who are willing to have me as part of teams and to be on committees for students, even to co advise. So I have got to do some of that. And I really, really enjoy it.

That's great. If you had stated, I think it may have been a letter when you were first, or a little overview when you're first hired. But there's a statement that you said that you would like to make the department more relevant to students? How do you approach that question? How? How do you make this thing? I mean, the department itself is, we talked about the uniqueness of the moment, we've talked a bit about some of the offerings within what is the relevance coming out of that group?

Yeah, so there are two kinds of related components or pieces to this. You know, I would argue that we, we remain relevant to the industries where we provide employees to the academics that we provide research, and also in industry as well. But our peer reviewed, research remains outstanding, our ability to be competitive, and very competitive money, national sound science, foundation, money and Department of Defense money, we still are very competitive with highly competitive federal dollars. And so no way, and we're certainly sought, our students are so sought after by employees, we still have a near 100% placement rate for undergraduates. So I would argue that we're doing pretty good at being relevant and actually feel pretty good that we have young faculty who are just outstanding, by any metric that you would use good teachers, good researchers are publishing or productive or finding funding, where I would be more critical, would be not relevance. But awareness. We remain after nearly six years of me being here, a much too well kept secret, you know, really well known in a small circle, not as not as well known broadly. And it's a problem is shared by many food science departments, not just this kind of more specialized Food Science Group. And so, you know, the challenge is, how do you make people aware of, you know, first that we're here, and secondly, what we do, and third, about the opportunities that most of us believe are terrific ones, for careers and for impact on society, and for fulfillment and self fulfillment, is just a real challenge. And we have tried, and I know, you know, Maureen, we have tried and tried. We've had high school, high school groups here on the weekends, we have a open house KSU open house, present, that's almost unprecedented for trying to get people in our facilities and connected with our students. We have tried to big and small one on one and with peer students, and we still have a great opportunity to drive awareness of grain science and awareness of you know, career possibilities, an impact, and that we should have the answer. But will you certainly continue to try hard to unlock the unlock the puzzle?

It's a problem with a lot of really great departments and a lot of great broad truths. Right? There's, lots of people who like do great things on how do you get people to understand it, and how to get people to know it and see it and join? Yeah, right.

Yeah, yeah, that's exactly right. And in a world where, you know, it's, you have to be accepting of kind of the, the professional careers that these are, you know, and so if you're, if your dream is to sit in an office, and look at a computer screen all day long, that's really not what we're training people to do. And that's why I decided to be a food scientist, right? Is I had worked in a chemistry laboratory since I was a freshman in high school, all the way through college in a federal lab and all the way through my master's degree. And it finally occurred to me that spending the rest of my life in a chemistry laboratory with no windows and no connection with other than my peers might not be my calling in life. You know, that I mean, the biggest, the biggest joke was I go to parties, and people would ask me what I do for my graduate research in chemistry, and I tell them and they gloss over and go, Well, that's nice. And I go, so this is gonna be my whole life. Yeah, I pour my life into something that's completely unrelatable to anyone who's not in the field. And what brain science allows you to do is work on things that everyone, like it or not, bread is everywhere, and either you love it, or you're afraid of the gluten, but you know what bread is. And I think that's terrific. And I think it's, you know, again, it's very relatable, everything we do here, you know, involves talking working with people involves working with your hands, involves using your mind. And it's kind of the perfect interplay of those three, three aspects.

I wonder whether there's some parallels, though, there are still because, you know, chemistry is everywhere, too, right. So, you know, everybody knows bread, but everybody knows. Chemicals, too, right? So if you say, like, you know, that you're a chemist, right, it's a lot about the difference between what a, what a chemist on a day to day, basis does, right, which is, which is different from what people understand. And the same is true for bread and Grain science and grain production. Right. So the data, you know, what you're doing in terms of food sciences, still somewhat removed from? Right, the product that people are familiar with? So, you know, yeah.

Well, what do you think of that perspective? And I would go yes, and no, you know, certainly for industry people. And so it goes back to you know, my mixed background is everything you do in food science industry is designed to put a product into the marketplace. It can be great dissertation level science, it certainly I've done dissertation level food safety work. But in the end, it isn't about the work, it's about the product. And I would argue in many things we do within the department again, Maureen has kind of seen it that there's there's hardcore science going on here that I could explain to a non scientist and they would glaze over and have no idea what I was talking about. But when I was talking about, but when I said, Well, you know, this science ends up in making bread that tastes better over time, or bread that has better color or bread that has is better for you nutritionally, then everyone could relate to that. And so again, I have one of my favorite organic books is sitting on the shelf above my phone. So I look at it, it's a one I learned a lot out of. And I'm I mean, it's hardcore chemistry. And unless you're a chemist, there's nothing in that book, that would be very relatable, but most of what we do here, even the hardest core science has a tangible foot, and practical, you know, products, processes, experiences of consumers.

It's a, it's a general question about, you know, applied versus pure science, right, and everybody does some sort of Applied Science, whatever, whatever it's in gets to, you know, the more applied you are, the more you get to say that he worked and, you know, for medicine, or, you know, whatever sort of other safety applications or whatever, you can explain it to people, and the further and further away you get from that, the more work you have to do to explain things, and then that's the application right there. And, you know, in everything you do, right.

Yeah. And that's in funny, is your role aware, right? Is historically, the more applied you are, the less real science you are, is the people who are the real scientists, the nuclear the rocket, you know, physics are the people who are highly theoretical, and as you move to applied, then people go that really isn't science. And of course,

There at least, historically has been that kind of view about things. Yeah. Yeah. And Maureen and I thought that I would vehemently oppose that kind of, yeah, yeah, that kind of thing. And, you know, the bottom line is, it's all science. And, you know, it all works along the scientific method. It's where we teach our students and what I believe you know, with all my heart is, if you want to be a great applied scientists, then you better understand the fundamentals. And the more you understand the fundamentals, the better of doing applied science you'll be and so we this department again, another unique thing is we have a feed mill and a flour mill and a bakery, where you can practice your craft, and you can use your hands and you can exponentially experience. You know, the science we teach you and we have, you know, world class scientist who can teach you the fundamentals. So the, you get both. So that you get the basic, and you get the, you get the kind of foundation. And then we teach you how you think about that foundational learning in terms of real life problems. You know, one of my old meat experiences as we're running a product in the large manufacturing facilities are getting the hot dog story. And the hot dogs are turning green, green, green, like really impressive green, and you go, so we, nobody's made the green hot dog. So it's not it's not microbiology, that's causing the hot dog to be green, it's not some kind of contaminant. So there's not copper or, you know, some kind of trace material that's making it green. And so we we look and look and look and thought and thought and thought and finally, what we figured out was the the water coming through the pipes into the plants that was potable, that was for consumption, human consumption, had enough trace minerals in it, that it was that was interacting with the iron in the meat, the iron is indigenous to the meat cells. And it was converting the iron pigment to a green color. And you go, man, incredibly, you know, kind of complicated science, to get to a very practical consumer consumer outcome right brain on dogs not good. You know, that's, that's an example of it's the, the foundational understanding of the system that allowed the solution of a very practical problem.

And there is something I was going to jump in a little bit ago and state there was, there's something about as you said, you spend hours working in laboratories have spent many, many classroom times working in laboratories. And then when you walk out of that, and walk into a bakery, we'll walk into a mill, it's fun, it's fun to see that the basic science that you had been studying and learning is applied right there in doing things that that will impact the population that are going to feed the world and those types of things. So going into those labs, I remember the first time walking into the mill, it was like, wow, this is this is pretty cool. Just seeing how it functioned and how it ran.

And, yeah, yeah, that's it. That's exactly right. So you know, it's an is something like we talked about earlier, that changes with the wheat that you use, and the products that you're trying to manufacture. And it's really quite a, an amazing spread of different kinds of technical challenges. And that's the world that our students kind of join in, join up for, which I think is just terrific.

And one of the things too, that, that I loved when I was working in that side of the industry, was the opportunities to get together with there, there was one meeting I would go to every year where we had, we had wheat breeders, we had millers, bakers, and and consumer groups all in the same meeting talking to one another, and you never really ever get at least before now you wouldn't get that kind of interdisciplinary interaction with a group they the languages were always a challenge and getting each other to understand what each other wanted. But that was always such an interesting piece. And that kind of goes back to the question I'd asked you earlier on interdisciplinary and the importance of that. But at a university here, you've got the breeder sitting right there, you've got the baking experts sitting right there, you've got the milling experts, and how all of those things come together and interact with one another is, is within your grasp in doing research. Okay, state.

Absolutely.

Very exciting.

I love the, you know, the use of the platform to try to get the word out. And having a philosopher involved is just terrific. It would be fun to, to come back sometime and talk about the philosophy of science, because I'd love to do that. I greatly appreciate your both your willingness to do this. I think it's a terrific public service. And, you know, the more we can get people to think that you know, demystify the science. Everybody wants to think science is unknowable. And that, of course, is ridiculous. All of us start at some point where, you know, we knew two plus two, and that's about all we knew, and everything else I know about science I've learned through a lifetime, not from yesterday or from 20 years ago, but it's a it's a continual and gradual process and it's accessible to everyone. I refuse to believe that science is the purview of the few chosen, special people. It does require hard work and harder work for some of us and others of us, but it's an accessible world. That's just You know, kind of a glorious Swan to be a part of, for people who are called to do it. You're here. Very good.

I'd like to thank you again for for agreeing to sit down and chat with us.

Yeah, thank you very much. And if any of your listeners would want to contact me the website is the best entrance way to there it has my contact information and the way to kind of get in contact with the department.

If you have any questions or comments you would like to share check out our website at https://www.k-state.edu/research/global-food/ and drop us an email.

Our music was adapted from Dr. Wayne Goins's album Chronicles of Carmela. Special thanks to him for providing that to us. Something to Chew On is produced by the Office of Research Development at Kansas State University.

In this episode, we switch gears to shine some light on an area of the food system that may not be overtly understood as critical by many. Dr. Matthew Sanderson, Randall C. Hill Distinguished Professor in the Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Social Work and professor of sociology at Kansas Statue University joins our three hosts in discussion. Sanderson's research aims to better understand the social aspects of human nature as major drivers in approaches to relations between people and the ecosphere. His research includes a focus on social processes that integrate economies, politics, and cultures into an increasingly shared — but sometimes contested — space.

Transcript:

Human Dynamics Within Systems - The Sociological Application in Globalization, Development, Migration and Environment, with Dr. Matthew Sanderson Professor of Sociology, Anthropology, and Social Work.

We want those students also engaging with two other groups, right? We want them not just engaging with each other in their academic silos, which we are very good at doing, but to get them out of their comfort zone and be able to sit take the engineer and the sociologist and the agricultural economist and the agronomist, take them out into the field with the farmer and have them understand the system, the agricultural food energy water system from the perspective of the stakeholder. That may seem simple, but that's a pretty radical move for a PhD science science level training.

Something to Chew On is a podcast devoted to the exploration and discussion of Global Food Systems produced by the Office of Research Development at Kansas State University. I'm Maureen Olewnik, coordinator of Global Food Systems.

I'm Scott Tanona. I'm a Philosopher of Science.

And I'm Jon Faubion. I'm a Food Scientist.

Hello everybody, and welcome back to the K State Global Food Systems podcast something to chew on. In today's podcast, we are switching gears to shine some light on an area of the food system that may not be overtly understood as critical by many. But in many ways human interactions and relationships within a given culture will guide people on how they eat, accept scientific findings in producing food and interact with one another in economic, political and sometimes contested spaces. The social aspects of human nature are major drivers in approaches to critical questions, willingness to adjust lifestyles are working norms, and interest in social drivers of using natural resources in a much divided time. Today's guest is Dr. Matt Sanderson. The Randall C. Hill Distinguished Professor of Sociology, Anthropology and social work, and professor of sociology at Kansas State University. Matt is currently exploring social drivers of natural resource use. This work concentrates especially on agricultural production, and water consumption in the High Plains Ogallala Aquifer region of the United States, our guest today is Dr. Matt Sanderson. Matt is coming to us from the sociology department at Kansas State University. And we're really excited to have you here today Matt, and understand better where the sociological aspects of your research into the global food system overall, before we get started in a discussion, as we normally do, I'd like to hear from you a little background on who you are, and what brought you to the point of your area of study what got you interested in sociology and, and working in this area?

Oh, gosh, well, thank you for having me on today. It's a real pleasure, glad to be here. And I usually, most people that know me know, I don't really like talking all that much about myself. But how I got interested in sociology and sort of how that connects with the global food system. Long story short, I was an undergraduate major here at K State. In business, I was a finance major with a minor in economics and decided after right around 911. It was 2001, 911. And I decided, there were some big questions that I still had after completing that the bachelor's degree. And so I made a big shift and went back to try to study something that I thought would give me more insight into humans, and how humans work and why the world sort of works the way it does. I was very interested. I didn't know what at the time I didn't have the language or the way of framing these questions, but I was very interested in questions about the market, and about power and about inequality and about how that works to shape human behavior and influence things like culture and social structure and norms and values around us and so on. So, sociology, I took a jump, I applied and looked at different programs in political science and sociology. I landed in sociology mainly because if I didn't have a great reason other than it seemed broad enough to answer the questions that I had, which were very big. And, you know, that's a strength and a weakness of the field. Its breadth But I loved it. And so I thought, well, I could do anything for four semesters. And if I don't like it, you know, trying a master's degree I can, I can go back and find a job in the banking world, the banking sector, the finance sector, and after two years, it'll still be okay. And I did the Masters, I loved it. I said, Well, I never really set out to get a PhD. I never thought about being a college professor. But here I am. So I guess this is the next step is to try. Look at the PhD. So did that. And long story short, I went to a small but very focused, concentrated, pretty respected program at the University of Utah, in Salt Lake City, and comparative international sociology. And I was really studying what is now called Global comparative sociology was comparative international then. And so I'm a comparativist. I'm a historical comparative sociologist, I'm very interested in making comparisons, analyzing social change over long periods of time, and across cases or across places. So sort of longitudinal comparative designs, finished a PhD, I got my first job in the middle of the right at the onset of the Great Recession in 2008. August of oh eight, I started my job first job at Lehigh University. In Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, was a joint appointment and as a sociologist, and they're global studies, new initiative and Global Studies, which is this interdisciplinary center that tried to integrate different types of work going on at the university, around issues of global importance around health, environment, community, social change, those sorts of things. And I love that. And I left that job only, because there was an opening back at Kansas State, my alma mater, and it was this was 2011. And I decided that if I was offered the job, I'd come back, and here I am. So I've been back at K State back home and my alma mater, since 2011. As my parents would probably tell you, they were very pleased. But they were also very surprised that we brought the grandkids back home and everything back home, because I had spent most of my life trying to escape Kansas, and especially rural Kansas, where I had grown up. And so to come back in your 30s, I had never thought I'd come back ever. And here I am. But I decided that what would give me the most meaning is something that's driven me since the very beginning, is not the attempt to not the chance to make the most money, I could have done that with my business degree, because I made a lot more money. But the chance to really try to impact have positive change impact the place that I places I call home and in Kansas, and especially rural Kansas, and with the knowledge and skills that I have. And so it was time to come back home. And since 2011, I've been engaged in a number of areas. A number of different types of work in Kansas and the broader Great Plains, but mostly engaging with rural communities around food, agriculture, rural community change. So in a nutshell, I mean, that's the last what 25, you know, 20-25 years? Yeah. That's that's how we ended up on this call. And and, you know, a couple minutes.

That sounds great. Just a curiosity. We're in rural Kansas, did you grow up?

Yeah, it's not so rural anymore. But I'm from Spring Hills where I went to high school, Spring Hill, Kansas. Southern Johnson County, northern Miami County on the line there. It's now a bedroom community for Kansas City. 40 years ago, it was the friend rural, outlying area of Kansas City, but it's changed a lot, a lot of subdivisions around now and so on. And my parents, my folks still live there, and my brother still lives in that area, as well. So still call at home. And I've been watching the change, kind of, you know, sort of urban encroachment into that space for a long, long time and seeing that change. And I also have family, you know, throughout the Great Plains, Nebraska, Lester, Kansas, Oklahoma. So this region really is home in a number of ways.

How was your training up to this point and your experience up to this point, or has it conditioned, the way you look back at those times? 40 years ago, when you were in Spring Hill, do you come to different conclusions now?

That's a great question. I mean, I one thing that sociology gets view that I'll never be able to fully repay my teachers and professors, but it gives you what we come to call the sociological imagination. And so what that means is that it gives you a lens through which you can understand yourself in the context of the larger society around you. And you understand much better about the forces and factors around you that shaped you and are in your head and have interacted with you're literally the DNA in your body to help shape how you see and interact with the world and vice versa. It shows you how you change that very context that shapes people, the society that you have an impact through every thought, and every action that you have every day, there are literally 1000s we don't think about them. But every thought every action is consciously remaking the very structures around us that make people that shaped people of who they are and who they can become. And so, as I've gotten older and approaching, you know, middle age now, I definitely look at home and think about home differently. And I can't unsee what I've learned about the society around us and how that shapes people, so to have more sort of theoretical or even philosophical view, yes, for sure. Having sociological training has reshaped how I think about home and what it what that means. And also given me an analytical lens to diagnose and think about what's happening there, and why and what to do about it.

I noticed that a lot of your work focuses on migration and the impact of migration in various, obviously globally, various parts of the world. Focusing down in on Kansas and the agricultural economy in Kansas view, have you done any work? Or do you focus it all on that aspect, that migration aspect on agricultural economy in Kansas?

Yeah, sure, sure. So I'll back up a little bit and tell you how I got into this spot. I seem to I don't think of myself, as you know, trying to be very comfortable with very controversial things. But I sort of end up in the middle of these things. I think I'm more so now because I study migration, and I study water. And those are those things in rural Kansas, are can be very tension can generate tension and be, you know, controversial. So, but I am a social scientist, or I think of myself that way. And so I try to understand and analyze with the lens and the tools that science gives us. And so with migration, yes, that was actually my entry point into studying rural environment issues, real water issues, caught up with groundwater conservation, so on. I wrote my dissertation on the relationship between migration and development. And this was a very across national study and playing, you know, overnight, 92 countries and over the past 50 years looking at, statistically what are the drivers of why people are moving across boundaries? And secondly, what are the consequences of those movements of those migrations, those inflows on communities? How do we measure that? Is it quote, good or bad? And for whom? And for what and over what time period? These are the questions that I was motivated with in the dissertation, I didn't start studying migration because I was thought of myself as a necessarily an immigration expert. I study it from the aspect of development. That's first and foremost, what I'm interested in this idea of social change, this idea of incessant growth economically, socially, culturally, for positive benefit, this idea of development, that's what I was really, fundamentally after, by going in sociology. And so I started becoming more interested in migration because everywhere I looked with development, you see people moving and they're either moving out or they're moving in people move that is the, it's endemic to human societies. It goes back south is it is the human story, it goes back to the beginning of humanity, people move now. The difference now is that we have things called national boundaries that never existed. So we have something called international migration that didn't exist 2000 years ago, for that matter, even 600 years ago, or 500 years ago. And so now International, the movement of people seems more complex because we are fixed by national boundaries in places. But that is, by far the anomaly of the human condition. I mean, most humans have never lived, most humans that have ever lived in the face of the earth have never lived in one place their entire life. Most humans have walked around figure moved around across all kinds of borders, and so on all through all that. So I was very interested in migration that way. And that led me Of course, from my experience in Kansas, I began being becoming very interested in southwest Kansas, because that was where growing up and throughout my childhood, and youth and so on, I had heard about all the stories of immigration. So I naturally went to the place I was most comfortable with. And that was southwest Kansas, I tried to understand, given the tools I had, what's going on here, why in Kansas, of all places, do we have this, these inflows of immigrants, particularly Latino immigrants, but in the early 80s, also Southeast Asian immigrants as well, and today, Somalis, Burmese and so on? How can we explain that? And what are the consequences of that? So I started looking at that published a lot of work on that I was trained as a social demographer. So I'm trained to look at population change, fertility, mortality, and migration. And found a lot of things about that, some of which are interesting, and some of which are not probably, but I'm fascinated in all of it. And that we could talk later if you want to, but that's what led me ultimately into looking into groundwater conservation issues as well. On the environment side, because I was trained in population and environment, those were the two substance barriers of training. On the population side, I looked at migration, that was the first part of my career up through tenure, I looked at migration issues. And then the sort of second part of my career now is looking more on the environment side and water, groundwater conservation, and food and agriculture, integrated food system sort of stuff. And it all comes together. For me out there in western Kansas, we have, it's just a fascinating place. It's got, there's water challenges, it has rural community challenges, it has population challenges, and also lots of opportunities and these things as well. So I'm naturally find myself constantly, although people are leaving that area, and they have been for a long time, I find myself going in the opposite way with my students. I'm traveling out in the middle of nowhere, Western Nebraska, western Kansas, panhandle of Oklahoma, spending a lot of time out there trying to figure out what's going on. And really, how do we, how do we encourage, how can I help facilitate a more regenerative, resilient rural community in these places?

What's the if you had to pick, two or three top limiting factors to flourishing of those communities flipped over? What might those be? Yeah, wow, too much. I mean, there's, there's immigration, but then there's diversity within the spot that has they've been immigrating to, if you will, are migrating to?

Yeah, well, I think, I think 10 years ago, I would have said, the limiting factor is something on sort of the population side, the human side, so something around immigrant density, and those sorts of things trust, those sorts of things in the community. Today, I think, I think actually less and less about, and this may be an estimate to as a social scientist to say, but today, I think less and less about the human side than I do the limiting factor of water, quite frankly. Because without water out there, none of that exists. Period. You don't have anything like a garden city without the Ogallala Aquifer underneath that period. So you'll have a lot fewer people. As the groundwater levels decline, and we shift back to dry land on dry land agriculture out there with something is inevitable. And we're arguing over the timeline over which that happens, and more importantly, why that might be worth why the water might be worth saving. But I spend less and less time actually out there talking about community level dynamics, People to People relationships, than I do, thinking about people to nature, people to environment, people to water relationships, and why that's so difficult. For a lot of sociologists environmental sociology, which I'm sort of a part I guess, is a real challenge to the field and my discipline because sociology developed as a purely, it was developed in the late summer. There's a question over when I developed but 19th century post enlightenment, right industrial revolution, there's a lot of change going on the transition from a rural to an urban society is fully in place in the late 19th century. Sociology really arises, you know, is birthed in that transition from a rural agricultural society to a modern, quote, modern industrial, manufacturing based society and all the tensions and traumas that, that brought about, that's really what sociology focuses on. And we're still there. It and one of the founders, Emile Durkheim, a French Swiss sociologist, was really trying to set sociology apart from psychology, and from some other social sciences that were emerging. So really think he went too far in trying to remove humans from the natural environment and make everything about humans themselves. So environmental sociology emerges in the mid late 20th century very recently, to try to re embed put humans back in the natural environment and talk about things like physics, and chemistry and biology, and these sorts of things, to sort of re re wed the human component that we've been looking about to these kind of biological chemistry, physics, relationships that we're looking at.

I know that at least one part of the state in the South East has been depopulated, and had significant problems because of their success in mining and the consequence of of them there is this sociology, seek to understand those horses as well, and any attempts at finding other ways for those communities to if not prosper, at least continue to stay together and not self disperse.

Yeah, so that's a good question. And the analogy, the analogy, or the case you bring up of mining communities, is for better or worse now being applied to groundwater dependent communities. Why and so, yes, and that's controversial as well. I know, I know that. But if you talk with more than a few irrigators, they'll tell you, yeah, we're miners, we mined the water. This is not, this is not a renewable resource out here. This is a finite resource, just like a coal seam. And when it's gone, it's gone. You know, and then we get into some really deep stories about what that means for human values and why that's happening and whether that should happen. But more than a few also say, You know what, no, we need to pull back. And we can extend the life of this thing, unlike a mining community in Southeast Kansas, or West Virginia for that matter. And we should have communities out here as long as we possibly can, because I or whoever goes back four or five generations, this place has meaning it's worth saving. And the water allows us to live out here. So let's get organized and try to figure out how we extend the life of this. So I can pass it down to my kids and so on. And that's the conversation going on, in a lot of these communities is even though it's not talked about that explicitly, it's do we want to look like this will be controversial, but do we want to look like a rural West Virginia? Or do we want to look like a more scaled down version of a sustainable version of, you know, eastern Nebraska type rural community? What do we want to do and those conversations that's active right now, in western Kansas, in church basements, in home now, maybe not as much with COVID? Because we can't get face to face patient. So we'll say, oh, we'll say over zoom, or wherever. I mean, those are the conversations that are taking place out there. And they're not only talking explicitly like that, but they're really talking about in a number of conversations, you know, who do we want to be? Where are we going humans are always trying to figure out what this means and who I am, and where are we and how are we good? Where are we going forward? And we do as sociologists I do as a sociologist work on issues of transition. So there are a number of tools, you know, what do we want this place to look like? And who do we want around us? And why? And are we troubled by who's around us and why and what gives us meaning and, and hope, and what challenges that and so on? So we work with those very issues. And I was struck by your mining example, because there are increasingly examples being drawn between southeast Kansas and southwest Kansas. Yeah,

It's hard to imagine the difference between Coffeyville and I don't know. Yeah, right. Southwestern Kansas. Amazing.

Yeah, or a place like the Ullyses. Syracuse. So, yeah, some place out over the over the aquifer where or if you go north right around west of Scott City where the water and in that area is already pretty low, what's left and some wells are off now or so on at Northwest Kansas, you've got some areas too that are that are having some challenging times. So working on a USDA project and on the Ogallala, and a number of us are starting to think about given we've been on this project, well, this will be the fifth year we're going to be wrapping it up this year, but a number of us are looking ahead and thinking about what's next. And a lot of the work that I did on that project is pointing to really pointing to this idea of transitions, that some places are going to want to save the water as best they can conserve it as best they can extend the life as best they can. And some are not. And that's community lead change choice, sort of self determination, right? So how do we facilitate how do we ease the transition back into a dry land form of agriculture with that base, with a lot fewer people operating a lot more land when a lot less capital? And in other areas, we're going to still have water to go after for 150 years or so it looks like so highly variable places to place to.

Yeah, sounds interesting. I spent a number of years in Minnesota. And in that case, it was communities redefining themselves, when there was no longer a timber industry to rely on. Were they going to keep an alive or further north when taconite mining was no longer profit. Yeah, but they Yeah, they stay there. They have to leave and it's there. In each case, the solution was somewhat similar, but somewhat different. And they were well underway by the time I got there. But it would have been interesting to, to see before to see the before side of that.

Yeah, exactly, another interesting comparison in with the forestry industry, the logging industry. And also think about, think about how to transition really what that means for the people that are living through those changes. And it's the same sort of dynamics, but the sort of population environment relations aren't exactly analogous. But the same sort of process here is in people's minds, because we're talking really there about culture, about norms, values and beliefs. And those don't change very easily or rapidly. And that's really what I think, you know, we've come to find out and a lot of areas in our, in our world in our in our society is the economy moves, the population shifts, things, it's a very dynamic market driven economy, it shifts quickly, the structures change, but culture does not culture lags. It does not automatically change when the economy changes. And that tension or that slippage between the economic change. And the cultural lag is really the source of a lot of tension and contradiction and confusion, argument in our society a lot.

Stigmatization people are tagged with, with being adverse to whatever play ever amounted to progress or old fashioned or inflexible, there you go in their views.

Yeah, yeah. Right. And then we argue over how fast should the change be? or not, and who benefits from those changes. And that's, that's really what we're, I think we're looking at over a lot of dimensions of society is a very dynamic market driven economy, if we're going to have that we're going to have incessant continual change, transformation. But humans, that's a very new thing in human affairs, if you go back over the scope of human history, 150-180,000 years, most humans, most humans that have ever walked on the earth, right? They were born into one family, they had one role in that group, and then they died and their kids would likely have the very same status. Right? And so we don't we don't live in that world. We live in a world that is much more open dynamic. I'm worrying about unsustainable on the resource side, but it's a much more dynamic, fast paced change world. But evolutionarily, I mean, we evolved in groups that were changed was very slow and incremental over time. 1000s of years. So we haven't caught up our culture lags the things in our head around our values, norms and beliefs. Those things get shaped In a context, but the economy and the material parts are always moving forward and outpacing us. So we're arguing over where we should be and who we are all the time. And that's a new idea for human humans, those who are given those are given questions for most of our species history, who you are and what you were was, where you were born and where you are. Now, we now we invent now we have to invent those things, and they're constantly being changes. And so we have identity crises. And we have them at various stages of our life, kids middle age. So anyway, well,

So Matt, you talked a little bit about some projects that you had worked on at K State one that was wrapping up, can you give us some notion of some of the interdisciplinary research activities you've been involved with maybe some specifics of different groups you're working with and some of the outcomes that you're looking for in those works?

Yeah, sure. So just real quick rundown of those there was there's a USDA cap, coordinated ag project cap led by Chuck rice here at K State and Megan Szczepanski and Regan Alaska met Colorado State involving collaborators. I think there's I mean, the team is huge. It's 70 to 80 people total, across the seven states over the aquifer, that project is you know, in the in the no cost extension, fifth year right now, it'll wrap up. And really what we're looking at there is, on the social side, I can't speak to the natural side of things, the agronomy side, and so on, but on the social side, trying to understand and build an integrated model of, of producer decision making. So under conditions of climate change, under conditions of market change, and under conditions of social change, and trying to build with a team of agricultural economists, and agronomist and hydrologist, and sociologists, and a single model that can A predict what has explained what has happened in this region, but also B look ahead a little bit and say, Okay, if these things change, then we can expect these sorts of scenarios going forward in this region. And bottom line, we can expect these scenarios to affect groundwater levels, over this time, time horizon, that's really the outcome we're trying to get is, is what will this do to the groundwater levels, if we change this price, this quantity, this value, this social cultural component, what happens to groundwater levels, that is a fascinating project to have been involved with. And to some degree, five years feels like we're just getting started. I mean, it's crazy. But that's a massive, massive undertaking. And that's why it hadn't been done it these, you know, I worry about the timeframe we're up against with some of these challenges. In the in the material world, but five years, we just, we built the dataset, we've got the model running, but it feels like we need another five years. And I'm not just you know, trying to ask USDA for more money, although we're going to be doing that. But five years feels like you know, now we need to see how this works, really, because it took that long to build this thing and communicate with people and learn how they these other folks how they talk and how we think as a team. So been involved with interdisciplinary things a long time. That's, one example.

Another example I worked on was with Marcellus Callidus and Jessica Heier Stamm, and many others, some of them have left K State on an NSF project on couple of natural human systems, where we were looking in the Smoky Hill River Basin to try to again develop an integrated model of how humans in the environment interact with water over time, in this particular place, and what that means for levels in the Smoky Hill water and what that means for biodiversity in our in our streams and river and Smoky Hill River and our creeks and tributaries. And what that means for farmers who are farming over this particular area, trying to build a model of how if you change the some factors on the human side, what happens to the environmental aspects of that system, the water levels, the fish levels and so on. Vice versa, if you have some external forcing event, like a changing climate under different scenarios, what happens to the environment side? And how does that feed back into effect the human dynamics of that system in a feedback loop? Right? So we're trying to build this integrative loop model of how this thing works over time in this in that particular region of the smoky hills. So that's another project I was involved with.

And another project I'm involved with, and I'm involved with right now is is called the NRT. It's a national research traineeship award to Melanie Derby from the National Science Foundation, Melanie, Dr. Derby in engineering, and the team was Stacy Hutchinson and Nathan Hendricks and others, big team as well, where we're trying to now it's a graduate traineeship award. So all most all the money goes into funding graduate students in an interdisciplinary approach to science. And the top the focus of that project is the Ogallala Aquifer and farming systems over the Ogallala. So it's it has a bunch of acronyms, but it's R cubed rural resource resiliency, national research, traineeship, and we're trying to figure out with students, And a little sort of sketch together curriculum that we're still building and developing as part of this project. How do we train the next generation of students scientists, to work with each other on very complex problems to try to get some traction on the things actually, so NSF putting money into this sort of a program as as a spearhead to kind of, I think, okay, my own interpretation, really to try to get people out of their disciplines and into rooms thinking about complex problems together as a part of their graduate training, so that when they leave the world, they leave that their PhD, they're ready to talk with an engineer is ready to talk with a sociologist, and may not know be an expert, but but at least can have a conversation about what a model should look like and what sort of things a sociologist brings to the table and vice versa, how a sociologist could understand how an engineer what they bring to the table? And what are their how do they look at the world as a starting point, as another extract to that project, we want those students also engaging with two other groups, right? We want them not just engaging with each other in their academic silos, which we are very good at doing. But to get them out of their comfort zone, and be able to sit take the engineer and the sociologist and the agricultural economist and the agronomist, take them out into the field with the farmer and have them understand the system, the agricultural food energy water system from the perspective of the stakeholder. That may seem simple, but that's a pretty radical move for a PhD Science, Science level training, is to actually have people talking with stakeholders who are acting out the system that we're studying, but that's a part of it. So these students will spend time in southwest Kansas with the research and extension folks out there, Jonathan Aguilar and Garden City, they'll spend time with farmers for a week or so this summer, and again, a little later. And then another group, we want them interacting with our policymakers in Topeka. So these students, graduate students, PhD and Master's students will spend time during when the legislature is in session. And with COVID, that has been a real interesting deal. But try to get them together with you know, have face time with policymakers to learn vice versa, about how policymakers look at food, energy, water issues, as well, to get some understanding of really trying to get between the farmers, the policymakers and the scientists trying to get some traction on what this system actually looks like, from what depending on the position you're in, in the system, if that makes sense.

So involved there to what this nerd I'm very excited about it. And it's high risk, high reward is challenged me in a number of ways when I teach in that PhD seminar, some sessions go well, some, some don't go well, because we have a very diverse group of people all very smart. But we it forces us as instructors, professors to say, how do we teach this? How do we, how do we how do we have to go back to basic pedagogy? Like, how do we, you know, where do we start trying to teach systems thinking? And how do we get people seeing this from different angles so that we can actually use science to solve problems and not just study them? That motivates me. And so that challenge is very, the big challenge, but it's very exciting. It motivates. So those are the three projects on interdisciplinary things.

The last thing I'll say there so I don't turn this entirely into a monolog is that with interdisciplinarity I've increasingly finding myself spending less time in sociology and and that I don't like that some days because I feel very like much like a fish out of water a lot of days, swimming with the engineers and so on. But, but but but when you are in that world, it's also a exhilarating because it's refreshing, it's new. And you really have to have a committed group of people that are willing to sit with each other and endure lots of communication problems. And, yeah, you got to be dedicated to learning how another person thinks, because we will not get anywhere, if you just sit down and, you know, give the traditional spiel that you give to, you know, your sociology students or your engineering students. So that's been challenging in this kind of second part of my career. But it's been a lot of fun working in interdisciplinary teams. And, I think that's really how we're going to if we're going to solve any of these big problems, we're going to have to get outside of our department, I think.

I was wondering, yeah, if you could give an example of one of the kinds of things about the human environment interaction that really, really matter, for understanding these systems. Right. So what were the kinds of values or beliefs or norms that that you're talking about, that that come up that are, you know, maybe interesting or surprising about the effects they have? Or about the ways the changes in the environment are affecting those? Because that's, you know, you're studying both ways, right?

That's right. So that's a great question. So one of the things that I've sort of zeroed in on over the years and narrowed the focus on is culture, I didn't set out to study culture, but I'm open like to think I'm somewhat open minded about, as a social scientist, I sort of am driven, led down the path that the data lead me and they've increasingly led me to culture. When I opened up that box of culture, it was a black box. It there are a lot of moving parts, but I don't know how they all work theory, there's theories about how culture works at the collective level, at the group level, but also at the individual level within the mind itself. And as I've sort of focused more on culture, I've become very interested in how culture responds to environmental changes, both in the social environment, but also in the natural environment, and vice versa. How culture human ideas, really non material ideas in their head, shape, the landscape, shapes, the atmosphere, shapes, the water systems. Right? So I'm very interested in that two way feedback and looking at culture and these relationships. So there are a lot of findings coming out from this work. I'll point to a few, I think, I think one of the bigger ones is the this idea that values held values affect natural outcomes. Right? So with held values, we're talking about fundamental ideas, guiding principles about right and wrong, good and bad, just unjust, fair, unfair. These are human constructs. These are made up ideas. They all come from somewhere. But ultimately, they're held in human minds and humans can change them. And we do. We change these things on various timescales, and they are malleable. That gives us some hope. That change is possible in our relationship with the natural environment, that change is possible in our relations with other humans. These things, these values, while they're very deeply held, and they don't change quickly, often, they can change and they do change on varying timescales and varying spatial scales. So what we found what I found with a bunch of graduate students, and I would listen, Steven Lauer just graduated fantastic graduate students, and Mariah Fisher in the Geography Department working with her lots of good students working on these things. What we found is that there are different types of values. First of all, not a huge surprise. But more importantly, that these value sets seem to drive worldviews, ideas about the world. And those values and worldviews together really shaped something as material as the flow of water in a stream. Okay, that sounds maybe far out, far fetched. But you can see these effects in the models in the statistics and the data, right. So people there are different types of values. They're really like five different types of values set. From this perspective, I'm working within their environmental or biospheric values. There are more humanistic altruistic values, there are values that are oriented more towards traditionalism. There are values oriented towards self interest, egoistic values, we call them and their values around openness to change and change itself, these five types of values that really shaped landscapes, and they also shaped interactions in group settings. What we found in a nutshell is that people not surprisingly, holding stronger environmental values, more deeply held values around relations between humans and the environment, right and wrong, what we should or should not do with, or to the natural environment. People holding stronger environmental values farm differently. When they farm differently, that as different as clear effects on things like land use, and land cover change, that has very clear effects on water levels, that has very clear effect at a scale way beyond the farm level, or even western Kansas that has very clear effects on atmospheric levels of carbon. So people, vice versa, that have, and I'm speaking generically here the day to get more nuanced and complex. And that's all in journal articles. But people that hold more strong traditional values, and self interest values, farm differently than people with stronger altruistic and environmental values.

I'll step back and say that in a couple things about that. People over the Ogallala Aquifer, the producers, the farmers, and so on, they hold each of these values to varying degrees. No one scores zero on any of these five values. And I talk a lot about that with students in a world where we polarize ourselves and put ourselves into camp, I'm a Republican, I'm a Democrat, I'm a progressive, I'm a conservative, I'm a farmer, I'm a urban citizen, you know, we have all these values we put on people, I give these tests, these values, tests, often the students in class, and one thing that always strikes them is that nobody scores zero on any of the values, we all hold them to varying degrees. And so in that there's a lot of commonality in shared values, there's just different degrees of commonality or difference. And that breaks down a lot of barriers, when you can start thinking about values that way, and shared values in that way, that breaks down a lot of barriers to trust and, and and in trying to produce some sort of positive change. So nobody holds no farmer holds these zero on any of them or or five on all of them, for that matter, all of our high levels on all of them, either. They're all sharing them to some degree, and there's some difference. The next thing I'll say is that in places that get labeled as flyover country, and more pejoratively is redneck land, and places where there's just a lot of backwards, people and so on and conservative in this that the other, ie much of rural America, when you actually give when you actually look at values, when you actually look at beliefs, you actually look at norms, you measure them, you see a lot of diversity out there, that's struck. There's a lot of diversity. And yeah, and you can see it in the data in the data, right? And we look at we talked with urban folks as well. And we give them the same questions. And we look at the data. Yes, there is a rural urban difference on sort of conjunctions or groups of these clusters. But there's also a lot of shared values between these two groups that I think get drowned out in the noise and the day to day sort of were different, or they're backward or were better, or whatever it is, right? So And here, I'm just talking about farmers. I'm not I just surveyed farmers, and there's tremendous diversity and farmers in western Kansas who would have known. They're not all the same. They have different ideas, and they have different worldviews. And some of them are operating under more constraints, financial social than others. But there is a degree of shared values operating there amidst diversity is one thing. So long way of answering that was we sort of look narrowed down on culture and especially on values and worldviews to try to understand how that shapes landscape change, how that shapes environmental change, and vice versa, how those changes then come back and reshape culture, reshape the ideas that are in humans heads about farming over long time periods, right.

So yeah, so what's the best way to be? Or what are some different ways about thinking about that diversity, right? Instead of looking at the map and seeing, you know, off Kansas or all of Western Kansas, like, one color, right, but once you see the diversity and everybody's views? How should that shift? Our thinking about land use about water use? And how to how to like adjust policy, because you're talking about, on the one hand, like individual values, right, but then we're also talking about, you know, collective decisions and general policies and individual actions that affect other people. So how do you translate that, that understanding of the diversity of views into thinking about water use and farming?

Well, yeah, so it's a good question. And it really gets back to this agency structure debate that's been going on in sociology, social science. Sure, Humanities philosophy, as well for a very long time. And that debate basically is about individual and society, self and society. How To what degree are these aligned or misaligned and when we when we talk about natural resource management, there have a common pool resource, which is what we have with the Ogallala, they're all drawing, essentially, from the same bathtub, they each put a straw, right each irrigator put the straw down into the, into the tub, and when they pull it out, it lowers the levels, other places. So we have a common pool resource problem, where one person's actions affect another person. And in some degree in unknown ways, still, now the hydrogeology geology has gotten a lot better about that. We can measure love well levels, and so on. And Kansas geological survey does that very well annually, and so on. Not my area. But my understanding is Kansas is really a leader in being able to measure this resource, this water compared to places like California, Central Valley, and so on. But we do have a common pool resource raises questions about fairness, about power of any one actor and what they can do to other actors in the system, fairly or unfairly. And so, enter, you know, a project where we're asking questions about, what should we do with the water that's left? And that raises all these questions of, well, if Joe or Jill, or Susie or Bob pulls this water out, you know, I'm out, I'm out of luck, and they've got more wells, and they've got more money and so on. These people working on these have been wrestling with these questions long before a little, you know, token sociologist comes along and starts asking these questions. I think what a sociologist can bring to that conversation is to try is that is the skills to try to make our values more explicit, and put them on the table in a structured discussion facilitation environment, and allow people who are at the table to make decisions about this shared resource that they otherwise wouldn't make in their own house or with their own farm family, or they'd otherwise, I don't want to say we're facilitators or adjudicators, like, you know, mediators are legal process by any means, but where otherwise, you would resort to, you know, you know, suing the neighbor or doing this, that or the other, make sure that your water was protected, say, okay, as a community level, at a community level, what, what do we want to happen? And why? And there, as you just heard from the discussion about values, there's a lot of diversity in the responses about what should happen with that water and why it should happen. But very few people are explicitly acknowledging their fundamental ideas about right and wrong in those conversations. They're drawing on what we call a cultural toolbox that they're given. And they don't really question it, because it's so deep in their mind. They've been so socialized, they don't. It's just not their opinion is right. And it's natural, because it just is that's the only thing that they know it's right. It's fair, you know, when you open up that box and allow conversations about, well, why do we want to save water? For who? Who benefits about that? And why do why would we want to conserve this? Why would we not want to conserve it? You don't you do start up discussions about tradition, and convention and outreach And toward others, or lack thereof, and the environment, and you really more deeply at the deepest level. And this is what we've been looking a lot at over the past year to really open up bigger conversations about identity, and who people are, and what gives their life meaning. And the water out there is really allowing these things to have these conversations, these feelings, these ideas about who they are to, to manifest sort of on the landscape, but they're asking questions about fundamentally about who I am I, and what am I doing? And those are questions in turn about. And this gets very provocative, but about humans and the natural world, at the deepest level about God, and about your idea of reality. And about often, as I said, in some public talks, whether you ultimately think that God put the water in the ground for you to use it, or whether that's not the case. And those discussions are rarely happening in policy circles. Those are never happening. We're arguing there about rights and legalities underlying all that what I'm trying to say underlying all that is a whole nother level that isn't talked about, but is really driving those discussions. And that's where I want to be, I want to be at the underneath level of the real driving motivations for people to action. Right. And that's what we're trying to do with this with these in very humbly and with these projects.

That's incredibly hard work. But I guess the idea, yeah, right, then. But yeah, you make these underlying things a little bit more explicit. And then you're also able to point out where, where there are commonalities, right, and give a place for discussion. So that there's a possibility for agreement to another level, I guess.

Yes. And so Exactly. So who am I to say whether we should conserve water in Western Kansas? That's a controversial statement as well, because of course, Kansas water law says the water in the under the ground, again, is to be used for the benefit of all Kansans. And I'm not maybe not a lot of people are aware of that. But Kansas has a very, very interesting water law that Texas does not have, Texas has right of capture, which says if the water is under your ground, you do with it what you want. And for your benefit. Kansas doesn't say that Kansas water law says the water under your ground is to be used for the it's called the beneficial use clause. The water under your property is your right property, right. But it is to be used for the benefit of the citizens of the state of Kansas. Right. So bringing people together. And at least making explicit why we're doing what we're doing with water in this place. is I think the least that should be done. Because if even if it does, we it's pumped dry, we will know why we did it. There will be no mistake about why it was done if we talk about our values. Otherwise, if we never if we never have that conversation, it'll be which we may never get to that level on the scale we need. But if we never have that conversation, we're going to argue a lot about this water law or that water law or this, this, this farmer or that farmer. And the conversation I'm much more interested in is about why we did why we're doing what we're doing. And if we collectively, as a group, decide that it's not we're saving or we're not we don't think it's this is there's a reason why this isn't the ground, it's the US and so on. At least our heirs and our ancestors will know why we did what we did. Whether we conserved it or not. And we'll be explicit about that. I don't think it's too much to ask, but it's very controversial and very hard work for sure.

Fascinating.

I really appreciate the input that you gave us. This was very, very interesting discussion and brought to light a lot of areas to consider when we are looking at some of the hard science problems. You know, water usage is obviously one of the areas that you've been most heavily focused on, but I really appreciate your time and this has been really great.

No, this has been a great conversation. Thanks so much for joining us.

No, I'm glad to have the opportunity to share something about what I've learned and what we've been doing and, and why we're doing it. One last thing, Maureen and not to get on you, this is a very common thing, but you listen to what I been talking about and so on, I think we'll have to start talking about all sciences as the hard sciences now. Engineering into it's always like hard science and soft science. And I'm not at all opposed that many things about what I do are soft in the sense that they're fuzzy. They're unknown. There's a lot of uncertainty. We don't have a lot of precision in the measures and so on. I feel like what we're doing is maybe the hardest science, I never missed an opportunity to point out so I'm not calling you out directly. I'm just saying in general, hard and soft sciences. I don't know maybe we need a new dichotomies ation of our Science. But more on that later for another podcast.

Very, very fair. Fair comment. Yeah, no, the conversation. You guys helped me out here. You'll have to help me come up with the right word to differentiate between the two approaches, but Well, again, I really appreciate your time. This has been an enlightening conversation.

It's been really great. Keep up the good work.

Thanks so much.

If you have any questions or comments you would like to share check out our website at https://www.k-state.edu/research/global-food/ and drop us an email.

Our music was adapted from Dr. Wayne Goins's album Chronicles of Carmela. Special thanks to him for providing that to us. Something to Chew On is produced by the Office of Research Development at Kansas State University.

On this episode, Dr. Dustin Pendell, professor of agricultural economics, and host of Kansas State University's Beef and Cattle Institute podcast Cattle Chat and returning guest Dr. Jessica Heier Stamm, Kennedy Cornerstone Teaching Scholar in the Department of Industrial and Manufacturing Systems Engineering join hosts for a timely discussion. Both Pendell and Heier Stamm study supply chain at Kansas State University, but from different perspectives. The discussion focuses on the COVID-19 situation and reviews ways in which product moves today and how that may change in the future.

Transcript:

Preparation and Management of Challenging Situations - The Bottleneck Effects of the Widely Defined and Critical Supply Chain, with Dr. Dustin Pendell, Professor in Agricultural Economics and Dr. Jessica Heier Stamm, Associate Professor in Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering

What happens if this was an African swine fever or mostly foot and mouth disease where humans don't necessarily get impacted but it's the animal side?

Something to Chew On is a podcast devoted to the exploration and discussion of Global Food Systems produced by the Office of Research Development at Kansas State University. I'm Maureen Olewnik, coordinator of Global Food Systems.

I'm Scott Tanona. I'm a Philosopher of Science.

And I'm Jon Faubion. I'm a Food Scientist.

Hello everybody and welcome back to the K State Global Food Systems podcast Something to Chew On. In last week's podcast we talked with Dr. Jessica Heier Stamm about her work on methods to continuously monitor and improve the widely defined and critical supply chain. This week Dr. Heier Stamm agreed to come back and talk about this important area with Dr. Dustin Pendell, whose work is more focused in the area of agriculture. Dr. Pendell, Professor of Agricultural Economics and Director of the Graduate Programs carries out broad research activities in the areas of livestock and animal health issues that span from the producer to the meat supply chain and into the final consumer. Good morning, everyone and welcome back to Something to Chew On. Today's guests, we have Dr. Jessica Heier Stamm and Dr. Dustin Pendell. You will recall that last week's podcast we had a good discussion with Dr. Heier Stamm and she gave us a little background on who she was and what her area of focus was. This morning. I think we'll start with Dustin Pendell and have Dustin, could you give us a little background on who you are, what you do and what got you interested in this area of study?

Absolutely. First off, I'd like to thank you for inviting me today to participate in your podcast. And a little bit about myself. My name is Dustin Pendell. I'm an agriculturalist here in the Department of Agriculture Economics at K State. I've been here on campus for five years. Prior to me joining here at K State. I spent nine years at Colorado State University, the faculty member there where I conducted research and teaching. And then I spent four years at K State get my PhD, grew up in a small cow calf operation in west central Illinois, growing up in Illinois, and they grew up on a cow calf operation. So that's where my interest in the cow calf industry in the beef industry also have degree in Agronomy, so interested in crops as well. So that's a little bit about me, and a lot of my work here at K State is very interdisciplinary. I spend a lot of my time working with that veterinarians, epidemiologist, folks over in animal science. And with my upbringing in the cow calf industry and my background undergraduate education in Agronomy. I've always had this appeal to work on issues, relevant timely issues. And it's not just me being an agricultural economist trying to solve it. It's me being an economist trying to work with the animal scientist trying to work with the the crop scientists, the soil scientists, the Ag engineers, etc. So that's a little bit about me, like I said, I'm currently here at K State, I teach a undergraduate class called data analysis and optimization. I teach a graduate level class called economics of animal health and food safety. That's part of my appointment. Another part of my appointment is outreach extension. And then I'm also have a research appointment where I conduct research mostly related to issues related to animal health. I'm also the director of our graduate program in the Department as well.

What do you do in your spare time?

Yeah, my spare time I pretty much travel wherever my kids are and do what they are doing. So..

yeah, yeah.

So Dustin, just kind of launching into the topic that we're here to talk about today, which is a follow up from Jessica's podcast on the supply chain. Can you give us a little high level background on what does it take to get product from the farm to a consumer these days?

Yes, so the supply chain that in the food industry is quite complex, I believe. Pick a product Pick a cow calf, for example, a calf that is calf born, which takes months, planing it, you know, through the gestation and breeding etc planning process through that calf is born, raised on it operation till a certain weight, maybe 500 pounds, it's weaned from there, it could stay on the operation, maybe as the background here stocker, or it could be sold through a sale barn. And then it could be taken to another farm, potentially raised for a while till I get to a certain weight, maybe 6-7-8-900 pounds from there, it could be sold again through sale barn, or it could be taken to a feedlot to be put on feed for, you know, 120 to several 100 days, 100 days. From there, it goes to the processing plant, where it's processed, and made into a whole bunch of different, I guess, pieces. From there, it can be shipped either locally, in the US internationally, maybe to different warehouses, where their distribution, it can be further processed, once it gets to wherever it is, then that could go into the retail outlets, or it could be diverted to the food service. And of course, every step along the way, you've got other actors or other players, whether it's transportation, other people providing inputs into this food system. And so that's just one particular example, using beef industry. I mean, every industry is going to be slightly different. You've got perishable or non perishable products. And so there's a lot of different complexities, I guess, a lot of steps.

A lot of steps.

One of the things that we've been talking with Jessica before was about individualized decision making versus kind of top down organization. And one aspect of that also is how many different paths there are through through systems and through supply chains, like you're just discussing and how centralized they are. So you say something about, or Jessica jump in sort of about in general, you know, how centralized these chains are, how, right versus how local they stay, or how they something about all that sorry, that's a lousy question, but I guess you get what I'm asking.

So thinking about this, kind of here is maybe this concept of centralized versus decentralized, we're talking about your individual actors. And we think, across time, we've started to see a lot more the structure of maybe certain industries in agriculture, where they become more consolidated. As an example, over the last two decades or so 80% of the beef industry 80% of the animals slaughtered are controlled by four companies. And so the structure has went from a number of maybe smaller, packing plants to a few really large individuals, maybe that's becoming more centralized. Now, I think, people you want to ask yourself, why is that happening? What are some of the benefits? And what are some of the costs of that, thinking about some of the benefits, we see, probably a lot of it comes back to costs. There's a lot of cost efficiencies that might be saved by becoming larger when you've got cold storage, for example. This is one example when you process a beef, you have to keep that beef in a cooler after you've done that. And so the more animals or the more pounds of meat, you can run through that cooler, you're going to lower those average costs. And so I think, as we've seen across time, the structure of the industry change. Again, I'm using just the livestock industry. I think costs have driven some of that. But I also think there's other factors that come into play when we think about this notion of a centralized maybe versus a decentralized system, not just cost. But it could be environmental issues that could be public health, probably international training. There's a lot of things I think that come back into this notion of a centralized versus a decentralized system. Now, I think as we're going through what we're currently going through with COVID If you follow anything on social media, there's a lot of comments, a lot of maybe pushback of people saying, you know, the current system that we're in this large, having a few large actors, a few large players, control a lot of the system maybe isn't necessarily a good thing, and maybe we should do a lot of have a lot of smaller, local, more regionalized either packing plants or food distribution? And so I think that's, that's a question that we need to look at and we need to answer is, what are the trade offs between where we've evolved to today versus what some people are calling for now is more mauler regionalised, distribution or packers? So I guess that's what I what I've heard what I'm seeing what I've been thinking about recently about this notion of centralized versus decentralized, or, you know, are we wanting to go back to where we were 20-30-40 years ago, I guess I'd like to get maybe what Jessica's take is, on this tour, this idea of individual versus kind of a centralized?

Well, I see a lot of parallels between what Dustin just described for the supply chain, let's say, for beef products, and other supply chains over time, because of cost and other pressures, supply chains in all kinds of industries have gotten very lean. So think about buzzwords like just in time delivery, or, you know, lean manufacturing, operating with the very least amount of inventory being held as can sustain the production line for whatever product that is, and concentrating operations in a small number of firms or locations. We see this on the pharmaceutical supply chain. Right now, that's also creating some some challenges with the COVID response. Because there are drugs in shortage, there are personal protective equipment items that are in shortage, because those supply chains have been designed to provide just the routine amount of supply and any disruption at any point in the supply chain can create havoc in other places. And so I think, across industries, this question that Dustin raised about what are the trade offs? What are the costs and benefits of a lean supply chain of consolidation of concentration in a small number of firms is one that we will very carefully need to study. There are obviously costs to carrying stockpiles of inventory of n95 respirators. But there are also as we're seeing very real costs of not having those stockpiles. Likewise, there are costs of consolidating beef production among four major players, but there are costs of not having a resilient and redundant systems that can be responsive to shocks or vulnerabilities or disruptions in other places in the supply chain.

So what I think what I'm hearing is that the major changes that have taken place in supply chain using cow calf, as an example, has been a consolidation and increase in scale. Is that correct? Or are there more?

No, I definitely the increase the scale. Economies of Scale is a big factor. I mean, it's not probably the only factor though. But it is most definitely in these economies of scale, allowing them to come back to these cost efficiencies. I also think that, you know, sometimes, when you have not only cost efficiencies, I think there are some other things that probably play into whether it be you know, think about slaughter plant, we have a few really large slaughter plants from where are they located at? Well, we know here in Kansas, we have some right southwest Kansas, Texas Panhandle, Oklahoma Panhandle, eastern Colorado. Who wants a packing plants we have a bunch of these throughout the country, really small, regional, how many people want these in their backyard? I think there's a reason why we've seen them in Kansas and western Kansas, for example, there's not a lot of population. So I think their kinds of scale are driving it is Jessica kind of pointed out. But I think there are some other things that we also need that one needs to also consider when they think about this from the bigger picture through all these different trade offs.

So I'm curious about what sort of process would be a good one for thinking about these different trade offs and thinking about how what goals we want out of our system, what we, what we want to achieve how much we care about Say you know that resiliency and how much we're willing to pay for it. Either you have thoughts about how to approach, thinking about these things.

I think modeling is a great tool to be able to examine different systems designs and understand the trade offs and dialogue with stakeholders about the trade off. So I think there are two really important components to considering what a next generation supply chain might look like. The first is understanding the perspective of all the stakeholders and understanding, you know, what, what does each one want out of the supply chain, or what's not working in the current supply chain, you know, if you talk to cow calf operators, today, they're very concerned about your concentration in the packing part of the supply chain, they're very concerned about being able to sell their animals for a fair price. You talk about the Packers, obviously, they're very concerned about the welfare of the workers, the continued operations, being able to sell their product as well. And so having an of course, the consumers interested about what prices they're paying at the grocery store, the welfare of the workers, the safety, health of their communities, and so forth. So understanding what's working or what's not working in the current system, and then taking that to a model to represent, you know, what are the costs and the benefits? If we configure the supply chain in this way? What are the costs and the benefits if we configure it in this way, I'm not an expert in policy or markets or economics. And so there are also some social science aspects of enacting those changes that need to be accounted for as well. And so I think, you know, what Dustin said at the outset of these challenges, interdisciplinary is going to be absolutely critical to us re envisioning what supply chains can look like.

Just to add to that real quick, I agree, we need to talk to the stakeholders, figure out, wait, first of all, who are stakeholders, it is going to be your producers, it's going to be everyone throughout the entire supply chain all the way to your final consumer, and figure out what what are their wants, and their needs. If you take a look at any research that has looked at what consumers want in the food side. And there's generally three or four attributes that always come out on top, you know, price, they want, you know, food that is affordable. Here in the United States, I believe we spend less than 10% of our disposable income. It's down around six or 7% of our disposable income on food. You compare that to some of your third world countries from developing countries, they might pay upwards of 50% 50% of their income, their supposable income is spent on food. So price is one of the attributes, generally food safety, safe, tasty and nutritious. Are your other attributes that consumers typically want to see. But then I also think you need to take into account what those producers and then all your other actors throughout that supply chain is, Jessica brought up another good point about modeling, rather than trying to change the system. And then we'll figure out what all the impacts are. We could use the modeling that Jessica talked about. And that can give us a better idea of what would work what wouldn't work. How much would those costs be by changing the various systems? That way it gives us a better idea of kind of those those benefits and costs that we've talked about. And so I agree with what Jessica said there in terms of thinking about how might we go forward with the supply chains?

In the current situation that we've got with food and challenges in the supply chain? We've been hearing, as you said social media on television, that there's a lot of food being dumped produce milk, are there long term impacts of something like that happening? Is that going to be a flash in the pan? Or do you think going back to some of the other comments that you made a little bit earlier? Is that going to have some force change on the decentralization or the way we look at getting food moved around?

Well, what I think in the short term what that is doing is that is you're starting to see that show up on social media, whether it's Twitter, Facebook, what etc. And I think that's really upsetting some people and I think those could be vocal could be asking for change. We start to see possibly some Are policymakers starting to do investigations? Wanting to know more? What should we be doing different how we should be doing different? Which kind of leads back to that last question that Jessica talked about, maybe we should model look at what a different structure would look like and take a look at those costs associated with possible different structures. And so there's a lot of things I guess, one could think about in this.

Just gonna follow up to that, I think we have seen some changes in policies and practices and supply chain operations, as news of the food waste has gotten out, right. So you all may be more familiar with the nuances and the details of this than I am. But USDA changed some guidelines to allow restaurants to sell the produce the eggs, the meat and things that they had would have received through their regular channels, even when they were not serving customers in the dining room. And so they could sell those products as if they were a grocery store, which is not typically allowed, right. And so redirecting some of that food that would have been potentially wasted back to consumers through a different channel, right. So they're not getting it through the grocery store, but they're getting it through the restaurant channel, and other ways to reconfigure that supply chain that had been designed to send products to restaurants, products to schools to now get to, to grocery stores, or direct to consumer in a way that hadn't been done before the pandemic. And so I think some of those short term changes, will maybe remain short term changes, others may be candidates for consideration about ways that we can adapt the policy more permanently going forward. So I think it'll be interesting to see what some of those responses may be.

And I would concur with that I just don't know long run, what will happen or if, if anything will happen. But I think, you know, some of what we're seeing in the media, social media, I'm just not sure if it'll just die out. And then as we think about the supply chains, how they should or maybe what they should look like in the future, that will then be incorporated into some of those potential policy changes that Jessica mentioned.

That relates to a question that I had, which is basically how easy is it to change these things? You know, how themes as if these supply chains develop, and the sins are made by industry, in ways that, you know, are not going to make it straightforward for us all this sort of say, hey, look, let's do something a little differently, everybody. So like, how stable are is the way things are set up right now? And how easy is it to change?

Some supply chains might be a little easier to adapt, and change. Others are going to be like we pointed out right at the very beginning, the food system is very complex. And so I don't think these are things that you can change very easily, especially overnight. Going back to the live animal, or fruits and vegetables. You know, we've got biology that gets that comes into play here, this is good, that's gonna be a little different to maybe a manufacturing sector. And because of the biological lags or the biology that gets involved in the animal agriculture, or I guess fruits and vegetables, that in itself is one complexity that maybe other industries don't have that don't see. I think that's a complexity right there. That's gonna be very hard to change. And it's not in the whole, there's so many players are so many people are so many other industries are that are involved in the supply chains. It's not just talking to the Packers in the feed yard, that maybe your cow calf producers, it's all these other industries that impacted, right, you've got your pharmaceutical industries that provide, you know, the medications to the industry, you've got your feed industry, so you get your grain producers. And so you've got a whole bunch of different players that might not actually produce the calf or produce the chicken. But you've got all but they're definitely involved in that chain. So changing this, the supply chain, I don't think it's very easy at all. I think it's going to be extremely complex. I think it will take a while to think through alternatives. And if we want to implement them, they'll have to be implemented slow as there's so many other people that are being impacted, and they will have to adjust and change their supply chains as well. So my initial initial reaction to your question.

I echo what Dustin shared and just chime in with a small anecdote that others may have seen. So this is from the healthcare side. It's so there's a shortage in hand sanitizer and distilleries, you know, mobilized to produce hand sanitizer instead of whiskey. And now there's a shortage in plastic bottles to put the sanitizer in so it can be dispensed. Right. So, health care supplies, supply chain personnel, you know, hospital resource managers have been trying to find out who are the producers of small plastic bottles, so they can dispense the hand sanitizer that they're getting in, you know, really, really big jugs in practical ways throughout their system. So just something as small as what bottle Do you dispense it in, can throw a wrinkle into even a creative solution. And so if you compound that through the entire supply chain, whether it's pharmaceutical, medical supplies, or food, fruit, vegetables, meat proteins, every one of those supply chains has those little nuances, those complexities all the way through. And so thinking about those implications is certainly tackling a complex problem.

In some cases, you have the cost of success when you have a critical ingredient. And the product is so highly desired that you've lost full access or appropriate access to, to the critical ingredient. Not enough blueberries for McDonald's yogurt, or whatever. And so now they have one component that's missing, and they can't, they can't sell the product at all. So it ramifies out even further into the mind of very minor ingredients in the system.

I guess another complexity to add on top of that is that the consumer and certainly in the United States is used to being able to get whatever they want, whenever they want it and not having eating locally, obviously, that's going to be very seasonal. That's really not what the consumer is used to.

And I think that's just probably a temporary. I mean, we're just we had such a huge shock to the system, right? You think about the demand side, we have people scared. And so they're all going out, rushing out buying products, whether that be meat, because we saw the pictures of the meat cases, for bare in the social media in the news, or, you know, Clorox wipes toilet paper. So you've seen this initial huge shock that we're not used to seeing, from demand side, on the demand side, thinking about groceries, on the restaurant side, now suddenly, everybody stays home, nobody's going out to eat. And so you got restaurants that are in there that are shut down, at least temporarily. And so that's a huge shock to their system as well. And thinking back to earlier questions about dumping milk, or this or that, in comments about the supply chains, how we've got them, we can't just change them overnight. Right? So we're making the same milk that's going in these little cartons that go to school, where you can't just turn on take the little cartons and sell them in a grocery store. You can't change our supply chain overnight, like Jessicas has talked about. It's I think that is some of these issues that we're seeing right now. Now, are they changing? Will they be able to adapt? Absolutely. But they just can't do that, that change, I can't make that change overnight. And so I think it is a short term shock, as we start to gradually open up as we start to go, you know, open up the economy start to go out to restaurants, etc. I think as demand builds back up, we'll start to, you know, we'll start to things will start to get back to, quote unquote, normal, if you will. And so I think it's just gonna take some time. But I think this is just a short term shock to the system will advance and then we can talk about the supply side shock as well.

What's the least likely factor to change? What's going to be? What might be different out there? Is there something that just is now have we learned something that makes it impossible to go back to some part of the system?

That's a good question. I'll have to think about that one.

Or is it was it going to be a trial and error? What will we find out? When we have go back the way it was and find the problem?

That's a good question.

I've been really interested in the question and I don't have an answer off the top of my head. Think about it.

I've been pondering it as well in a different context in the context of some spice industry, if you will, or the flavor industry. Some of those very minor ingredients are quite unusual and susceptible to alteration, and susceptible to contamination, and we have problems with sanitizing them, because you know, that they're difficult, and it might change them. So we might, we might find that what we've what we've decided to do, might be very, very difficult to do at least one step, perhaps. So I think it's just gonna have to be a learning experience.

Yeah, your, your might be right there. Yeah. What, as we tried to go back to some things and realize that maybe it didn't work. Maybe it doesn't work, maybe we've improved, we've learned or maybe what we're doing now isn't working, we have to go back. And there's really no other way to around it.

As far as as for nosocomial diseases are concerned, for example. Would it be possible? Or would it be in the realm of possibilities that that certain strains or certain varieties or certain genetic compositions of a feed animal or a bird or whatever might be selectively susceptible to those or? or pass that disease more readily on to a human? Or am I asking the wrong? The right question? Maybe?

Yeah, I might want to leave that to an epidemiologist or public health, not not an economist.

I had a bigger picture thought on what may or may not revert to the previous normal with respect to supply chains. This may be my optimistic side talking, but I'm a perpetual supply chain educator, my hope is that we don't go back to a scenario where we only think about supply chain when it's broken. You know, so now everybody knows about the disruptions in the food supply chain in the Lysol wipes supply chain in the PPE supply chain. We know about supply chains now, because they're not working the way that we expect them to. I may be overly optimistic, but I hope that we continue to think about supply chains and how they impact our lives. And, I hope that people get excited about solving those problems.

Do you think there's a ways in which we can be more attentive to different kinds of risks to the supply chain coming on? Now? I mean, I think, I don't know that much about this. But I have a sense that, right. I mean, farmers are sensitive to the possible diseases that their animals have and their crops have. Right. And so when we thought about and heard about bird foods, etc, before, I mean, sort of from the general population side, I think, you know, I mean, we worry about the transfer over to humans, and we're all going to get sick, but we're also, you know, aware that that's the ag industry is worried about this with respect to their animals, and then sort of, you know, perhaps diseases, etc, the same right, but, now we're looking at and that would disrupt, right, sort of, like a major, major disease amongst all right, you know, amongst livestock, you know, we know that's going to disrupt the agriculture industry, right, but we haven't, it seems to me then, like intentive to like how, how major things like this economically would, would shift. Right, so people getting sick, right, would totally mess up the supply chain the same, this kind of way, right? Does this just raised like new issues that we haven't been attentive to, and maybe thinking about enough? Are these are these things people have been thinking about? And then just like we weren't, we weren't ready for it?

That's a really good question. You know, question that I've asked myself over the last couple, two, three weeks, is we're talking about we're seeing COVID-19 which is a human and animals aren't impacted. mean, they are being impacted now, because we've seen that the bottleneck with packing plants, not having a labor force to keep their packing plants open. Thus, we don't have a place for our live animals to go. And so if you see in the news, how they've been euthanizing animals for welfare reasons. What happens if this was an African swine fever or mostly foot and mouth disease where humans don't necessarily get impacted, but it's the animal side, which is exactly what you're talking about. Because it's going to enter deuce, I think a whole others. There'll be some similar issues that we're seeing now. But I think it's going to open up a whole lot of other issues that we haven't experienced, from the fact that you're gonna have a whole bunch of animals that are sick. So we're going to have to think about depopulating potentially lots and lots of animals. What do we do with those animals? Some of the things I think that could be similar, as you know, we've seen the federal government and maybe state and local governments as well pass legislature that legislation that provides relief, economic relief, stimulus funds, I guess, you could say. So that would be something similar, I could see that happening already on the maybe if it was a different disease, helping out maybe producers who are losing livestock, which I think we're seeing that now, I think that could be a similarity, I think you're going to probably see similar issues in the supply chain, except now there's just not enough animals going into the supply chain. So it's not enough animals bid up the price. So prices, I think at the retail level will be extremely, could be pretty high, we could start to see issues with international trade, where maybe we're wanting to import more. But same time, maybe some people don't want to maybe don't want to ship product out of maybe they're scared? It's an interesting question, I guess I'd have to think a little bit about all the different differences between what we're currently seeing on the human side versus an animal. But absolutely, I think you're gonna see a lot of there will be a number of things that are the same. But there will be certain maybe it's disease specific things that are different. That one might have to think about to kind of think through kind of trace out the impact who's being impacted, and then subsequently up and down the entire supply chain.

I think I heard somewhere in your question, a thread about whether this has been on the radar of the public, the policymakers, the researchers, this kind of an outbreak. Yeah, yeah. So I'll pick up on that thread. It has been the potential for a global pandemic, whether human animal or zoonotic. So across species, is the subject of a great deal of, research and study much of it at K State. And what's been interesting to see play out in this particular event, is that this is a perfect storm, that is sort of the worst case scenario that a lot of these researchers have considered. And as much as we would like to say, you know, couldn't we have been more prepared for XYZ? It's, you know, some of that preparation was there, some of it's a matter of, of managing the situation in the moment, and some of it is a matter of every possible scenario is playing out here in terms of impact on on human health impacts on the economy, impact on supply chains, and all of those components at once. And so yes, there has been attention paid to this, but there's certainly opportunity for us to learn, because I think, you know, the science is pretty clear that these kinds of events are going to become more common, not less. And so this isn't the last major event, whether human animal or both, that we'll need to deal with and so whatever we can learn from this event, can only help us be more prepared for what's coming down the road.

So now that you've had chance to interact you to? Do you see areas that that in your areas of interested overlap that you are that you didn't know before or…

Not I think we've served on one PhD students committee, we looked at kind of a systems approach, building a model. And as a director of the grad program, a lot of what we as economists do, is we look at optimization. And I know Jessica, teaches some supply chain classes. She's teaching a game theory class for which we've got one of our grad students already enrolled in that this upcoming semester. And so I think there is probably a lot more overlap on what both on the teaching side, as I teach, I teach an optimization class as well, in the spring term, teaching, but I think from a research standpoint, I think Jessica and some others, just had a paper came out recently, if I'm not mistaken, that looking at some agent based modeling, in southwest Kansas, thinking the beef industry livestock. So I think there's some interesting things with that particular research. And I think they could easily adapt that to other parts of the industry aspect, whether it's Packing Plant Industry, or others. And so I think there are probably a lot of overlap and interests, whether it be from a teaching, or especially a research side, as well.

Is it your sense that the work that you two are doing and how many other people number doesn't matter, that are producing these results? And these recommendations, are they being effectively communicated to the actors that can actually make a difference in the, for example, in the supply chain? Are we doing an effective job of communicating up and out?

I think we can always do better with that aspect of research, we get excited about the results. And we get excited about the student successes. And when we're able, we also engage with stakeholders to make sure that we're informing our modeling and our research at the front end, and evolving with their feedback through the middle and delivering those recommendations out. But I think that those pieces always can be improved. That's my perspective. And that's a priority of mine, in my current research, going forward, just partnering with state and local health departments, and so forth, but there are challenges in that as well, from the perspective of what's appreciated and rewarded in the university structure. But also just the bandwidth of the practitioners and finding the ways to engage that are best for them. And I think, you know, extension does a lot better job of this, in terms of engagement than other parts of the university.

And to follow on that, if we go back and look at maybe 15 years ago, when I started where we are now, you know, there was a lot of emphasis on, you just got to publish publishing your top in journals, work with other economist. Fast forward to today. It's, it's all about, are you having an impact, not necessarily in a top journal, but who are you helping? And one way to look at that is, you know, if you're in try to solve real world problems, you work with economists, engineers, and maybe a Veterinary Epidemiologist. And so I think we're starting to see a lot more of that. I think that we can do better, as Jessica pointed out, but I think we have seen a lot of that, you know, in my short 15 years and at the university. I also think what we've seen just within the last 2-3-4 weeks, I think we at the university, I think the our K State Extension has done an outstanding job putting out those relevant resources as timely resources, whether that be financial planning, whether that be in the public health, or whether that be helping model transportation in a particular region, for maybe livestock, and so I think we're starting to see a lot more of that communication, a lot more of the outreach, a lot more of the extension. And these last several weeks showing everything all the great things that we're doing at K State. And I hope going forward, that we will continue to communicate that information, whether that be a podcast or whether that be short factsheets or a radio interview, to the necessary people, whether the leadership at university leadership in Topeka, or in Washington, DC.

Well, Jessica and Dustin, I want to thank you both for your time here today. This has been a really interesting conversation. Each time I talk to somebody on campus, I realized how much more in depth research is being done in areas that impact people on a daily basis. And I think this, this added some clarity to some of the things that we're dealing with today and gives us a little insight on what we may be looking forward to in the future. So thank you so much for joining us today.

Yes, thanks for the opportunity.

Yes, thank you very much.

If you have any questions or comments you would like to share check out our website at https://www.k-state.edu/research/global-food/ and drop us an email.

Our music was adapted from Dr. Wayne Goins's album Chronicles of Carmela. Special thanks to him for providing that to us. Something to Chew On is produced by the Office of Research Development at Kansas State University.

Dr. Jessica Heier Stamm, Kennedy Cornerstone Teaching Scholar in the Department of Industrial and Manufacturing Systems Engineering at Kansas State University, explains the applications of supply chain engineering in the humanitarian response of the current pandemic. Dr. Heier Stamm develops quantitative models and algorithms to designs and improve humanitarian relief and public health systems. Her work has modeled the impacts of facility location decisions on cholera response in Haiti and earthquake response in Nepal.

Transcript:

Demand for Humanitarian Response – How to Apply Industrial Engineering Toolbox to Solve Problems Related to the Humanitarian Response, with Dr. Jessica Heier Stamm, Associate Professor in Industrial and Manufacturing Systems Engineering

The transdisciplinary perspective and having multiple kinds of expertise at the table is critical to making the model the right model, whether that's in the public health and humanitarian sphere, rather in the animal environmental health sphere.

Something to Chew On is a podcast devoted to the exploration and discussion of Global Food Systems produced by the Office of Research Development at Kansas State University. I'm Maureen Olewnik, coordinator of Global Food Systems.

I'm Scott Tanona. I'm a Philosopher of Science.

And I'm Jon Faubion. I'm a Food Scientist.

Hello everybody and welcome back to the K State Global Food Systems podcast Something to Chew On. COVID-19 has affected all areas of our everyday life. One of the things that we rely on the most but rarely consider is the supply chain. Do you buy locally produced products. Even if an effort is made to do that many of the things needed for everyday life come to us through a complicated and many times an international supply chain in a time of crisis, a functioning supply chain is critical in getting essential materials to where they are needed. Today's guest is Dr. Jessica Heier Stamm Associate Professor in industrial manufacturing systems engineering and the Gisela and Warren Kennedy Cornerstone teaching scholar. Dr. Heier Stamm uses operations research and game theory tools to analyze supply chain systems in which decisions about systems control are made in a decentralized way. This work is addressing two central research questions. What is the impact on systems effectiveness as a result of decentralization? And how can systems be designed to mitigate the adverse effects of decentralization? Answers to these questions can help us gain a better understanding of the supply chain and will have direct implications for participants in that supply chain in designing and managing those process systems. In the last few podcasts, we've been discussing viruses and research dealing with the physical nature of the organism, and computer aided models that help us to understand how viruses spread. Modeling can also be used to establish methods of getting help to those that need it the most. Again, from our socially distance homes and offices, we would like to welcome Dr. Jessica Heier Stamm to the podcast. The logistics systems are critical in the movement of people and supplies. Logistics modeling can apply to medical situations like we're seeing today with COVID 19 outbreak, or Congestus will be used in the critical movement of food and supplies. I'm excited to learn more about this area of study. Jessica, before we get started on research that you're currently involved with, can you give us a little background on yourself on who you are and how you become interested in this area of work?

Certainly, first, let me say thank you for the invitation to be on the podcast. I think it's never been more important to examine Global Food Systems challenges from transdisciplinary perspectives. And I agree with what you said Maureen that the logistics are a big part of that. So I'm a native Kansan. I grew up in Quinter, on a small farm there. And early on, I enjoyed using math to solve problems. But I also had this deep desire to make a difference in people's lives. So that through a somewhat circuitous path led me to earning an industrial engineering degree at K State. And at the time that I was entering college, I didn't meet an engineer until I was a senior in high school, let alone know what most engineers did or what industrial engineers did. But I came to learn that industrial engineers design, improve and manage systems that produce goods and services. And I was really drawn to the opportunities to use math and statistics and business skills to make things better. But the examples that I saw in the standard curriculum about the systems that traditional industrial engineers were working with, were not the examples that I wanted to see myself working in through my career. I was really excited about using the same tools in that industrial engineering toolbox. To solve problems related to humanitarian response to getting the goods and services to people in need people that have been affected by disasters or long term public health challenges. And so at the conclusion of my undergraduate studies, I decided to go on to graduate school and really focus on becoming an expert in supply chain engineering, but with the intent to apply those skills in the humanitarian domain. So I earned my PhD at Georgia Tech. One other fact that I didn't mention is that I knew that I wanted to be a teacher, before I knew that I wanted to be an engineer. And so a faculty role really helped me mash up those two interests that I had, I had an opportunity to come back to K State, and I just couldn't turn it down. So I joined the faculty about nine years ago. And about three years ago, I became a graduate faculty member in the K State, interdisciplinary master's in public health program. So now I have what I tell my students is the best job in the world, I get to work with them on important challenges that the world is facing. And I get to interact with stakeholders who are making decisions about logistics systems and help them find ways to solve those problems.

And how would you over the nine years that you've been here? How have the problems or circumstances or situations that you're bringing your expertise to have they changed? Have they shifted? I sense there's going to be sort of a tidal shift coming up. But has there been a change over the last few years any otherwise?

The predominant area where I'm focusing my work continues to be in disaster preparedness and response for human public health systems. At the same time, since I've been at K State, I have worked on a number of projects that touch animal health that touch environmental health, water, decisions around water and land use. And I really see those things holistically, right, I think about myself as a person who studies supply chain systems that support human animal and environmental health. And at K State, we really prioritize and recognize this notion of One Health, how all of these components are linked together. And in studying them together from a multidisciplinary perspective, we can have a greater impact on those problems. So I do think that my focus has broadened to think about how that tool set is applicable to a wide variety of domains.

In reading through the work you've done in the recent past, your focus has been on decentralized systems. What are the pluses and minuses, the differences between looking at this type of activity from a centralized system in a decentralized as the decentralized? Better? Is it just more common? What is the focus for that perspective?

Certainly, I would say that the majority of systems if we think about these complex supply chain systems that support human animal environmental health, they really are comprised of multiple stakeholders, all the way from the private sector, to the government, to the nonprofit organizations. And so these, these systems in practice are more often decentralized than not. On the other hand, most of the tools in the toolbox that we bring to bear to model these systems have been built from a centralized perspective, the perspective that we can optimize a single function to achieve the goals of the system, that one person can, or one entity can determine what the constraints and boundaries of the system are, and make the decisions to control actions within that system to achieve the goals. And that's fine. But those kinds of models really end up optimizing components, isolated components within this broader system. To get a bigger picture and a better fidelity to the real world. We need to account for that decentralization for the different levels of decision making for the different objectives and information that stakeholders have, and for the ways in which decisions are actually made. If we think about it from that system's perspective, we may have been optimizing sub components, but the result is not a system optimal solution. And so it's very important to think about how do we adapt our traditional modeling approaches to account for that real decentralization? And then what insights can these new models give us to better understand to better design to better manage those systems, Maureen, you also asked a broader question about whether decentralization or centralization is better. I think, you know, from a philosophical perspective, the answer is it depends a lot on on the nature of the system

That makes total sense is we know, the food system, the medical system, whichever you want to look at is made up of a lot of parts. And it would not, there would not be a centralized focus on how to do that. And it's interesting to understand that you've got a lot of centralized focus is put together and that is the decentralization.

Could you give an example of a centralized system and how some of the techniques that are traditionally used would address optimization there, and then, you know, example of just how different it is once things are not centralized?

Sure. So we think about a single, let's say, transportation for optimizing the deliveries, that it needs to execute in a given timeframe, let's say a day, that single transportation firm owns the assets that it's using or contracts with its drivers in their assets, and can make decisions, how to deploy those resources to meet the demands that it's facing from its customers. A traditional optimization model works well at that scale, to be able to deploy those resources to maximize on time delivery, or maximize profit or minimize cost, whatever the objective function might be for that firm. But if we think about the ecosystem that that firm works in, even within other segments of that same company, they are serving different markets, they are serving different consumer segments, maybe one branch of that company is operating, truckload delivery, and another branch of that company is operating, express air freight with last mile, local truck delivery. In a lot of our major transportation companies, those two branches of the same company operate as independent entities. And the resources, the drivers, the pilots, the planes, the trucks that belong to one of those entities are not necessarily shared or even visible to the other part of the same company. Could there be synergy? By pooling those resources and allocating them to the pooled demand across those two different segments of the same company? Absolutely. Are there costs associated with collaborating across those two divisions of the same company? Yes. And so one thing that we focus on in in the research that my group does is how do we think about allocating the costs and benefits of collaboration of making this decentralized system function a little bit more closely to the centralized one, in a way that makes those two separate entities more likely to want to collaborate, so that they both come out ahead. And that's it, that's a hard problem to figure out how to allocate costs and benefits across entities to to move towards achieving the system wide objectives that you might achieve with a centralized approach. But recognizing the realities that those two segments of the company are still going to make their own decisions according to their own profit objectives or market objectives.

So that is the main issue there that there is not centralized decision making between the two? Or is it that there are different sets of interests, that you're not looking to optimize for a single thing, but these different subunits are trying to accomplish different things?

Both and. Right, so there's not centralized decision making. And the reason that centralized decision making may not be realistic to achieve is that there are different objectives. Even if the bottom line objective for the overarching company is profitability, the way in which each organization sees itself contributing to that, and the metrics may be different for each. I can take this a bit more specific to challenges that we've seen in public health emergency response. So we think about one project that my students and I worked on was looking at the response to the cholera outbreak in Haiti that followed the 2010 earthquake there. And so about 9-10 months after the earthquake occurred in January of 2010. In the October timeframe, cholera was discovered in Haiti. For those who may not know cholera is a serious bacterial disease that can be easily treated with routine methods. But if those treatments are not readily available, people with significant illness can die within hours. So that makes easy access to treatment facilities a high priority and combating the disease and the consequences of that disease for the population. Many international and and local non governmental organizations, health organizations, United Nations agencies were involved in the response to cholera in Haiti, the publicly available data that we accessed through the World Health Organization and the Pan American Health Organization identified more than 100 unique entities that were operating cholera treatment facilities in Haiti, at the peak of the operation, there was some degree of communication between many of those entities that operating facilities via the United Nations cluster system that tries to bring together independent organizations who are operating in the same space, to share information to share objectives, and so forth. But there was not a centralized agency who had the authority to direct these NGOs and other responders about where color treatment facilities needed to be located. And so the actual system was quite decentralized, individual organizations made decisions about where to set up their color treatment facilities. And what we saw was that there was a great concentration and services and facilities available in the capital city. But there were many rural areas where there was no cholera treatment facility available within any reasonable transportation distance for the population, or based on the conditions. And so the result of that decentralization was redundancy in some areas, so duplication of service, and disparity so complete in availability of service in other areas. We don't believe that we could achieve complete centralization, there is no entity with the authority in many of these international disasters to dictate what Non Governmental Organizations will do and where they will operate. But what we were able to do with our models was to demonstrate the potential benefit of reallocating the same resources in different locations, and how that would impact the accessibility of treatment of cholera for the population across all of Haiti. And we see those results as a starting point for saying, you know, what are some mechanisms that could encourage this still decentralized system to behave more like one that we could achieve if we did have this hypothetical centralized control, things like providing additional resources to organizations that are willing to operate in remote communities, because obviously, that operation has additional costs. Those organizations are not as visible to their funders and to donors if they're operating in rural areas. And so what are some mechanisms, even information sharing about where demand is not being met, and how organizations might be able to better use their resources, recognizing that organizations will still make those decisions independently. But providing information or providing financial support to help them make those decisions more readily could be a mechanism to moving towards this more centralized outcome?

It is very interesting. I'm kind of curious about how, how to think about modeling, this independent decision making. In some sense, everybody, all the organizations that are down there have some set of common goals. Right. You know, they're trying to address the humanitarian crisis, and they have different focuses, probably for sure. Right. But they've got some common set of goals, but you're just talking about costs and such as cost of money, but costs too, while funding right sort of through their donors. Could you say a little something else about like, what, what the incentives and what the goals of like different individual organizations are in a crisis like this and how you think about them and how you think about what's driving their decision making?

Certainly. So a number of scholars have looked at what some of those objectives are, we have not specifically been investigating the components of those objectives but have benefited from the work that others have done. There are the missions of the individual organizations, right? What is their priority? What is their organizational purpose. And to the extent that that can be captured in a model, you know, that that goes into their decision making, there is also the need to secure continued funding. And for many of these organizations, that does mean demonstrating to their donors that they're being financially responsible, that the funds that the donors are giving, are going directly to the cause to the mission. And so anything around management or logistics, or investing in systems that might make some of these practices more efficient, goes into that overhead category that is not counted as direct investment in mission. And so it can be an opportunity to educate donors about the metrics that are used to evaluate the operation of nongovernmental organizations. So there's that the need to continue to receive donations, and then to demonstrate financial stewardship of those donations. So how many people are they serving per dollar that they invest or? And so there, it gets to some very nuanced mathematics, right? If you choose the wrong metric for any optimization model, or a decision maker is not solving a mathematical model, they're using a heuristic decision process in their heads to make that decision. So if you back out what those criteria are, we can get a model to give lots of different answers depending on which metric we put in that objective function. And so thinking carefully about whether we're measuring efficiency, right outputs over inputs, or effectiveness, did we accomplish the goal that we set out to do which was to minimize the number of cases and minimize morbidity and mortality? Or even equity? Did we serve the people across the country at the same level? Or were we prioritizing people that lived in urban areas over rural areas, so how you choose those metrics, and then how you combine or balance those metrics can have a big impact on what the outcome is.

Since the stroke of the COVID pandemic, we are starting to hear more and more examples of large organizations, both private and public, that are making huge changes in what they do, what they make, what they, you know, essentially, who they are, and going from, you know, forwards going from making radiator pumps to ventilators or whatever. And are, are these the sort of models that those folks could apply to optimize this change, in course, this change in process that they're putting themselves through.

Certainly, there is a role for models to help with that. If you think about changing from producing automobiles to producing ventilators. That's potentially a subset of the suppliers, the raw material suppliers or the parts and equipment suppliers could be similar, but a variety of them are going to be different. And so identifying procurement strategy for the new parts and equipment that are necessary identifying an efficient and effective production process or how are you going to need to retool, reconfigure the factory. What does that physical space look like? And then what is the the distribution chain look like once the ventilators have been produced? They're not going to be going out through the the regular distribution chain that Ford has. So who are the other partners that need to be at the table to think about what is the end target for these new products? Yes, the kinds of supply chain models that we use to improve the traditional automobile supply chain can be reconfigured and re adapted to design manage and improve this adapted supply chain for ventilators.

Thanks.

I see that you use game theory tools to do some of the research that you're working on and analyzing these systems. Can you tell me what game theory is and how that works in the analysis that you're doing?

Yes, game theory is a formal way to represent decisions of multiple stakeholders when those decisions have strategic interaction. So if I'm making a decision, and it doesn't impact you, and it's not impacted by any decision that you make, there's no strategic interaction between those decisions. But the minute that something that you decide impacts, the options available to me are the outcomes for me based on my decisions, then there's a potential to model that as a game. The name comes from formalizing the strategies, the actions and the outcomes in table games, board games, and so forth. But it's been applied to economics, supply chains, political science across a variety of different disciplines. The purpose is to model and then better understand the behavior of decision makers in these strategic environments. The way that it comes into play in the research that I do on supply chains, is to overcome the limitations of the traditional optimization models that have taken this centralized perspective where there's a single decision maker. So if we use game theory, we can bring in the perspective and objectives of multiple decision makers and identify the impacts and the outcomes of decisions by each of those decision makers and then predict what what they would do in practice, and what actions would be beneficial or detrimental to the overall system based on on those decentralized actions.

So one of the main games of game theory that maybe people have heard about is the prisoner's dilemma, right? Where two people are making decisions on their own right in cooperating, they're gonna do better off but there's incentives for each of them to, to cheat or to not cooperate, right? And then that drives them to a situation where things are not good for any of them overall, right? So a lot of what I have heard about game theory is the ways in which the equilibrium states that people end up being when they're individually making these decisions on their own interests are often not in their collective best interests. Right. Tell me what kinds of things you see when you apply game theory to these human humanitarian decision making?

Certainly, so you're right, that much of the study of game theory has identified that the outcomes in equilibrium are not those that would be mutually beneficial to the players. And what we see when we apply this in supply chains, particularly with respect to public health, I'll make a couple of points. The first is we used game theory ideas to model decisions of individual patients in seeking where to obtain a vaccine for the h1n1 pandemic, right. So, vaccines were available at a number of different clinics, information was available to the public about how many vaccines were available at each location, people make decisions about where they're going to seek health care, based on their own objectives, we might imagine that those objectives include the distance or the travel time to get to the facility, and the relative waiting time or congestion that they're going to experience at that facility, which is a function of how many other people are there, and how many vaccines are available at that place. And so the traditional optimization approach, if we're thinking about a vaccine distribution problem, is to say, we're going to send out the vaccines and we can tell people where they must go if they want to receive a vaccine. That doesn't work, when people are independently rationally making their own choices about about their health care. And so a more realistic approach is to say, here's where the vaccines are, what decisions are people likely to make? And that gives us a metric for what is likely to happen in the system. And what we saw when we applied game theory in that way, modeling the individual patients decisions was that some facilities had more vaccine than they had people willing to visit the facility to receive the vaccine. Other facilities were overwhelmed and highly congested. And so what that speaks to in turn have, you know backing out some policy recommendations is the opportunity to design that distribution system a priori, having accounted for people's likely decisions. So we would make different decisions about where to send the vaccines. If we assumed up front, that people are going to make their own choices about where to visit, then we would make if we assume that we could tell them where to go. Since we know that the situation is really that people make their own decisions, let's design the system so that it operates effectively under that scenario. So that's one, that's one perspective, that's one thing that we see when we incorporate game theory into those models. And to your original point that the decisions of individual decision makers are not necessarily in their mutual best interest. The idea of game theory is that people are going to make their decisions. And in an equilibrium solution, there's no way that one patient could switch to another facility and be better off in terms of the distance she had to travel, or the waiting time that she experienced, there would have to be collective movement of groups of people who were coordinating. And so that moves to another branch of game theory, where we explicitly model the opportunity for decision makers to collaborate with one another in groups, smaller, large groups. And what we see there is that if the system the incentives, the mechanisms are designed, well, we can actually achieve group decisions that approximate what would happen if we could tell everyone exactly what to do, even when we don't have to tell everyone exactly what to do. What do we mean by that? designing the system and the mechanisms means figuring out a way to allocate costs and benefits. So if we collaborate, that presumes that we have a way of sharing information presumes that we have some binding agreement that we're going to do what we say we're going to do, these kinds of models apply more readily to organizations, necessarily, then to individuals. And so the context where we're exploring this is with healthcare and public health organizations, thinking about their supply chain decisions. So if we work together to procure the supplies that we need, there are supply chain synergies, because we have a greater total demand, we can collaborate on transportation, we can share inventory management costs. But in order for us to collaborate, we have to have information systems that talk to one another, we have to decide when we pay for transportation, do I pay for 50%, and you pay for 50%? Or you pay for 60? I pay for 40? Was that decision based on. And so if those cost and benefit allocation mechanisms are designed in appropriate way, we can achieve those supply chain synergies that we would not be able to achieve otherwise, if individuals were acting just on their own according to their own objective functions. So we see both ends of the spectrum. When we model things with game theory, we see. Yes, the reality that decentralized decision makers can end up in an equilibrium state where none of them is as well off as they would be if they collaborated. But we also see what system design parameters are necessary to achieve that collaboration and move the system to that better equilibrium.

I was just gonna ask how specific those kinds of recommendations are and well, and how general are they right sort of other general things that you can say that about supply chains where you can induce better collaboration, or you can put into place the right kinds of mechanisms that would allow collaboration to work, where you can generalize these policy recommendations to a wide variety of situations like maybe food supply chains, as well as vaccines, supply chains, as well as, you know, humanitarian situations or there's really very specific deep situation.

Great question. We are working toward generalizable insights based on general models that would be translatable across industries. We are not specifically there yet, with respect to the cooperative game models that I described. For a number of reasons we're trying to incorporate the multiple objectives and the decisions over time to be able to make those models generalizable. What we have been able to see with respect to the public health systems that we've studied, is that certain nuances of those decisions depend very heavily on the context. It's a what, what is the form of the objective function for individual decision makers? What are the demographics, the geographic configuration of supply and demand points, and so forth. And so from that perspective, the models can be really useful in identifying areas where we need additional health care providers, or we need to recruit existing health care providers to be able to distribute vaccine, for instance, where we need to account for different demographics in terms of just the underlying healthcare infrastructure in a particular location. So at this stage, we have primarily focused on what specific recommendations can we make for the dataset that we are exploring? Then we're working on backing that out to generalizable models?

At the beginning, you mentioned I think, I think I remember mentioning, interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary work, can you tease out a little more information on the need for interdisciplinary activities and understand how those different facets work into the kind of modeling that you're doing?

Certainly, and to highlight that, I think I'll go to three models that are more closely related to food systems, some work that we have done. And I'll start by saying that the transdisciplinary perspective and having multiple kinds of expertise at the table is critical to making the model the right model, whether that's in the public health and humanitarian sphere, we're in the animal environmental health sphere. I see my role in these teams as somebody that can help the team visualize what the system is as a whole and how the different components of the system linked together and then find the mathematical linkages that we can use to model those connections. But I cannot know what the right for instance, disease transmission model looks like. For that I need an epidemiologist I cannot know for human decisions, how to represent values and beliefs and norms and policy choices. For that I need a sociologist and an economist. And so I see my role as bringing those pieces together and helping them talk to one another, not the people, right, which is another challenge of interdisciplinary work is, is helping the people learn to talk with one another and understand each other. But to make the pieces of the model talk to one another in a way that links everything together. So some specific examples. I've worked on a project to understand some of the interdependencies between the beef cattle industry in the transportation industry. The case study region that we use for that project was southwest Kansas, obviously, a major center for beef cattle operations for the country. And this collaboration involved partners in electrical and computer engineering, in computer science at the Beef Cattle Institute, and in psychology, in addition to myself, to try to understand these interdependencies to try to model the different components of that system and then try to understand some strategies for managing those interdependencies. So when we have infrastructure systems, like the food system and the transportation system that depend on one another mutually they're vulnerable to shocks to cascading shocks and cascading failures in any of those systems. And so one important priority for this project was to identify mitigation strategies. For these disruptions, and understand the potential impact of secure information sharing, let's say, via blockchain technology or something similar, the impact of that secure information sharing on the system outcomes, if there is a disruption in one of these infrastructure systems. And so being able to represent each of those granular pieces in a mathematical model requires those multiple expertise at the table. So the bottom line, that connection to where my work comes in, is really to understand how to allocate these costs and benefits of information sharing across the stakeholders, the cow calf operators, the stalkers, the feeders, the Packers, how do you allocate the costs and benefits of sharing information, let's say via a blockchain technology in a way that can encourage everybody to participate, and can help achieve system resilience if there was a shock in the system, because there's a blizzard, and the transportation is not available, if there's a shock in the system, because there's a suspected foot and mouth disease outbreak. You know, how does that cascade through the system? And what strategies can we put in place to mitigate those impacts?

Interesting, the blockchain technology is something that I had seen introduced to the food system. Oh, probably, in the last five years. There was a gentleman with Walmart that's now with the FDA that really pushed it hard and had a big voice in all of this. Do you see that as being and continuing to grow as a major connector for these systems over time?

I think that it has great potential. I am not personally an expert in blockchain and its specific strengths and weaknesses and opportunities. I defer to my electrical engineering colleagues for some of those specifics. But I do think that systems like it have the potential to overcome some of the challenges that we see with adoption of information sharing and traceability to the extent that it's able to ensure the security and the privacy that stakeholders have been concerned with. And I think it has some of that potential. Again, from my perspective, it comes down to how do you allocate the costs and benefits of that technology in a way that makes it attractive? If there's an upfront investment in deploying the technology across an operation, you know, a herd or a feedlot, or a packing facility? Who bears that upfront cost? And who reaps the benefits? Is there a benefit in routine operations in terms of a premium price for the product? Or is the benefit solely in these low probability high consequence disaster events, and changes the calculation in how you allocate the costs and benefits across stakeholders?

So with the idea of interdisciplinary and partnerships, you did a great job of explaining the criticality of that, is this something that carries forward with you in teaching is this notion of inner interdisciplinary, brought into the classroom?

Yes, and I'm working to increase that as well. So one class that I have really enjoyed developing and teaching is one around quantitative models in health. And so over the the series of times that I've offered this course, we've had students from the College of Veterinary Medicine from the College of Agriculture from palliative engineering, more importantly, had speakers from across different disciplines in on campus and from industries outside to try to, to come around this common topic of using quantitative models to advance human animal and environmental health. And I think it's a really beneficial experience for the students to see how, you know, the statistics or the optimization or the epidemiology or whatever it may be that they're coming to, from their own disciplinary perspective, also has linkages with things that other people are working on. And by bringing those pieces together collaboratively, they're able to tackle problems of growth. Human importance. And I think, you know, I've found even in my undergraduate courses, where the curriculum is much more specific and detailed, and there's certain amount of information about operations research that you must cover in this semester. The more examples that I can bring from multiple industries, from multiple perspectives about ways that these models are relevant, the more excited the students get. They want to know that what they're learning can make a difference in systems that are important to them. And when I was a student, I really was really excited about the tools in this industrial engineering toolbox. I was less excited about the examples that I saw, where those tools were being applied. And so my goal as an instructor is to demonstrate the breadth of systems where these tools really do have an application and have the potential to have an impact in the hopes that that conveys the message to the students that whatever their passion is, there's a way to use these quantitative tools to make a difference in that sphere.

That's great to hear that that's that that's the approach that you're taking. Because I think it's critically important to the students, that they start seeing that broad perspective of how these things interact with one another.

Well, it's the world that we live in, right. So regardless of whether a student is going to leave with a bachelor's degree and go out into industry and begin a traditional career in industrial engineering, where they're going to pursue their own passion and path or they're going to go to graduate school work on research. No matter which of those paths and any that I didn't name they choose, they're going to be operating across multiple disciplines, multiple cultures, and need to understand the role that they play and humbly accept the things that they don't know. And the ways that they need to rely on experts in other domains.

So absolutely critical. So very, very well said. One last bit of discussion here, I wouldn't when we were just starting. Before actually, we started to record here. We mentioned the fact that our most recent podcast was with Dr. Caterina Scoglio,. And you said that you had had the opportunity to do some work with her. Do you want to speak just a bit about some of that interaction? And what kind of research you you carried out with Dr. Scoglio?

Certainly, actually, the example that I gave with the beef cattle and transportation infrastructure systems is a collaboration with Dr. Scoglio. And so far, a very, very productive one drawing on her expertise in network systems. And the expertise of folks at the Beef Cattle Institute and colleague in psychology, Gary Brase, thinking about how people make decisions in these kinds of environments. And so it's been a very fruitful and interesting opportunity to think about the way that each of us brings those perspectives to a common problem. One where I think K State is really uniquely positioned to think about the challenges in that space.

Good, I find myself highly educated, or at least much more comfortable discussing these, these topics than I was before.

It's been interesting. Thank you.

So. Jessica, do you have any questions for us or any closing comments?

You know, as I think about the role of supply chains and Global Food Systems, especially in light of the challenges that we all are facing right now, in the midst of the COVID 19 pandemic. We see supply chains on display, right? If I had said six months ago that I work on supply chains for human animal and environmental health, I get some nods. Right. But now, the supply chain is at the forefront of our minds. We don't necessarily notice the essential service that supply chains provide in delivering our most basic needs, whether it's food and medicine, or the tools that we need to do our work like a N95 respirators or spare parts for the tractor, right? The supply chain does all of those things. And we don't notice a supply chain until it stops working the way that we expect it to work. And so I think we have a really unique opportunity right now, when supply chain logistics is at the forefront of our minds to take advantage of that, I hope that one outcome of this very trying time is that we think about ways to design supply chains, so that they're more resilient. And I hope secondarily, but equally importantly, that another outcome is that students get really excited about the real impact that they can have, by studying and working on supply chains on things that impact people's lives every day.

Well, that's a great, great way to end the discussion. And I want to tell you, I really very much appreciate your time. And as Jon said, I learned a lot here. I've worked in areas that dealt with a supply chain for years, but you brought a new twist to understanding how some of these things work. So I want to thank you for that.

Thanks for the opportunity. Thank you so much. I really enjoyed talking with all of you and I hope that you stay safe and well.

Likewise, you as well. Have a great day.

Thanks.

Bye bye everyone.

Bye bye.

If you have any questions or comments you would like to share check out our website at https://www.k-state.edu/research/global-food/ and drop us an email.

Our music was adapted from Dr. Wayne Goins's album Chronicles of Carmela. Special thanks to him for providing that to us. Something to Chew On is produced by the Office of Research Development at Kansas State University.